Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began the first of a two part interview with Rob Walton, creator of the recently completed graphic novel, Ragmop. Greg Smith, whose research interest extend from cognitive theory of emotion to the translation of The Maxx for television, conducted this interview. Smith is the author of a great forthcoming book on Ally McBeal and the aesthetics of serial television, which is coming out later this year. Yesterday, Smith and Walton took us deep into the political and economic theories behind the book. Today, they explore some of the influences -- from Samuel Beckett to Jack Kirby -- that shaped this idiosyncratic story.

Many of you, of course, live in areas where the comic book shops are sub par and don't stock Walton's Ragmop. I should note that the book is of course also available from Amazon and other online bookdealers.

Lest people think that Ragmop is an economic treatise, we should point out that it's incredibly funny too. The rhythm of the jokes feels a lot like the jokes in classic animation. What did you learn about joke structure from animation?

Drawing storyboards for ten years definitely helped refine my comic timing as well as what I absorbed as a kid watching Monty Python, Bugs Bunny, the Marx Brothers, and reading MAD Magazine. Animation also taught me how to use "beats". Those are moments of silence when a character suddenly clues into something, like when the Tetragrammaton realizes that there are dinosaurs in Heaven (page 241) or Alice's spit-take on page 178 (you don't see too many spit-takes in comics, do you?). Ragmop appropriates all of this material, which originates for our purposes with Vaudeville and Silent Film comedy. It was amazing to be able to distill eighty years of comedy culture in a comic like Ragmop. I don't think it could have been done any other way. It was a cartoon comedy or nothing. I was dealing with such grand themes and extreme viewpoints that it never once occurred to me that this would be anything other than a comedy.

Aside from animation I did read up on the history of comedy going back to the Greeks. I was happy to learn that what I was doing in Ragmop was nothing more than what was done at the original festivals, where ancient comedians would parody and lampoon the figures of establishment in their day. That's where comedy seemed to begin. It's also why it has always been reviled and suppressed over the centuries by the various targets of its humor.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part One)

Today's interview with comics creator Rob Walton was conducted by my good friend, Greg M. Smith, who teaches media studies at my undergraduate home, Georgia State University. Whenever I come to Atlanta to visit my family, I make a point to get together with Greg, who takes me to the local comic shops and shows me what I have been missing all of these years. He's introduced me to a broad range of books that had otherwise slipped my grasp but one of the best was Ragmop. When Smith learned that the long unfinished Ragmop was going to be completed and reprinted as a graphic novel, he asked if I'd be willing to let him interview Rob Walton for my blog. What could I say? Wild Horses couldn't stop him and in any case, I was as excited as he was at helping to introduce my readers to this fascinating book. Everything from here is Greg's.

Ragmop was one of the great unfinished comic stories until recently, when creator Rob Walton completed and published his 450 page graphic novel. Picture the love child of comic book great Jack Kirby and economist Adam Smith, all done as a Looney Tunes cartoon. Or maybe the best story of an interstellar conspiracy ever done by ALL the Marx brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, AND Karl).

Ragmop is the story of the chaotic pursuit of the "O-Ring," an emblem of power that keeps the current pretender to divinity named Tetragrammaton (you know him as "God") in heaven. Everyone wants the O-Ring: the American government (where an idiotic president is under the sway of the evil Mr. Black), insane lobotomizing psychologists, former Nazis, beatnik poet/physicists, the Pope and his cabal of assassin cardinals, an alien race known as the Draco (based on real life aliens!), and even Uncle Walt (yes, THAT Walt). Most importantly, our heroine Alice Hawkings (after her unsuccessful career as the super-villain Thrill Kitten) and her three dinosaur sidekicks (Darwin, Einstein, and Huxley) are also in pursuit, with the fate of the world in the balance.

Ragmop mixes pratfalls and economic theory in a way that is utterly distinctive to comics. Rob Walton can be reached at robwaltoon@sympatico.ca, or at his blog. Ragmop can be purchased at finer comic shops everywhere.

Tell us about the publishing history of Ragmop.

Ragmop began as a serialized comic back in June of 1995 published by my own imprint Planet Lucy Press. That lasted ten issues before moving over to Image Comics for two issues. The second issue could not carry the sales needed for it to remain with Image, so I published a final issue before abandoning the series to return to animation full time sometime in 1998.

Over the years people kept asking me when I would finish the book. I told them I had no plans to return to the material, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Too much had changed on the political scene, and I felt the story would have to be completely updated to reflect the new realities of the War on Terror. Then came a bout of underemployment in 2004-2005. To fill the gap I began to pick away at Ragmop trying to find a new way back into the story.

I had reread the published issues and had a good idea of what worked and what didn't. I knew I needed a new opening, something that would plunge the reader right into the action. I also wanted to introduce the political angle immediately as a way of being honest and upfront with the reader. I also knew I wanted to incorporate and expand upon the "Plunder Blunder" backup story from issue six that told us a little of Alice's past criminal activity as a way of better establishing her as the main character of the story. This process alone took four to six months to resolve. My first pass at this material was modeled on the narrative structure of Rocky & Bullwinkle with a lot of stops and starts in the story as well as having a "voice over" narrator. Those who read that first version didn't like it at all. Thankfully they were right and that I had the good sense to trust their judgment. I excised the Rocky & Bullwinkle shtik and found myself off to the races.

Updating the script turned out to be a fun exercise and gave me a chance to correct a lot of the art and story. It took me a further year to complete the final edits and new pages required to bring the story to its soul-shattering conclusion. Having it complete in one volume I can finally appreciate the accomplishment. I think I did exactly what I wanted to do even if it falls short of some people's expectations. I'm personally proud of the book.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

The Escasy of Influence and the Power of Networks

Today, I want to call to your attention two recent articles which speak to themes that have been recurring interests in this blog since we launched last June -- the first deals with the relationship of intellectual property and creative expression, the second deals with web comics as a site of experimentation and innovation. Both warrant closer looks.

Jonathon Lethem , an author whose fiction consistently plays around with themes of fandom and popular culture, has published a provocative essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence," in the most recent issue of Harpers, which explores the ways that copyright has operated to constrain and plagiarism and appropriation to expand the richness of our culture. Lethem's statement is impossible to summarize here because it expresses its ideas as much through its form (composed of remixing a range of writers who have dealt with the contemporary debates about copyright, including Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Richard Posner, Lewis Hyde, David Foster Wallace, and Henry Jenkins).

Something of the piece's argument can be determined by its opening quote from John Donne:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated."

For those who are curious, Lethem mashes up a passage from Textual Poachers with the Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life, the book which provided me with my theoretical underpinnings:

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own--artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not "having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle"), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. "Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become "real" without being actively reworked: "Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: "It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby." Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

As a fan of Lethem's fiction (The Fortress of Solitude), I am tickled pink to see my own writing included in this context. Every so often, journalists, who see me as an advocate of very loose copyright protection, ask me how I would feel if someone took and used my work without my permission as if it were a kind of gotcha question. In reality, I am delighted to see people engage with my ideas; I give much of my own intellectual property away on a daily basis -- here in the blog and elsewhere -- because I care much more about having an impact on the debates that impact our culture and in providing resources for my readers than I am interested in regulating what they do with my text. Of course, it is nice when they acknowledge that I wrote the material, as Lethem does here, but I also understand as the quote from Donne suggests that new works get built on the shucks of old works and that to be part of the conversation is to become the raw materials out of which new texts get generated or perhaps simply the compost that allows them to grow.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab in the News

Chris Kohler ran a story in Wired last week about new academic programs in game studies and design, in which the new Singapore-MIT GAMBIT games innovation lab figured prominently, alongside the new Serious Games masters program being launched by Carrie Heeter at Michigan State University and the new bachelor's degree program in game art and design recently launched by the Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, California. These are to be sure only a few of a much broader array of colleges and universities which currently offer degrees or research opportunities in the area of game studies and design, each with their own strengths and emphasis. Certainly I would want to acknowledge here the pioneering work in this area at the University of Southern California, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, to cite simply the American institutions.

Kohler bases his representation of our efforts primarily on an interview he conducted with core participants some months ago. He recently reprinted the full transcript of the exchange via his blog and I am crossposting it here with his permission in hopes that it will give my regular readers a clearer picture of what we are trying to accomplish.

Kohler was flattering in his representation of "Prof. Jenkins" (that guy again!) as the key figure behind the project but in fairness, I should stress the degree to which CMS co-director William Uricchio has been the primary player in our negotiation to create the lab and that the day to day operations of the lab are being capably overseen at this point by CMS alum Philip Tan, who has been seconded to our team from the Singapore Media Development Authority. Both Tan and Uricchio play a prominent role in the interview which follows.

We got some thorough ribbing in the fall when we announced that the Lab would be called SMIGIL (Singapore International Games Innovation Lab) and I joked at Serious Games that we were going to change our name to GOLLUM (Games -- Online Learning, Large, Utterly Massive). In the end, we have settled for GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology). While we are still negotiating some final details of the arrangement, we remain optimistic that the lab will launch this summer with our first crop of games prototypes starting to surface in the fall. My trip to Singapore in January was partially focused on identifying collaborators at leading Singaporean institutions who would be working with us on the first round of research.

Chris Kohler: You've been on the front lines of research into video games for quite a long time, but if I understand correctly this is the first big push for CMS into actual work in video game design. Why get into this area of education?

Henry Jenkins: That's a bit of a simplification. I have long been a strong advocate of innovation, creativity, and diversity of games as well as a strong supporter of the serious and independent games movements. That's probably the part of my work which has been most visible beyond the MIT campus. But, we have been taking steady steps over the past eight or nine years through the Comparative Media Studies Program to move decisively towards games production. The Comparative Media Studies has embraced an ethos of applied humanities.

Some years ago, CMS collaborated with Bing Gordon to develop a Creative Leaders Program for Electronic Arts: our faculty and students sat down to brainstorm with key EA designers, including Will Wright, Neil Young, and Danny Bilson, about the future of the games medium. For the past seven years, we have run a week-long intensive games design workshop every January in collaboration with people in the training program at Sony Imageworks and with a range of local Boston area games companies. Our students conceptualize and pitch games in the course of the week and receive feedback from industry insiders (representing companies such as Harmonix, Mad Doc, and Turbine). We have gradually built on that foundation by having games-related courses taught on campus by games industry insiders, such as Christopher Weaver (Bethesda Softworks), Ian Lane Davis (Mad Doc), Eric Zimmerman (GameLab) and Frank Espinoza (Warner Brothers). We have a long tradition of bringing games industry professionals to MIT to mentor and advise students on their class projects. We have long brought game designers of all kinds to campus to interact with our students
and share with them front line perspectives on industry trends. We have had a steady stream of students who have sought to combine computer science and comparative media studies and have gone on to do internships and get jobs as game designers.

We have now six years of track record doing conceptual and playable prototypes for educational games -- starting with the Games to Teach project which was funded by Microsoft Research and then the Education Arcade, which has hosted major events on games and learning at E3. This group has experimented with the use of game mods as a platform for developing educational games, transforming Neverwinter Nights into Revolution, a game set in Colonial Williamsburg. We recently hired Scot Osterweil (The Zoombini's Logical Adventure) to head up a team of our students working with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision to develop Labyrinth, a multiplatform experience designed to help kids develop literacy and math skills. It will be, we hope, the first CMS developed game to find its way into distribution. Eric Klopfer, another colleague, has been a leading researcher working on Augmented Reality Games and Beth Coleman, yet another colleague, is doing important work on the use of machinema for artistic expression.

Continue reading "Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab in the News" »

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Millenial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with Duke professor Anne Allison talking about her recent book, Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Today, I continue that interview.

I mentioned last time that I spoke on a panel with Allison at Duke and thought I'd share a few more aspects of my interest in this area.

For one thing, the New Media Literacies project is currently working on a documentary about the cosplay community: our team went to Ohayocon this January to do interviews with anime fans and the costuming community. I wasn't able to share that footage at Duke but I was able to share some footage that a recent CMS alum, Vanessa Bertozzi, had produced of a young woman named Chloe who described the ways that cosplay and her fascination with JPop and anime motivated her to learn more about the Japanese culture and language:

"I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in sixth grade. When I was in the seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten. "

Chloe is representative of what I have called "pop cosmopolitanism." I have mentioned this concept in the blog before and wrote about it extensively in an essay that is found in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. She has attached herself to Japanese popular culture as a way to escape the paroachialism of contemporary American culture -- to find a world outside or beyond the American borders. And in doing so, she has moved from a fantasy version of Japanese culture towards closer engagement with Japanese fans via the internet and with Japanese language and culture through her courses at Smith College.

I also shared with the group some sense of the ways that the American comics industry has started to absorb influences from manga in the hopes of combatting a trend which finds Japanese comics outselling American comics by as much as four to one in the U.S. market, perhaps the only internationally produced media content that outsells its domestic counterpart in this country. I showed how companies like Marvel and DC had sought to absorb elements of the themes and style of Manga while attaching them to their flagship superhero characters with the greatest emphasis occuring in works that target female consumers. See for example the romance comic, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, for a comic that deals with classic Marvel superhero themes in a manga style. Indeed, this turn towards manga style in both mainstream and indie comics is starting to open up a space for female writers and artists as well. A curiosity in this case is the link between manga and female readers/writers given that the Japanese comics being imitated here are not always or even primarily those aimed at female readers in Japan. Lots more here to reflect upon in the future, that's for sure.

I also suggested that this was an international phenomenon, citing as an example The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga , a British anthology that I picked up in Singapore. The editors struggled in their introduction to justify the use of "manga" to characterize a collection of works by a global set of contributors, including some very interesting work Asia Alfasi (Libyan by birth, Scottish by residence), who uses a manga style to tell the story of a hijab-wearing Arab Muslim girl living in the United Kingdom. The book represents one of a number of recent efforts to strip the term, "manga," of its specific reference to Japan and argue that "manga" refers to a specific set of styles and genres in comics that travel freely across national borders in an increasingly global marketplace of ideas and influences. On the one hand, this book suggests the world-wide influence of Japanese media and at the same time, it suggest ways that media producers in other countries are learning to attach themselves to this phenomenon to open up the western market to their own cultural products. A core question at the present time is whether "Cool Japan" is an unique phenomenon or whether we will see more and more national cultures attract their own passionate groups of young fans in the west.

Now, back to the interview...

In the book, you draw on the concept of de-odorization to talk about the ways cultural materials are stripped of their local specificity as they enter the local markets. Yet at this point, Japanese culture carries enough cache that it's styles and themes are actively being imitated by American companies. Do you see this as a shift in the strategies by which Japanese cultural goods are being marketed?

Yes, and it represents a change coming from both Japan and the US. Until about the early 1990s, cultural products from Japan that bore the trace of their cultural roots too strongly simply didn't sell very well abroad. Given this, companies like Sony purposely tried to make "global" versus "Japanese" products (Sony itself was a name chosen for its global-cachet and its electronics were colored gray with an aesthetic style meant to be modern and international rather than Japanese per se). For the past decade or even a bit longer, however, there has been a global fad for Japanese products that has now come to value, even fetishize, their "Japaneseness." A Saban executive told me that when Power Rangers came out in 1993, the show had to be Americanized and its Japanese roots heavily censored. However, by 2002 (when I was talking with him), showing Japanese script, riceballs, or temples in a Japanese cartoon was an added attraction and not only was it not airbrushed out, such signs of Asianness were now being actively solicited.

What I think Japan authenticates in the minds, fantasies, and tastes of US fans of J-cool is not so much Japan as a real place as mush as a particular aesthetic. I characterize this aesthetic in my book by the qualities of polymorphous perversity ( a continual moving of borders,constant transformation, repetitive change and accretion of powers, body-parts, and mecha) and techno-animism ( a world that gets animated by technology and human bodies that, in this animation, also become cyborgs). Godzilla embodied these two qualities and arose in Japan at a moment of historical disrupture and postwar reconstruction. My argument is that--in part because of Japan's wartime and postwar history--it bred a fantasy culture more dependent on polymorphous perversity and techno-animism than was American pop culture at the time. Now, the US is less stable, complacent, and economically secure than it was in the 1950s and itself is experiencing some of the social and political tensions Japan was in the 1950s. Also this is a moment of heightened flux, migration, change, and mobility around the world; these social conditions breed and embrace the cultural tropes so rampant in J-cool and this is what the "Japan" of J-cool represents for American fans, I argue.

Continue reading "Millenial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part Two)" »

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

Millennial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part One)

In January, as part of my three week lecture tour, I stopped off in Durham, North Carolina where Duke University was hosting a special event designed to discuss the issues being raised by Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, which was written by one of their faculty members, Anne Allison. I was one of several outside researchers who shared their insights into the issues the book raised. I had a great time interacting with the students and faculty there both through this event and a seminar session the following day.

I have long been an admirer of Anne Allison's work which touches in complex ways on issues of globalization, cultural identity, fan cultures, sexuality, and popular culture. For me, one of the real values of her work is that she has read deeply into what Japanese cultural critics have had to say about some of the materials that have made their way over to this country. Given how little of this writing has been translated into English, this is an especially valuable service to those of us interested in this topic. The book offers a richly detailed series of case studies of the interplay of Japanese and American popular culture, going back to the tin toys produced during the American occupation, Godzilla and Astro Boy, and other early texts which made it into the western marketplace. The core of the book describes the emergence of an ethos of "coolness" around Japanese cultural imports -- moving from a time when the industry sought to erase markers of cultural difference to the present moment when many western consumers are embracing these products (toys, anime, manga, games) because of their Japaneseness.

Today and tomorrow, I will be sharing with you an interview with Anne Allison about her latest project. Here's her official biography which will provide some background about who she is and how this project fits into the larger trajectory of her career:

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist currently working on the globalization of Japanese pop culture in entertainment goods like Pokemon. Her recent book, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006) looks at the global marketplace, capitalist logic, and fantasy construction of Japanese toys through the lens of Japan-US relations. Allison has published two previous books. The first, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press 1994) is a study of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining white collar, male workers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs. Her second book, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-HarperCollins 1996, re-released by University of California Press 2000) examines the intersection of motherhood, productivity, and mass-produced fantasies in contemporary Japan through essays on lunch-boxes, comics, censorship, and stories of mother-son incest. Anne Allison is Chair and Robert O. Keohane Professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

Let's start where your book ends. You write, "Finally, of course, there is the significance and signification of Japan in the creation of a global imagination no longer dominated (or at least not so completely) by the United States. The attractive power at work here may be less for a real place than for the sense of displacement enjoined by the postindustrial condition of travel, nomadicism, and flux generated and signified here by somewhere "not-the-United-states" but within the orbit of the globally familiar. Still, American hegemony is being challenged in the symbolic virtual medium of fantasy making. And in this a see a positive contribution to the cultural politics of global imaginings in millennial monsters and Japanese toys." Explain. In what sense is it more important that this is not American popular culture than that it is culture from Japan? Or conversely, why does it matter that American youth are consuming culture produced elsewhere? What do you see as the political, cultural, and economic implications of this shift?

It's always struck me that Americans are very insular; we tend to see America as the center of the world, American culture as the global standard and norm, and the American lifestyle as the best in the world. Much of this is unconscious and comes from, among other things, a popular culture so dominated by US-produced fare. So, to disturb this sense of American-centeredness and to open up Americans to understanding and recognizing cultural difference is good, I'd say. Of course the question then is: does the popularization of J-cool amongst American youth really signal an opening up of consciousness and sensitivity to cultures and a cultural way of life that is different? I would say - to a degree, yes. But what matters here is not that fans of J-cool necessarily understand the complexity of "Japan" as the origins of this different popular culture. Rather, what is important here is more the disruption of the dominance of American culture. This is the cultural implication of a shift in pop culture in the US.

But you also ask about the political and economic implications and this is a harder question to answer. Economically, Japan is as much a postindustrial, neoliberal economy as the US so I'm not sure there is a radical shift here in the wave of J-cool spreading across the US. Politically, we could say there is more possible significance: the acceptance of soft power from somewhere else implies a challenge (well, a "soft" challenge)to the unilateralism of the US empire and the way the US nation-state is imposing its will and policies on the global stage (invasion of Iraq) without consulting or cooperating with others.

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

When Piracy Becomes Promotion Revisted...

Last fall, Reason magazine reprinted the "When Piracy Becomes Promotion" section from Convergence Culture, foregrounding the ways that the arguably illegal practices of fan subbing have helped to build the American market for anime.

More recently, I received a tip from reader David Mankins about the ways that the commercial marketing for the anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, sought to explicitly tap into the fansubbing circuit. Haruhi had been a huge success in Japan and had generated growing interest in the American Otaku community through its circulation in fansubbed versions. Wikipedia offers this history of the international reception of the series:

DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 and 90,000 units sold of the first two DVDs respectively as of August 2006. A 2006 online poll of Japan's top 100 favourite animated television series of all time, conducted by TV Asahi, placed the series in fourth place. The series has also become somewhat of an internet phenomenon in both Japan and English-speaking countries thanks to the distribution of English language fansubs, and over 2000 clips of the series and user-created parodies and homages were posted to video sharing websites such as YouTube. The popularity of these clips (and those of other popular Japanese series) lead the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to request that YouTube remove clips protected under copyright.

Rather than ignore this history, the company releasing the anime series officially in the United States openly courted anime fans, urging those who have loved the fan sub version to support the commercial releases.

Here's an account of the campaign published last December on The Anime Almanac:

Buzz was generating through out all off last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets with promises of the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that "The World as we know it will end" that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website's source code. The popular website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along with the highlight of the letters SOS written on their news posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery....

Bandai's idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet. They have also created a Myspace page and encourage fans.

The movie is done "for fans by fans" style, and they really know their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialog with a Korean-Americain, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren't expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catch-phrases like "O Rly?" and "No Wai!" are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee's choice to translate a word to "psychic" over the word "esper", a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-prefered word written under the original recording...

Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to "All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works," and specifically gives no thanks to "downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs." This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

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

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

Attend the tale of plucky young independent filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who have tapped every device available to them in the era of participatory culture to get their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters in front of an audience.

Rather than waiting for the film to come out on DVD to offer director's extras, Buice and Crumley shot a compelling series of videos about the film's production and released them via iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, where as of August 2006 they had been downloaded more than 600,000 times. As audience interest in the property grew, the team used their own blog/website to solicit support from their fans, promising that they would insure that the film got shown in any city where there were more than 150 requests. Indeed, they were able to use the online interest expressed in the film to court local exhibitors and convince them that there was an audience for Four Eyed Monsters in their community.

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

Most theaters would normally avoid a project like ours because we don't have a distributor who would be marketing the film and getting people to show up. But because the audience of our video podcast is so enthusiastic about the project and because we have numbers and emails and zip codes for all of these people, we've been able to instill enough confidence in theaters to get the film booked.

As of today, the site has received more than 8000 requests from screenings. Fans can use their website to monitor requests and to help them to identify other potential viewers in their neighborhood. As Crumley explained,

We've learned that it's almost impossible to distribute your film to theaters the way the current system works, but their are loop holes, and they are building your own audience and then proving to theater owners you have that audience and that they are willing to show up to pay money to see your film that's something distributors don't have to do, but theaters would really benefit if they did.

The film and the web campaign behind it has drawn interest from the Sundance Channel which plans to broadcast it down the line but who used it to launch a series of screenings of independent films in Second Life, where once again it played to packed houses.

Based on their experiences, the filmmakers have started talking about what they call "collective curation" of content: a scenario where independent producers court audiences via the web, creating interest through clips and previews, and identifying where they have a strong enough following to justify the expense of renting theater space and shipping prints. They believe that such an approach will help other directors get their work before enthusiastic paying customers.

Seeking to support other filmmakers who want to follow in their footsteps, the Four Eyed Monsters team has posted a list of more than 600 movie theaters around the country which they think might be receptive to independent films and encouraging others to fill in relevant details.

The filmmakers will be sharing some of their experiences and perspectives to those attending the Beyond Broadcast conference this Saturday. As reported here earlier, this conference is being co-hosted by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law, and Yale's Information Society Project.

The Four Eyed Monsters team also play a prominent role in the newly released documentary on videoblogging which CMS graduate student (and Beyond Broadcasting organizer) Steve Schultz has helped to produce for the Project nml Exemplar Library. As I have mentioned here before, we are producing a series of web-based documentaries for use by schools and after school programs interested in getting young people involved in media production projects. I will be featuring more information about this documentary down the line but I wanted to call it to your attention in advance of the Beyond Broadcast conference since it provides such a useful overview of the implications of citizen-based media. This is the first of the documentaries produced under the supervision of our newly hired production coordinator, the talented Anna Van Someren.

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

From YouTube to YouNiversity

I wrote the following article for Chronicle of Higher Education and it seems to be stimulating some discussion out there. Since at some point it will be taken off the Chronicle's site, I figured I would exercise my rights as an author to republish it here. My one regret is that the Chronicle removed a reference to William Uricchio who is my co-director of the CMS program and whose contributions are key to the program's success.

Consider these developments: At the end of last year, Time named "You" its Person of the Year "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game." Earlier in the year, Newsweek described such sites as Flickr, MySpace, Craigslist, Digg, and YouTube as "putting the 'We' in the Web." The business "thought leader" Tim O'Reilly has termed these new social-network sites "Web 2.0," suggesting that they represent the next phase in the digital revolution -- no longer about the technologies per se but about the communities that have grown up around them. Some are even describing immersive online game worlds such as Second Life as the beginnings of Web 3.0. All of this talk reflects changes that cut across culture and commerce, technology and social organization.

Over the past few years, we have also seen a series of books (both journalistic and academic) that analyze and interpret these new configurations of media power. In his recent book The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler describes the reconfiguration of power and knowledge that occurs from the ever more complex interplay between commercial, public, educational, nonprofit, and amateur media producers. Grant McCracken's Plenitude talks about the "generativeness" of this cultural churn. Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) shows how these shifts are giving rise to niche media markets, and Thomas W. Malone (The Future of Work) analyzes how such changes are reshaping the management of major companies. My own book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, describes a world where every story, image, sound, brand, and relationship plays itself out across the widest possible array of media platforms, and where the flow of media content is shaped as much by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms as it is by decisions made in corporate boardrooms.

These writers come from very different disciplinary perspectives -- business, law, anthropology, and cultural studies -- and they write in very different styles. We can't really call this work an intellectual movement: Most of us didn't know of one another's existence until our books started to hit the shelves. Yet taken together, these books can be read as a paradigm shift in our understanding of media, culture, and society. This work embodies an ecological perspective on media, one that refuses to concentrate on only one medium at a time but insists that we take it all in at once and try to understand how different layers of media production affect one another. As such, these books represent a new route around the ideological and methodological impasses between political economy (with its focus on media concentration) and cultural studies (with its focus on resistant audiences). And these books represent a new way of thinking about how power operates within an informational economy, describing how media shifts are changing education, politics, religion, business, and the press.

Many of these books share the insight that a networked culture is enabling a new form of bottom-up power, as diverse groups of dispersed people pool their expertise and confront problems that are much more complex than they could handle individually. They are able to do so because of the ways that new media platforms support the emergence of temporary social networks that exist only as long as they are needed to face specific challenges or respond to the immediate needs of their members. Witness, for example, the coalition of diverse ideological interests that came together last year to fight for the principle of network neutrality on the Web.

The science-fiction writer and Internet activist Cory Doctorow has called such groups "adhocracies." An adhocracy is a form of social and political organization with few fixed structures or established relationships between players and with minimum hierarchy and maximum diversity. In other words, an adhocracy is more or less the polar opposite of the contemporary university (which preserves often rigid borders between disciplines and departments and even constructs a series of legal obstacles that make it difficult to collaborate even within the same organization). Now try to imagine what would happen if academic departments operated more like YouTube or Wikipedia, allowing for the rapid deployment of scattered expertise and the dynamic reconfiguration of fields. Let's call this new form of academic unit a "YouNiversity."

How might media studies, the field most committed to mapping these changes as they affect modern life, be taught in a YouNiversity?

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

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

The other day, I had a discussion of the politics of fear with Doug Thomas (USC), Carrie James (Harvard), and Larry Johnson (The New Media Consortium) as part of a gathering of MacArthur foundation grantees working on their Youth and Digital Learning Initiative. I was pretty happy with some of the ideas that emerged from that conversation so I thought I would share them with my readers.

Let's start with an example of how the politics of fear works. Consider, for example, the case of a recently proposed piece of legislation here in Massachusetts which would regulate violent video games as in effect a form of pornography. Here's how GamePolitics describes the legislation:

The proposed legislation, which does not yet have a primary sponsor, would block underage buyers from purchasing any game which:

* depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community, so as to appeal predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors
* is patently contrary to prevailing standards of adults in the county where the offense was committed as to suitable material for such minors
* and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.

The bill in question was written by Jack Thompson, who has sought similarly legislation around the country and has consistently been overturned by court decisions. Interestingly enough, the most outspoken backer of this law is none other than Boston Mayor Thomas Menino -- who is, incidentally, the same local politician who is responsible for the city's gross over-reaction to the Aqua Hunger Force signs the other week. I find myself pondering why we can't just tell people that Menino is someone who has demonstrated already that he is so out of touch with popular culture that he can't tell the difference between a cartoon character and a bomb and that he is someone who is afraid of his own shadow (or more accurately, who understands the political advantages to be gained by fostering a climate of fear). Given the current logic of the way our fear-based politics functions, we might expect them to ban cartoon characters on airplanes and have our children line up to be searched for coloring books and stuffed toys before they can pass through security!

Or consider the case of the late and unlamented Deleting Online Predators Act which would have prohibited school and public libraries which receive federal funds from allowing patrons to access social network and blogging software. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has introduced a new piece of legislation, the so-called Protecting Children in the 21st Century act, which would incorporate and expand upon many of the more noxious features of the original DOPA. I am sure we will be talking about this more in the months ahead. It would seem to one of the clear hallmarks of the politics of fear is the use of the term, "protection" or "protecting" in the name of the legislation.

In both cases, these bills, which are based on a fundamentally wrong-headed understanding of the issues they are designed to address, attracted or are likely to attract significant levels of bipartisan support. Indeed, in a highly partisan political climate, these kind of bills may be the only pieces of legislation which pass with little or no debate and with overwhelming support.

Why? Well, consider what it would mean to be opposed to a bill which promised to protect young people from online predators. And indeed, even if you decided to oppose such a bill, you either would have to deny that the problem existed (which would leave you to be labeled as hopelessly out of touch with the darker side of reality since these bills usually feed on at least some high profile tragedies or some sensationalized news report) or you would have to suggest the problem is not as bad as has been claimed (in which case your acknowledgment of the problem will be used as evidence of how wide spread the concern being addressed really is.) So, the politics of fear works because the costs of opposing the child protection acts are simply too high, especially in an era where political leaders are permanently raising money and campaigning for re-election.

The politics of fear also works because the benefits of a fear-based politics are so high. Basically, such legislation enjoys bipartisan support because it allows culturally conservative Republicans to appeal to their base and liberal Democrats to show their independence from theirs. Why do Joseph Lieberman and Hillary Clinton line up behind pretty much any piece of legislation which would restrict free expression in the name of protecting young people? Because it allows them to adopt positions which make them see "moderate" and appeal to so-called "security moms" without really crossing any core constituency. There would be costs in, say, opposing abortion but there is no real cost in trying to regulate youth access to digital technology.

The politics of fear works because it serves the interest of the news media in two ways: First, the mass media are feeling the erosion of their consumer base to digital media. If they can convince parents that it is unsafe to allow their sons and daughters to go online or play video games, they may slow the erosion. They have little to fear from alienating those young viewers further since they are already defecting in great numbers and essentially mass media news speaks to an older consumer base. Second, fear-based coverage leaves us glued to the set, seeking out more information. We are doomed to go from one crisis to another, to have Anna Nicole Smith's death and custody battle push Barack Obama's announcement for the presidency off the lead slot on CNN, because fear and outrage trumps hope everytime.

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The Future of Television (Circa 1999)

Bill Densmore of Clickshare recently shared with me the text of an e-mail I had sent him in May 1999 describing what I saw as one scenario for the future of digital culture. I decided I wanted to share it with you to spark a conversation about how far we have gone towards realizing some of the key elements of this scenario as well as how far we have yet to go on other fronts. (the reference points to The X-Files and My So-Called Life give you some sense of the time when this was written.) I was responding to an essay he had written about micropayments and the struggle to insure the diversity of digital culture.

Everything from here is part of the original text:

My own research has centrally concerned the ways that popular audiences consume and create value from the resources provided them by the mass media. As I suggested yesterday, I don't find the lowest common denominator model helpful for thinking about the success of most popular entertainment. Rather, I see the popular audience composed of a coalition of different
audience interests who may share certain programs, films, stories in common but who get fundamentally different things from them and who interact with them in different ways. The most creative producers understand this now, while the broadcasting paradigm helps to mask the degree of diversity and fragmentation of the contemporary media audience. It is clearer when we go on line and survey the range of web sites constructed around a particular series or parse through the flame wars on fan discussion lists which occur when radically different reading publics are brought together.

A second focus of my research concerns what I call "cultural convergence," which refers to the social and cultural changes in how we relate to media content in our everyday life that help prepare the way and establish the market viability of technological convergence. When we try to understand what is happening in our culture, we see two things: a growing desire to participate
more fully in our media culture -- not just as passive consumers but active transformers of media content -- and a growing tendency to tighten corporate control over intellectual property law. This is resulting in a crackdown on fan web sites, MP3 files, etc. and thus a closing off of the cultural participation encouraged by the web.

Now, here's what I imagine occurring when we add something like your clickshare to the mix -- along with dramatic improvements in the delivery technology for digital media:

1)All television content becomes available via some form of webtv, including past episodes. If I want to join a series midprogress, I can go back and watch earlier episodes for a reasonable rate with micropayments as the means of exchange between me and the television producers.

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

Second Life (Round Three) -- 'Nuff Said

By now, you know the drill. Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I are going around and around about Second Life.

Round One Henry Beth Clay
Round Two Henry Beth on Clay Beth on Henry Clay on Henry Clay on Beth
Round Three Henry Beth Clay

For some other smart and thoughtful responses to the debate, check out:
Irving Wladawsky-Berger,

Grant McCracken,

Sam Ford,

Ron Burnett,

Mark Wallace,

Jesse Walker,

Intellagirl.

All of this is going to make much more sense if you've already read the earlier rounds of the conversation.

Mapping the Debate

Clay began his most recent post with the following:

We agree about many of the basic facts, and that most of our variance is about their relative importance. So as to prevent the softness of false consensus from settling over some sharp but interesting disagreements, let me start with a list of assertions I think we could both agree with. If I succeed, we can concentrate on our smaller but more interesting set of differences.

I think you and I agree that:

1. Linden has embraced participatory culture, including, inter alia, providing user tools, using CC licenses, and open sourcing the client.

2. Users of Second Life have created interesting effects by taking advantage of those opportunities.

and also

3. Most people who try Second Life do not like it. As a result, SL is is not going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term, to use your phrase.

4. Reporters and marketers ought not discuss Second Life using phony numbers.

The core difference between our respective views of the current situation is that you place more emphasis on the first two items on that list, and I on the second two.

Yes, that about sums it up except that for me, there's another issue on the table here: whether purely quantitative measures are adequate to the task of meaningfully evaluating an emerging media experience.

Let's suppose all of Clay's numerical claims were true, then would they negate the cultural importance or likely influence of the cultural experiment we are calling Second Life? I have been trying across my posts to suggest other levels on which Second Life is culturally meaningful and influential other than those which depend entirely on its head count.

Clearly, there is a need for reliable data points about the scale, composition, and levels of engagement witnessed by various online environments. I share Beth's call for further refinements of such tools. I am simply rejecting the idea that this issue can be reduced to a single data point and I am certainly rejecting the idea -- widespread in the business community -- that the only thing that counts is what can be counted.

Relying purely on quantitative data is especially dangerous at a time when things are in flux and when we do not yet have an adequate framework in place to interpret the data that we are collecting. These numbers may answer some of the questions we want to answer but only if we understand how to read them meaningfully.

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In Defense of Crud

"Ninety percent of everything is crud" -- Theodore Sturgeon

I have found myself thinking a lot lately about the issue of quality as it relates to the emergence of participatory culture. Several things have raised the issue in my mind:

The first was reading a very interesting essay written by Cathy Young, a regular columnist for Reason magazine, debating the merits of fan fiction. In fact, Young outs herself as someone who has written and published fan fiction set in the universe of Xena: Warrior Princess. She is in turn responding to a diatribe against fan fiction by fantasy writer Robin Hobbs. She writes:

Hobb's indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness. Deriding the idea of fanfic as good training for writers, Hobb wrote, "Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else's world, characters, and plot....The first step to becoming a writer is to have your own idea. Not to take someone else's idea, put a dent in it, and claim it as your own."

Young works through some of the standard defenses of fan fiction (I won't go into all of them here, since I've delivered most of them in the past myself and am a little tired of the arguments.) But she ends with the following:

So is the growth of Internet-based fan fiction a cultural development to be wholeheartedly applauded? Not quite. The good news about the Internet is that, in a world without gatekeepers, anyone can get published. The bad news, of course, is the same. Much fanfic is hosted on sites such as fanfiction.net, where authors can get their work online in minutes--which means that professional-quality stories coexist with barely literate fluff, and reader reviews will sometimes congratulate an author on good grammar and spelling. Even sites that prescreen fanfic and encourage authors to use beta readers and a spell checker tend to be quite lax with quality control, and only a few fan fiction archives are genuinely selective.

For the more sophisticated fanfic lovers, the high crap-to-quality ratio can mean a frustrating search for readable stories. The real problem, though, is that less experienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story. It is frankly disturbing to encounter teenagers and young adults whose recreational reading is limited to fanfic based on their favorite shows, and there have been moments when I have felt like telling some of my own readers to put down the fanfic and pick up a book. It is even more troubling, as far as educational experiences go, that a teenager can wantonly butcher the English language at fanfiction.net and get complimented on a "well-written story."

Golubchik thinks that such concerns are exaggerated. "If anything," she says, "I think that fanfic teaches kids to be more discerning. The quality stuff does tend to percolate to the top; it gets recommended and popularized." Indeed, while the worst of fan fiction can make a Harlequin romance look like Charlotte Bronte, the popular stories are at least no worse in quality--and sometimes far better--than, say, The Da Vinci Code.

The mainstreaming of fan fiction is likely to raise standards further, bringing more educated people into the arena and perhaps encouraging some voluntary gatekeeping, such as contests with input from professional writers or editors...

Perhaps, as with other cultural products often dismissed as intellectual junk food, the answer to bad fanfic is simply better fanfic.

The second was reading a debate between Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur (which I am sure to be saying more about down the line) and Chris Anderson, the promoter of the concept of the "Long Tail."

Here's some of what Keen had to say:

Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing....I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life. Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Keen's overtly and unapologetically elitist comments, frankly, get under my skin -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing if it forces those of us who believe in participatory culture to question and defend our own assumptions at a moment when the world seems to be moving more decisively in our directions. So, I find myself thinking a bit more about the vexing issue of quality. So let me offer a range of different responses to the issue:

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The News From Second Life: An Interview With Peter Ludlow (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced readers to Peter Ludlow -- philosophy professor, editor of the Second Life's town newspaper, someone who thinks deeply about what civic engagement means in the context of a virtual world. Today, I continue that interview with some of Ludlow's thoughts about the recent debate sparked by Clay Shirkey's critiques of Second Life and continuing into some of his insights about the challenges of governing online communities. I am hoping this interview whets your interest in the book he is writing with Mark Wallace. Wallace and Ludlow are lively writers and provocative thinkers who are raising questions we need to consider if we are indeed moving towards the era of Web 3.0.

An Aside
Okay, let's get back to this matter of Web 3.0. Of all of the things I said about Second Life in the exchanges with Shirkey and Coleman, I've taken the most heat for my dismissal of the concept that virtual worlds might represent Web 3.0. (Well, maybe my historical analogies but I will get back to those in another post.) Ludlow comes back to this matter here and takes a few whacks at me himself and perhaps justly so. But let me at least explain what I was responding to. I was talking about some of the hype and misrepresentations that have emerged from journalistic coverage of Second Life. I suggested that this reframing of virtual worlds as Web 3.0 might not be the most helpful way of understanding what is going on. There does seem to be a lot of confusion out there about what exactly is meant by the phrase, Web 3.0 -- whether it describes what comes after web 2.0 or whether it describes the enhancement and augmentation of the existing communications system. I suspect very few thoughtful people who are really engaged in online worlds imagine that they will displace the existing web altogether, though I have talked to some journalists who seem to imagine this is some kind of a realistic possibility.

Many of the popular representations of the evolution of the web offer a sloppy way of modeling the transition from one state of the web to the next. Consider this widely circulated image. It shows some moments of overlap between web 1.0 and web 2.0 but also seems to depict a moment where web 2.0 replaces Web 1.0 altogether and the same seems to be occuring here as web 2.0 gives way to web 3.0. I don't see any other way of reading what is being depicted on this particular chart.

But as I suggest in Convergence Culture, there are no dead media (though there may be some dead delivery technologies). Old media do not go away; they become part of a much more complex layering of different communications options within the media landscape. The web doesn't replace television or newspapers; virtual worlds won't displace social networks; they all will be available as possible ways to communicate. The emergence of a new medium may create a crisis for the old medium, requiring standard practices to shift, forcing us to rethink its social status or functions, redirecting patterns of production and consumption, but in the end, the old medium will survive in some form. This is what Ludlow says below. It's also what I was trying to say about the affordances of virtual worlds. Tell me that virtual worlds will be more central to our culture in the future and I won't argue with you. Tell me as some journalists -- and as the above chart seems to suggest -- that web 3.0 will displace earlier models of the online world and I am going to be skeptical.

OK, enough self justification. Now onto the interview...

I wanted to give you a chance to respond to Clay Shirky's recent critique of the hype surrounding SL. Do you agree or disagree with his concerns about how the mainstream media has been 'duped' about the population of SL? What has the response to this story been like within SL?

The exchange between Clay and the community hasn'’t been very productive. Clay came along with some true, but very obvious and not so interesting observations about the “Second Life residents” number, and then people on Terra Nova started genuflecting and saying what a genius Clay was. This was infuriating for a lot of us, because we have been calling out those numbers as bogus for over a year. For example, in the Herald we called a foul on the residency stats when they crossed 100 thousand, but more than that, we also pointed out that the “US Dollars Spent” numbers were bogus.

Clay took us to be saying that if insiders knew about the bogus number, then it was enough – the major media didn’t need to know. But of course that wasn’'t our point at all – it was more frustration with the mainstream business media and the eggheads on Terra Nova for only reading a very narrow bandwidth of sources (of which Clay is one). Apart from pointing out the obvious meaninglessness of the “residents” number, Clay's contribution was weak, for reasons that you pointed out: The interest of Second Life has nothing to do with the number of eyeballs it is delivering, and everything to do with the quality of the people that are in world and the kinds of activities they are engaged in, how those are going to influence future iterations of the web, and the long tail their activities are going to have.

IÂ’'ve seen lots of virtual communities, ranging from the WELL, to Mindvox, to the Italian PeaceLink network of the 90s. The WELL was not important because of how many people were there, but who was there and what they were doing. I made so many amazing contacts there, ranging from people like Mike Godwin and John Perry Barlow, to Josh Quitner, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Jon Lebkowsky, R.U. Sirius, and the list could go on and on. The contacts IÂ’'m making and the things I am learning in Second Life are even more amazing, perhaps by an order of magnitude.

There was something retro about Clay’'s critique, and that something is this: it assumes the value and success of Second Life is tied to the number of eyeballs that are converging there. That is, the critique is assuming a push media model of value. But push media is in trouble, and that is the reason that SL is crawling with marketing and PR people -- they are trying to come to grips with “life after the 30 Second Spot” (to steal a line from the title of a book by Second Life resident Joseph Jaffe. Second Life isn’'t about counting eyeballs, it is about establishing relationships with quality technical, social, and artistic contacts that have a high impact and will continue to do so, learn from them, and then try to engage them in your own projects.

I also have a bone to pick with you regarding something you said in your response to Clay. It is certainly true that Second Life is being hailed as an example of Web 3.0, but no one is claiming that Web 3.0 replaces or even dominates the future of the internet. If you think of Web 1.0 as the commerce web and Web 2.0 as the social web, no one would argue that 2.0 replaces 1.0. This is a point that Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company made in response to you and Clay. No one thinks Web 3.0 is going to replace asynchronous communication. It is just something else that is being added to the mix, and it is going to contribute to the commercial and social aspects of the web, but it will also be its own weird thing. The interest of Web 3.0 at the moment is that the people who are there are younger early adopters and social trend setters (IÂ’'m thinking of my 11 year old daughter and her friends as a case in point.) Asynchronous communication is useful, but real time in-world meetings are very effective for some social and commercial applications.

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The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)

I first became aware of Peter Ludlow and his work for the Alphaville Herald when NPR called me up and asked me to be a pundit commenting on a nationally broadcast debate between the candidates for the leadership of the largest town in The Sims Online -- a debate between a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach and a 20-something airline employee from Virginia. I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the mechanisms surrounding the election broke down, some voters were denied the right to cast their ballots, the election technology was manipulated, and charges of corruption and poor sportsmanship flew right and left. The Alphaville elections, in other words, were the game world counterpart to what happened in Florida in the 2000 elections. Ludlow, who was far more deeply emershed in this world than I was, became my expert guide through this whole process. I wrote about these events for Technology Review and later revisited them for a section of my book, Convergence Culture.

I lost contact with Ludlow for a while but recently he wrote me to see if I might give him some advice about his own new book project -- his account of his time as the editor first of the Alphaville Herald and then of The Second Life Herald, co-authored with Mark Wallace. Their book recounts a fascinating saga of mobsters and griefers, of civic boosters and would be socialites, and of the challenge of governing virtual worlds. The book will be coming out some months from now from the MIT Press but in the meantime, what Ludlow had to say was so timely, especially given my recent exchanges with Clay Shirkey and Beth Coleman about the value of Second Life and given our forthcoming Beyond Broadcasting conference that I wanted to share some of his reflections with you much sooner than that. When he is not playing the part of a muckraking journalist in Second Life, Ludlow is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Linquistics at the University of Michigan.

In the conversation that follows, he explores more systematically what it means to construct civic media in Second Life and discusses his contributions to the life of this emerging online community. Tomorrow, he will share his reflections on the Second Life Debate as well as his thoughts about the challenges of governing online worlds. Together, these two installments represent a fascinating inside perspective on the nature of civic engagement in Second Life.

Axel Springer announced the other day that they would establish a full time newspaper in Second Life. What do you see as the significance of this announcement? What does it mean to the existing local newspapers which are indigenous to SL?

The Axel Springer virtual newspaper, called The Avastar, launched a few weeks ago, and they have had, suffice it to say, a rough start trying to find their way around Second Life. One problem is that Second Life is a very complex and hard to understand cluster of social spaces, and the Avastar managers don''t seem to understand the world very well. I also don''t think they have had great success in lining up knowledgeable and articulate writers, and if they think people are going to *pay* to read their paper (or, for that matter, advertise in it) they are badly mistaken.

The fundamental problem with their project, however, is their idea that there is some sort of value added by virtue having their newspaper in a PDF format, rather than a blog-like format. PDF doesn't integrate into the Second Life infosphere in the appropriate way (they can't link to other stories, we can't link to them, people can't comment, the stories are stale by the time they appear, etc).

If you think about it, their project is somewhat reactionary. They had an opportunity to come to this strange and fantastic new place where all the rules can be rewritten, and the only thing they could think of doing was coming up with a product that mimics meat space newspapers as much as possible. Far from offering us a new way to think about news and entertainment and how it should be presented, they are effectively trying to make a last stand for static push media by using PDF instead of a blog or some sort of social software.

From the outside, I''m sure they look all bleeding edgy ("oh look, a newspaper in a virtual world!") but from inside they look reactionary in concept, and clumsy in execution.

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

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled "Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy." It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, public media professionals, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups.

Beyond Broadcast 2007 builds on the overwhelming success of last year's sold-out event, "Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture" held at Harvard Law School. Over 350 people took part in-person and online through the virtual world Second Life. Attendees used several unique online tools, including a web-based "question tool" to probe panelists, a collaborative wiki, live blogging, flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us tagging, and YouTube video production. These tools enabled the conference to practice what it preached, turning the event into a two-way participatory interaction in contrast with many conferences. The tools have been expanded upon this year, already spurring an active conversation on
the conference web site, weeks before the event.

I will give the Keynote Address, followed by panel discussions from media makers and policy commentators. Details of these panels are being updated on the conference web site

In the second-half of the day, the conference turns its focus to working groups that attendees will help organize. Building on themes coming from the plenary sessions, participants will target specific issues or questions and join efforts with the diverse crowd of others. In the past, these groups have been facilitated by thought leaders in technology, policy, and academia. Many attendees last year expressed their appreciation for this hybrid conference approach in
which they had a chance to "do something before heading home."

There will also be an evening reception, called "Demos and Drinks," showcasing groups that are doing exciting work related to conference themes.

Registration is only $50 (before February 9), and includes lunch and the evening reception. There is also a special 50% discount for students. The conference follows the 2007 Public Media Conference taking place in Boston February 20-23.

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today's post, I offer an interview with another of the conference's speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a "culture of citizenship." After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director. According to Wikipedia, "The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation's work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen's and their government."

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let's start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the "bread and circus" aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference's theme, "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy" invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me -- the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I've met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I've met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch -- for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump -- a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I'm thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

Continue reading "The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout" »

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

More Second Thoughts on Second Life

A week ago, Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I launched a three-way conversation across our blogs which was designed to spark a greater public conversation about the value of Second Life. We have been extremely pleased by the range of other responses to our posts which have cropped up on other blogs.

By agreement, we are each returning today to respond to each other's posts and offer some concluding thoughts on the issues which have emerged through the conversations so far. Beth's post can be found here. Clay's post can be found here.

As some readers have noted, the disagreements here may be more apparent than real. Clay, Beth and I agree that Second Life is probably being over hyped if our criteria of significance is defined statistically but that it may still be an important site of cultural innovation and deeply meaningful to the people who spend their time there if we adopt more qualitative measures.

The "debate", if you can call it that, circles around competing criteria by which we might measure the importance of Second Life. Shirkey's original post sparked such heated response in part because it seemed to be pushing statistical and commercial criteria forward at the expense of other ways of evaluating the importance of what is going on there.

Shirkey says as much:

Concerning popularity, I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable (an argument I made in the Meganiche article), but they won't, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.

Beth believes that Second Life may well push well beyond niche status by providing a compelling model for how we might live in a virtual world that captures the public imagination and paves the way for subsequent developments in the design and deployment of virtual worlds. Second Life, she suggests, represents one step further along a century long evolution of human communications capacity:

What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and "portable" spaces can be inhabited as a home.

Shirkey, by contrast, believes that "virtual worlds" is not a meaningful category:

Put another way, I believe that the group of things lumped together as virtual worlds have such variable implementations and user adoption rates that they are not well described as a single conceptual group...Pointcast's management claimed that email, the Web, and Pointcast all were about delivering content, and that the future looked bright for content delivery platforms. And indeed it did, except for Pointcast. The successes of email and of the Web were better explained by their particular utilities than by their membership in a broad class of "content delivery." Pointcast tried to shift attention from those particularities to a generic label in order to create a club in which it would automatically be included.

I believe a similar thing happens whenever Second Life is lumped with Everquest, World of Warcraft, et al., into a category called virtual worlds. If we accept the validity of this category, then multi-player games provide an existence proof of millions-strong virtual worlds, and the only remaining question is simply when we arrive at wider adoption of more general-purpose versions

Ironically, of course, many bloggers have responded to Shirkey by arguing that he is comparing apples and oranges by lumping Second Life together with these other gaming platforms. Second Life, they argue, is not a game. And in doing so, they are making his point for him: Second Life, he argues, can not be meaningfully lumped in with these other forms of virtual worlds because it is not a game and read on its own terms, it does not demonstrate there is a robust or widespread public demand for this kind of online experience. Again, though, this is to revert back to a set of statistical criteria for evaluating the cultural significance of Second Life.

Let me repeat for the third time the statement which may best sum up my own position: "Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there."

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

The Beatles Win the IAP Games Competition

A few weeks ago, I shared with readers of this blog some of the thinking behind our annual workshop on translating traditional media content into interactive entertainment experiences. This is a workshop we have done for the past seven years in collaboration with Sande Scordes from Sony Imageworks. Students with different skills and backgrounds are put onto teams together and asked to select an existing media property that they think would form the basis for a compelling game experience. In the course of the week, these teams think through issues of narrative structure, character development, graphic presentation, interactivity, audio design, market potentials, and business models to come up with a 20 minute "pitch" for how and why they think such a game might succeed. The students worked long, long, long hours trying to pull together their presentations and on Friday, they gave their pitches and got feedback from our panel of judges (which combine industry and academic expertise). Every year, we get blown away by the quality of the presentations and this year was no exception.

The winning team this year, led by CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby and including Cabell Gathman, Ben Decker, Sarah Sperry and Laura Boylan, imagined a unique partnership between Apple Music (which owns the rights to the Beatles's songs and likenesses) and the Nintendo Wii (which offers an exciting platform for a new kind of games/music experience). The presentation opened with a montage of clips designed to display the unique sense of humor and comradary that one associates with the classic Beatles movies, the game like potential of some of the sequences from Help and A Hard Day's Night, and the ways that the Beatles themselves had experimented with the construction of animated avatars through the Yellow Submarine and other projects. Their high concept -- "Grand Theft Auto meets the Fab Four" -- a "sandbox" game experience which allows players to take on the role of the Beatle of their choice. As they explained, people have strong feelings about which Beatle they want to be and might not take kindly to starting out the game as Ringo and working their way "up" to John or Paul. They might also have strong feelings about which period of the Beatles' lives they wanted to inhabit or preferences about which of the many imaginative realms introduced through their songs they might want to visit first.

The Wii would allow novel play mechanics which might range from trying to "net" the Blue Meanies or deliver flowers to "all of the lonely people" to performing as a band -- they even imagined a level which might be called "Sitar Hero" which reflects a particular memorable moment in the group's development. Periodically, the player might be besieged by mobs of screaming fans that rip off their clothes and delay their movement through the levels. As they successfully complete a level, they would get to perform another hit song from the group's repertoire and they might be able to enter a more surreal, psychedelic realm such as the Octopus's Garden or Lucy in the Sky with Gardens. Each level starts with a muted palette designed to mimic the black and white of their classic films but as the Beatles master the challenges and spread love through their music, they color our world.

The group's witty presentation was peppered with a range of compelling slogans -- "All YOU need is Love. Wii provide the rest" or "Let it Wii." They even were able to offer some convincing arguments that this project might not be as far fetched as it might seem, given Apple's recent venture in allowing Cirque du Soleil to repurpose and remix classic Beatles cuts for their new performance piece.

And if anyone wondered what the Fab Four would look like as game characters, they ended with a series of Beatles Mii (see above) that drew their inspiration from their previous embodiments in animation.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts (Part Two)

Well, in the midst of running this interview with Michael Counts about environmental advertising and spatial storytelling, it turns out that a major controversy has been brewing in Boston over the past two days about environmental advertising. To be specific, The Cartoon Network had placed a series of flashing light displays promoting Aqua Hunger Force at various locations around major cities, including apparently under some bridges in Boston. You can see what the displays looked like in this image produced by CMS alum Rekha Murthy and distributed via Flickr.

Here's what happened next according to one news report:

A television network's marketing campaign went badly awry on Wednesday, causing a day-long security scare in Boston that closed bridges, shut major roads and put hundreds of police on alert.

Apologising for Boston's biggest security alert since the September 11 attacks more than five years ago, Turner Broadcasting said it had placed electronic devices at bridges and other spots to promote an animated cartoon.

Police mistook the small, battery-powered electronic billboards as possible improvised bombs.

The discovery of the first one on a bridge led police to stop morning rush-hour traffic on an interstate highway just north of Boston, halt a busy train line, cordon off the area and deploy a bomb squad, which blew it up.

By afternoon, at least nine more of the "suspicious" devices were found. Authorities mobilised emergency crews, federal agents, bomb squads, hundreds of police officers and the US Coast Guard as traffic froze in parts of the city....

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said he was prepared to sue.

"It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme," he said. "I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred during the response to today's incidents."

The alarm prompted the Coast Guard to close the Charles River that runs through the city and caused authorities to shut down major bridges along with several roads.

"This has taken a significant toll on our resources," Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told reporters.

I should note, as Ford does, that Turner is a sponsor of the Consortium and that we were not consulted in any ways about what they planned and executed in this case.

Meanwhile, let's return to our regularly scheduled interview with Michael Counts in which he discusses the Yellow Arrow project and its relationship to his background in popular theater. For more background on Yellow Arrow and Counts, check out yesterday's post.

Many critics see media as distracting us from the world around us, yet your projects seem to be using media to force us to look at the real world from a different perspective. Is that a fair summary of your focus?

Yes. A different perspective and one that celebrates each individual's unique perspective. As so many aspects of our culture are doing right now -- from myspace to youtube -- we have been interested in the value and significance of the subjective and commonplace. So many things today seem to be driving towards the idea that the "ordinary" is in fact quite extraordinary if you can find the right vantage point.

Your work tends to blur the lines between art and advertising. Many of your early projects are treated as independent theatrical productions yet your current website seems to be pitching many of these same techniques and practices to potential corporate clients. Can you say something about the ways you walk the lines between these two worlds? Why might a commercial client today be drawn to techniques that might have seemed experimental and out there even a few years ago?*

If Yellow Arrow is an effort to help people find things in all categories that they might be looking for out in the "real world" by allowing others to publish their thoughts, ideas, histories and the like, there is no reason in my mind that products or brands shouldn't be a part of that. One of my favorite stories that I heard about Yellow Arrow being applied successfully involved someone who had posted an arrow pointing out a cool coffee place in San Francisco at which the owner made one outstanding coffee at a time and paid great attention to detail -- that the experience of being there and talking with the owner was quite memorable. The original post was found by another guy who was going to San Francisco and looking for interesting things to do -- not the everyday tourist stuff. He followed the original post, went to the coffee shop, experienced what the original poster had described and used the "comment" feature of YA which sent a text to the original poster at that moment - meanwhile, he was back in Australia. This created a link between the two guys and a sort of reward for the guy who originally found and "mapped" this spot - others had followed in his path and enjoyed his recommendation. In truth, the coffee guy is a brand and his establishment commercial. People are looking for all sorts of things and YA and projects like it should simply help people find them -- brands too. The problem, I think, emerges when brands (or individuals for that matter) lie or try to get people to engage with them at all costs like so much modern advertising has done. To me that type of business practice will increasingly be a thing of the past. If the guy who posted the original anecdote about the excellent coffee was the coffee guy himself and his coffee sucked, few would follow the advice after one or a few people caught on. Hopefully this type of blogging, be it on-line or using text messaging, will keep us honest and help good things and interesting and hidden histories find those who are looking for them.

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

Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts

From the launch of the Comparative Media Studies Program, we have had a steady stream of students who have been interested in the role which media plays in urban spaces. In part, this is because there is a strong crossover between our program and the MIT tradition of work in architecture and urban studies. We've had students do thesis projects which center around how we conceptualize and map urban environments; we've had interesting projects in the space of augmented reality -- projects which use handheld and gps enabled technologies to create an interesting overlay of digital and physical space, allowing people to annotate the world around them. I've mentioned here before the project Rekha Murthy did examining the flow of official and unofficial communications media in the Central Square area just off the MIT campus. In the course of this research, she started stumbling onto yellow arrow stickers that were posted on lampposts and walls through her study area, which led her to learn more about the Yellow Arrow project. Based on her contacts, we developed an MIT Communications Forum event on Branding the Urban Landscape, which featured Jesse Shapins of the Yellow Arrow Project, as well as Thomas V. Ryan, senior vice president of mobile and digital development for EMI Music North America, and Jon Cropper, then creative content channel strategist at Young & Rubicam Brands.

Today and tomorrow, I am featuring an interview with Michael Counts, the head of Counts Media, which organized and deployed the Yellow Arrows as an innovative effort to try to get people in cities around the world to look at their environments in a different way. Yellow Arrow, which Counts describes below, is a fascinating example of participatory culture and viral marketing. If you don't know about Yellow Arrow, you may be interested to check out their home page.

I asked Counts to share with me some basic biographical information. Here's what he sent:

Michael Counts is an artist and entrepreneur who has been a pioneer in experimental theatre, art and entertainment for over a decade. As co-founder and artistic director of Gale Gates et. al. he was instrumental in the development of DUMBO, Brooklyn and served as primary architect of the creative identity of this now vibrant cultural district.

In 2002, Michael started The Ride New York LLC. which later grew to become Counts Media Inc. Backed by some of Broadway's major producers, this new company has allowed Michael to further expand into international entertainment and continue the pursuit of large-scale environmental productions and installations. Some of the initial Counts Media investors include the founders of Blue Man Group; Vivek Tiwary of Starpolish and Tiwary Entertainment Group; Robyn Goodman, producer of Avenue Q and founder of Second Stage Theatre; and Charlie Flateman, former President/CEO of Gray Line New York. Counts Media's projects over the past years have drawn the attention of major media globally, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, Wired Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The London Times, Liberation, Politiken, the Sydney Morning Heraldand the Discovery Channel among countless others. As Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, Michael drives the creative vision and organizational culture of the company, defining his team's unique entertainment products and properties that bridge all media.

Michael grew up in New York City and studied at Skidmore college under Gautam Dasgupta, author, critic and founding editor of Performing Arts Journal. He continues to reside in DUMBO, Brooklyn

Counts is a fascinating mixture of theorist, entrepreneur, and artist, someone who is helping to change the ways residents think about the cities around them. I am pleased to share with you some of his thinking.

How would you describe Yellow Arrow?

Since Yellow Arrow began, we have defined it several different ways. Initially we called it a M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Project), that then became M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Publication), which finally became M.A.P (Massively Authored Publication) as we determined that its use could extend beyond the creative or artistic aspects of the project. For example, we learned a great deal as we began to work with Lonely Planet and their community as they were primarily interested in the "travel" aspects of Yellow Arrow. We ultimately found that what we were really creating was a new and subjective map of the world. I became particularly interested in the idea that there should really be as many maps of the world as there are individuals or perspectives - for instance, your map of New York, based upon your interests would likely be very different than my map, based upon my interests in New York. The patent application actually calls it a "deep map." We have also been very interested in the idea that each object or location has a really compelling history if only it can be unlocked or revealed - for instance, the corner of 38th and 8th in New York, consider how many events have occurred there and how those events and histories might relate to each other and how interesting it would be to access that invisible reality. I think that Yellow Arrow and the growing number of projects and ideas like it, both on-line and in the "real" world, can help us navigate increasing complexity and reveal the patterns in apparent chaos.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink