Last year, TechCrunch turned the social media circus on its side by reporting that Facebook was strongly considering integrating a "hate" button ahead of their IPO to boost interactions with the site. Scores of Facebookers, Tweeters, and Tumblrs alike took to their profiles to praise, debate, and/or protest the move by the social media giant because of its inevitable impact on our increasingly corporate-controlled culture.

Those in favor argued that integrating such a button would tear an already-polarized world to extremes, bringing unnecessary bullying, fighting, and negativity to a cyberspace and social media sphere long overrun by hate.

Those in support of the button believed it would give them a platform from which to publicly air their grievances with big businesses, political leaders/political movements, celebrities and media products, as well as to encourage a culture of "talking back" to those in power.

But all was for naught: TechCrunch fabricated the story as an April Fool's Day Joke fooling thousands of readers. To quote T.S. Eliot, April is the cruelest month!

The debate did, however, open up a new cultural conversation: What are the benefits of a public display of hate, and how able are we now to display it? After all, the "like" button, incorporated across-the-web two years earlier, protected the interests of corporations, allowing them to market their products to an even wider audience while stifling would-be boycotters and isolating protestors to uncentralized pocket groups without much exposure.

Marginalized and subjugated communities have long taken to the streets in protest. Feminists, black civil rights leaders, and gay liberation fronts have historically had a vested interest in publicly protesting problematic media, protected by a first amendment right to free speech in the public sphere. Their "hate" was inconvenient, a problem for businesses and politicians (and their customers/constituents) in brick and mortar establishments who had to physically walk past and confront the protest to perform their daily duties.

But the social media sphere, and Facebook in particular, has changed all that, moving causes and protests to online forums and to cyberspace. Here, seemingly "public" spaces (like Facebook and Twitter) are for the most part actually "private" spaces owned not by governments that must answer to the people, but to private corporations that must answer to their shareholders. Speech in these private spaces is not protected and can, indeed, be censored at will as businesses and Facebook itself sees fit. Indeed, the voices of the inconvenient can be silenced with a few clicks.

If Facebook has integrated itself so well into our lives that it now decides elections, and if we now take to "the Facebook" instead of "the streets," as our modern-day public square, what does it mean when such displays of hate and protest aren't equally incorporated into the Facebook platform? What information is lost when we can't see the number of "dislikes" a company has? And how can we, as media and culture researchers-as cultural historians-write about the present?

Last summer, for instance, Chick-fil-A Chief operating officer, Dan T. Cathy fueled a firestorm with several statements indicating that the brand did not support marriage equality and argued that those who "have the audacity to define what marriage is about [were] inviting God's judgment on our nation."

As Cathy's statements erupted into a news media maelstrom, Facebookers "liked" Chick-fil-A's page at alarming rates, giving a false sense of support for Cathy's comments by silencing statistics that would show how many "unlikes" the comments encouraged as well as how many "dislikes" and even "hates" would have been generated as well. Of course, what followed was also a stampede of posts by those in favor of marriage equality, but it would be impossible to know how many were posted given a business' ultimate control over its page, including the ability to delete comments and ban users.

In other words, quantitatively speaking, while we can more or less measure the positive impact of a media event on a business, a media product, a political movement, or a celebrity, those same statistics are not available to measure the negative impact of the same event making it impossible to find acceptable metrics with which to measure hate-to understand and make sense of our world where hate is a key human response.

As an audience researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I do a lot of work to analyze the way in which people engage with television shows, storylines, or actors to see how they are interpreting such texts and how they are informed by them or make sense of them in their day-to-day lives.

For instance, in one study conducted last year, I learned that rural gay men completely isolated from "gay culture," often found and watched The Oprah Winfrey Show in order to identify with gay guests and reframe the notion of homosexuality as a sickness to one of homophobia as a sickness. Many of these same men, however, felt the need to "come out" because rhetoric on the show suggested being closeted was to be lying and inauthentic to the truth of yourself. Several of those viewers then decided to come out, even when it could and did pose physical and emotional danger or even homelessness.

Another study (conducted during the first season of Glee) found that many gay male viewers rejected Kurt's character as an offensive stereotype, and would have preferred to not have such a representation at all as opposed to the one offered. In response, Glee producers ushered in several more gay characters in the following seasons to create a spectrum of masculinity.


And a forthcoming study, also on Glee, found that bisexual and queer viewers are continually devastated by the show's privileging of "coming out" storylines that encourage a "gay or straight" binary. Much like with Oprah's fans, these viewers are critical that the show is teaching parents and youth alike an either-or sexuality where trans and bi identities are delegitimated.

Much early audience work looked at fan engagement with shows to get a sense of how people were watching media. But this method left out a range of spectatorship practices for those who might watch programs inactively or decide not to "hate-watch" shows or not watch them at all for specific "anti-fan" reasons. The people over at Ring Wing Watch, an organization dedicated to "monitoring and exposing the activities of the right-wing movement" so we don't have to, are a good example as well as the gay and bisexual viewers of Glee mentioned above.

So, after years of studying who (s)he "likes," we now want to study (s)he who "hates" but given the extensive limitations to finding those people outlined above, we turn to qualitative research aimed simply at talking to people about what they watch, what they don't watch, what they love, what they hate, and why. We want to study the "anti-fan" every bit as much as we study the "fan."

Originally published by The Huffington Post, 18 July 2012.

Last year in an interview with BigThink.com, Jonathan Franzen said, "The world ... divides into people who have one opinion of Oprah Winfrey and people who have ... the diametrically opposite opinion. That's a remarkable thing to achieve, to divide the world in two; it's like parting the seas."

Franzen is partially right: Vocally, people seem to express either categorical love or hate for the once "queen" of daytime. As a cultural critic, in my eyes, her supposed polarization is actually unremarkable. Our talking-head, confessionalist media culture, which she admittedly helped create, demands of us a dedication to one-side-or-the-other opinions and perspectives. This seems to hold true for most aspects of our articulated public lives; you're either all in or you're all out: politics (presidential candidates and party devotion), legislation (gay rights and healthcare reform), news sources (Fox News vs. CNN), religion (fundamentalists vs. agnostics), geography ("city folk" vs. "country folk" or coasters vs. heartland); and even sexuality (gay vs. straight, read this piece about Anderson Cooper).

Although we've now had widespread color TV for half-a-century, our mass-mediated world has never been so black and white. In a climate dependent on fervency, my job as a scholar, as I see it, is to sell doubt and/or hesitation and to encourage people to furrow their eyebrows and truly consider other intentions and perspectives.

The new two-part OWN documentary Oprah Builds a Network, (if you can get around all the promotional plugs for other OWN series) is actually a poignant exploration of our culture's dedication to this mob mentality.

Since its inception, the word "struggling" has managed to inundate stories about Oprah's network in such a way I've been surprised SOWN has not been a pun that caught on. We are so bombarded by stories of OWN's failures (such as firing 30 employees, canceling Rosie, and suffering low ratings) that we falsely historicize the birth of now-successful networks as instantaneously popular when that's simply not the reality (did you know Bravo used to be all about ballet?). In so doing, we also set a trend for potential like-minded networks (and programming) to recoil in fear of following where Oprah has failed. But at the end of the day, has she failed and is OWN struggling, and if so, by what metrics? Are we so far gone from the days of hoping to use television as a mechanism of change and progress that we now only consider ratings when determining the successes and failures of a particular media product?



These articles are almost assuredly chased by hundreds of (often misogynistic) comments from users who seem gleeful at the prospect of Lady O's fall from grace. And in a way I'm not sure would be the case with a male TV executive (such as Al Gore's Current TV which had its share of troubles). Oprah's network could easily play the ratings game by programming trashy reality television. If you think she doesn't know how to do "trash TV" (to stifling popularity), you have a short memory. The O Empire was built upon nearly a decade of such programming before she parted ways with Ricki Lake and company when she overhauled her syndicated talk show in the mid-'90s (again to a drop in the ratings).

Although I certainly have my critiques of Oprah and her media's trajectory (which I can articulate without hate and exclamation marks), her dedication to featuring series she sees as part of her life's mission (ratings to the wind), actually, is remarkable. In its first two years, OWN created programming that brought a variety of new perspectives to the table, hosted by or featuring LGBT individuals (often the perspectives of B&T are lost on the airwaves), folks with non-normative, other-raced, and non-abled bodies, and frequently tackled issues relevant to feminism and women's rights. Lisa Ling's documentary series, Our America, is in my not-so-humble opinion, some of the best programming on television. By giving these disenfranchised voices a spot at the table, OWN can and does make an impact in innumerable lives, which, as a researcher, I have had the opportunity to witness firsthand.

I recently completed two years of work on a project studying the impact of television in the lives of rural gay youth and was blown away by the many stories of people transformed by Oprah programming, everything from a young boy excommunicated from his Mormon community to a rural Missouri teen forced to partake in "pray the gay away" conferences. These young men were able to find solace in the representations of other sexualities constantly treated with dignity by the Oprahsphere and thus able to rethink "commonsense" to make homophobia the pathology instead of homosexuality.

Imparting the potential of television as a tool for social change, in 1958 Edward R. Murrow offered a seed of optimism:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Does Oprah programming meet this rubric? I concede, not always. But at least it's headed away from the Jersey Shore. Oprah as an executive herself has attempted to create progressive television that's not solely driven by ratings. As she says, she wanted to deliver programming that would "drop little pieces of light into people's lives.

There is certainly a utility in expressing hate, and I do think it is important to do so. I'm not saying I've been above absolutely detesting something or someone for no reason (I'm looking at you, Zooey Deschanel!), but in writing this article, my intention is to express the importance of doubt and encourage the taking up of middle ground. While I use Oprah as a case study, this can really apply to any of our cultural either-or imperatives. Why are we so quick to declare an unchanging, steadfast belief before considering the weight of our words? Have doubt! Humor a variety of perspectives. And don't be unyielding, because it's unfortunate that in our modern black and white public media culture, being 50 shades of gray is considered a fetish.

Notes:

1. This article was originally published by The Huffington Post, 18 July 2012.

Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 5 July 2012.

Anderson Cooper's "outing" this week beautifully illustrates something I have been writing about for a while: the imperative of coming out. The paradox of homosexuality is and has been that one must at once not be gay while at the same time publicly (confessing/admitting/declaring) that (s)he is. But what does that mean, exactly? If the presumption is that we are straight until we say otherwise, then why are the most common reactions to Anderson's outing, "We already knew!" or "It’s about time!" Hollywood legend might describe the alleged homosexuality of figures like Agnes Moorehead or James Dean as an "open secret"--something about which to argue at pretentious dinner parties. But I bracket "outing" with quotations marks because if everybody already knew Anderson was gay, why was he constantly hounded to declare it? And why aren't people satisfied with his declaration?

I'll admit some guilt here; as an Oprah scholar, I've long thought Anderson’s semi-successful talk show suffered by his Donahue-esque journalistic fourth wall, something Oprah deflated by making herself always already one of her own guests. I draw this parallel because soon after his "outing," Star Jones quite ickily suggested on The Today Show that Anderson outed himself to boost his ratings just like when Oprah admitted she used crack, got pregnant as a teenager, and considered suicide.

"I’m a little bit of a cynic; you know I've been in daytime television a long time.... There are times that you generate information for ratings." Shame on you, Star Jones.

But why didn't Anderson come out on his talk show, instead choosing to write a letter to Daily Beast? Will that letter be good enough, or will he be expected now to discuss it on television? And, indeed, can he discuss it without the kind of appalling accusations constantly volleyed in the news? That afternoon, Anderson, his syndicated talk show, was a rerun (it's on hiatus) and he was absent from his late night news program, Anderson 360. If he came out to help his ratings, he sure has bad timing.

Anderson in a 2008 issue of The Advocate that I also contributed to.

Our media culture often portrays coming out as this great moment of personal achievement--a bourgeoisie notion of psychological wholeness or self-actualization after which (and only after which) we can become our true, complete selves. This trope is then used to justify our demand that celebrities (and by extension our culture of celebrity mimics) come out of the closet "for their own good." Just look at Ellen DeGeneres, people (like Oprah) often say, ignoring the six or so years after her outing that she was out of work and out of money. We can throw all kinds of Foucault at this: although he never specifically addressed coming out as we understand it today, confession for Foucault functions not only as a mechanism of articulating but also making truth as well as establishing one’s own credibility and authenticity. In other words, the lie we tell ourselves now is that we come out for ourselves, when in reality, we’re mostly supplying the demand.

The coming out imperative comes from an old association between gayness and deception, dating back at least as far as McCarthy and the 1950s (the Lavender Scare) when homosexuals were indicted as deceptive individuals prone to blackmail. After gay activists in the '60s and '70s made the coming out process (as a political tool to combat invisibility) relatively commonplace, talk shows began quietly suggesting openness which ultimately became a demand when AIDS and HIV made homosexuality a "dangerous deception" for unsuspecting heterosexuals (see Gamson, Freaks Talk Back). We might say we're coming out to our friends and family just for ourselves, but if that were the case, I might ask why the repeating line "they deserved to know the truth" is such a staple in coming out stories.

In her remarkably articulate response to Anderson's outing, "fruit fly" Kathy Griffin deftly discusses the continuing dangers of outness: "[D]espite the very real, the very necessary, and the very life-changing progress we have made in this country ... America--the world--is not fully represented by Chelsea in New York City ... [it] is, in larger part, small towns like ... Wichita, Kan., where I was [asked], 'Kathy, how do you deal with so many goddamned fags?'" Foucault writes that our society believes confession "exonerates, redeems, and purifies ... unburdens [us] of [our] wrongs, liberates [us], and promises [us] salvation." But none of those attributes are particularly true of many coming out narratives in certain areas of the country (or the world) where outness can and does lead to greater isolation, bullying, suicide, or homicide.

Anderson's sensible closet (photo parody).

In his letter, Anderson writes: “It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something -- something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed, or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.... The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.”

Anderson is an astute television personality--he could have exploited his outing for ratings, and who knows, maybe he will discuss it openly when his show re-premieres in Nate Berkus' former studio this fall. But instead of folding to and perpetuating the cultural myth that public confession psychologically liberates us, Anderson decided to address his sexuality in a well-crafted letter that demonstrates a new, old reason for coming out: to break down invisibility. I applaud him for it.

As a culture we must be more sensitive of our demands and our expectations (of both our celebrities as well as our friends), for the realities of queer individuals all across the world are different--and just because someone isn't out to you or your family, doesn't mean they are living their life in a closet.

Notes:
1. Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 5 July 2012.