Supplemental Post #1 - Laura Broman. unnecessary extended metaphor

 I keep thinking about Ouellette and Hay’s evocation of Louis Brandeis’ “laboratory of democracy,” as they “emphasize this experimentalism and ongoing effort to test limits and to manage failure” (220). I was initially resistant to the notion that any of what Ouellette and Hay discuss qualifies as democracy, but heck, the whole concept of “democracy” is so malleable, so ill-defined, that why not.

Ouellette and Hay make it clear that their exclusive focus is on reality TV, but I am reminded of the Andrejevic reading of a couple weeks ago, in which one of his TWoPper respondents described audiences as TV producers’ “constituents.” There is something I find kind of abominable about that statement (like, should artists really be considered your elected representatives?), but nevertheless it shows that the production of narrative TV, too, can be viewed as a democratic or participatory process in certain ways.

I’d like to temporarily set aside the theme of self-governance/neoliberalism and take the “democratic television” idea as a chance to think about the other parallels between television participation and theories of democracy. Reading Ouellette and Hay I started thinking about James Madison’s Federalist 10, in which he discusses the danger of the faction, a portion of the citizenry united by interests that go against the interests of the group at large. Factions are natural, and you can’t destroy them without destroying liberty itself. He argued that a democratic republic would mitigate the dangers that faction poses to a functioning state. And, as history has shown, it all worked out perfectly!

The notion of faction as natural to democracy makes me think of the toxic wasteland that is 21^st-century fandom culture (apologies to Henry Jenkins). Certainly we could describe the ideologically opposed groups within fandoms as factions that reflect how the American democratic system has historically operated: we can see how the producers of Star Wars chose to respond to the racist faction of the fandom calling for Kelly Marie Tran to be excised from the cast rather than the faction calling for queer representation. Faction is natural, as Madison argued, and when left unmitigated it becomes corrosive to the whole system.

I have no real point here. But Madison argued that the best way to mitigate faction was to have a republic, and as I’ve already said it was fucked from the very beginning worked out pretty well for us. So how do we work through this problem when it comes to fandom? If that TWoPper sees themself as a "constituent," are TV writers their representatives in a democratic republic? Is this really working out for us? Am I just blabbering at this point?