Abigail De Kosnik and Jaclyn Zhou on Diversity on Streaming Platforms in Pandemic Times
Abigail De Kosnik and Jaclyn Zhou recently featured as speakers at the Pre-Event Opening of Ecran Total, presenting "Diversity on Streaming Platforms in Pandemic Times" with Benjamin de Kosnik, Veronika Jackson, Matthew Jamison, all members of the Media Metadata Research lab (mmrl). The mmrl assigned diversity scores to 30 films and television series that were broadcasted on major streaming platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The Diversity Scoring system aims to be legible to a wide audience by accounting for both quanitty and quality of representation from ethnicity to age to sexuality and nationality.
From the discussion (from Abigail):
We know that the U.S. media industries have become more interested in diversity and have expressed a greater commitment to diverse representation over the past seven years. In 2014, Laverne Cox, a trans actress who was a main cast member on the Netflix hit series "Orange is the New Black" appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the exemplar of what Time called the transgender tipping point. This issue announced that the high profile of trans celebrities such as Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, and Janet Mock, had "tipped the scale of social judgement from intolerance to tolerance, acceptance and recognition of trans people". Of course, as Cox and many other trans activists, artists and scholars pointed out, in the wake of this Time magazine issue, the trans tipping point may have meant that trans people became more visible in U.S. society but this visibility also led to a spike in harassment and violence against trans people, so the tipping point has not been altogether positive.
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So we consider the trans tipping point, OscarSoWhite, and MeToo as three different but related moment when the U.S. media industries were pushed from within and without to diversify its storytelling, to represent a range of genders and races and ethnicities more and in more robust ways. Hollywood responded to this cultural moment, this collective pressure to showcase more female and BIPOC leads. Warner Brothers heavily marketed its first big budget film centering on a female superhero Wonder Woman in 2017, and Marvel similarly hyped up its first film centering on a Black superhero with a nearly all black cast Black Panther in 2018.
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Our idea at mmrl was to create our own system to score diversity in media text and to evaluate television in a period of time when the entire U.S. media landscape has been fairly focused on diversity and inclusion. And also at a time when streaming TV platforms became a primary soruce of fictional screen-bsed content for many millions of Americans as we were at home more than ever and cinemas were largely closed. The goals we set for ourselves for our diversity scoring system is that we would produce quantitative and graphic assessments understandable at a glance, but when we say understandable at a glance, is it?
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