User:Profkls/FMS166CL/Course description

Course description
FMS 166CL: Creative Labor in the Media Industries Department of Film and Media Studies UC Santa Barbara Winter 2014

MW 11:00 - 12:00 pm Girvetz 2129

Creative labor is arguably the most crucial component of the media industries and yet over the past thirty years employers have repeatedly clashed with their workers over such issues as compensation, creative authority, productivity, and ancillary output. In part this trend is a result of increasing competition, as the number of media services have multiplied and as audiences have fragmented into smaller niches. Media companies responded to these developments by forming huge conglomerates that could balance their risk by extending their reach into film, television, and digital media. As a result, media conglomerates today are larger and more complicated than ever before. They are also more closely attuned to the imperatives of Wall Street than they are to the subtleties of creative endeavor or the nuances of audience tastes. Media CEOs spend most of their time wooing investors and crafting quarterly profit statements, rather than thinking about content or creativity. This in turn privileges cautious creative decisions that are relentlessly market tested at all stages of production. Employers have furthermore sought to contain production costs by trimming budgets wherever possible and by using new media technologies to cut labor costs. New technologies have also allowed employers to reorganize the spaces of production so that workers in Hollywood often find themselves collaborating or competing with (low-paid) counterparts in such places as Bombay or Seoul. Interestingly, the very same pressures that have disrupted labor relations in Hollywood are providing new opportunities to media workforces abroad. Over all, these trends have dramatically transformed the conditions of creative labor for actors, writers, craft workers, and others.

This course examines the struggles between media conglomerates and creative employees regarding such issues as remuneration, working conditions, creative authority, new technologies, unionization, and runaway production. It makes comparisons between film, television, and digital media, and between US and overseas conditions of creative labor.

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