Victoria Cox 12/21/2012 ENGL 372 Digital Girls: iCarly and Cyborg Realities Fan: Regarding Sam's blue

remote controlwhich I have a photo of hereif you count up all the sounds that the remote has made, it's a total of 93 unique sound effects, and yet there are only six buttons on the remote. Freddie: Well, I designed the remote to be programmable, so I can assign the buttons whatever sound effects we need that week. -iStart a Fanwar In a laudatory article for Hollywood.com, Michelle Lee said she loves iCarly because the show makes no apologies for being exactly what it is: an old-school, family-friendly sitcom with zero edge. The show focuses on a trio of pre-teens who forge new spaces of digital publicity in their self-produced and wildly popular webshow. The humor is physical, nonsensical, and aggressively pointless; the adults are typical models of Schneiderian thickheaded impotence; and the central conflicts revolve around the madness of visibility and obsession. While the show is unarguably, unprecedentedly successful, Lee's identified characteristics are hardly self-evident. And yet, as both its fans and creators testify, the show's popularity stems naturally from its sincerity,1 even as engages unceasingly with sarcastic, absurdist, and even flagrantly counterproductive narratives and forms of humor. Rather than either committing to or breaking from ideas of reality and sincerity, iCarly as a text instead subsumes the digital, the altered, the ironic and subtextual inextricably within compelling markers of realness and honestyand is, ultimately, so successful in this obfuscation that it reads as 'edgeless'. The central premise of the TV show is that the titular Carly and her best friends Sam and Freddy run an internet-only web showalso called iCarly, and as popular as its real-world
1 Schneider, 14 Dec. 2012.

analog counterpart. The site of the in-show program is iCarly.com, which resembles Nickelodeon's web domain identically. Nickelodeon uses its own web show format to air clips from the television program, as well as additional content that resembles but is not identical to what is ostensibly produced by the children in-show. This material is largely limited to the single-camera format and studio location of the fictional iCarly program, and plays under the heading cool web show highlights.2 In both the fictional and actual iCarlys, viewers can create and contribute video content that may then aired on the show(s). In perhaps the preeminent piece of poststructuralist iCarly scholarship, Jason LaTouche examines the efficacy and complexity of this play as follows: ...in the hyperreal space iCarly is constructing, the real is irrelevant. [A viewer] made a real video that she sent to the real website and it was really aired on a webshow that was shown on both the television show and the website. In order to do this, the girl went along with the fiction that Carly, Sam, and Freddy were not actors, that the website and show were actual real entities and not fake signifiers. Most importantly, the consequences of these actions had actual results. By choosing to participate in hyperreality, no matter how "fake," the girl, and viewers like her, produce authentic, satisfying, real experiences.3 In this manner of fusing the real and fictional realms through user interaction and digital communication, iCarly manages to make the distinction between the two partially indistinguishable, and essentially irrelevant. In her seminal Manifesto for Cyborgs, Donna Haraway proposes a new conceptual mythology. By her definition, "a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction."4 While Haraway's cyborg is largely theoretical, the young female heroes of iCarly are immersively engaged with the digital realm on a near-constant basis, perpetually working to present the self as a source of live entertainment that is then disseminated to the public. At the same time, the focus of the
2 iCarly.com. 3 LaTouche 2. 4 Haraway 1.

television show is on overcoming private interpersonal conflicts between the three friends, often employing the very constitutive elements of the hyperreality they perpetuate to reclaim and redefine their own livesas in iDon't Want to Fight, where Carly and her violent, meatloving friend Sam have to stop fighting over iCarly's importance to their friendship when an iCarly viewer poll votes that they are both acting dumb and should just make up. Haraway proposes cyborging as a political strategy, but the realm of iCarly utilizes it as a totally understated method of livingone that identifies and projects itself as fully, unironically 'real', but that also emphatically rejects effective progress. iCarly's endpoint is always a joke, to the exclusion of anything else. The show opposes learning a lesson, and has never featured a Special Episode with a dark or profound topicit instead seizes every opportunity to overturn these moments. At the end of iGo One Direction (in which current boy band phenomenon One Direction appears on the show playing their real selves, or characters who resemble themselves in every identifiable way), Carly's brother screams after a fleeing child, Bethany, come on, come back! Our story can't just end like this! It needs some kind of resolution! This is the end of the sub-plot, and Bethany never appears again. Creator Dan Schneider has also repeatedly insisted that the point of iCarly is just to make people laugh, and has designed episodes explicitly for the purpose of demolishing subtextual fan speculation. One such episode, entitled iStart a Fanwar, depicts the show's leads heading a panel at Webicon (a fictionalized version of fan convention Comic-con), and interacting with a crowd of rabid iCarly fans in increasingly absurd ways. The promotional tags for this episode indicated that it would be a watershed moment for Creddie and Seddie plotlines; referring to the fan-made portmanteaus for potential Carly/Freddie and Sam/Freddie romantic relationships. Instead of furthering a romantic plotline, the episode involves the trio arguing

with passionate Creddie and Seddie fans who hijack their Q&A panel. These fans are depicted as obsessive viewers who reject the reality of the web show in favor of their preferred reading: In one instance, Carly shouts into her microphone that "Freddie and I aren't in a romantic relationship," to which a audience member replies, "Respectfully, I disagree." She then produces a tablet full of "screen caps I've taken from actual iCarly webisodes proving the Carly and Freddie actually do like each other." Aside from representing the malleability of content as it shifts from producer to consumer in an interactive digital reality, this encounter reflects just how little credence this show extends to ideas of 'actuality.' The episode resolves with Sam and Carly telling the fansboth the in-show audience and those beyond the fourth wall'Sure, we're better-than-average looking teenagers with 'those feelings.' 'But iCarly is about comedy. Stupid, pointless comedy, just to make people smile and laugh.' Schneider posted several follow-up responses on his blog, including one directed to any iCarly fan who was upset by 'iStart a Fanwar' In this post, he clarifies the point of the episode from his directorial perspective: Do you act like the psycho fans you saw in the episode? Probably not. More than likely, you're just a normal person who feels passionate about iCarly. If you are, then you're not the kind of fan we were parodying...My goal always is to make you laugh, smile, and have a fun time not make you feel angry or hurt.5 These interactions between creator and audience function identically for both iCarlys. The critique of an overserious reading is virtually identical, whether it comes directly from Schneider through his blog, or from the characters themselves. The episode itself is also at times a cutting send-up of fan culture ("Don't you understand? A nerd riot can last for days! Many of these people don't have jobs or lives to get back to!"), but also goes to great lengths to cater to these same audiences (the secondary plot is an incredibly involved song-and-dance
5 Schneider 21 Nov. 2001

battle between Carly's brother and Jack Black in elaborate fantasy costumes). This audience in turn pushes back and interacts with the show in ways that cross the boundaries of a simple creator/viewer relationships. The supremacy of the author is, in fact, a recurring anxiety within the show: this episode's Webicon conflict is repeatedly contrasted with the iCarly crew's previous attempt to attend, which was thwarted by a deranged fan who trapped them in her basement and forced them to play with her.6 By harnessing this episode to further a point about the primacy of topical humor, Schneider reveals the extent to which he is simultaneously subject to the response of the viewerin this show to perhaps a greater extent than any other, given its thematics of self-production and inclusion of consumer submissions into the program itself. Further, the message that attempts to insert is a request for genuine, sincere engagement, but only with the show's most topical elements. All of which, too, is undergirded by a functional insistence that none of that matters as long as it is funny. On the unofficial iCarly Wiki, these admonishments against intensity are represented in ambiguous ways. On the page for iStart a Fanwarone of over a thousand user-created pages hosted at the sitea contributor describes a goof in the episode: In the scene which the girl with the Pear Pad was showing supposed "proof" Carly and Freddie's love, she mentioned that she took screencaps of actual iCarly webisodes. However, in the picture where she shows Carly staring into Freddie's eyes (from the episode "iCarly Awards"), Freddie is actually holding the camera so she couldn't have actually screen-capped that moment.7 This comment, steeped as it is in numerous layers of accepting and rejecting the presented fictional reality of iCarly, serves as a functional lens for examining questions of self-awareness and repurposing. This episode, so involved with issues of scrutiny and seriousness, nonetheless provokes the selfsame intensity and evaluation that it purportedly mocks. It would appear that someone along this continuum must be missing the point. And yet, in conversation
6 iPsycho. 7 iStart a Fanwar, iCarly Wikia

with fan response, Schneider reassures us that The writers and I love the iCarly super-fans!8 This sort of intense analysis of such a self-identified and persistently empty text can also be part of its fun. An attempt at this juncture to parse the vastly different levels of self-awareness from everyone who engages with this program appears moot given this schema: any level of engagement is acceptable, appreciated, as long as everyone bears in mind that it doesn't matter. Schneider, and his cast and viewers to the extent that the propagate this viewpoint, attempts to assert that iCarly is inherently meaninglessand that this does not serve to impede enjoyment of the product, but rather furthers it. Moreover, this meaninglessness is so fundamental that any attempt to derive meaning, however ardent, however apparently successful to the one launching it, can only ever result in the reproduction of meaninglessness, even while, as LaTouche attests, it has tangible repercussions.9 In a sense, this insistence reinscribes not just the show, but all of reality as devoid of meaning and messagebecause, of course, we can't extricate the media object from our interaction with it.10 While this may seem like an audacious assumption to make, let us first examine the issue of spaghetti tacos. On October 5, 2010in the middle of the fourth season of iCarlythe Dining and Wine section of The New York Times ran a brief piece on the spaghetti taco.11 Dan Schneider is quoted saying It was just a little joke I came up with for one episode...Then it turned into a running joke. And now its this thing people actually do. This 'joke' now operates as more than a culinary development, or a semi-branded means of engagement with the show, but is entirely both: The mixture of spaghetti and tacos is odd, Amelia admitted. But its actually pretty
8 Schneider, 21 Nov. 2011. 9 LaTouche 1. 10 Baudrillard, 1. ...It is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real. 11 Stapinski 1.

good. Theyre one of my favorite foods. I guess kids like making them because they think its cool to be like the people from "iCarly. But the real reason, she said, is that 'the taste is really, really good.'12 When asked to reflect on this phenomenon, Amelia's mother fluctuated between reluctance and resignation: 'Theyve been so influenced by the media,' she sighed. 'Theyll make their own iCarly show in her room and then come out and have the spaghetti tacos. Its kind of a thing we do.' Both Baudrillard and Haraway present their simulation theories in terms of capital and power. Along these axes, iCarly seems designed to propagate its own demise, pushing selfgenerated content and dissolving the importance of consuming references that pay back into the show's brand. Perhaps this talk of sincerity and the singular primacy of humor form their own real hereand yet iCarly held the coveted spot of the most popular show among the age 2-11 demographic for vast swaths of its television run, and was the first live-action sitcom in Nickelodeon history to reach 100 episodes.13 Miranda Cosgrove, who plays Carly, was the second-highest-paid child actor in 2011.14 As with every other aspect of its construction, iCarly undermines any potential message for which it might prove a vector. And yet in his blog post chronicling the show's finale, Schneider refocuses the show's success from the work of his studio to the way that, thanks to the fans, iCarly became part of American pop culture.15 As he runs through the episode scene-by-scene (the format of most of his episode-specific posts), he continually reminds readers that when you watch it, if you feel that deep emotion, you should know... it's all very, very real. He explicitly lists the parts where he cried, or where cast members broke down in tears. Still;

12 13 14 15

Stapinski 2. Hickson 1. Orenstein 1; iBattle Chip, iCarly Wikia. Schneider, 23 Nov. 2012.

As I wrote this episode, I kept telling myself, "Dan! Don't make it too sad!" So, I tried to keep lots of comedy in, too. That's why, at the end of this very poignant goodbye scene between Carly and Sam, I decided to have Lewbert enter the elevator, which gave Sam the opportunity to be her good ol' funny, crazy Sam self. I love how she SCREAMS "Get out!" and terrifies Lewbert. It's great how he runs away screaming, like a terrified little girl. So funny. Haraway's cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities16 but fusions and boundary dissolution appear here as the new normal, at least for the under-twelve demographic. Even though (or perhaps because) it is predicated upon a vast rejection of deep meaning, the resulting product reads as wholesome and sincere, invites participation and laughter. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible...Everything is already dead and risen in advance, Baudrillard intones,17 and he is imminently correct. And, as Schneider says, I hope it gives you a happy, warm feeling again. I hope it makes you laugh and smile. Living fully within the comedy of nihilism (I'm very glad Baggles made it in. I don't know why, but I just love that big ol' green sack of yogurt with a perpetual sinus infection. :)18), the void of progress or resolution here becomes funny instead of crushing. Given a potential realm where the laughable quest for meaning is reversed into a meaningless quest for the laughable; a realm where nobody learns and nobody dies, the appeal is evident. Indeed, it is already extantit looks like a couple of cute kids cooking a pickle on a spit with a blowtorch; and it comes infused with hundreds of digital reminders that the only way it could possibly hurt anything is if you try to convince yourself it matters. You don't have to worry if the show is heading in the "direction" you want or not. This is an iCarly episode where you can just kick back, chomp on some microwave popcorn, sip a Diet Coke, and just have a good time watching some fun iCarly comedy. No pressure or anxiety. Yeeee-hoooo!!! :)19 .
16 17 18 19 Haraway 7. Baudrillard 1. Schneider, 23 Nov. 2012. Schneider, 3 Oct. 2009.

Seasons one and two are currently streaming on Netflix. I would recommend starting with iSaved Your Life. Or perhaps its season predecessor, iQuit iCarly. You can decide. They are all equally engrossing.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulations." Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Mark Poster, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 166-184. Print. Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism." AnarchoTransHuman Zine. 1 Feb 2012. Print. Hickson, Alessandra. "Top Kids' Show 'iCarly is All About Tech." NYU Livewire. 2011. Web. 19 Dec. 2012. iCarly.com. Nickelodeon Viacom, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. iCarly Wiki. Wikia.com, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. "iBattle Chip." iCarly Wiki. Wiki Community. 18 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2012. "iDon't Want To Fight." iCarly. Nickelodeon. 1 March 2008. Television. "iGo One Direction." iCarly. Nickelodeon. 7 April 2012. Television "iStart a FanWar." iCarly. Nickelodeon. 19 Nov. 2010. Television. "iStart a Fanwar." iCarly Wiki. Wiki Community. 18 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2012. iPsycho. iCarly. Nickelodeon. 4 June 2010. Television. LaTouche, Jason. My Real Imaginary Friends: iCarly and the Power of Hyperreality. Americana 10.1. 2-2. Print. Lee, Michelle. "'iCarly': the Best Sitcom Since 'Arrested Development'?" Hollywood Magazine Online. 19 Nov. 2012. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. Schneider, Dan. "FUN FACTS: iCarly Says 'iGoodbye.'" Danwarp. 23 Nov. 2012. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. Schneider, Dan. "To Any iCarly Fan Who Was Upset By 'iStart A Fan War.'" Danwarp. 21 Nov. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2012. Stapinski, Helene. "Spaghetti Tacos: Silly Enough for Young Eaters." The New York Times: Dining and Wine. 5 Oct 2012. Web. 14 Dec 2012.