I'll be presenting a version of this work at PCA/ACA 2006
excerpt
In a recent online column, Mark Pesce wrote that "October 18th, 2004 is the day TV died. That evening, British satellite broadcaster SkyOne... ran the premiere episode of the re-visioned 70s camp classic Battlestar Galactica... a few hours after airing on SkyOne, '33' was available for Internet download" (http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html). Placing a contemporary sci-fi sensation and a contemporary technology of distribution alongside each other, this paper explores both through the theoretical concept of hybridity. The hybrid — whether a human+machine organism or a broadcast+networked medium — as the provisional fusion of two into one, always leaves a gap where the intended and anticipated operation of the system can and does run amok. The contradiction between reinscribing binary difference and erasing it is evoked in every hybrid, and I am interested in the way it plays out across the diagetic narratives of the television series Battlestar Galactica and the technical and legal frameworks of the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent.
Battlestar Galactica presents the status of its central cylon characters as decidedly indeterminate, both in terms of their bodily constitution and in terms of their individuality and autonomy. The show thus illustrates the instability that the hybrid introduces into supposedly fixed categories like human and machine. This tension — between the militaristic imperative to divide and demarcate friend from foe, and the treacherous ecology of hybridity that inevitably undermines it — fuels the narrative engine that made for an underground television hit. If mimicking humans was simply subordinate OR equivalent to being human, the series would lose a powerful instrument of its own perpetuation — the one composed, quite ingeniously, of the hybrid as a nexus of suspended questions.
Meanwhile, the Internet facilitates a global TV fan culture, inciting viewers overseas to follow U.S. programs before they are syndicated abroad. As media that “institute new ratios... when they interact among themselves†(53), in McLuhan’s words, neither television nor the web are left unchanged by their encounter in BitTorrent and their other hybrid progeny. One commentator on BitTorrent’s copyright skirmishes remarks that “unsurprisingly this high-tech larceny has a strong sci-fi bent, betraying the geeky culprits, with two Stargate shows, one Star Trek show and Battlestar Galactica in the top 10†(Sturgeon) — if Battlestar Galactica is among the most popular TV downloads, that is, this status is tied to the intercourse of audiences, technologies, and narratives, each of which works through and by the tensions of the others. Hybridity is an evocative mode of conceptualizing these contacts and interminglings, and this paper argues that it is a crucial terrain of contestation both on and for television.
