Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview with Matt Hills

Last time, I ran the first of a two part series featuring an interview with Matt Hills, a leading British thinker about fan culture and genre entertainment, discussing the revamped Doctor Who series. Hills is currently hard at work writing a book, Triumph of a Time Lord, which discusses the retooling of this classic British series for new audiences and new times. In the first installment, I focused on questions concerning the series's relations to its most hardcore fans, discussing the argument that the new Doctor Who represents what happens when fans take over control of a media franchise. But that's really too simple an explanation for all of the changes which have happened here. This time, I asked Hills to drill down on how the changes in the series format reflect trends in British and global television production as strategies to broaden the viewership of the programme.

As with last time, Hills assumes readers are relatively familiar with the contents of both seasons of the new Doctor Who -- and makes frequent and telling references to individual episodes. He's pretty careful not to kill the drama for poor Americans who haven't had official access to all of the episodes this season (and haven't figured out how to order them from UK Amazon or download them from some extra-legal source.) But if you've really remained in the dark about what happens this season, you may not want to read this since there are some major plot developments that get discussed here.

Of course, there are going to be spoilers afloat in the Doctor Who community at this point: it is really absurd to have such long delays in the distribution of the series between the United Kingdom and the United States, two countries seperated by a common language, at a time when information flows so fluidly across national borders along various digital networks. Television fan culture is now global and producers run a high risk when they muck about with the temporality of information flows!

To what degree do you think the new Doctor Who has been conceived for a global rather than a national audience? I gather there were complaints early on about
the "Americanization" of Doctor Who because of shifts in the format. Have those concerns settled down?

If anything, I'd say that UK fandom has shown a certain pride in the show's volume of overseas sales - back in the day, this always used to be cited as a barometer of the old series's popularity. There are still some residual and highly proprietary attitudes among a few UK fans, though, who very much perceive the show as 'theirs', which isn't always helpful. The history of Who has frequently been one where certain groups of fans have contrasted its supposed "Britishness" to the allegedly "American" values of, say, the likes of Star Trek. And that hasn't totally gone away, even in an era where fans can internationally access the same production information, and spoilers etc, at pretty much the same time via web-based communities like Outpost Gallifrey.

I think one sign that the show has absolutely been conceived of as a global vehicle is its comparative reliance on London as a setting. Filming in Cardiff has frequently doubled for London - even causing some consternation to drunken passers-by on those late-night occasions when the Welsh capital city has been 'dressed' as London: I overheard one Welshman shout "how rude!" as he lurched past a London underground sign which the production team had erected in the city centre for the filming of 'Rose'.

Contemporary London helps to sell the show's Brit identity abroad: it makes sense as a setting for international audiences much more readily than other UK cities would. The 'showreel' used to promote series one to buyers and advertise it on-air to audiences, included that scene of Big Ben being demolished by an alien spacecraft: 'marvel as an international icon of tourism is trashed' was evidently just as strong a subtext as 'we've actually got decent special effects'.

And Cardiff's first appearance was, of course, in 'The Unquiet Dead', which compensated for this by capitalising on the BBC's reputation for costume drama (again, something likely to help sell the show overseas). This combination of 'cool London' - set up in the very opening montage of the series - and 'heritage'/period drama settings makes the show a likely candidate to travel well. And the emphasis on clear storytelling (by Who's standards) and iconic monsters are also both tokens of a global ambition, as are the occasional inserts of media coverage within invasion stories, which the show has been increasingly careful to internationalise, so that fictional US newsflashes, for instance, are seen on-screen alongside UK ones.

The 1996 US-UK co-production of Doctor Who was far more self-evidently "Americanized" than the current series. There, the TARDIS had a "cloaking device", and the Doctor kissed his 'companion' in a more straightforwardly romantic manner compared with the various contrivances Russell T. Davies has used to justify this event. And though some fans may feel the latest show has been "Americanized" in the sense that it's followed in the wake of US TV successes like Buffy, or adopted a story arc approach characteristic of shows like The X-Files, in fact elements of the new series' format can be traced back through previous Russell T Davies' screenplays and even his own Who novel - the emotionally complex, hard-hitting, and beautifully condensed Damaged Goods - as well as being indebted to developments in other Who novels: for example, the matter of groups of people (conspiracy theorists) trying to track the Doctor was raised in the Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy, and is not simply or directly a reaction to developments in genre 'realism' in US cult TV (even if some of these 1990s Who novels may, themselves, have been written in the shadow of The X-Files). And the self-reflexive depiction of fandom (done far more directly than 'Love & Monsters') is carried out in Kate Orman's Virgin novels Return of the Living Dad and Room With No Doors, in which a fan actually discusses negative fan stereotypes and asserts that he wanted to "get a life" by emulating the Doctor. Given that these adventures were written for, and sold to, a fan niche market, it's not at all surprising that they moved ahead of the new series in terms of explicitly addressing fandom as a subject. But there is a very strong argument that far from simply reacting to American cult & quality TV, the new series is partly reacting to developments there (and production values) and partly reacting to developments within an international community of professionalised fan writers.

If the series were conceived of more centrally for a national rather than global audience, then I'd argue that it would display far more of a sense of UK regionality than it does. Even Christopher Eccleston's "all planets have a North" Doctor has been rapidly replaced by David Tennant adopting an estuary English (or London-ish) accent in line with his Casanova performance, and the international sales that presumably garnered. And Peter Kay's Bolton accent surfaces in 'Love & Monsters' only when he is under heavy monster make-up, seeming to suggest that the producers wanted to reinforce the point - yes, this is still Peter Kay the famous comedian, even under all the prosthetics. Otherwise, the dominant norm in the new series of Who is that its characters and settings are London-default and largely speak in 'received pronounciation' or Queen's English: plus ca change. UK regionality is suppressed because of its irrelevance to a global audience: the fact that the series is made by BBC Wales has made relatively difference to its material form, though it has undoubtedly been a great boost to the Welsh TV industry, which - much like UK fan audiences - has again shown considerable pride in its success. And I think that takes me back to where I came in on this answer!

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills

For the past decade or so, I have had people come up to me and treat me as though I were an expert on Doctor Who. This is because I co-authored a book with Doctor Who expert John Tulloch (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text) called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. I provided the sections on American Star Trek fans and Tulloch wrote the sections on British and Australian fans of Doctor Who. I hate to say it but I really didn't like the classic Doctor Who very much, though my wife and son were hardcore fans. My son dressed up as Jon Pertwee when he was a wee lad, much to the confusion of our midwestern neighbors who had never heard of the actor before. But when Doctor Who returned, I fell hard -- again, perhaps not as hard as my wife and son -- but hard enough.

So, I reached out to my friend and colleague Matt Hills of the University of Cardiff to share with us a British fan's insights into what has happened to the new series. Wisely, I let my wife and son frame the questions. Hills wrote Fan Cultures which is perhaps the most important new book on fandom since... hmm, what was the name of that book again. There's a conversation between the two of us about generations of fan studies in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, and as you will learn below, he is now hard at work on a new book about the Doctor. So what follows taps Hills's special expertise as a fan and academic obsessed with this particular series.

I am going to run this interview, which is quite long (no doubt a shocking development for readers of this blog) but also quite rich, in two installments. This part focuses heavily on the relationship of the new series to its long-time fans, reading the new Doctor Who as a prime example of what happens when the fans take over the franchise. Along the way, there are lots of minor spoilers so for those of you who have not seen the second season, read this at your own risk. I don't think there are any fatal spoilers here but it's death by papercuts. And in any case, the more you know the individual episodes, the more you are going to get from his more specific comments.

Tell me a little about your relationship to the series and how you came to be
writing a book about the new production.

I've been a fan of the series since I was at least three years old - according to family stories, I used to be quietly absorbed in watching long before I learnt to talk! So, I suppose I've been a fan longer than I can actually consciously remember. My earliest proper memories of the show are of watching 'Genesis of the Daleks' on its original transmission, and 'The Deadly Assassin', both of which must have made a big impression. Davros really did terrify the younger me, even in 'Destiny of the Daleks'. And Tom Baker's eventual departure in 'Logopolis' formed a major part of my childhood emotional life...

As for how I came to be writing this book about the 'new' (2005--) series - Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century - well, it was really just something I felt I had to do, given my previous work on fandom and science fiction TV, and my love for the show.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to discuss the idea, however briefly, with Russell T Davies. He was absolutely supportive, and welcomed the notion that scholars might want to study the programme's latest version.

One interesting snag, though, is that because I'm not doing the book as an official BBC publication, BBC contracts apparently mean that production personnel are not able to grant me interviews. This is what I've been led to believe, anyway. It seems to be a very different situation, and a very different moment, to when John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado were writing Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text back in 1983 - they interviewed a wide range of then-current and former production personnel. It strikes me that right now, something like Doctor Who, especially with the success it's had, is much more intensely about information control and 'brand management' than it ever was before. It's almost as if there is a kind of info-war taking place - sometimes between the lines, and sometimes bursting into full view - between producers, fans and academics.

So, this book will probably have to be written without behind-the-scenes access, which is a shame in a way - but it's not as if working from 'the text' has ever stopped academics before: there's still masses of interesting things to be said about the new show and its audiences from different kinds of media studies perspectives.

I've ended up working with I.B. Tauris because of their excellent track record in publishing books on US and UK cult/quality TV: I've contributed to their books about Angel and a forthcoming one on CSI, and they've also done things like Reading the Vampire Slayer and Reading Desperate Housewives - spot the trend in titles! I wanted to avoid 'Reading' in my own title, though: it sounds a little limiting. And as I argued in Fan Cultures (2002), my very dense first book, being a fan is about so much more than 'reading' a beloved TV series. By now, I think 'reading' is a rather old-school academic concept or metaphor for what we all do in relation with television shows.

I.B Tauris have also recently published James Chapman's excellent study Inside The Tardis, which focuses on the 'classic' series of Doctor Who. My own book will be a little more theoretical than James's: he begins, only semi-humorously, by likening cultural theorists to Daleks and Cybermen, which I find truly astonishing. For me, 'theory' isn't ever going to be the monster of the piece. I begin my manuscript by suggesting that the ideals and politics of media theory - which often involve championing the underdog and challenging systems of power - are actually really much closer to the ideals of the Doctor himself. And in any case, Who fan writers and luminaries such as Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, and Tat Wood have been making very interesting use of so-called 'theory' in their work for years. Like the best of their writings, I'm aiming to provoke fandom, and sometimes challenge received wisdoms, but not disappear up my own fundament at the same time (hmmmm, famous last words, there!).

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

This has been my week for dealing with law professors -- having engaged in a conversation with Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler last week at the MIT Communications Forum, I was pleased to find a review of Convergence Culture over at the blog of the University of Chicago Law School written by Randy Picker. The first and second parts of the review mostly provide a detailed, accurate, and positive summary of the key points from the book, targeting those passages which may be particularly relevant to people interested in the legal implications of participatory culture. The last segment, not surprisingly, gets into the book's discussion of fandom and intellectual property law. I thought I would use my post today to respond to a few of Picker's key points there.

Now let's be clear that I am no expert on the law. My wife happens to have a law degree from the University of Wisconsin and we both take some interest in developments in the area of intellectual property law and regulation of free speech. I suspect I know more than most laymen about these matters as they impact fan culture and the other sites of grassroots participation I have written about. But I would be a fool to try to debate the fine points of the law with a scholar of Picker's stature.

Fan FIction and Fair Use
Picker writes:

Jenkins pushes (p.190) for a reformulation of fair use "to legitimate grassroots, not-for-profit circulation of critical essays, and stories that comment on the content of mass media." But he clearly wants more, as he recognizes that most fans aren't that interested in producing work that the law is most likely to protect (parody or critical commentary of the sort seen in The Wind Done Gone), but who want instead to write about Ron and Hermione kissing.

Let me spell out a little more precisely what I argue on page 190 in the book:

Nobody is sure whether fan fiction falls under current fair-use protections. Current copyright law simply doesn't have a category for dealing with amateur creative expression. Where there has been a public interest factored into the legal definition of fair use -- such as the desire to protect the rights of libraries to circulate books or journalists to quote or academics to cite other researchers -- it has been advanced in terms of legitimated classes of users and not a generalized public right to cultural participation. Our current notion of fair use is an artifact of an era when few people had access to the market place of ideas and those who did fell into certain professional classes. It sure demands close reconsideration as we develop technologies that broaden who may produce and circulate cultural materials. Judges know what to do with people who have professional interests in the production and distribution of culture; they don't know what to do with amateurs or people they deem to be amateurs.

For me, the phrase, the public right to cultural participation is a key concept underlying the book's discussion. If I had my way, the right to participate would become as important a legal doctrine for the 21st century as the right to privacy as been in the late 20th century. I argue elsewhere in the book that a right to participate might be abstracted from the combined rights listed in the First Amendment and the right to participate would include the right to respond meaningfully to core materials of your culture. In that sense, I might go beyond our current understanding of fair use.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Ms. Doonesbury's Lament or Why She Can't Take Our Class

We've been getting some calls and messages here at the Comparative Media Studies Program regarding the situation with Mike Doonesbury's daughter getting lotteried out of our Introduction to Media Studies subject. See the most recent installments from the long running comic strip.

An installment a few weeks ago introduced the problem, saying that she was lotteried out of a HASS-D subject in Media Studies.

So let me clarify some of the background. In MIT lingo, a HASS-D is a Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Distribution subject. Essentially, this is our variant on the core curriculum. Each student selects from a broad array of possible options. Interestingly, there is only one HASS-D in Media Studies at MIT: the Introduction to Media Studies class which we teach each fall. I created this class in collaboration with Martin Roberts about a decade ago. It is currently being taught by my colleague, Beth Coleman, who doesn't look very much like the guy shown in the cartoon.

The class is a large lecture hall subject which draws 50-75 students and breaks out into a range of smaller discussion sessions.

By design, HASS-Ds are small subjects. We are not allowed to have more than 25 students in the discussion sections. A Lottery system is set up to deal with the overflow problem created by the most popular classes. One of the prides of MIT is that these HASS-D subjects are taught by MIT faculty -- we all spend time in the undergraduate classroom -- unlike a certain place up the road from us, where such subjects would likely be taught by graduate students.

Ironically, Introduction to Media Studies has never actually had a lottery. Gary Trudeau is correct that the subject draws strong interest -- many students share Ms. Doonesbury's passionate engagement in the topic -- but because of the mixture of lecture and breakout session, we have been able to accommodate every student who wants to take the class.

That said, I would have little sympathy for Ms. Doonesbury's protests for special treatment. MIT is very much a meritocracy and would not make exceptions to its policies based on parental pressure or other forms of personal influence. MIT is proud of the fact that it does not allow "legacies" -- students whose parents have MIT degrees do not receive preferential treatment in our process -- and has never given out an honorary degree. Those who wear the brass rat have earned that honor by hard work. We try to be flexible in accommodating special needs of students but at the end of the day, a lottery is probably the fairest way to decide who stays when a class is oversubscribed.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested in knowing the back-story on these particular strips. I can say that we in the Comparative Media Studies program are delighted that Ms. Doonesbury is so enthusiastic about wanting to get into our classes. We hope she makes it one of these days. We'd love to see her become a major. A growing number of frosh are arriving at MIT wanting to major in our program. We are now the largest Humanities major at MIT.

Several people have noted that the guy in the cartoon doesn't look very much like me -- and he looks even less like Beth (who as I said is the person teaching the class this term). So, here's the offer. I will send a free copy of Convergence Culture to the first person who sends me a doctored version of the cartoon which replaces the rather generic professor character with an authentic Henry Jenkins avatar. Send them to me at henry3@mit.edu.

Update!: We have a winner and in record time. Genie, a reader from Australia, was the first to send me a "corrected" (or some would say "doctored") version of the Doonesbury cartoon with my likeness embedded. Here it is:

After all, to "doctor" is to make someone better, isn't it?

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Picking Over Pilots

Let's take a moment today to think about the shifting status of the pilot episode on American television -- a worthy topic in the midst of the rolling out of a battery of new television shows across the various networks.

In the past, the pilot served very specific functions within the behind-the-scenes decision-making at the networks. We might think of the pilot as functioning in television the way that a character sheet functions in comics or animation: it seeks to define the core characters and central premise of the series but it also does so by pushing them into their most extreme versions. The characters in pilots are often over-defined to the point of being reduced to stereotypes as the producers try to show who these people are, how they relate to each other, and what functions they serve in terms of the plot.

Compounding this problem is the degree to which performers have not yet fully jelled with their characters -- in many cases, they may have just received news that they were assigned these roles and been rushed into production on short notice. They are trying desperately to prove they can act so they can hold onto these parts. In the past, it was not at all unusual to recast key roles after the pilot was shot and before the series reached the air. In any case, we know that character on television is generated as much by choices made by the performer on set as they take up the roles as written and make them their own and typically it takes a few episode for the rough edges to give way to more fully human characters. (Of course, the opposite can also happen and a compelling character in the pilot can be smoothed out or compromised through the production process.)

Radical shifts in the conception of the series may occur after the pilot has been shot (see, for example, the case of classic Star Trek where Spock was a highly emotional character in the pilot and Number One, a character cut after the pilot, represented the voice of cold rationality). The pilot was almost never a particularly strong episode from the point of view of the audience but producers and network executives knew how to read pilots, or thought they did, and used them as tools to make decisions about the show's fate. It would not be rare for the pilot to get shuffled into rotation later in the run of the series (again, Star Trek is the classic example here where the original pilot got reframed and turned into a two part episode -- a flashback -- later in the run of the series). There was a clear separation between the pilot and the first episode.

And all of this took place behind closed doors. Network executives saw lots of pilots; they knew more or less which ones turned into good shows down the line and they knew what were the symptomatic rough spots experienced by most pilots. They might be anxious about innovation and shut down shows which took them in new directions; many of those shows are more likely to be embraced by at least cult audiences than network executives, but for most series, they knew what they were looking at when they saw a pilot.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Update: The Flow Television Poll

A while back, I posted here my choices for Flow's television poll: Flow is an online zine where media scholars share their insights about contemporary developments in the medium with what they hope will be a diverse and engaged general readership. Participants were asked to identify but not rank their top ten favorite television shows of last season.

Well, the results are now in and can be read in their entirity over at Flow for anyone who might be interested in what a bunch of academics think is worth watching on television. The top ranks look like this: Lost won overall, identified by 12 of the 24 critics who participated; the second tier down was Arrested Development, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with 10 votes each (Keep in mind that 7 people also voted for Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club which may suggest that news/entertainment got more votes overall than Lost depending on how we count). 8 people (myself included) vote for Veronica Mars; Project Runway and Deadwood got 6 votes each; and altogether, 94 different series, specials, commercials, and YouTube videos got identified by at least one voter. Of the shows I identified on my original list, Spooks/MI-5 was the only one unique to my rankings. I don't know whether I should be depressed because my taste is so mainstream or kind of proud.

As Jason Mittell notes, many of the shows identified reflect the ways that new media is impacting our relationship with television -- shows that have not yet aired legally in the markets where the critics live, content which circulated only on Youtube or as in the case of Colbert's remarks, gained visibility through digital circulation, and series which really only found their audiences among academics once they became available on DVDs. In fact, he suggested that The Wire might have ranked very high indeed, based on feedback from academics who were discovering it on DVD had it not been off the air during the 2005-2006 season and thus been ineligible for inclusion. Mittell predicts it is an early front-runner for status in this coming year on the strength of its new season which is indeed getting rave reviews. (I still have to catch up with Season 3 on dvd before I can watch it but my Tivo is storing away episodes for the cold winter months ahead.)

Anyway, I thought you might be interested.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Random Acts of Journalism": Defining Civic Media

I have found myself this week struggling to put together my thoughts on the concept of civic media in light of a series of conversations and encounters I had last week: for one thing, there was the public conversation which the MIT Communications Forum hosted last Thursday between myself and Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) about how participatory culture was impacting how we access and process news and information. For those who'd like to hear the podcast of that conversation, you can find it here. For another, I listened to the earlier exchange which the Forum hosted involving Dan Gilmore (We The Media), Ellen Foley (The Wisconsin State Journal) and Alex Beam (The Boston Globe) on the rise of citizen journalism and its impact on established newspapers which can be found here. And finally, I got into a series of interesting conversations about the impact of new media on civic engagement as part of the planning process for a new series of books being put together by the MacArthur Foundation on Digital Media and Learning.

Across all of these conversations, I found myself returning not to journalism as it has been traditionally defined but to something broader I want to call civic media -- that is, media which contributes to our sense of civic engagement, which strengthens our social ties to our communities -- physical and virtual -- and which reinforces the social contracts which insures core values of a democratic society.

Imagining New Kinds of Imaginary Communities
Newspapers and news broadcasts can certainly play that role and some of the speakers from traditional newspapers at the Forum events made powerful points about the important role that newspapers play at all levels -- from the micropublics of individual neighborhoods up through cities, states, regions, nations, and global cultures -- in forging a sense of connection between and within what Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities." Anderson's point is that we feel a sense of emotional bond with people who we will never meet in part because media, like newspapers, continually remind us of what we have in common as citizens. Democracy depends not simply on informing citizens but also on creating the feeling that we have a stake in what happens to other members of our community. Such an attitude emerges in part from what the newspaper reports and the rhetorical structures it adopts; it also emerges through the perception of the editor's responsiveness to her readers and the notion that the op-ed page of the paper functions as a shared forum where community members can speak with an expectation of being heard. Part of what may be leaving young readers feeling estranged from traditional journalism is that they feel that these publications do not represent the most important experiences of their lives, do not care about the issues that matter to them, and do not value the kinds of communities which they inhabit. One need only point to the ways that news coverage of issues from games violence to MySpace and DOPA emphasize the adult's concerns but do not report or reflect young people's perspectives.

Players often experience a similar sense of social connection in regard to their guilds, for example, in multiplayer games. There are plenty of players who go on forays on nights when they are too tired to see straight because they don't want to let their virtual neighbors and comrades down. Such games are powerful introductions to civic engagement because they taught young people what it was like to feel empowered, what it was like to feel capable of making a difference within a world, and what it was like to feel a strong set of bonds with others with whom you worked to accomplish common goals. This is something radically different from Robert Putnam's argument that people who go online lack the deep social ties that emerged through traditional community life. Those people who form guilds in multiplayer games can scarcely be described as "bowling alone," to use Putnam's potent metaphor. This is a totally different ballgame. What ever we want to say about what they are doing -- they are doing it together.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For Those Living In Or Around New York City...

My book tour promoting Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide takes me to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria next week.

Here are the details:

Convergence Culture:
A Conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson
Wednesday, September 27, 7:00 p.m.

Henry Jenkins, author of the new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You), two of the nation's most incisive cultural critics, will discuss the ground-shifting and often surprising ways in which audiences are participating in the creation, distribution, and consumption of media in the digital age, and the effects of these developments on entertainment and learning. The program will be followed by a reception and book signing. Tickets: $10 public/$7.50 for students with ID/Free for Museum members, call to RSVP. Buy Tickets Online

I hope to see some of my blog-readers from the Greater New York City area in the audience. I am told that they will put up a streaming audio and transcript of the talk sometime in October and I would announce it here when they do.

I am also scheduled to be interviewed on Tuesday night on the Joey Reynolds Show on WOR and the WOR network. For those not in NYC, the show seems to be available online here.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:36 AM | Permalink

Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen

Yesterday, I ran an outtake from Convergence Culture which centered around the efforts of Scott McCloud to build public interet in micropayments as a means of supporting digitally distributed comics. Like McCloud, I believed that micropayments offered perhaps the best way to provide a commercial infrastructure which would preserve the diversification of content that currently characterizes the web while at the same time allowing artists to make a living off of their work. When McCloud spoke at MIT last week, he told me that Reinventing Comicswas designed to be a book about the future when it was published more than five years ago and it was still a book about the future now. We are just moving towards the future at a slower rate than any of us might have imagined. The success of iTunes suggests that people are willing to pay small amounts of money online to consume content they want (and thus suggests that some micropayments model might still make sense). At the same time, they are doing so through a central distribution channel which could easily become a gatekeeper locking lots of content producer out.

I have not been paying as much attention as I should lately to developments in the debates around micropayments and other ways of paying for online content. A few years ago, I served as a member of a thesis committee for Todd Allen, a student at New York University's Gallatin School, who was doing a project focused on business models for digital comics producers. He has since self-published the thesis as a printed book and made it available online Allen is now a Chicago-based consultant and author on matters related to digital media and its business applications. He teaches E-Business for the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management Department at Columbia College Chicago. Allen's writing on technology has been seen in the Chicago Tribune and Iconocast. Allen has worked with a diverse group of companies including the American Medical Association, National Parent Teacher Association, Modem Media and the Marketing Store. Outside of technology, Allen spent two seasons covering the New York Knicks for New York Resident, a Manhattan weekly paper, where he also penned a humor column. He once appeared on MTV in a futile attempt to explain computer science to Pauly Shore.

Todd is someone who follows digital comics very closely and so I decided to check in with him this week to see if he could bring us up to date about developments in that area.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

comics and convergence part four

This is the final in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide dealing with the ways that the comics industry is responding to shifts in the media landscape. This segment deals with how we pay for digital content. Reading back through this, this section felt less au current than the other excerpts on comics I have posted here. When he spoke at MIT last week, Scott McCloud, himself, conceded that micropayments have not so far taken off in the ways that he had hoped and that other business models were emerging to support online content. To bring us up to speed on the latest developments in this area, I have arranged to run an interview tomorrow with industry observer Todd Allen, about recent trends in the digital distribution of comics.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Education of Sky McCloud

Last Thursday, the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab played host to Scott McCloud, the comics theorist, creator, entrepreneur, activist, and visionary, who traced for us the progression of his thinking about comics as a medium -- from his first book, Understanding Comics, which gave us a language for thinking about sequential art, through Reinventing Comics, which argued that digital media represented important new opportunities for comics creators and readers, through to Making Comics, which offers practical advice to would-be comics writers and artists and in the process, lays out some important new arguments about the role of choice and styles in graphic storytelling.

As McCloud noted, he first spoke in that same room 12 years before in the wake of the first book's publication and I have helped to bring him back to MIT on several other occassions. Indeed, we were lucky enough to have him do a week long workshop for our students several years ago when the ideas for Making Comics were first taking shape. So, with Scott, I knew what we were getting -- an articulate, empassioned, and visionary thinker about comics as a medium, whose work has implications for anyone who thinks seriously about the popular arts. McCloud engaged thoughtfully with questions from the MIT community on everything from the economics of online publishing to the potentials for comics on mobile platforms, from the design of tools for making art to the evolving visual language of the medium. I certainly recommend checking out the audio recording of his presentation and question and answer period.

Yet, the big surprise of the evening was Scott's 13 year old daughter, Sky McCloud. When Scott first asked if his daughter could make her own presentation following his opening remarks, we were not sure what to expect but immediately agreed.

The last time I had seen Sky, she was a toddler interupting her father's talk at Harvard's Veracon. Today, she is a dynamic young woman - a delightful mix of goth and geek -- who felt self confident enough to share her own perspective in front of a packed Bartos auditorium crammed with several hundred MIT and Harvard types.

She told us about the family's plans to do a 50 state speaking tour over the next year as her father rolls out his new book and as the family (Scott, his wife, Ivy, and his daughters, Sky and Winter) conduct an experiment in home schooling. Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.

Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation -- someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.

Let's be clear: Sky is an exceptional child, the offspring of a remarkable man, and her parents have had the flexibility to incorporate her learning (and that of her sister) into their professional lives. Not just everyone can take off for a year and travel the country with their family and still take in an income from speaking gigs. Yet, the core of what they are accomplishing here should be part of the educational experience of every child -- what she is learning grows organically from her own interests; she is being encouraged to express herself across a range of different media; she is encouraged to translate what she is learning back into public communication and is empowered to believe that what she thinks may matter to others. As I have suggested in a blog post this summer, these experiences are so far more available outside of the formal educational system through afterschool programming and home schooling than they are in the public classroom. Like many other home schoolers we have encountered through our research, she is using the potentials of new media both for creative expression and social networking.

I know that I make some people nervous when I talk here about the values of home schooling. Many people assume that home schooling is mostly used today by the religious right to escape secular education. But in fact, today's home schoolers come from many different backgrounds and are stepping outside of formal education for many different reasons. More and more kids are moving in and out of schools depending on where they are at in their emotional, social, and intellectual development or what kind of situation they are confronting in their local community. My wife and I home schooled our son for a year when he was Sky's age and oddly enough, one of his primary textbooks was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, but at the end of that year, he returned to a private school for the rest of his high school experience. I am not suggesting everyone should home school their kids. Most people should not. But I am glad that it is an option and I think that educators should study what is working in these home school contexts and pull the best of it back into their pedagogical practices. As they do so, they could learn a lot by listening to Sky McCloud speak about her experiences on the webcast of the event.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

The World of Reality Fiction

In Convergence Culture, I included a sidebar about the remarkable fan fiction produced by Mario Lanza. Lanza is a fan who gets to consult with and often receive fan letters from the characters who populate his stories. Lanza writes fan fiction involving the contestants featured on Survivor -- a series of engaging, richly detailed, psychologically nuanced original "seasons" cast with "all stars" known to readers from their previous appearances on the series. At the time he started writing reality fan fiction, the idea of combining elements of reality television with narrative fiction might have seemed more than a little odd. Today, though, there is a growing body not only of amateur but also professional fiction which borrows elements from reality television.

I asked my son, Henry Jenkins IV, to share with my readers some of his impressions about this emerging genre. Henry recently graduated from the University of Arizona where he studied media and creative writing. He has already published several essays of his own media analysis, including one in Nick Sammond's anthology, Steel Chair to the Head, which traces his experiences growing up watching professional wrestling, and another -- a father/son dialogue on Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- which is included in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. He has been very active in the spoiling and fan writing communities around Survivor through the years and so brings an insider's perspective to this topic.

What follows are his thoughts about reality fiction:

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

I am always fascinated when some bit of bottom-up generated "content" starts to get momentum and gain greater public visibility. This past few weeks, I have been observing a ground-swell of interest in a Star Trek fan video set to Nine Inch Nails's "Closer." Many of you will have already seen this video. It has already been featured by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, by Susie Bright, and by Salon's VideoDog among others.

As someone who has done work in the past on Star Trek fans, I have received multiple pointers to this video from friends all over the world. Many of the people who sent it to me and certainly many of the bloggers who have pointed to it seem to have little or no awareness that there is a much larger tradition of fan-made videos or that the video makers, T. Jonsey and Killa have produced a larger body of work that circulates within the fanvid community. As artists, they are known for their sophisticated techniques and intelligent use of appropriated materials as well as for their diversity of approaches to their subject matter.

It is the nature of YouTube that the work which appears there could come from almost anywhere and that it is often consumed outside of its originating content: YouTube is the place right now where work travels from one grassroots community or subculture to another. There are real advantages to such a site since it results in cross-influences and more innovation, experimentation, and diversity, yet there are also losses to this process of decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption.

Technical Innovation and Grassroots Media
Given that I have been following the development of fan-made music videos for more than fifteen years now, I thought it might be helpful if I spelled out some of what I saw when I looked at this particular segment. Through the years, I have watched dozens of hours of these videos, produced within a broad range of fandoms. In fact, my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, published in 1992, already contains a full chapter tracing the aesthetics and production practices surrounding fan music videos.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Will Newspapers Survive?

For those of you who are living in or around the Boston area, I wanted to flag two events next week that will be hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and will be free and open to the public.

The Emergence of Citizens' Media
Tuesday, Sept 19
5-7 pm, Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab
Speakers:
Alex Beam, Boston Globe
Ellen Foley, Wisconsin State Journal
Dan Gillmor, Center for Citizen Media

News, Information and the Wealth of Networks
Thursday, Sept 21
5-7 pm, MIT Building 3, Room 270 (3-270)
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture
William Uricchio, MIT

The second panel emerged in part because USC anthropologist Mimi Ito wrote an interesting post in her blog comparing Convergence Culture and the Wealth of Networks after Yochai and I had visited her center about a week apart. Here's what she wrote:

Henry's Convergence Culture and Yochai's The Wealth of Networks, are the state of the art in thinking about new media and the Internet. Both provide both rich detail in the form of concrete cases as well as frameworks for understanding the social, technical, and economic changes coming down the pipeline that are both highly original and syncretic. But my goal at the moment is not to do a book review. I just want to ruminate on one thread of conversation that emerged from spending a day each with these thinkers and their texts.

Henry and Yochai are in many ways complementary thinkers who share an appreciation for the bottom-up, emergent, and viral forms of social organization emerging from the maturing media ecology of the Internet. Mostly they are in agreement about the scope and nature of the sweeping changes on the horizon as content turns digitally networked, and they both are actively participating in shaping these conditions of the future to be safer for the creative and knowledge production of everyday folks. But they also have some interesting differences....

Yochai also believes in the power of distributed intelligence and wired prosumers, and he sees amateur cultures such as fan cultural production as examples of "the wealth of networks." But his focus is on what he calls "nonmarket" forms of culture and knowledge production. If Henry's central cases are media fandom and alternative news, Yochai's are open source and distributed models of software and knowledge production such as Linux, Wikipedia, alternative news, and some forms of science (eg. bioinformatics, seti@home). He argues that the dominance of commercially produced forms of knowledge and culture is a historical anomaly, and we are in the midst of a correction that will give more weight to amateur, non-commercial and folk forms. In many ways his argument is probably more radical than what Henry or I might say about the promise of amateur and folk cultures. He sees everyday amateur producers as increasingly the source of generative forms of knowledge and culture, that provide a genuine alternative to commercial media.... At the end of the week, I think what it came down to for me was that this balance depends crucially on the specificities of the cultural forms in question. Yochai pointed out that his argument about distributed nonmarket production really focuses on cultural forms that can be easily decomposed, like software and encyclopedia entries. In his book, he talks about how even in the case of science textbooks, where it seems like this should work, the units are large enough that it is difficult to sustain as a volunteer effort. If we look at music, for example, amateur performance has always persisted because it is a media form that is amenable to local performance. Contrast that with something like feature films or the sustained multi-year (or at least season-long) narratives you get in an anime series, and you start moving into domains that require both a certain amount of capitalization as well as a sustained authorial viewpoint.

For those of you who live outside the Boston area, these events will be available after the fact on streaming audio. I will provide information once the webcasts go up on line.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cory Doctorow as Exemplar

Throughout the fall term, I am going to be sharing with readers more of the work we have been doing for the MacArthur Foundation on new media literacies, building up to the release of a significant new white paper in late October which makes the case for a new set of social skills and cultural competencies which we need to be incorporating into American education. We are already hard at work putting these ideas into practice, developing curricular activities and supporting materials that will help teachers and after school programs respond in more meaningful ways to the challenges and opportunities of the new participatory culture.

One of our core projects is the development of an exemplar library. When we spoke with teachers and after school programs, it was clear that they recognized that their students were interested in new forms of cultural production that are enabled by new media technologies and new forms of cultural distribution supported by the web. They knew that their students were fans, bloggers, and gamers. But they faced a number of issues: they had no standards by which to evaluate work produced in these new and emerging media; they didn't know enough themselves to give good advice to student media makers; the students lacked role models to help them understand future opportunities in this space; and the students were facing ethical issues that their teachers and parents didn't really understand.

We decided to respond to these challenges by producing a library of short digital films focused around media-makers and the craft and ethical choices they face in producing and distributing their work. For each media maker, we may produce 5-10 short (4-5 minute) video segments addressing different points in their creative process. A teacher or after school program might show one or more of those segments to kick off a discussion about media production processes. They may decide to work horizontally -- fleshing out one form of media making -- or vertically -- looking at storyboarding or interviewing techniques across a range of artists and media. These videos will be accompanied by supporting materials -- vocabulary sheets, charts showing the various tools the artists use, and potential production activities that can be brought into the classroom. We also imagine that as students get engaged with the videos they will seek out more content on their own via our website and thus dig deeper into the whole world of media production than can be accomplished within the constraints of the school day.

Long term, we expect to make this an open library where anyone can insert their own content and thus provide an incentive for teachers and students to engage with media production projects around artists in their own local community. In the short run, we are producing these videos in-house -- working with Comparative Media Studies graduate students and with our new production coordinator Anna Van Someren, who was until recently part of the Youth Voice Collaborative here in Boston.

We are just now putting the first crop of exemplars out on the web and I figured I would showcase them here as they go up. One of the first will have special interest to readers of this blog, many of whom found this site because of some early shout outs by Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing. When Doctorow was speaking at MIT last year, CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby grabbed some time with him to talk about blogging, science fiction writing, and online communications. The documentary was produced for middle and high school students but we think it will engage many adult viewers as well.

Here are some highlights:

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Multiplatform Entertainment: A View From China

Last week, I posted about the rapid speed with which television content has moved into new channels of distribution and the degree to which the American public seems to have embraced the ideal of rerun on demand, television for download, call it what you will. One of the key lessons of media studies is that the same technology may get adopted in different ways and at different speeds in different cultures around the world. This is one of the real value of taking a global perspective on media change.

My post inspired one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students, Rena Huang, to post some thoughts on her blog about how this same process is playing itself out in China and I asked her if I could repost these remarks here. Huang is a second year Masters student who is doing a thesis on the growth of the Chinese animation industry and is working with CMS faculty memberJing Wang, the Chair of the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, to construct a digital archive of Chinese animation in collaboration with the Beijing Film Academy. She was also part of the team from our Convergence Culture Consortium who participated in Project Good Luck this summer helping to document mobile culture in China. For those who haven't checked that site in a bit, they are still uploading pictures and interviews from the trip, including an interesting exchange with the Back Dorm Boys, the Chinese students who became famous for their lip-sincing video at You-Tube.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Astroturf, Humbugs, and Lonely Girls

Last week, reader Todd asked me what I thought about LonelyGirl15. At the time, I had only a passing awareness of the Lonely Girl phenomenon. Just in time, though, my friend Zephoria posted a very interesting discussion of LonelyGirl15 over at her blog, Apophenia. Here's her explanation of the back-story:

For those who aren't familiar, videos by LonelyGirl15 started appearing on YouTube over the summer. She's supposedly a teenager who is home schooled by religious parents who don't know she's creating videos online. Her friend Daniel helps her with the videos and they often talk back and forth across their videos. It's rather endearing but too good to be true.

As more videos popped up, people started questioning whether this was real or not. Speculation mounted and fake lonelygurls started to appear. People created videos to comment on LonelyGirl15. People flocked to the LonelyGirl15 forum to discuss. Problem is the LonelyGirl15 domain was registered before the videos started appearing. People started tracking down more and more clues, trying to hone in on what it was, who was behind it. Suspicion mounted. In classic fan style, people dove right down and tore apart all of the data. Quite a few thought that this was an ARG, Jane McGonigal style, but she denied involvement on NPR. Others thought it was an advert or some marketing campaign.

The clues people dug up were fascinating. Personally, i was intrigued by "Bree's" MySpace profile. I knew it was fake but i didn't know if the YouTube LonelyGirl15 made the MySpace profile LonelyGurl15. Why did i know it was fake? Well, i read too many teenage MySpaces. Not sure i should give away clues as to how to create a real-looking fake MySpace profile. ::wink::

Then press started covering it. Hands down, The New York Times had the best coverage. I can't help but wonder if the NYTimes knew the truth because they are certainly using the same language: "Hey There, Lonelygirl - One cute teen's online diary is probably a hoax. It's also the birth of a new art form." If so, go Adam for good reporting!

With your help we believe we are witnessing the birth of a new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story-- A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the internet. A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience.

Right now, the biggest mystery of Lonelygirl15 is "who is she?" We think this is an oversimplification. Lonelygirl15 is a reflection of everyone. She is no more real or fictitious than the portions of our personalities that we choose to show (or hide) when we interact with the people around us. Regardless, there are deeper mysteries buried within the plot, dialogue, and background of the Lonelygirl15 videos, and many of our tireless and dedicated fans have unearthed some of these. There are many more to come....We want you to know that we aren't a big corporation. We are just like you. A few people who love good stories. We hope that you will join us in the continuing story of Lonelygirl15, and help us usher in an era of interactive storytelling where the line between "fan" and "star" has been removed, and dedicated fans like yourselves are paid for their efforts. This is an incredible time for the creator inside all of us.

But it may not be news to many of the people who have suspected all along that Lonelygirl15 was a fake, a fraud, a hoax, or some other form of fiction. She was perhaps "fake" the way professional wrestling is fake -- that is a fake we are supposed to see through and enjoy nevertheless

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Beauty of Brian Michael Bendis

For several posts now, I've been running an interview with Alan McKee, the editor of Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, a book designed to focus attention on the ways fans and consumers evaluate different forms of popular culture. McKee asked his contributors to do several things at once: first, to choose the "best of class" within a form of popular culture which we had deep investments and then to set about to justify that choice in terms of the criteria which consumers most often use to evaluate good and bad work in that space. I used the invitation as an excuse to write about superhero comics. From the start, it was clear that my preferences in comics have as much or more to do with their authors as with their artists. In many cases, I read pretty much everything published by certain writers: favorites include Robert Kirkman, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Neil Gaiman, Ed Brubaker, and Brian Michael Bendis. Already to focus on superhero comics is to navigate between two fairly strong taste communities around comics:

Comic fans are sharply divided into two camps: on the one side, there are fans of comics as popular culture (with a focus on the creative reworking of genre elements and plays with continuity) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Wizard; on the other side, there are fans of comics as art (with a focus on aesthetic experimentation and unconventional content) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Comics Journal. At my local shop, the two types of books are divided off from each other by a partition designed to keep the kids from mangling the adult books, but also working to signal a certain cultural hierarchy at play. To praise Bendis as one of today's best writers is already to take sides since the Comics Journal crowd will look down their noses at you if you admit to reading superhero comics.

The most interesting contemporary comics fall somewhere between these two extremes - including work published by smaller companies like ABC, Oni, Image, Dark Horse, or Wildstorm which put their own spin on the superhero genre or works published by the boutique labels, such as Vertigo at DC or Max at Marvel, which are maintained by the mainstream publishers. Increasingly, the lines between mainstream and indie comics are breaking down. Much as indie filmmakers are getting a shot at directing Hollywood blockbusters, indie comics creators (such as Gilbert Hernandez, John Strum, or Peter Bagge) are venturing into the mainstream without risking their street cred.

I ended up choosing Bendis in part because he represented so many of the trends reshaping contemporary comics -- not the least of which was a the tendency discussed above to blur the lines between indie and mainstream comics. Bendis came from alternative comics and brought some of that sensativity to the mainstream.

My essay tries to determine what made Bendis a unique voice in the superhero genre (despite some profound differences in theme and audience across his various books) and also what made him exemplary of contemporary comics production. What follows are a few excerpts from the essay.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part Two)

This is the second part of a two part interview with Alan McKee, the editor and mastermind behind a fabulous new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which introduces what I see as a vital new approach for thinking about how we evaluate various forms of popular culture. The essays in the book combine anthropological and autobiographical insights -- both asking about their own evaluations and then reading them against larger taste communities. The result is an academic book which is fun to read and which will itself spark countless conversations as people debate what might constitute the "best of breed" in their favorite form of cultural production. The book is sure to also raise debates at academic conferences where evaluative judgements have long remained taboo (even though all of the decisions we make are shaped by often unexamined evaluations about which texts are worth studying, writing about, teaching, etc.)

Early cultural studies sought to escape the shadow of high culture criteria as well as a history of insensitivity to work produced in alternative cultural traditions, yet it has in the process falsified its object of study. We ignore the degree to which evaluation and debating evaluations is central to the pleasure we take in popular culture. We ignore the kinds of popular aesthetics which shape these evaluations and allow to stand the myth of consumers as undiscriminating and popular culture as undifferentiated. And we essentially ignore the degree to which popular culture is, to borrow from my own writing, "the culture that sticks to your skin," (see my book, Hop on Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture) and thus can not be meaningfully understood from a traditional stance of academic discipline.

My hope is that aca/fen can, in fact, break down this inhibition about evaluation while at the same time, develop new conceptual frameworks for thinking about how evaluation works in fan communities. This is why I am so happy to see McKee and his contributors do such a spectacular job in realizing his goals for this project.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part One)

A little while ago, I raised the question of whether one can be a "fan" of high culture and was pleased to see a high level of interest in this question.

I am excited to report that there is a new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which pushes even deeper into the question of how we evaluate various forms of popular culture and how those evaluations do or do not connect with the ways we assess work in high culture. Alan McKee, who teaches in the Creative Industires program at Queensland University of Technology (which I increasingly think of as the sister program to Comparative Media Studies), has brought together a world class mix of academics, fans, and journalists, who share with us what they see as "best of breed" examples across a range of different sites of popular aesthetics. So we get Will Brooker on the Best Batman Story (The Dark Knight Returns), Sue Turnbull on the Best Serial Killer Novel (Red Dragon), Thomas McLaughlin on the Best Basketball Player (Michael Jordan), Simon Frith on the Best Disco Record ("Never Give Up"), Sara Gwenllian Jones on the Best Villain in Xena:Warrior Princess (Alti), and John Hartley on the Best Propaganda (Humphrey Jennings, The Silent Village).

As this sample of the categories and judgements suggest, all of these claims are open to debate and that's precisely the point. Contributors were asked to offer "defensible" but not "definitive" choices and then to deal precisely with the terms of debate that might shape the judgements we make in these particular sectors. If the categories here seem like a grab bag -- and trust me, there are some even more surprising categories here such as the Best Motorbike, the Best Australian Romance Novelist, and the Best Website for Men who have Sex with Other Men -- then it is because popular culture is not a unified field, not one thing that can be simply contrasted with high culture. (Of course, high culture is also not one thing but that's a debate for another day.)

We would never judge Lisistrada, Everyman, Mother Courage, Oklahoma, A Noh drama, and A Doll's House by the same criteria -- each gets read according to terms defined minimally by a specific tradition and historical period and in some cases, by specific artists. (I never stop laughing at the college journalist who reviewed a Brecht play and complained that he just couldn't identify with the characters.) So, why should we apply a single set of criteria to talk about popular culture and why in the world should that criteria get defined by the norms of high culture?

I will admit that I am biased since I have a piece in this particular collection -- The Best Contemporary Mainstream Superhero Comics Writer (Brian Michael Bendis) -- which I will excerpt here in a few days time. But I have rarely enjoyed reading any "academic" book as much as this one. McKee is an editor who values lively and personally engaged writing, someone who pushed all of the contributors to write to a general readership, and for once, they listened. I never knew academic prose could be this fun! And underlying it all are some powerful ideas about how we value the culture we consume.

I wanted to share some of McKee's own thinking on this topic with my readers, so I asked him to address some core questions about the book's premises and will run the interview here in two parts.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Behind the Scenes: Designing Rocketo

Last Friday, we hosted our orientation for new and returning graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies Program. One of the featured speakers on the program was Frank Espinosa, the creator, writer, and artist behind Rocketo, a comic book series which he is self-publishing through Image comics.

Rocketo has been singled out by Entertainment Magazine as one of the best new comics and is currently in the running for three Eisner Awards. Espinosa came to comics following an extensive career working in animation at Disney and Warner Brothers, which included contributions to the redesign of the classic Warner Brothers characters and the writing of the in-house guidebook for their animators and work in the design of toys, games, and theme park attractions.

Rocketo is not like any comic you have ever held in your hands before -- for one thing, it's an adventure comic (decisively not a superhero saga) at a time when this genre has all but disappeared from view. It borrows as much from classic science fiction (the Lensman books, Cordwainer Smith, among others) as it does from classic mythology (Harpies and Kraken anyone). From the first page, you realize you are entering into a thoroughly imagined, deeply immersive world -- one which mirrors our own and yet is strangely different at the same time -- a world fully stocked with interesting creatures, strange lands, and well defined characters. For another, it's structured horizontally; the artwork is highly expressive and often abstracted (reminding me at times of the most accomplished work to come out of UPA during the 1950). His use of color to capture emotion and movement is nothing short of breathtaking. Rocketo is a remarkable blending of the pulp elements of popular culture and the formal experimentation one associates with the outer limits of alternative comics. The first graphic novel, Adventures in the Hidden Sea, has been published and he is just now finishing his first story arc dealing with this character.

We are lucky enough to have Espinosa as a Martin Luther King Fellow in our program for the coming year, where he will be teaching classes in Character Design and World Building, as well as supporting some of our efforts in educational games and media literacy.

We recorded Espinosa's talk as an experiment and I figured I would pass it along to my readers here. Every Thursday, throughout the term, the Comparative Media Studies Program hosts a speaker series. The series is designed to introduce our students to cutting edge developments in all of the sites being impacted by media change. So, we may bring in a comics artist one week, an advertising executive the next, a filmmaker the week after, and an activist the week after that. We try to mix and match media, to combine academic and practioners, but to keep it all lively and informal. Some weeks, we host large scale public events through the MIT Communications Forum. The Forum has long had webcast versions of its programs, such as this one featuring television writer David Milch (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blues, Deadwood) or this one featuring long-time film industry spokesperson Jack Valenti. As of this term, we are also going to be offering podcasts of our events and I will be flagging them for my readers.

What follows are a few of the highlights of his talk but there's no way to fully capture his wicked sense of humor, his rambunctious intellect and his engaging personality, all of which come through well in this podcast.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Television Goes Multiplatform

It's hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that Apple launched the video Ipod and the ABC television group was the first to announce a serious commitment to make its top rated television shows accessible to consumers via legal downloads. Within a few weeks time, the other networks were forced to cut their own deals with Apple paving the way of a new era of rerun on demand.

A document shared with me recently from one of our corporate research partners gave me a glimpse into just how dramatically the landscape of American television has changed, providing a breakdown network by network of the various platforms through which one could access their content.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Experimenting with Brands in Second Life

In 1954, Frederick Pohl, a gifted social satirist and science fiction writer, published the short story, "The Tunnel Under the World", which should have been made into a first rate Twilight Zone episode. A man wakes up in bed next to his wife, gets up, and goes to work, and along the way, he starts to sense that there's something subtly different about his world:

He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were most unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

But no one else seems to have noticed that the entire adscape has changed overnight. And then it happens again, and again, and again. By the end of the story, he discovers that he is living inside a consumer research experiment:

They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow -- heaven knows how they did it -- they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people -- right under their thumbs. Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however they do it, what happens is they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day they see what happened -- and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising....They test every last detail before they spend a nickle on advertising!

Pohl's short story about this microworld that allows Madison Avenue to run experiments on consumers anticipates the role that brands and advertising will play in new multiplayer game worlds such as Second Life. Second Life has been one of the hot new stories in participatory culture in recent months. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks uses SL as a primary example of the grassroots energies being unleashed in network society. Educators are increasingly experimented with the affordances of this space with Harvard's Berkman Center teaching a course in intellectual property law this term open to Harvard students and their avitars. Psychologists are using Second Life to conduct therapy -- especially for autistic patients for whom it can represent a gradual introduction into reading and communicating cues about emotional states during social interactions. There are experiments going on that are exploring new governance structures in political science, new forms of community in sociology, and new modes of transaction in economics. Activists are using the space to increase public awareness of their concerns. And sexual minorities are finding new outlets for erotic expression amid the hidden corners of this world.

We might think of Second Life as a platform for thought experiments -- a place where we can test ideas that might not be ready for prime time, where we can experiment with new ways of being on both a personal and communal level. If you can think it, you can build it on Second Life, and so far, if you build it, they will come. Some have called Second Life the digital counterpart of Burning Man -- a place where people come to see and be seen, to build and to see what others have built, and to celebrate their power to reimagine the terms with which they conduct their everyday lives.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Picking Favorites: The Flow Television Poll

As a periodic contributor to the online media studies webzine, Flow, I received an invitation this summer from Jason Mittell (who regularly posts comments here at this blog) to participate in a poll about the highlights of the past television season. Here's how he described our task:

The goal is to solicit the opinions of Flow's esteemed group of writers & editors (past & present) in generating a poll of the best television of the last year, as somewhat arbitrarily defined as July 1 2005 - June 30 2006. ....A few clarifications - we're looking for "new" television only, so any program or series you vote for must have aired new episodes within the 05-06 season, but it does not need to be a new series. The bulk of Flow's contributors are located in the US, so we expect the majority of entries will be American television - however, if you wish to vote for a non-US title, you may (as long as it aired new episodes within the timeframe). If you are not located in the US, you can vote for any show that aired episodes new to your region within the timeframe, including older shows just coming to your locale.... Finally, you may vote for programs that did not air on traditional television (like an online series or unaired pilot), but please include a way for the curious to find it - we are looking for "television" defined somea broadly, so you can vote for things other than a conventional series, but be sure it fits into the television medium better than cinema or another medium.

Some have speculated that there is a kind of academic canon of television -- certain shows that are watched by all academics but are not necessarily highly rated by the rest of the world (I sometimes wonder if everyone who watches Veronica Mars, for exmple, has a PhD or more improtantly, if ever PhD in the world watches the series). Or conversely, that there are programs that are highly rated across the general public but which no academic will be willing to publicly acknowledge. For the moment, I am talking about academics who are proud to say they like television. Don't get me started about the liars and hypocrites who claim not to even own a television set. So, as social experiments go, this looks to be a fascinating one.

I know in my case, it has already forced me to think about whether my taste as a fan and as an academic are necessarily alligned: are there shows that interest me intellectually but not emotionally? Are there shows I love to watch but don't really admire on that level? Are there shows I should be watching (and don't) but might want to list anyway? Are there shows that don't deserve the top ten but might benefit from my listing them more than the predictible choices that I know every other academic is going to list? (It' s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Lost is going to be in the top few vote getters here). Do I want to fall in line or signal my idiosyncratic tastes and interests? How do we pick the best in a medium whose cultural standing is still under question or where there are not widely agreed upon standards of evaluation?

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Slamming Media Effects

Some of you thought Ian and I were playing a little rough with each other. Wait till you hear about the kind of rough treatment that media effects researchers have been getting lately.

CMS graduate student Sam Ford recently told the story over at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog:

In 1999, a team of professors from Wake Forest University made headlines with a quantitative study that found a correlation between watching professional wrestling and participating in fighting while on dates among teenagers, in a study that also highlighted other potential negative behaviors associated with watching pro wrestling.

While the study was not published at the time, it did receive a substantial amount of attention and was covered by most of the major news outlets. Then, last week, when a written essay based on the study and releasing the full results of the study was published, major media outlets once again reported on it.

WWE Owner Vince McMahon was livid. On last week's episode of Monday Night RAW, WWE announcer Jim Ross lashed out and the study and promoted Mr. McMahon's response to be made available on the WWE Web site for fans, and also on the company's corporate site for investors.

That response claimed, among other things, that the study was "junk science" and that the findings were both dated and unsubstantiated. Of course, in true McMahon fashion, Vince went on to say that the study was produced by "some obscure professor who finally got someone to read his paper and is trying to get his name in the media." WWE certainly didn't hide from the issue, even linking to the study on its Web site to bring further attention to the results from fans and engage in a dialogue, although WWE was definitely issuing their response in "wrestling promo" mode.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink