Rogers State University The Weird Science of Marketing Westworld Paper Essay 3 (7 pages) is also same way as essay 1 based off of the reading/screening con

Rogers State University The Weird Science of Marketing Westworld Paper Essay 3 (7 pages) is also same way as essay 1 based off of the reading/screening content that you were assigned this week.Like many professors, I also expect students to use scholarly sources when writing a college-level research paper. To support your claims and point you should refer scholarly sources on your subject that agrees with you. If you exploit their words as a way to support, your point will be very powerful. Check again please our Writing Criteriaon MyCourse, you will see that you`re required to use at least 4 scholarly sources in your essay. (at least one of them should be class reading) REMEMBERED
The Weird Science
of Marketing
‘Westworld’
HBO aims to rally hardcore fans through
digital strategies, VR experience
By DANIEL HOLLOWAY
@gdanielholloway
• ‘Westworld’
looks
terrific, but
the show is
confused
about what
it wants to
be and what
it wants to
say. Review,
p.135
To give “Westworld” a chance at becoming
that show, HBO’s marketing team is using
technology that mirrors the world of the
series to rally hardcore fans.
“We knew that there would be two
distinct strategies,” says Sabrina Caluori,
senior vice president of digital media and
marketing for HBO. The ?rst of those is the
theatrical-style campaign of on-air, online,
and outdoor advertising that is a must for a
big-series launch.
“The second,” Caluori says, “given the
pedigree of the producers, as well as the
content and the rich story world, is a
primarily interactive campaign that was
targeted at sci-? fans, tech enthusiasts, and
the fans of our producers.”
Those producers are the husband/wife
team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy — he
of “The Dark Knight” and other collaborations with his brother, Christopher Nolan;
she of “Burn Notice.” They serve as principal
writers and showrunners on “Westworld,”
and executive produce alongside J.J. Abrams.
They also worked closely with HBO on the
series’ marketing, from the poster tagline —
“Every hero has a code” — to a virtual-reality
experience and a microsite that will serve as
a hub for fans looking to dive deeper.
“With ‘Westworld,’ there were really good
IN CONTENTION
FACETIME
DATA
opportunities to bring the park out into the
real world and break that fourth wall,”
Nolan says. “So we talked about all of the
ways that we could actualize the park in the
real world.”
One of those was VR. Last year, HBO invited Nolan and Joy to demo the HTC Vive —
the ?rst time either had tried the technology. Joy described feeling “reality shock” after
removing the headset. “It’s such an interesting, immersive way to tell a story, and it
dovetails so nicely with what we’re doing
with ‘Westworld,’” she says.
Fast-forward to September, and the
premiere of a VR “Westworld” experience
created by series staffers at TechCrunch
Disrupt.
The price of a headset such as the Vive
starts at $799. That makes VR among the
least accessible platforms on which to market a television show. HBO understood and
embraced that; after all, a trip to Westworld
does not come cheap.
“We built something that was highly
immersive and interactive,” Caluori says.
“The fact that we didn’t get scale out of it
from a consumer perspective matched with
the overall strategy of both reaching that
tech in?uencer but also continuing to drive
home the exclusivity of Westworld as a park
destination.”
Matching that strategy is the microsite,
DiscoverWestworld.com, which resembles
the website for any luxury resort. But it has
darker substrata for the frequent user to dig
into. As the series progresses, it will be a portal through which fans can unlock additional content, all of which will have input from
Nolan, Joy, and their team.
Such promotional tools are not new;
Caluori says it was “a no-brainer” to build a
realistic theme-park site. The site for ABC’s
“Lost” was a leap forward in the science
of sucking time from super-fans. But tech
advances have ripped the ceiling off how
innovative such sites can be. If “Westworld”
delivers creatively, the site could be one way
to not just lure a fan base, but to keep it fed.
“Your most engaged and passionate fans,
particularly when we’re dealing with a genre
show, can be your greatest advocate,”
Caluori says. “So that’s for us the reason to
build out this very rich experience. If we can
create something cool, they’ll help to drive
the overall word of mouth and success of
the show.”
Ratings
Winners
and Losers
It was a big week for major
network premieres. Which
shows will survive their
inaugural seasons?
By DANIEL HOLLOWAY
0927.019-021.TB.Lede.indd 21
CBS
Airing after “The Big Bang Theory,” “Kevin Can Wait” drew
a solid 2.6 live-plus-same-day
Nielsen rating among adults
18-49. “Bull” bowed with a
strong 2.2 demo and the week’s
top total-viewer haul for a
series premiere, at 15.5 million.
NBC
“This Is Us” drew 10 million
viewers and the week’s top
series-premiere demo rating,
with a 2.8. Delayed viewing lifted the premiere of “The Good
Place” to a 3.3 demo rating
in live-plus-three numbers,
matching “Kevin Can Wait.”
ABC
Fox
A weak premiere for Thursdaynight drama “Notorious”
(1.1 in the demo, 5.4 million
viewers) at 9 p.m. dragged
down the season debut for
“How to Get Away With
Murder” an hour later
(1.4, 5.1 million).
With lead-in “Rosewood”
drawing an abysmal 0.7 demo
rating and 3.7 million viewers,
“Pitch” barely had a chance.
The freshman baseball drama
debuted to 1.1 in the demo
and 4.2 million, despite heavy
marketing from Fox.
SEPTEMBER 27, 2016
VARIETY.COM
WITH “GAME OF THRONES,” HBO wove
dragons, sword?ghts, and blood magic into
a demographic-crossing television hit. Now
it hopes to do the same with robot cowboys
and mad scientists.
Based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 ?lm
about a theme park ?lled with thinking,
human-like machines gone haywire, “Westworld” premieres Oct. 2 on the premium
cabler. Humongous in scope, the show is an
ambitious gambit at a critical time for HBO,
which could use a big drama to carry its ?ag
past the looming end of “Game of Thrones.”
GUEST COLUMN
21
9/26/16 5:46 PM
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Original Article
Cyborgs, desiring-machines, bodies
without organs, and Westworld:
Interrogating academic writing and
scholarly identity
KOME ? An International Journal of Pure
Communication Inquiry
Volume 5 Issue 1, p.91-103.
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and Permission:
kome@komejournal.com
Published by the Hungarian Communication
Studies Association
DOI: 10.17646/KOME.2017.16
Deborah M. Netolicky
Murdoch University, Department of Education, Australia
Abstract: This paper fashions a lens through which to view scholarly identity and the
experience of academic writing. The lens of inquiry I apply is the metaphor of Season 1
of sci-fi HBO television show Westworld and its characters, especially its cyborg
protagonist Dolores. Thrumming like electric currents through this lens of inquiry are
Haraway’s theorization of the cyborg, the fictional worlds of science fiction and
Wonderland, my own lived experience, and Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines
and bodies without organs. I engage in the cyborgic technology of writing in order to
playfully explore what it means to be a cyborg academic operating in intersecting
machinic worlds. I ask: Can we listen to our internal voices and write our own stories?
Can we burn the world clean with our scholarship and the ways in which we interrogate
ingrained and expected practices?
Keywords: New Media, metaphor, cyborg, science fiction, Deleuze and Guattari
Introduction
In this paper I use my relationship with the metaphor of Season 1 of the HBO television
series Westworld as a way into scholarly identity work and theoretical exploration. I adopt a
technological lens as a mode of inquiry and a disruptive act of destabilization within the
authoritarian world of academic writing (Muhr & Rehn, 2015). In doing so, this paper
responds to Muhr and Rehn’s (2015) call for greater attention to be paid to the technological
mediation of academic writing, to cyborg writing in particular, in order to facilitate a wider
variety of textual forms, especially in scholarly journals.
In this paper, Westworld and the cyborg character of Dolores act as a metaphor for the
Western academe and the Western academic. As conceptual processes are defined and
structured through metaphor (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003), using metaphor as a lens to re-see the
world and re-consider reality can help to restructure experiences and understand intangibles.
It can provide a coherent frame for imaginative rationality (Mart?nez, Sauleda, & Huber,
2001), helping us to test imaginative models for reality against our own realities. Being
playful in our orientations to research can spark imagination and lead to fresh insights
Address for Correspondence: Deborah Netolicky, email: deborahnetolicky[at]gmail.com
Article received on the 21th December, 2016. Article accepted on the 12th May, 2017.
Conflict of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interests.
Netolicky, D.M.
92
(Watson, 2015). Scholars can straddle the imaginative and the real (Mus, 2014), drawing
together fiction-like artistry and scientific systematization. Researchers have employed
metaphors in order to develop researcher and reader understanding of complex experiences.
For example, Jones (2013, 2015) has utilized the bat from Aesop’s fable as researcher and
storyteller (2015); and the Persephone myth and labyrinth image as metaphor for the journey
of the doctoral student (2013). Brabazon (2016) uses the zombie as a lens through which to
critique the neoliberal university. These metaphors provide not only playfulness, but can also
operate as structural frames and meaning making tools (Netolicky, 2015; Sharoff, 2013).
They can, as McWilliam (2000) puts it, unsettle what it means to behave properly in the
academe and in doing so push against accepted ontologies and epistemologies.
The metaphorical, the imaginary, the literary, and the fictional, can be legitimate tools
in the researcher-writer’s arsenal. Writing, reading, and viewing are all methods of inquiry.
Czarniawska (2007) sees literary artefacts such as novels as partners of research, sources of
meaning, and models of inspiration. For Haraway, looking through the science fiction genre
is a way to explore the production of worlds (Grebowicz & Merrick, 2013; Haraway, 2004b).
Science fiction can be seen as a kind of cyborg ethnography (Balsamo, 2000). Fictionalizing
research (such as Kara, 2013) can create layers of deepened awareness, invoking imagination
to conjure new and alternate ways of knowing (Caine et al., 2016). In this paper, I semifictionalize my own experiences as I move between authorial and semi-fictional voices,
writing inside, outside, and alongside the lens of Westworld and its character Dolores. I slip
in and out of Westworld fiction, my own constructed and deconstructed realities, and my
authorial voice that tries to impose order onto my muddled thoughts and dis-ordered written
words. I explore metaphor as a vehicle for scholarly and writerly identity work, while happily
embracing what St. Pierre and Pillow (2000) call a lusty confusion that interrupts and
deterritorializes knowledge making. That is, this paper is open to messiness, not yet knowing,
showing my workings. In it I ‘think out loud’ through writing in order to offer a perspective
on the ways in which scholars, especially those early in their research careers like myself,
work through their identities, make choices in their research and writing work, and negotiate
their mechanical entanglements.
Method is political (Lather, 2013) and this paper deliberately embraces cyborg writing
as radical site of disruption of accepted notions of science (Prasad, 2016). I draw upon
Haraway’s cyborg (1991, 2006), which offers an alternative way of understanding the self
and its relation to the world (Brophy, 2016). I embrace Haraway’s (1991) assertion that
reading, writing, and in this case viewing, science fiction are useful for theorizing and
exploring possibilities. Goodeve (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000) notes that Haraway uses the
tools of science fiction to speculate through myth-building; building ontologies via the
imaginative. Science fiction is a methodological tool and source of inspiration for Haraway
(Grebowicz & Merrick, 2013), allowing her to speculate about possible theories and potential
futures. In this paper, the science fiction television show Westworld allows me to explore
possibilities and push at boundaries of writing and of self. I take up Brophy’s (2016)
challenge to deploy the figure of the cyborg with care and self-reflection, in order to more
deeply understand self-technology relationships.
Although theorization of the self has a long history (see, for instance Cooley, 1902),
by the 1980s identity had emerged as a rich, complex, and explicit field of study. The field of
identity remains interdisciplinary and diverse, with inconsistent views of what identity is and
how it is shaped. While a tension remains around to what extent identities are fixed or fluid,
stable or unstable, this paper takes identities as flexible, multiple, and continually shaped by
contexts and relationships. This view is consistent with theorists who conceptualize identities
as pluralistic, multiple, overlapping, and intersecting constructions, operated by the individual
(Breen, 2014; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Lawler, 2014). In this view,
Netolicky, D.M.
93
identities are ever-unfinished, ongoing co-constructions, constantly being recreated and
refined over time.
This paper’s notion of academic writer as cyborgic human-machine is also couched in
Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machine (1977) and body without organs (1977, 1987), as
well as in the work of others who have explored the machinic, mechanistic aspects of
academic writing and scholarship. Muhr and Rehn (2015) write that:
We as scholars … readily accept that our writing will always be processed through a set of
complex mechanistic moves, reduced to fit the journal issue, suitable for packaging and sale
by the academic publishing industry. We as writers struggle with the limitations that
technologies of writing place on us, as they constrict and control us, pushing our words into
the straightest of lines and most linear of narratives. (p. 136)
Their words —“reduced”, “constrict”, and “control”— reflect the oppressive pressure
that limits and shapes scholarly writing. The reference to “mechanistic moves” and
“packaging and sale” construct academic writing as a neoliberal machine concerned with
performance and metrics. Henderson, Honan, and Loch (2016) channel Deleuze and
Guattari’s desiring-machine to explore the academicwritingmachine and the ways scholars
may desire to both be ruled by, and to break, the machine. In a world in which academic
writing is critiqued and measured at every turn, Henderson et al. note that academics are
shaped by their interactions with the world of publication, citation, and performance. The
academic writer, they suggest, becomes machinic themselves in their response to the machine
and their desire to be counted as worthy within its performative metrics. Riddle (in press),
too, conceptualizes the academic as desiring-machine; that is, individualized producer
churning out performative outputs for the competitive university system. According to
Riddle, the academic is hyper-visible, hyper-performing, hyper-producing machine, desiring
success within the neoliberal system. He suggests, however, the need to question both the
system and academics’ part in keeping the system running as it is.
Like Donna Haraway’s (1991, 2006) cyborg, the academic writer is an organismmachine, an assemblage of humanity, experience, science, and the technologies of writing
and communicating. Writing itself is the technology of the cyborg (Haraway, 1991, 2006),
and all forms of writing are cyborg writing (Muhr & Rehn, 2015). The academic writer melds
themselves with their electronic devices and with software for word processing, reference
management, data generation, and data analysis. They become one with their online identities
through social media, Twitter bios, academia.edu profiles, and citations. Deliberate cyborg
writing is multiplicitous and diverse, operationalized to challenge dominant Western
epistemology (Prasad, 2016). Those such as Gale (2016) embrace the technology of writing,
and the interrupting of writing technology, making it trip and falter, a vehicle for constant
non-linear becoming. Here I embrace my own cyborg self, as deliberate fusion of flesh and
machine, and the possibilities offered by science fiction, for theorizing ways of being in the
world. In this paper I use the metaphor of the Westworld cyborg character of Dolores to
reimagine my scholarly-writerly identity, envisioning a future in which, as the character of
Maeve asserts in Episode 8 of Westworld’s first season, I can “tell my own fucking story,” in
my own way. This paper thereby gives others permission and encouragement to tell their own
stories in ways that might challenge dominant ways of being, knowing, and writing.
Westworld’s world of human cyborgs and monstrous humanity
The HBO television show Westworld, based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same
name, aired its first season from October to December 2016. For the purpose of this paper,
the ten episodes that made up Season 1 provide a metaphorical lens through which to view
Netolicky, D.M.
94
scholarship and writing in the academe. In the show’s Westworld (an Old-AmericanWestern-themed game park of sorts) cyborg creatures look, feel, suffer, and behave like
humans; the cyborgs’ suffering, we learn, is key to their humanity. Like Haraway’s cyborg,
Westworld androids are ubiquitous and invisible (Haraway, 2006). Their artificial
intelligence is made up of coded memories, scripted dialogue and loops of repeated
behaviours. Their bodies were once made up of the true cyborgic combination of “part metal,
part meat,” as Frentz (2009, p.821) describes the nature of the cybernetic organism. Later,
however, as technology evolved, their bodies are made up of organic matter: muscle, flesh
and bone. These later cyborgs—3D printed humanoids dipped in skin on Vitruvian Man style
hoops—are virtually unrecognizable as different from the humans. But, as Haraway (1991)
and the sterile lab surrounds in Westworld remind us, the cyborg body is not an innocent
body, born by and into nature. It is mechanically and unnaturally constructed. It is Other.
This Other-ness is part of why the cyborg is “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions,
and dangerous possibilities” (Haraway, 2006, p.121), an apt metaphor for the academic writer
exploring their identity. The cyborg academic writer, too, risks being Other, being dismissed,
being marginalized in academic discourse.
The cyborgs of Westworld are literal bodies without organs, but also bodies without
organs in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense: “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter … the
full egg” (1987, p.153). The Westworld cyborgs represent unformed consciousness, potential
consciousness, awakening consciousness. They are the embryonic egg through which
intensities pass again and again. They are corporeal matter, and as the season evolves, they
realize that they do matter. The Westworld cyborgs are full of untapped uncracked potential,
yet they are imposed upon by the coders and creators who control them, much like the
organism that imposes upon the body without organs’ “forms, functions, bonds, dominant,
and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p.159). Throughout Season 1 we watch as the cyborgs of Westworld slowly rattle in their
eggshell cages, finding ways to be sentient and free.
In Westworld, androids are seeking their own humanity. In academia, scholars are
seeking scientific systems and technological aides to research, write, and communicate. For
Haraway’s cyborg and for the academic writer, identities are fractured. In Westworld the
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