The L Word's most literal exemplar of a career in freelance lesbianism is Alice Pieszecki, a bisexual-identified character who works throughout the series as a queer culture guru for media outlets including LA Magazine, public radio station KCRW, and fictional TV talk show The Look (portrayed by Leisha Hailey, the only out lesbian cast member when the program premiered). Alice is certainly not the first queer woman to draw a diagram visualizing the complex web of hook-ups and break-ups that form the fabric of her community, but she is the first to make this graphic her trademark. The principle of her "chart" is introduced in the pilot episode when she plays a six degrees of sexual separation game with Dana, sketching out the serial couplings that connect the two of them with each other and with several friends. At the end of the scene, the camera tracks over their heads to frame a large white board where Alice keeps a running tally of the links amongst her circle of acquaintances (Figure 17). But it becomes clear that the chart is more than a personal pastime for Alice when, in the opening of the second episode, she pitches it to her editor as a marketable motif for an article (Figure 18): "The point is we are all connected, see? Through love, through loneliness, through one tiny lamentable lapse in judgment. All of us, in our isolation, we reach out from the darkness, from the alienation of modern life, to form these connections." Although her boss is unimpressed, Alice (or more properly, The L Word's writing staff) here exhibits a savvy appreciation for the productivity of networked intimacy under late capitalism. In a marked update from her initial pen-and-paper explanation, Alice now demos the chart on her laptop using a graphics tablet. Only a few scenes later, she has implausibly launched a successful user-generated version online (Figure 19): "You know the chart? OK, I put it on the Internet... This thing is growing. People are adding names, and it's growing exponentially." This vision of a web platform driven by relationships was prescient for its time (January 2004, just before the inception of Facebook) and already signals the harmony between The L Word's rendition of sexual community and the development of digital technologies.
While the network ethos of the chart is ever-present throughout the series, most notably in Alice's talk radio show based on the concept, the chart itself doesn't reappear until the beginning of season 4. Here, in an eruption of metatexual instruction, Alice and Jenny introduce Helena to what is now a vibrant online community, telling her "it's so much fun, you don't know what you're missing! ...It's like a social networking site -- for lesbians" (Figure 20). In Alice's opinion, the core feature of this diversified portal, now dubbed OurChart, is still its "hook-ups page": an interactive visualization of data on who has slept with who. The graphics that represent this interface on screen are artifacts of the program's technological imaginary, unrelated to any recognizable web browser or platform. Although Alice does describe in detail how to add a link by inviting someone to join, this scene's pedagogy is oriented more toward ideology than tangible usage, hyping a fantasy of seamless equivalence between the sexual network and the digital network. OurChart's discourse thus aligns perfectly with late capitalism's marriage of subjectivity and communication. The connectedness that Alice identifies as a hallmark of interpersonal relations in a sexual subculture is likewise a hallmark of the present-day organization of work, which depends increasingly on self-organizing cooperation facilitated by media and information technologies. The L Word styles itself to capitalize on those synergies, with the effect that, for example, the mythology of Shane becomes technical as much as sexual, because as a "hub" ("anyone who has slept with over 50 people," although in Shane's case the number is close to 1000) she is instrumental in binding together the digital as much as the face-to-face social network.
In contrast to season 1's more innocent reveries on the chart, this particular scene functions as an integrated promotion for the concurrent launch of the actual OurChart.com, itself a promotion for the The L Word in a sort of mise en abyme of transmedia branding. The tie-in website opened in January 2007, on the same day as the season 4 premiere, but its interactive features weren't up and running until several months later (Cashmore), during which time the program's improbable vision hovered before fans as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Industry blogs reported that Chaiken, newly-minted CEO of OurChart, confirmed that "The idea to migrate the chart to the Web grew out of a story line on the show... Now, in the upcoming season, that character will realize that the chart has caught on... At the same time, the real-world chart also will go live" (Davis). In the context of convergence, defined by mobilizing viewership as immaterial labor, harnessing a "real-world" social network to work productively as an online social network is a predictable marketing strategy. But OurChart.com, as portrayed within The L Word's fictional Los Angeles, symptomizes the ideological payload of this move: the fantasy of an unmediated and frictionless correspondence between subjective and digital layers that ignores the intercession of communication technologies and capitalist economies. The site as rendered here is markedly unconstrained by funding or infrastructure -- after Alice "put it on the internet," it just "caught on" with no apparent need for development, staff, advertising, or revenue. Moreover, beyond Alice's assurance that when you add one of your hook-ups to the chart the other party must opt-in, the characters express no hesitancy over the alarming notion of translating intimate sexual histories into a searchable online database. These convenient erasures make OurChart.com formidable as a cutting-edge promotion precisely because it takes the The L Word's economy of lesbianism as labor to its logical conclusion, enticing viewers-cum-users to work toward producing these values in more direct and centralized ways.
While the network ethos of the chart is ever-present throughout the series, most notably in Alice's talk radio show based on the concept, the chart itself doesn't reappear until the beginning of season 4. Here, in an eruption of metatexual instruction, Alice and Jenny introduce Helena to what is now a vibrant online community, telling her "it's so much fun, you don't know what you're missing! ...It's like a social networking site -- for lesbians" (Figure 20). In Alice's opinion, the core feature of this diversified portal, now dubbed OurChart, is still its "hook-ups page": an interactive visualization of data on who has slept with who. The graphics that represent this interface on screen are artifacts of the program's technological imaginary, unrelated to any recognizable web browser or platform. Although Alice does describe in detail how to add a link by inviting someone to join, this scene's pedagogy is oriented more toward ideology than tangible usage, hyping a fantasy of seamless equivalence between the sexual network and the digital network. OurChart's discourse thus aligns perfectly with late capitalism's marriage of subjectivity and communication. The connectedness that Alice identifies as a hallmark of interpersonal relations in a sexual subculture is likewise a hallmark of the present-day organization of work, which depends increasingly on self-organizing cooperation facilitated by media and information technologies. The L Word styles itself to capitalize on those synergies, with the effect that, for example, the mythology of Shane becomes technical as much as sexual, because as a "hub" ("anyone who has slept with over 50 people," although in Shane's case the number is close to 1000) she is instrumental in binding together the digital as much as the face-to-face social network.
In contrast to season 1's more innocent reveries on the chart, this particular scene functions as an integrated promotion for the concurrent launch of the actual OurChart.com, itself a promotion for the The L Word in a sort of mise en abyme of transmedia branding. The tie-in website opened in January 2007, on the same day as the season 4 premiere, but its interactive features weren't up and running until several months later (Cashmore), during which time the program's improbable vision hovered before fans as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Industry blogs reported that Chaiken, newly-minted CEO of OurChart, confirmed that "The idea to migrate the chart to the Web grew out of a story line on the show... Now, in the upcoming season, that character will realize that the chart has caught on... At the same time, the real-world chart also will go live" (Davis). In the context of convergence, defined by mobilizing viewership as immaterial labor, harnessing a "real-world" social network to work productively as an online social network is a predictable marketing strategy. But OurChart.com, as portrayed within The L Word's fictional Los Angeles, symptomizes the ideological payload of this move: the fantasy of an unmediated and frictionless correspondence between subjective and digital layers that ignores the intercession of communication technologies and capitalist economies. The site as rendered here is markedly unconstrained by funding or infrastructure -- after Alice "put it on the internet," it just "caught on" with no apparent need for development, staff, advertising, or revenue. Moreover, beyond Alice's assurance that when you add one of your hook-ups to the chart the other party must opt-in, the characters express no hesitancy over the alarming notion of translating intimate sexual histories into a searchable online database. These convenient erasures make OurChart.com formidable as a cutting-edge promotion precisely because it takes the The L Word's economy of lesbianism as labor to its logical conclusion, enticing viewers-cum-users to work toward producing these values in more direct and centralized ways.
