Your Channel, Your TV: How Queer is Interactive TV?

By Kate Pelling March 2008

In this essay I am asking the question of how queer interactive TV might be. Using the word ‘how’ does assume some level of queerness to be already present in interactive TV, and I will expand on this later, but the extent of this queerness and in what areas will be explored here. Queer is a broad theoretical term and so I will firstly define how I am using it in relation to interactive TV and then I will apply the term to interactive TV’s content, which has elements both easily identifiable as queer and that could be read as more carefully coded queer signals. I will discuss exposure and closetedness by looking at further examples of the content of interactive TV and discussing where the promise of fame or exposure might lie in relation to queer discourses. I will explore whether the queer content, form or nature of interactive TV is part of a queer space whether the contradictions of exposure coupled with closetedness that creates a discord placing it into the realm of queer. I will also explore the politics of the format, positioning interactive TV within the context of TV in general, where I will consider the nature of ‘trash’ as a medium in comparison to ‘quality’ TV programming. A wider issue that incorporates interactive TV is the impact that changes in technology have on society, to explore this I will look at how interactive TV is presented as a community activity, techno-utopian discourses and the phenomenon of ‘cultural lag’. I aim to definitively locate interactive TV as a queer medium, but a queer medium with inherent contradictions that both expose it’s queerness and keep it firmly in the closet at the same time, a position that potentially limits any real subversive impact that it may have on society.

I am using the term Interactive TV as specific television channels that can be found on Sky, Cable or Freeview, whose content is supplied by or structured around the users of the channel via a website, texts, phone calls or by sending in video clips via other media such as mobile phones. The focus of this study is going to be Sumo TV , and primarily their programme My Sumo , I will also include in my focus the channel fame TV , programmes on the channel are also called fame TV, which uses the banner Your Channel. Your Content. Your Choice!

There are many further examples that could also be included within the domain of interactive TV, from mainstream shows such as X-Factor and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here , which include phone voting as pivotal to the narrative and functionality of the shows. There are also a plethora of sex, shopping, religious and psychic interactive channels who provide a service to the viewer. I will mention at this point the recent controversy surrounding phone lines relating to mainstream interactive TV. It transpired that on several shows some viewers had been voting or entering competitions and their votes or entries had not been given the same chance of succeeding as other viewer’s entries but the public was not aware and continued to spend their money on the calls or texts. The exposure of these malpractices has created a strange phenomenon of fear around the use of phone lines, certainly in mainstream shows, and cast an air of suspicion around the whole idea of interactivity. Producers will continue to use phone lines as they are integral to the narratives of the programmes but it has created a shift in the culture, empowering the viewer as they are more suspicious of the cost and workings of the phone line set up. This deception and the resulting mistrust, will also play a role in the shaping of interactive TV as a queer space, which will become clearer once I have defined my use of the term queer.

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer”, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative - a position that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or feels marginalised because of her or his sexual practices.”

In this quote Halperin defines queer as a position that is at odds with the legitimate and the dominant, so the phone vote deception places the mainstream shows in this space against the legitimate and within a position in relation to the normative. The notion of an identity without an essence could be specifically applied to the content of the interactive TV shows where my interest lies, in the variety of clips that are shown, having mostly the same source, the internet, there is no further empirical description of the clips that can offered, the quality and diversity of subject matter defies simple category. This inability to categorise the subject, and a dominant themes of sexuality and subversion inherent in the clips, positions Interactive TV as a queer subject.

Any definition of queer is inextricably linked to ‘other’ sexualities, the sexualities displayed on the videos featured on Sumo TV cover all tastes and types, from heterosexual to queer sexualities including fetishism and disabled sex. There are two conspicuous subsets of queer content on Interactive TV, these are videos that are indicatively queer to start with, such as my own video work which is a queer interpretation of Elvis impersonation, shown on Sumo TV between August and September 2007 , and those that introduce queer notions into an existing mainstream product queered either by reworking it or by fictionalising something around it.

A good example of the latter subset of queer content is the clip Stephen Hawking Sex Tape (see Image 1 below) where Hawking, just as famous for being a disabled person as much as for his achievements, is at first sexualised and then made vulnerable by the implication of impotence. The clip is set up as though it is a covert sex tape that has been released onto the internet although the falsity of this tape is clear, Hawking is easily imitated because of his synthesized voice and his physical presence does not feature in the clip, it is only a computer screen and the electronic voice signifying his presence. This clip queers the subject and then legitimizes it again by taking the sexuality away, presenting the whole thing as a private exchange made public on the Internet.

Image 1: Stephen Hawking Sex Tape

The other type of queer content is clips that are originally queer in content, as already mentioned I have first had experience of contributing queer content to Sumo TV. This puts me in a position where I can categorically say that an element of the content of Sumo TV is queer because I contributed to the content and my work is queer in nature and subject matter. Another example of content of queer origin is The Goddess Bunny (see Image 2 below), a queer performer who has achieved cult status on the internet. The Goddess Bunny video is advertised by Sumo TV as “in fact a man called Sandie Crisp, formerly Johnny Edward Baima, a quadriplegic American drag queen with polio. The video was shot 20 years ago, at a time when she was depressed and not eating. She’s now a part time go-go dancer, a lot healthier, and lives in LA.” (See Appendix 1)

Image 2: The Goddess Bunny

Apart from the use of the word quadriplegic in the description which is quite obviously an exaggeration, the Goddess Bunny is seen tap dancing and is clearly not paralysed, Sumo TV’s description is quite sympathetic and respectful, not using negative language such as ‘freak’ which would have been an easy direction to go in. It is however very interesting that the write up focuses on how healthy the Goddess Bunny is, stressing that she is no longer as she was in the video, which could be interpreted as an attempt to place the performer within a hierarchy that includes ‘health’ as status. This questioning of the health of the queer subject references attitudes around HIV status and it reflects sexual and HIV status as hierarchically less important than the healthy heteronormative subject.

Repositioning of status is also clear in reworkings of films, a popular genre of internet videos, such as Psycho Potato which is the shower scene from Psycho with a potato performing the part of Janet Leigh, and Derrick’s Dickmento (see image 5 below) which uses Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) where the protagonist, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife. In Derrick’s Dickmento the man’s short term memory loss means that he has forgotten what a dick looks like, a situation that another man takes advantage of in order to receive a blow job, saying “it’s not a dick, it’s a mouth-based video game”.

Image 5: Derrick’s Dickmento

Both Psycho Potato and Derrick’s Dickmento introduce many layers of sexuality, with Psycho Potato replacing the naked female body of Janet Leigh with a vegetable, sexualising the vegetable by treating it in the same way as the original female body, culminating in a violent peeling and stabbing of the potato, with the peelings clogging the plug hole in the shower instead of being washed away like the blood in the original film. Derrick’s Dickmento interweaves a homosexual act with inter-racial power relationships, the protagonist is black and the person abusing the situation is white, and the fetishism of tattooing. The whole narrative is a queering of a film that already interfering with a linear time frame, so it could be understood as a layering a queer sexuality over an already queer space and time.

Interactive TV promises the fame of exposure and makes it available to anybody with an internet connection or mobile phone. This aspect of interactive TV, feeding on the viewers desire of fame, is potentially the least queer device in the whole concept as it reflects a truly dominant view in today’s culture. However, the culture’s obsession with celebrity and fame does create a distorted view of reality and provides a delusion that is capable of shifting the sense of what a whole society stands for. Exposure in relation to potential fame, and exposure in relation to personal information and the self are all devices present in interactive TV, but there is also a strong sense of closetedness, like the Stephen Hawking’s covert sex tape as mentioned before, and the more carefully coded streams of information contained within the content of the clips, which appears as exposure but the exposure is often a false reality hiding the reality from view. The falsity is queer, and the hidden content, through marginalisation is queer and both exist against the legitimate view. The contradiction of the two states existing in the same place also sets up an equally queer space

The video My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay (see Image 3 below), shown on Sumo TV was originally taken from Internet video site YouTube where it was viewed over a million times and gathered 3979 comments, including one user whose comment was just the word “queer” .

Image 3: My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay by Bo Burnham

In this very clever video Bo Burnham is protesting that he is not gay but it I framed in such a way that implies a homosexual knowledge. It is not a heterosexual disavowal of homosexuality in the traditional sense because it is not an attack on homosexuality, but an affectionate play on identity and perception of sexuality. Eve Sedgwick unpacks the idea of closetedness in her book The Epistomology of the Closet : “To point rhetorically to the emptiness of the secret, “the nothing that is,” is, in fact, oddly, the same gesture as the attributation to it of a compulsory content.” Sedgwick points out that an empty space as a secret is essentially the same space as a secret that has something contained in it. In relation to interactive TV, the disavowal of the queer content is just the same as the acknowledgement of the queer content because it is contained, or empty, in that same space.

Homoerotic imagery features heavily in the content of the shows, Cigarmantoronto Smoking Cigars for example (see image 4 below), where the cigar that the man is enjoying gets bigger and bigger; edited together so that it appears as growth of he phallic object in his mouth. This implies a latent homosexuality on the part of the white, middleaged man that is both exposed an clear in it’s intention and hidden and closeted in it’s distancing from any actual sexual act at the same time.


Image 4: Cigarmantoronto Smoking Cigars

Fame TV provides an interesting contradiction between the presentation of the programme, and it’s politics. The presentation, the mediator between the audience and the TV programmers, is a completely lateral placement in that the presenters, almost entirely young, blonde heterosexual females (see image 6 below), seem almost indifferent to there being a camera on them, not letting it distract them from chatting to each other about what they did the previous night or even chatting to someone off screen, none of which bears any relation to the clips to be played. They discuss texts sent in to the programme by viewers, padding them out to a point of complete annihilation of any sense, such as Laura, the presenter pictured in image 6 telling an extended story of how she had been to the shop with her mother to buy a chicken . But the queerness of the clips in terms of quality and the accessibility of the viewer is in direct contrast to the absent, heteronormative presentation, which is entirely hierarchically based, ie healthy, young and blonde.

Image 6: fame tv image taken 17:30 01/03/2008

Both fame TV and Sumo TV are presented live and unscripted. The live presentation of the programmes also adds to the idea of the unexpected and randomness of the programming, live TV has both an association with history, looking back to the days when all TV was live, before technology progressed to allow the recording of programmes, and of the future, where it becomes low budget alternative to expensive recorded programming, and accessible as anyone can broadcast live with a webcam.

The historical context of television has always implied a lack of power of the viewer; the audience is represented as a passive element to the active performance on the screen. Interactive TV brings into question the direction of the gaze, because it introduces the idea of the audience watching themselves. This is not a new idea in general, with candid camera shows being a part of TV schedules virtually since TV began, but the difference is that the candid camera shows had used the public in structured scenarios which set up the possibility of the unexpected but were actually carefully scripted in order to produce a specific outcome. Interactive TV that is internet based introduces an element of randomness that in truth renders it almost unwatchable as there is often no connection or continuity from one clip to another, and while the presenters may give the viewer the title of the clip and even say what it might contain but there is no way of knowing what is going to be the outcome.

Randomness of subject and pace is a truly queer stance, it is not definable in terms of regular time, there is effectively no formula to contain it and from one clip to the next it could easily either offend or amuse, irrespective of the viewer’s sensibilities and tastes. The running order of clips is predetermined by the producers of the shows, the unexpectedness of the programming is entirely provided by the nature of the clips and in watching there is never any idea of what may be presented next, this makes it either disjointed and nearly unwatchable, though highly curious, unpredictable but compelling. In the case of Fame TV the audience vote and if a clip receives two votes it is shown full scrren, which has the dual effect of making the production less queer than Sumo TV as it becomes framed as popularity or status, however it is actually quite rare to see a clip on fame TV as their programming is dominated by their presenters talking and commenting on texts sent in by viewers.

The low production values and ‘home-madeness’ of the video clips shown on Sumo TV, and even more so fame TV, occupies the genre of trash TV, low status part of the entire TV hierarchy. A mainstream TV show, such as a costume drama on the BBC, with high budgets and generous production values lays claim and is generally assumed as being ‘better’ than something made cheaply and with low-fi technology and low budgets. To use ‘trash’ as a means of performance is a queer concept in itself, when the quality of the idea or creativeness behind the clip may easily be on a level with any highly produced piece, it’s subversion of the desire to be ‘better’ situates it within a queer context.

Big Jim’s sponge puppet in Jonny at the Pub (see Image 7 below) is a great example of a ‘trash’ video that uses trash as it’s main devise. The puppet is green and made of sponge and is served a drink in the pub with no questions asked, the pun of the piece being that a ‘person’ made of sponge would naturally want to drink. Like Psycho Potato, mentioned previously, this substitution of an original person subject with a low status inanimate object does not attempt to trick the viewer into believing it as human, or real in any way, the purpose of the substitution is simply to represent the original with an improbable or impossible alternative.

Image 7: Jonny at the Pub by Big Jim

Richard Dyer criticises programmes with very high production values that her refers to as ‘qualities’ in his book Only Entertainment :

“The pleasure of this well-done density is partly sensuous – Fortunes of War would have been worth it for Harriet’s cardigans and teacups alone; or, as a friend of mine puts it, the only trouble with qualities is that the actors will keep standing in front of the furniture.”

This criticism firmly places the emphasis that society places on cost over content, which fits with the dominant cultural view of shallow celebrity and surface wealth. Although a queer idea is related to surface rather than depth in terms of knowledge, as discussed in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari as a ‘rhizome’ , it does not necessarily fit with an idea of the valuing of surface appearance over content. That interactive TV breaks the rule of high status, high quality production and does honour quality of content to some degree, the producers perform a selection process between what is uploaded onto the Sumo.tv website and what ends up being seen on the TV show, shows a subversion of a current society ideal.

Interactive TV’s preoccupation with sex of all denominations, varieties and fetishes, suggests a position that runs against the heteronormative but if the presentation of the shows is considered, being largely aimed at the male heterosexual youth, then it could also be seen as entirely in line with dominant sensibilities and society structures, merely providing a platform for heterosexual youth to snigger at everything that falls outside of their own remit, a disavowal aimed at positioning them higher in the social hierarchy. In addition to this potential position, as with fame TV, the presentation is the most dominant and consistent visible theme and is framed as heteronormative.

The weekly Sumo TV newsletter says that the audience of Sumo TV wants “a bunch of stupid, pointless, meaningless, time-wasting videos” (see Appendix 2) this shows that the programme makers place the content of the channel as of a low status, positioning themselves higher up the hierarchy. However as it is the viewers that have provided the clips it could also be interpreted as a placing of the audience either within this low status, as being the subject of the content, or as of a higher status than the content, having the power to dismiss the subject as hierarchically lower than themselves along with the queer sexuality that is so present in the content.

Politicality is also evident in the naming of programs using personal pronouns, ‘My Sumo’, ‘Your Channel’. This implies an inclusion of the viewer in the programme creating a distinct community relating to the programme, queer poet John Ashbery wrote “the fact of addressing someone, myself or someone else, is what's the important thing at the particular moment rather than the particular person involved" This treatment of the audience as a whole instead of a collection of individuals implies that the audience is given agency within the process but in reality that position is entirely controlled by the programmers. This issue of agency is an important point to consider because it allows the viewer the perceived power to contribute and watch, or to switch off, by this they perceive to be adding to the content of the cultural mass whilst at the same time losing their individuality and real agency within the process.

This means that the show is represented as a community event, ‘your’ or ‘my’ programme, and on the surface very democratic; however the final editing and content is completely at the discretion of the producers, and the corporate owners of the channels. This places the channel and producers in a position of power over the audience, a conventional hierarchical position, not occupying a queer space or time at all. Interactive TV could be situated as the ultimate in democratic technology, allowing the audience to have creative input into the programming but, added to the producer input, the opportunity to be ‘discovered’ and receive rewards for creativity, implies a potential increase in status rather than the reward being the contribution for its own sake, the pursuit of increased status also positions the programming as away from a queer space.

The perceived democratic positioning of interactive TV is largely a result of it’s close relationship with the internet and the other crucial connection between interactive TV and the internet is sex. The layers of sexuality inherent within the programming of interactive TV, as shown in the examples already given, show the complex relationship of viewer demand and holding back from demand in the sense of maintaining a sense of potential rather than actual satisfaction. The most watched clips on the website Sumo.tv all have sexual content, and the presentation of the clips, unscripted, with laddish presenters, revolves around an assertion of dominant sexuality which provides alternative sexualities as material to be ridiculed.

As well as looking at the content and presentation of interactive TV in terms of queer discourses it is important to consider the difference between interactive TV and conventional TV. This is predominantly the hybridisation of TV and other technologies, such as the internet or mobile phones. Hybridity is explored in techno-utopian discourses, the combining of technologies provides a starting point for making available to everyone anything that they desire via technology. Target audiences for these utopian discourses would be ‘everyone’ although because interactive TV has a small audience it immediately places it outside and within a queer space and time.

This idea of having everything you could need provided by technology introduces the isolated individual, and the virtual community. In 1996, Stewart describes the impact that this may have on communities and society, with interactive TV being the beginning of his ‘protean box’:

"The future of information technology descends upon us in a swarm of buzzwords: global village, electronic superhighway, information age, electronic frontier. Someday soon, cyberspace - the vast, intangible territory where computers meet and exchange information - will be populated with electronic communities and businesses. In your home, a protean box will hook you into a wealth of goods and services. It will receive and send mail, let you make a phone or video call or send a fax or watch a movie or buy shoes or diagnose a rash or pay bills or get cash (a new digital kind) or write your mother. That will be just the living-room manifestation of what promises to be a radical - and rapid - transformation of commerce and society, the greatest since the invention of the automobile."

This utopian view of future technology is biased towards online communities and Sumo TV in particular is keen to promote their sense of community. Queer fits very neatly into this idea of community providing identity just from inclusion within the group, not necessarily needing further categorisation within the set. Queer’s position against the normative however aligns more with the distopian view. Kling describes the "comparably dark" dystopianism which views technology as “a vehicle to exacerbate human suffering” . Community is one of the most positive ideas relating to a queer identity, technological dystopianism examines how certain technologies "facilitate a social order that is relentlessly harsh, destructive and miserable" , a negative view which moves away from community and identity, but also places it against the ‘legitimate’ norm.

“Just as there are those who predict that the Internet will liberate relationships and engender community, there are those who view online relationships as shallow, impersonal, and often hostile. These researchers argue that only the illusion of community can be created in cyberspace”

So if the reality of the technology involved in interactive TV has both utopian and distopian themes and the result is that of a shallow, impersonal sense of community it occupies a queer territory and the question is then of what impact that might have on society. Sociologist William Fielding Ogburn does entertain the possibility that the effects of culture and technology are reciprocal, instead of the technology feeding the culture, he understood technology to be an autonomous independent variable affecting the dependent variable of culture, writing, "in nearly all cases [of cultural lag] the independent variable proved to be a scientific discovery or mechanical invention."

The ‘cultural lag’, the measure of time between a technology’s invention and the corresponding social adjustment, while providing a framework to discuss a connection between technology and society suggests one unified culture and therefore the theory is destabalised when the culture is taken to be multifaceted. Ogburn believed that in this way technology was responsible for nearly all social change, creating a possibility of a real connection between technology and social revolution. By looking at Interactive TV in these terms it can easily be placed as a radical revolutionary and potentially society destabilising proposition. The fact that this ‘cultural lag’ in itself, while being a quantitative time based theory is actually very difficult to identify and to measure. That the Cultural Lag has a temporal quality and the effect of the technology is seen as having a negative effect on society, such as the introduction of basic television being represented as ultimately producing a society of couch potatoes with short attention spans.

“A 1999 Time Magazine article, in fact, claimed that the Internet is a "technological wonder, every bit as revolutionary as the light bulb or the telephone. [It] is going to shape our lives in the century ahead" (Okrent, 1999, p. 38). As such, the cultural lag and the extreme interpretations of the technology that follow may be more extreme as well.”

The present state of Interactive TV would be placed as a time frame positioned within the cultural lag, between the fixed points of the conception of the interactive technology and the actual cultural shift that could occur as a result of the technology. I propose that the time frame in between these temporal points could be understood as a queer space and time, a time of undefinable elements that are destabalising to society before a new normative state is achieved.

So in asking the question ‘How Queer is Interactive TV’, I can assume some level of queerness in content from my personal contribution, and there is certainly a strong element of other queer content as shown by the examples given in this essay. Form becomes a more difficult space to identify as queer or not, there is heteronormative presentation, the promise of exposure, and actual exposure of subjects within the video content, and the perceived safety of closetedness within coded queer information, a politically democratic premise, an idea of virtual community and a place within a ‘cultural lag’ which positions it within a queer space; all forming a set of contradictions between queer and non-queer that run right through interactive TV.

So while interactive TV has the potential to occupy a platform for social disruption or even social change, in reality it is a heavily produced and controlled environment, offering the idea of power and fame to it’s audience and yet manipulating and processing what is ultimately consumed by them. Aiming interactive TV at young people and people ‘with time to waste’, shows a patriarchal power structure that is not overwhelmed by any queer content shown as the product is too random in terms of subject and form despite maintaining it’s queer ‘trash’ status. This contradiction is key as it becomes a platform for queer subjects coupled with heteronormative presenters; indicatively queer content being shown on satellite or cable TV channel which is part of a massive corporate structure, a position that is ultimately heteronormative, through a queer sensibility, to a patriarchal product passing as a subversive ideology.

List of Images

1. Stephen Hawking Sex Tape, Still taken from video http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=3416307

2. The Goddess Bunny, Still taken from video http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=12875

3. Derrick’s Dickmento by College Humour.com Still taken from video http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=3244941

4. My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay by Bo Burnham Still taken from video http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=2511063

5. Cigarmantoronto Smoking Cigars Still taken from video http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=3089530

6. Fame TV Still taken from TV image taken 17:30 01/03/2008

7. Jonny at the Pub by Big Jim Still taken from video http://www.sumo.tv/watch.php?video=2990003

List Of Appendices

1. Sumo Newsletter 3 Received by email 08/01/2008

2. Sumo Newsletter December 2007 Received by email 25/01/2008

Bibliography

Books/Journals

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London/New York: Continuum, 1987)

Dyer, Richard, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992)

Dyer, Richard, The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002)

Foucault, Michel, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Vol 1-3 (London: Penguin Books, 1994)

Halberstam, Judith, In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York/London: New York University Press, 2005)

Halperin, David M,Saint=Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, (New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995)

Kiesler, Sara, ed. Culture of the Internet (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997)

Kling, Rob, ed. Computerization and Controversy: Value conflicts and social choices. 2nd ed. (San Diego, USA: Academic Press, 1996)

McChesney, Robert, So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market: The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. (New York: Routledge, 2000)

Mulvey, Laura, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006)

Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 1989)

Okrent, D. Raising kids online: What can parents do? Time Magazine, 10 May, (1999). P 38-43

Ogburn, William Fielding, Nimkoff, M.F, A Handbook of Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) p. 90

Perloff, Marjorie, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistomology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1990)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994)

Websites

John Ashbery quoted in Perloff 258 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_2_44/ai_53260174/pg_8

John Vincent "Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet". Twentieth Century Literature. Summer 1998. FindArticles.com. 23 Feb. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_2_44/ai_53260174

Cultural Lag or Cultural Drag, The Impact of Resource Depletion on Social Change in Post-Modern Society Copyright 2002 John F. Kraus II
December 8 2002 http://www.mercer.edu/sociology/IndependentprojectfinaldraftDec072002.htm

On Utopias and Dystopias: Toward an Understanding of the Discourse Surrounding the Internet by Dana R. Fisher http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue2/fisher.html#ab

X Factor http://www.xfactor.tv/ accessed 22/02/08

I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here http://www.itv.com/Entertainment/reality/iacgmooh/default.html accessed 22/02/08

Sumo TV Website www.sumo.tv accessed September 2007-February 2008

Fame TV Website www.fametv.com accessed December 2007 – February 2008

From Utopia to Dystopia: The Twin Faces of the Internet
Debra Howcroft & Brian Fitzgerald http://www.csis.ul.ie/staff/bf/paperv2.pdf accessed 05/02/08

YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ accessed September 2007 – February 2008

Films/TV

Memento (2000) Dir. Christopher Nolan

Psycho (1960) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

My Sumo, Sumo TV Sky Channel 144 22.00-21.00 every week night

Fame TV Sky Channel 187