Another fantasmatic equivalence in play at OurChart.com, beyond plotting a sexual network onto a technical network, is its conflation of onscreen and real life communities. The L Word's ultimate alibi is authenticity, and the website is a winning move in that rhetorical game: because "real" lesbians now chart their relationships just like the characters do, Alice and her friends evidently represent "real" lesbians. Thus OurChart.com not only advertises The L Word but buttresses its structuring ideology, leveraging user participation to heighten the verisimilitude of its portrayals. This was not the program's first attempt to garner cultural credibility by layering behind-the-scenes narratives over its fictional soap opera, and in addition to amplifying the figurative parallel between production world and story world, OurChart.com provided a distribution channel for this ongoing stream of supplemental content. With regular submissions by Chaiken and actors including Beals, Hailey, and Moening promising fans insider access to The L Word empire and the opportunity to interact with its stars, OurChart.com enhanced the impression that the program engages an actually existing lesbian community (a role played here by the site's users). Blogs and videos by paid contributors augmented this pre-packaged material and its subliminal creed of commodity lesbianism, with the implied assumption that, in order to appeal to The L Word's audience, the website must be front-loaded for consumption.
The typical layout of OurChart.com's home page supported the impression that professional content was its main attraction, with editorial blogs and videos on display in the central space while recent user-generated content (along with ads) was relegated to a sidebar (Figure 5). Navigational links led to expanded views of these commercial components, including themed columns by the staff, original web series, and actors' dispatches from the set, as well as to the discussion forums and profiles that comprised the site's social platform. OurChart.com was built on an open-source content management system {http://drupal.org/node/128791}, and its networking features, when they arrived, were relatively commonplace. After filling out a personal profile, users could manage a list of friends, send public notes or private messages, create blog entries, upload pictures, and track their comments on posts throughout the site (Figure 6). As a whole, the organization of OurChart.com showcases once again the characteristic tension of fan-driven promotions: its challenge was to offer enough open interactivity to attract a productive user base while still expressing and enforcing a homogenous brand.
OurChart.com's particular balance of these demands turned out to be an effective one, as the site gained rapidly in popularity and prompted extensive participation. One article reports respectable usage numbers by July 2007 (Kramer), and though the focus here is the appeal of professional programming, conversation in forums, blogs, and comments was also lively. The corporate strategy underpinning OurChart.com follows a broader trend to position gays as a privileged marketing category, and Pete Cashmore cites data suggesting that this move carries over to the internet, where "gay, lesbian and bisexual users are an extremely valuable demographic: social networks and blogs targeting this segment of the audience could perform well" (January 2007). OurChart president Hilary Rosen parrots a similar doctrine in statements that the site will "present marketers with a great opportunity to reach a consumer market that is targeted, financially independent and loyal" (Announcements) and later that "The lesbian community is Internet-savvy and is twice as likely as heterosexual women to consider the Internet their prime source of entertainment" (Becker). Such mavens, and indeed many of the analyses directed at the commodification of gay identity, see this tendency in terms of an aptitude for consumption -- the inference is that the web's primary innovation is increased opportunities for advertising and sales. What the close relationship between The L Word's onscreen representation and online implementation of the "chart" demonstrates, however, is that the transition from broadcast to broadband enables a qualitative intensification that becomes concerned with what the gay demographic can produce as well what it can as consume. The L Word can monetize lesbianism because late capitalism renders subjectivity itself productive through communications networks.
The typical layout of OurChart.com's home page supported the impression that professional content was its main attraction, with editorial blogs and videos on display in the central space while recent user-generated content (along with ads) was relegated to a sidebar (Figure 5). Navigational links led to expanded views of these commercial components, including themed columns by the staff, original web series, and actors' dispatches from the set, as well as to the discussion forums and profiles that comprised the site's social platform. OurChart.com was built on an open-source content management system {http://drupal.org/node/128791}, and its networking features, when they arrived, were relatively commonplace. After filling out a personal profile, users could manage a list of friends, send public notes or private messages, create blog entries, upload pictures, and track their comments on posts throughout the site (Figure 6). As a whole, the organization of OurChart.com showcases once again the characteristic tension of fan-driven promotions: its challenge was to offer enough open interactivity to attract a productive user base while still expressing and enforcing a homogenous brand.
OurChart.com's particular balance of these demands turned out to be an effective one, as the site gained rapidly in popularity and prompted extensive participation. One article reports respectable usage numbers by July 2007 (Kramer), and though the focus here is the appeal of professional programming, conversation in forums, blogs, and comments was also lively. The corporate strategy underpinning OurChart.com follows a broader trend to position gays as a privileged marketing category, and Pete Cashmore cites data suggesting that this move carries over to the internet, where "gay, lesbian and bisexual users are an extremely valuable demographic: social networks and blogs targeting this segment of the audience could perform well" (January 2007). OurChart president Hilary Rosen parrots a similar doctrine in statements that the site will "present marketers with a great opportunity to reach a consumer market that is targeted, financially independent and loyal" (Announcements) and later that "The lesbian community is Internet-savvy and is twice as likely as heterosexual women to consider the Internet their prime source of entertainment" (Becker). Such mavens, and indeed many of the analyses directed at the commodification of gay identity, see this tendency in terms of an aptitude for consumption -- the inference is that the web's primary innovation is increased opportunities for advertising and sales. What the close relationship between The L Word's onscreen representation and online implementation of the "chart" demonstrates, however, is that the transition from broadcast to broadband enables a qualitative intensification that becomes concerned with what the gay demographic can produce as well what it can as consume. The L Word can monetize lesbianism because late capitalism renders subjectivity itself productive through communications networks.
