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Archives: April 2007
April 30, 2007
Reflections on Media in Transition 5This entry is a stub. My goal here is to create a space where people who attended the Media in Transition conference this weekend can share their perspectives about what worked or didn't work during the event but also give us suggestions about what they might like to see at Media in Transition 6 which will be two years from now. This year's focus on collaboration, creativity, and appropriation emerged from discussions among conference participants at Media in Transition 4. We were especially urged to try to develop themes which would allow more participation from artists, educators, lawyers, activists, and policy people and I am happy with the ways that this year's conference did attract more non-academics into the mix. So far, at the closing session, there has been a greater emphasis placed on historical perspectives, which have long been a hallmark of the Media in Transition events but which were under-represented this year. There was also a desire for more critical or skeptical perspectives on media change and as always, more challenge to insure the diversity of the mix of speakers at the event. And finally we were urged to reach out to librarians and archivist who had special roles to play in preserving the past even as they are involved in insuring the circulation of culture. These were all great insights but I am sure that there are other ideas out there we should collect while the conference is still fresh on everyone's mind. So, fire away. But keep in mind that to some degree our ability to draw in these other groups will depend on your outreach in your local community. So, talk up the conference and help us identify people you know who should be in the mix next time. The plenary events are already available in podcasts. Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures Collaboration and Collective Intelligence Copyright, Fair Use and The Cultural Commons Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art We will be posting a directory of participants to our conference website as well as providing access to many of the presented papers. Indeed, there are lots of interesting papers already here And for those of you who would like to read some live blogger accounts of some of the events, here's some we've found already: Axel Bruns So, thanks for all of you who came. If you weren't here for the conference, check us out. And either way do let us know what you think...
April 27, 2007
Liwen's Digital Journey Into the Computer WorldLast week, I shared Debora Lui's essay about her relationship with the Netflix Queue as an example of the work I've received on an assignment I set my students in the graduate prosem I teach on media theory and methods. They were asked to write an essay which drew on personal experiences as the basis for theoretical observations about media and popular culture. Today, I wanted to share another example of the work generated in response to this assignment. This one comes from Liwen Jin, a CMS first year master's student, who comes to us from the People's Republic of China. So much has been written in the west about China's embrace of digital technology that I thought you might appreciate reading her perspective on the changes new media has wrought in her country and about the process by which she became digitally literate. Liwen's Digital Journey into the Computer World My first time to touch a computer was in May 1995, when I was about to graduate from a primary school. My parents sent me to a professional institute to let me get some basic training in wielding the computer. However, when I arrived at that summer school, I was totally surprised and even scared by the fact that all of the students there were twenty or thirty something except me, only a 12 year old girl in that big class. During that time, very few Chinese people knew how to operate a computer. Computer education was limited to MS-DOS and keyboarding. In that class, though I was the smallest one, I got the highest grade in the final test, which made me pretty confident in utilizing the latest technologies, and it fascinated me with that small magic"box" at that young age. After that, I had no more experience with the computer until entering high school in 1998. Every high school student in China was supposed to get some elementary computer education. However, the fact was far from the requirements set by the country's National Education Ministry. High school students usually sat in the computer room, busy doing their own homework. Driven by the intense pressure of College Entrance Examinations, high school students usually devoted all of their time to their studies. They did not have weekends, nor extra time to watch TV or play the computer. They were usually regarded as one of the most "miserable" social groups in China. Besides, the Internet was not popular at all at that time. Getting access to the Internet was very expensive and the speed was quite slow. Without the Internet, a computer is just a dead body without its soul. To me, the computer at that time was an alternative to the typewriter, which had no connections to my daily life or studies at all. The late 20th and early 21th century was a period when China was fervently riding the wave of the "information economy". The bubble of the dot-com economy in the West brought this fever to China too. The business of computers and dot-com rose to prosperity overnight. In late 2001, my parents bought me a $2,000 personal computer because I was admitted to one of the most famous universities in China. However, it was still rare for college students to carry a personal computer around on campus in that year. I became the first one in my department who owned a personal computer. Fully enjoying the "luxurious" convenience of the computer and the richness of information, I nonetheless slipped into one extreme. I became really immersed in the virtual world. I spent less and less time communicating with my classmates, but more and more time chatting with strangers on the Internet. In different chatting rooms, I disguised myself by different "identities": college student, female artist, singer etc. I enjoyed discussing art, Chinese literature, films, and entertainment news with different people using different identities. Just as Sherry Turkle says in her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, the existence of the Internet has become a place where people are able to forge "cyber-identities" and even get more comfortable being who they are. The Internet possesses the magic to "decentralize" the social identities of users in the virtual world--it strips users of their identities, wealth, social status and social relations in the real world, which makes it possible for online individuals to freely express their opinions and communicate with each other. It "shatters" the "bodies" of people, making their online identities so fragmented and multiple that it becomes really difficult to unify them. Besides, I felt that the separation of online identities from offline identities also resulted in the irresponsibility of netizens to their online speeches. Indeed, my immersion in cyber space gradually separated me from "true" communication with my friends in real life for a while. Some of my friends even thought I got the symptoms of autism. In fact, during that time, except going to school, I usually confined myself to my room and surfed on the Internet. But gradually, many of my friends got the same symptoms as mine. From 2003 to 2004, most of my classmates got their own computers and began to replicate my experience with their own. Generally speaking, girls liked to indulge in chatting on the Internet, while boys preferred to play computer games. It became a common phenomenon that dorm-mates chatted on OICQ or MSN instant message instead of talking face to face even though they were living next door to each other. Furthermore, it became very true that some students who behave timidly in real life may speak arrogantly in cyberspace. I actually was also along with them. My friend once told me, "you look very gentle and quiet in real life, but so funny and naughty on MSN. It's really hard to unify those two of 'you'!" That's what I defined as "cyber schizophrenia." People could have two or even more personalities with the infiltration of "virtual life" into real life. I still remember that one boy who looked extremely shy in real life unexpectedly sent me a series of love letters via email or MSN instant messages at that time. But after I turned him down, he looked so natural and unembarrassed when encountering me on campus. It seemed that the guy on the Internet was not "him" at all. Indeed, the Internet, in this sense, greatly challenged the Chinese tradition of Confucianism which urged people to abide by the principle of moderation and to avoid verbal aggressiveness in any case. One of the most interesting cyber events during that period was cyber love. It became a fashion especially among college students, since young students had more time surfing on the Internet and they could usually pick up new technologies much more quickly than other social groups. Besides, people do tend to be more frank and audacious in cyberspace. There was a popular love story entitled "First Intimate Touch" written by a Taiwanese writer on the Internet during that period. It described a tragic cyber love story which got widely spread among college students. In fact, the "First Intimate Touch" also ushered in the prosperity of cyber literature in China. The Internet opened a new door to aspiring writers and connected them closely with the audience. In the past, writing had long been considered as a lonely profession, but when prose and poems got put on the Internet, the instant feedback made writing not so lonely any more. That phenomenon could be regarded as the early stage of the convergence of media producers and consumers. In 2003, another kind of online community began to fascinate me. That was the online Bulletin Board System (BBS). My university's BBS was one of the most popular college BBSes. It was usually deemed the virtual home to all NJU (Nanjing University) students, just like Mecca to the Islamic. Even though I have been graduated for nearly two years, I still cannot get rid of the habit of logging into NJU BBS every day to see the latest news and join students' discussions of hot social issues. I thought BBS could be a virtual form of the Habermasian public sphere for the cause of China's democratization. However, I gradually found that online communities like BBS only validated the theory about the principles of the popular mind of large gatherings of people on the Internet. This theory was first proposed by French social theorist Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: The masses live by, and are ruled by, subconscious and emotional thought process. The crowd has never thirsted for the truth. It turns aside from evidence that is not to its taste, preferring to glorify and to follow error, if the way of error appears attractive enough, and seduces them. Whoever can supply the crowd with attractive emotional illusions may easily become their master; and whoever attempts to destroy such firmly entrenched illusions of the crowd is almost sure to be rejected. On Chinese BBSes, there was one recurrent issue that never failed to attract the attention of "the crowd", that is, the anti-Japan nationalism. Last year, MIT's Visualizing Culture issue was just a case of this point. MIT's Visualizing Culture course, which used a 19th century wood-print image of Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese prisoners, was spotlighted on MIT's home page. Unexpectedly, these images swiftly sparked complaints from the MIT Chinese community. Some Chinese students re-posted the images to several famous college BBSes in China, which stimulated a vehement fever of anti-Japan hatred on China's BBSes. Those "angry young people"began to throw "bricks" on the Internet. Someone even exposed the email address of Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, and instigated people to condemn him via email. Vociferous comments flew around the BBS sphere. Most of them were rude, while truly rational and objective voices were only submerged under the abuse. Obviously, the masses in the blogosphere could easily lose their rationality and follow the "emotional thought process." In 2004, the term "blog" became a key word of that year in China. I also joined the crowd to chase that trend. I established my first blog on the Internet and kept writing essays and poems on it. It was really a wonderful place for me to write my meditation on various social, political or cultural issues, and then share with my friends. Compared to BBS, the advantage of the blogosphere lies in its greater rationality than the BBS sphere. On BBS, with their true identities veiled and agitated by mass netizens, people tend to express extreme ideas and they are free of any responsibility for the consequences of their speaking and contents. In the blogosphere, one blog is a separate and independent unit, which is immune to the chaos of the crowd. Besides, after the advent of blogs I saw a trend of the unification of online identities with offline identities in China. Some bloggers have begun to view their blogs as a virtual spiritual home and uncover their real identities on blogs. In this way, netizens will be more responsible for their online speeches. Thus, blogs were supposed to become a powerful driver to accelerate the democratization process in China. However, it dismayed me again. The swift development of celebrity blogs in 2005 finally brought a rigid hierarchy in China's blogosphere. The popularity of a blog became positively related to the fame of the blogger in real life. Celebrity blogs greatly overshadowed common people's voices, the result of which discouraged ordinary people from participating in the democratization in China. Besides, the features of the"eyeball economy" dictated that rationality and abstractness were usually far from the foci of our society. The people in cyber space were rarely willing to bother themselves to explore the profundity behind the text. The entry which gets the most clicks on my blog is actually the one to which I post my own photos. Today, I have been used to the life with the computer and Internet, though my mom still thinks that is addiction. But MIT is always a place full of computer/Internet "addicts." I cannot even imagine a day without computers and Internet! However, I have to admit that working on the computer is quite inefficient. With the Internet open, the computer becomes a kaleidoscopic world which seduces you to do everything else except your work. The affluence of information on the Internet is thus a virtue as well vice to us. To me, I will continue my journey in this colorful digital world. And I will continue exploiting every chance brought about by new media to promote the democratization in China. I believe that should be regarded as one of the most important missions for overseas Chinese students, to develop and advance our own country along the way of democracy.
April 26, 2007
Media in Transition 5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital AgeThis weekend, the Comparative Media Studies Program will play host to several hundred researchers, activists, and artists from around the world who will be attending the fifth of our Media in Transition conferences. The core theme of the conference centers around issues of Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, though our goal is to discuss the present moment in relation to the larger history of media change. I haven't publicized the event here because the number of participants has reached such a level that there are very few seats left for people who simply want to attend. For those of you who are in the Boston area, it may make sense to drop by for one or another event since there is no fee to attend and since we often have some seats left. For those of you who are not in the Boston area, have no fear. You will have two opportunities to take advantage of the event programing. First, we will be streaming the plenary events via Second Life. And Second, we will, as with all of our events, be offering webcasts which will be announced here once they are available. To view from New Media Consortium Campus: You must first join the NMC to view from here. It's free and simple. Go to the following address: http://sl.nmc.org/join/ and give them your SL Avatar name, your real name, a valid email address, and for affiliation, mark as 'MIT'. The SLURL for the NMC Campus is here: For more info about the NMC Campus in Second Life, go here:
Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and professional credentials co-exist and cooperate in a complex media ecology. Are we witnessing the appearance of a new or revitalized folk culture? Are there older traditions and practices from print culture or oral societies that resemble these emerging digital practices? What sort of amateur or grassroots creativity have been studied or documented by literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of folklore? How were creativity and collaboration understood in earlier cultures? Are there lessons or cautions for digital culture in the near or distant past? Speakers Lewis Hyde is the Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College and a fellow of the Berkman Center on Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. He is a poet and essayist whose current book project is a defense of cultural commons. His book Trickster Makes This World (1999) is a portrait of the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and lively. Thomas Pettitt is an associate professor at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark, where he lectures on late-medieval and early-modern literature and theatre, and on folk traditions. S. Craig Watkins writes about race, youth, media, and technology. His most recent book is Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. He is currently working on a book examining the social consequences and implications of young people's changing media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Moderator: David Thorburn is professor of literature and director of the Communications Forum at MIT. He is the author of Conrad's Romanticism, and, most recently, co-editor of Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Friday, April 27 Plenary Conversation 2 "Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First? Speakers Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use focusing on children and youth's changing relationships to media and communications. She has been conducting ongoing research on kids' technoculture in Japan and the US, and is co-editor of Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. She is a research scientist at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and a visiting associate professor at Keio University in Japan. Cory Ondrejka is the chief technology officer at Linden Lab where he leads the team developing Second Life. He also spearheaded the decision to allow users to retain the IP rights to their creations and helped craft Linden's virtual real estate policy. While an officer in the United States Navy, he worked at the National Security Agency and graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power School. Trebor Scholz is assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich. He is founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity and has contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited The Art of Free Cooperation forthcoming with Autonomedia (NYC). Moderator: Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the book The Future of Work. Malone has published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters and is an inventor with 11 patents. Friday, April 27 Plenary Conversation 3
Speakers Hal Abelson is professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is engaged in the interaction of law, policy, and technology as they relate to the growth of the Internet, and is active in projects at MIT and elsewhere to help bolster our intellectual commons. Abelson is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, and Public Knowledge and serves as consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Patricia Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at American University where she also directs the Center for Social Media . She is the author of several books including Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (2007), The Daily Planet (2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (1999). She has been a Fulbright and John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival. She received a career achievement award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association. Wendy Gordon is a professor of law and Paul J. Liacos Scholar in Law at Boston University. In many well-known articles, she has argued for an expansion of fair use utilizing economic, Lockean, and ethical perspectives. Gordon Quinn is president and founding member of Kartemquin Films where for over 40 years he has been making cinema verite films that investigate and critique society by documenting the unfolding lives of real people (i.e., Hoop Dreams, 1994). Quinn is working on Milking The Rhino, a film examining community based conservation in Africa and At The Death House Door, a film on a wrongful execution in Texas. Moderator: William Uricchio is co-director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and professor of comparative media history at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. His most recent book is Media Cultures, on responses to media in post-9/11 Germany and the U.S. Saturday, April 28 Plenary Conversation 4 Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers. Speakers Erik Blankinship is a co-founder of Media Modifications, a new start-up whose mission is to expose and enhance the structure of media to make its full learning and creative potential accessible to all. He has many years of experience working with children as an inventor of educational technologies and activities and as a researcher studying the potential of digital media for teaching and learning literature, history, mathematics, and game design. While an undergrad at the University of Maryland, College Park he was a recipient of the Jim Henson Award for Projects Related to Puppetry. Juan Devis is a new media producer at KCET/PBS Los Angeles in charge of all original web content including Web Stories, KCETs multimedia webzine. He is currently working with the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Institute for Multimedia Literacy to develop a serious game based on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Devis was recently awarded a writer's fellowship at ABC/Disney for his original screenplay Welcome to Tijuana which is scheduled for production early in 2008. Devis is president of the board of Freewaves, a non-profit media arts organization. Renee Hobbs is associate professor of communication and education at Temple University where she directs the Media Education Lab. She has worked extensively with state departments of education in Maryland and Texas, and her new book Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English (2007) provides empirical evidence to document how media literacy improves adolescents' reading comprehension skills. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley has been the artistic director of Mixed Magic Theatre for over 20 years. I that role, he has written/ produced/ directed a number of productions including From the Bard to the Bounce: A Hip-Hop Shakespeare Experience, Kwanzaa Song, The Great Battle for the Air, About Me and the Adventure (with Community Prep and the Rhode Island School for the Deaf) and four Annual Black History Month Celebrations at Portsmouth Abbey. Pitts-Wiley was resident artist at Brown University Summer High School in 2001. Alice J. Robison is a postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where she is a consultant for several new media initiatives including New Media Literacies and advises several student-run organizations devoted to the study of videogames and interactive media including the Harvard Interactive Media Group and the MIT Videogame Theorists. Moderator: Henry Jenkins is co-director of Comparative Media Studies and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities at MIT. He is the author and/or editor of several books on various aspects of media and popular culture including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and is the author of the blog Confessions of an ACA/Fan.
Plenary Conversation 5 Today, artists working in new media, including video, web projects and music confront contested and conceptually confusing terrain in which reproduction can be as perfect as the artist desires and endless copies theoretically possible. Yet many find the lack of clarity stimulating and a compelling space in which to break new ground. Why are so many artists today mimicking new forms of visual culture and their distribution systems -- even at the risk of confusion with their popular sources? How are artists debating the value of tightly controlling distribution of media art versus allowing its wider reproduction? What are the tradeoffs artists make between creating artificial scarcity to increase a work's unique value and increasing its visibility through broader reproduction? How are the needs of those who teach and write on video going to be met in the face of hyper-commodification? Speakers Tony Cokes, who teaches art at Brown University, uses videotapes and installations to explore personal, cultural and historical constructions. Cokes's works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum Soho, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and other venues. Andres Laracuente approaches art making as adventure, and frequently focuses on the idea of existence in mediation. With past exhibits in Chicago, New York, Berlin, and Paris, he is currently developing a documentary of art making in collaboration with artists across the U.S. Michael Mittelman is founder and editor of ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, a biannual DVD periodical. He is also an active artist with exhibitions at the List Visual Arts Center, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and ArtSpace, New Haven. Moderator: Bill Arning is curator at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Since joining the List Visual Arts Center in 2000 he has organized such acclaimed exhibitions as America Starts Here - Ericson and Ziegler ( 2006), which was awarded first prize for best monographic show in a Boston museum by the International Association of Art Critics; Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten (2005); Son et Lumire (2004); and Influence, Anxiety and Gratitude. Sunday, April 29 Plenary Conversation 6 What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here? Speakers Suzanne de Castell is a professor in the Faculty of Education in Curriculum and Instruction at Simon Fraser University where he specializes in literacy, new media and educational technology studies. She has published widely across these fields, and was senior editor for the books Literacy, Society and Schooling; Language, Authority and Criticism; and Radical Interventions. Fred Turner is an assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Communication. A journalist turned cultural historian and media scholar, he is the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (2001). Siva Vaidhyanathan is associate professor of culture and communication at New York University and a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004) and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001). Vaidhyanathan's writings have appeared in many publication including the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times Magazine, Salon and The Nation. Jose van Dijck is professor of media and culture in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Moderator: Nick Montfort is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003), and co-editor of The New Media Reader (2003). Montfort's digital media collaborations include the Grand Text Auto and The Ed Report.
April 25, 2007
A Few Thoughts on Media Violence...The news of last week's tragic shooting at Virginia Tech has brought the usual range of media reformers and culture warriors (never camera shy) scurrying back into the public eye to make their case that "media violence" must be contained, if not censored, if we are to prevent such bloodshed from occurring again. Almost immediately, longtime video game opponents Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil McGraw started appearing on television talk shows, predicting that the shooter would turn out to be a hardcore video game player. (The odds are certainly with them since a study released several years ago of frosh at 20 American colleges and universities found that a hundred percent of them had played games before going off to college and that on average college students spend more time each week playing games that reading recreationally, watching television, or going to the movies.) In fact, when the police searched the killer's dorm room, they found not a single game nor any signs of a game system. The focus then quickly shifted with the news arguing first that the shooter was a heavy viewer of television "including television wrestling" and then linking some of the photographs he sent to NBC with images from Asian cult cinema -- most notably with the Korean film, Old Boy. An op-ed piece in the Washington Post asserted that Old Boy "must feature prominently in the discussion" of Mr. Cho's possible motivations, "even if no one has yet confirmed that Cho saw it" and then later, claims that Cho "was shooting a John Woo movie in his head" as he entered the engineering building. And then, of course, there was that damning evidence that he had construct violent and aggressive fantasies during his creative writing classes. Time magazine even pathologizes the fact that he was a college student who didn't have a Facebook page! Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don't! None of this should surprise us given the cycle of media coverage that has surrounded previous instances of school shootings. An initial period of shock is quickly followed by an effort to round up the usual suspects and hold them accountable -- this is part of the classic psychology of a moral panic. In an era of 24 hour news, the networks already have experts on media violence in their speed dial, ready for them to arrive on the scene and make the same old arguments. As a media scholar, I find these comments predictable but disappointing: disappointing because they block us from having a deeper conversation about the place of violence in American culture. I want to outline here another set of perspectives on the issue of media violence, ones that are grounded not in the literature of media effects but rather in the literature of cultural studies. I have plenty of criticisms of the media effects approach, which I outlined in my recent book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, but for the most part, my focus here is more on what cultural studies might tell us about media violence than it is in critiquing that body of "research." So, let me start with an intentionally provocative statement. There is no such thing as media violence -- at least not in the ways that we are used to talking about it -- as something which can be easily identified, counted, and studied in the laboratory. Media violence is not something that exists outside of a specific cultural and social context. It is not one thing which we can simply eliminate from art and popular culture. It's not a problem we can make go away. Our culture tells lots of different stories about violence for lots of different reasons for lots of different audiences in lots of different contexts. We need to stop talking about media violence in the abstract and start talking about it in much more particularized terms. Otherwise, we end up looking pretty silly. So, for example, a study endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 100 percent of feature length cartoons released in America between 1937 and 1999 contained images of violence. Here, we see the tendency to quantify media violence taken to its logical extreme. For this statement to be true, violence has to be defined here so broadly that it would include everything from the poison apple in Snow White to the hunter who shoots Bambi's mother, from Captain Hook's hook to the cobra that threatens to crush Mowgali in The Jungle Book and that's just to stick with the Disney canon. The definition must include not only physical violence but threats of violence, implied violence, and psychological/emotional violence. Indeed, if we start from a definition that broad, we would need to eliminate conflict from our drama altogether in order to shut down the flow of media violence into our culture. Perhaps this is reason enough not to put pediatricians in charge of our national cultural policy anytime soon. Certainly few of us would imagined our culture improved if these films were stripped of their "violent" content or barred from exhibition. Almost no one operates on a definition of violence that broad. Most of us make value judgments about the kinds of violence that worries us, judgments based on the meanings attached to the violence in specific representations, so church groups don't think twice about sending young kids to watch Jesus get beaten in The Passion of the Christ, and games reformers go after first person shooters but not World War II simulation games (which coat their violence in patriotism and historical authenticity) even though this genre is now consistently outselling more anti-social titles in the video game marketplace.
April 24, 2007
Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me...A while back, I mentioned that Jonathon Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and Men and Cartoons, had poached a passage from Textual Poachers in an article he wrote for Harpers about copyright and creativity. Since Lethem, along with Michael Chabon ( The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), has emerged as one of the poet laureates of fanboy lit, I was delighted to discover that my work on fan culture had made it onto his radar screen. But it just keeps getting better. Annalee Newitz was interviewing Lethem for Wired and asked him directly about his relationship to Textual Poachers, as she reports in her blog: Lethem, always a fan of art that exists in a copyright gray area, is eager to encourage fanfic writers of all stripes. He admires Henry Jenkins' seminal book about fanfic, Textual Poachers, and champions the creative appropriation of pop culture icons. "Fanfic is a beautiful allegory of appropriation," he said. "But that doesn't mean the exact gesture is the most aesthetically promising one." Translation: Fanfic rules because it tweaks copyright law, but it's not always good art. Maybe Lethem just hasn't read some of the fantastic Harry Potter fanfic that's out there? Moreover, Lethem has laid down a challenge to the fan writing community, which I am happy to help publicize here: The award-winning nerd novelist revealed that he'd love to be in a slash fiction story. Whom would he want to be paired with? "I want to be surprised! I want to see ones I wouldn't think of!" he enthused, eyes wide with anticipation -- or possibly fear. Lethem believes he's been "slashed" only once, paired with fellow geek novelist Michael Chabon in a "sublimated homoerotic comic by Patricia Storms that was just an inch away from being Kirk and Spock." Lethem may well be the first celebrity in my memory who has publicly campaigned to be the subject of a slash story. I can certainly think of plenty of examples where stars and writers not to be subjected to the slash treatment. (Personally, I am rooting to see Lethem climb into bed with The Goatman, the aptly-named character from one of his short stories, but then what do I know...) I became aware of the Lethem effort to encourage people to slash him about the same time that I learned about the latest efforts of Steven Colbert to encourage his own brand of grassroots creativity. As his website at Comedy Central explains: For Your Editing Pleasure So, at a time when other producers are sending out cease and desist notices to shut down mashups of their content, Colbert is encouraging you to re-edit and recontextualize incriminating statements from his show (and believe me, what made the sketch so funny when it first aired was the whole series of potential meanings behind seemingly innocent statements once he planted the idea in your head.) Of course, none of this has stopped Viacom from trying to get Colbert Show segments removed from YouTube in what is surely a classic example of a media company speaking out of both sides of its mouth at once.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
April 23, 2007
The Wrestler in My Living Room...My students sometimes nail me for a tendency to overuse the metaphor, "wrestling" to talk about the work we do in making sense of a particular theory or cultural phenomenon in my class. But this term, rather than wrestling with a theory, we had a chance to study theory with a wrestler. A few weeks ago, WWE superstar Mick Foley, better known to his fans as Mankind, came to MIT to interact with our students. The primary occasion for Foley's visit was a class which we have been offering this term on American Professional Wrestling. The class was added to our curricular line up to take advantage of the expertise, experience, and connections of one of our graduate students, Sam Ford, a lifelong wrestling fan, who has performed as a manager as part of a minor wrestling circuit back home in Kentucky. In his fictional role, Sam plays the part of an arrogant young man who has left home to go off to the evil city and study at MIT. Sometimes, he wears his CMS t-shirt into the ring and confounds his rivals with a mixture of fancy theory speak and just play bad-mouthing. Sam did his undergraduate thesis at Western Kentucky University on professional wrestling but as a master's student at CMS, he has been devoting his attention to the ways soap operas have responded (or more precisely, should be responding to) shifts in the media landscape. But we didn't want to let him off that easily and so we have put him to work helping his fellow graduate and undergraduate students make sense of the controversial and complex world of professional wrestling, which he describes as an immersive story world, a term he also uses to explain the appeal of soap operas and comic books. Sam has tapped his network of contacts and has gotten the cooperation of World Wrestling Entertainment, which has sponsored talks at MIT by long-time announcer Jim Ross and Mick Foley. The class has also attracted a fair amount of media coverage, including an article that recently ran in The Boston Globe: reporters have expressed astonishment that MIT now offers a class in professional wrestling (confounding expectations both about who MIT students are and who is interested in watching televised wrestling) but also more or less comprehending the reasons why anyone studying contemporary media culture needs to give at least a passing glance to the squared ring. For me, the reasons why we should care about wrestling are the following: 1. As Sam suggests, Wrestling has been an early experimenter in transmedia storytelling. From the get go, moving its entertainment between televised buildup and arena shows, and gradually absorbing print magazines and comics, action figures and other toys, radio shows and podcasts, pay-per-view events, and so forth into its media empire. So, in that sense, wrestling gives us a glimpse into the future of the American entertainment industry, embodying most of the trends I discuss in Convergence Culture. 2. Wrestling also carries with it the rich legacy of late 19th and early 20th century entertainment forms, such as circus, vaudeville, and popular melodrama. When Jim Ross was on campus, he entertained us with stories of life on the road, which could have come as easily from the mouth of a traveling showman a century earlier. As I have written in my essay, "Never Trust a Snake," (reproduced in The Wow Climax), professional wrestling borrows much of its core vocabulary from melodrama and much of its politics from American Populist traditions. 3. Wrestling gives us a glimpse into the culture of working class masculinity. I think elite Eastern institutions should be studying it for the same reasons I suggested a week or so back that we should be studying Evangelical media -- because it can give us insights into other parts of American culture at a time of polarized political rhetoric and culture war discourse. Wrestling can be pure agit-prop, translating contemporary politics through the lens of its performance traditions, and as it does so, it helps us to identify the complexities and contradictions in American political thought.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
April 20, 2007
Contra the Snacks HypothesisLast month, Wired Magazine ran a special issue defined around the theme of "snack media." At the heart of the issue was the following proposition: We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive). In a sense, this is a return to a very old idea that television of the future will be designed for zappers, that it will be designed in very small units which can make sense outside of any narrative context and that can be consumed whenever we want. In Convergence Culture, I explore how a contemporary television show like American Idol is designed to balance the fragmented interests of Zappers (or snackers) with the gradually deeper levels of investment represented by casuals and loyals. On a superficial level, much of popular culture looks as if it is designed for this kind of fragmented and short-term attention. So, it is not hard for Wired to find film producers, say, who are skeptical about whether the feature film will continue to be the central form of cinema: It's not written in the Bible, "A movie shall be two hours." Somebody made that up to sell theater tickets. With technology, the very definition of a story has changed. It used to mean an actor and a script. Now a story is a 15second, no-dialog clip of somebody running across the street. An artist used to be the person who could get the studio to finance, manufacture, and distribute a story. Today an artist is somebody sitting in Des Moines in front of his computer - and his audience isn't a million folks at once, but one person a million times over. I now look to GoFish and YouTube to get ideas, to see what's going on. They show me not only what people are posting, but also what people like. It's a much better metric than a Nielsen rating system. Or to find radio programmers who think people are too antsy to sit still for an entire song: Why climb the "Stairway to Heaven" when you can take the elevator? That's the logic behind Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), an experimental radio protocol currently in development that takes classic tunes and whittles them down to about two minutes. "People's patience for music - even the stuff they like - is thin," says founder George Gimarc, a veteran programmer and former DJ from Dallas. "Twelve songs per hour won't cut it." Gimarc and his team of editor-musicians use what he calls "intuitive editing" to trim pop songs to their catchiest crux, pruning seconds from a guitar solo here, lopping off a chorus there. Or television critics who think that the previews are more entertaining than the programmes: Even if you're a regular viewer, labyrinthine shows like Lost and Prison Break require full concentration and are best consumed in marathon viewing sessions aided by TiVo or DVD. But you can still drop in on complex dramas midseason - just make sure you catch the "previously on..." recaps before each episode. These mini montages have become a captivating subgenre for both regulars and channel surfers. Back in the early days of narrative dramas, in the '70s and '80s, bare-bones recaps for serials like St. Elsewhere rarely topped 30 seconds. Fast-forward to Lost or Prison Break, and recaps of a minute or more are common, with some lead-ins for season openers or finales taking nearly two minutes to bring viewers up to speed - and bear in mind that each shot in those recaps now lasts less than two seconds on average. Sometimes editors rescue scenes from the cutting-room floor, if those bits tell the story in a tidier form. It's a new kind of TV serial, distinct from both the hour-long episode and the season-long arc. So, what's wrong with this picture?
April 19, 2007
Applied Game Theory, R.I.P. 3: Addiction and CopyrightI am continuing my series of highlights from the Applied Game Theory column I wrote with Kurt Squire. The first is a column on the concept of games addiction (mostly Kurt) and the second is about the City of Heroes dispute with Marvel comics over copyright (mostly Henry). For the record, the City of Heroes dispute got settled out of court and the terms of the settlement have not been made public. I am posting tonight from Cornell University. James Paul Gee and I had a public conversation today about games, participatory culture, and learning. We've done these off and on for the past several years -- what I call the Jim and Henry show. Our host recorded it and will be making it available as a podcast so I will let you know when it is available. J For the love of God, get that screenshot away from me! New research suggests that people who play video games to excess exhibit traits similar to those of drug users.  Or so read the headlines at MIT's Technology Review. A recent study on neurotransmitters and gaming made big waves: researchers showed that people who report "being addicted" to games experience increased releases of dopamine (a chemical associated with pleasure), when shown game-related images. Most gamers react with amusement, before asking, "And this is a big deal because...?" If we are being honest, most of us have had played a game more than we should have. Some game designers brag about producing "addictive" titles. A few highly publicized stories  particularly around Massively Multiplayer games show that some people do let their gaming get the best of them, forgetting (or refusing) to sleep, shower, eat, or take care of loved ones. Of course, any activity from work to working out can have an adverse impact on our family, health, and relationships. And in fact, most of us have experienced something like what this research describes. All it takes is the login sound from WoW to put our minds back in Azeroth. So why does this matter? It is one thing to urge people to balance game play with other import aspects of everyday life, another to equate gaming with drug addiction. Once that happens, groups like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association step in, claiming authority to regulate the media you consume. Here's how it usually works. A group of moral reformers comes to the AMA or APA with a policy brief that cites studies "proving" that games are highly addictive. These groups do little or no independent research, relying on what they know from reading the papers (where negative research is disproportionately represented) and then they vote to approve some kind of feel good resolution or policy statement, which itself becomes fodder for more sensational news coverage It's hard to translate these research findings into meaningful social policies. After all, America's success rate in the "war on drugs" hardly demonstrates that we should take a similar tack on other "social problems"? Most pleasurable activities stimulate the release of brain chemicals. We don't know how, say, playing a highly competitive game of basketball affects the brain because you can't sit in an MRI while playing point guard, but we do know that working out also leads to increased dopamine. So does eating food. Basically, if we banned activities that lead to changes in brain chemistry, the species would die out from starvation or a lack of procreation. Maybe just plain boredom. And once we start asserting that some activities are simply more meaningful than others, we are back in the business of making cultural, rather than "scientific," judgments and in that space, it is hard to justify why the AMA should have any more say than, say, professional organizations devoted to studying the cultural impact of media. So what can we do as gamers? We must refute the idea that gaming is a drug and suggest that it's an activity -- one a large portion of the American public, although apparently not of the American Medical Association, finds meaningful. In fact, this same study found that part of the pleasure in gaming is the learning that occurs through confronting new challenges. Second, gamers should push to understand why people find games so compelling. Researchers like Ted Castronova and Constance Steinkuehler have shown that for some people the roles and identities in games are more rewarding than the roles available in the real world. Maybe Azeroth is a more socially engaging place than Starbucks, USA for some people out there. This can't be explained purely in terms of dopamine dependency. Researchers like Jack Kuo and William Huang at Mt. Sinai Hospital in LA are developing more Now, hand over that joystick!
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
April 18, 2007
Applied Game Theory, R.I.P.2: Role-Play and RaceYesterday, I took a few moments to acknowledge the passing of "Applied Game Theory," the column which Kurt Squire and I wrote for Computer Games Magazine for the better part of five years. The column now has no home because the magazine has stopped publication. If any magazine editors out there are looking for columnists, we are all ears. The goal of the column, not unlike the goal of this blog, was to bridge between academic research on games and other media and a general public which is grappling with trying to make sense of this emerging medium. We weren't games reviewers in any traditional sense. We were taking what we knew as academics -- Kurt as someone in the field of Education, I as a media scholar -- and using it to address topical concerns impacting game design, the games industry, and games culture more generally. Some months, the ideas in the column originate with Kurt and got tweeked by me. Some months, fewer in fact, the ideas originated with me and got some assistance from Kurt. We brought different kinds of expertise and experience to the table. As a rule, the more detailed they were in discussing individual game titles, the more likely they were to originate with Kurt. While I play games from time to time, he grew up with games and remains a serious gamer. I am much more of a casual games guy who has a strong intellectual interest in what's happening in the medium. All told, it has been one of the most successful intellectual and creative collaborations of my career to date and I am sad to see this chapter of my work coming to an end. Yesterday, I shared a few pieces we wrote about aesthetic issues around games. Today, I wanted to push a bit deeper into the public policy debates around games. The first is a piece mostly written by me which deals with the debates about role play and its ties back to a larger history of anxiety about theatricality. The second piece reports on some research Kurt Squire and some collaborators at University of Wisconsin-Madison have been doing, examining how players of Grand Theft Auto think about race and violence. Performance Anxiety To be sure, most Christians wouldn't consider role-playing games to be the devil's work. There are other groups, such as the Christian Gamer's Guild, which embraces role-playing as a form of fellowship. There has been a movement to develop alternative, spiritually uplifting, Biblically-grounded games and several mainstream ministries have developed sites that rate games so parents can choose which ones are consistent with their own values. Yet, it is too easy to make fun of such views as wacky extremism. Strip aside the Satan talk and the underlying logic of their arguments differs very little from the critique of role-playing offered by more mainstream reform groups. Games, the argument goes, are not simply bad because they express bad ideas; these reformers see the very act of role-playing as dangerous, because it blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Consider some of the following claims made against Pokemon: "Not only does this repetitive practice blur the line between reality and fantasy...the child learns to accept unthinkable behavior as normal." "In order to master this game you need to take on characteristics of what you are playing." These arguments have a long, long history. Theater Historian Jonas Barish documented the persistence of what he called "the anti-theatrical prejudice" from its early roots in the writings of Plato through to its absorption into Christianity at the hands of St. Augustine and down to the present day. Plato argued that actors were professional liars who, over time, came to believe their own lies. After decades of playing debased and amoral characters, they lost moral judgment. Actors were often associated with madness, delusion, and drunkenness. Theater was equally dangerous to spectators. The theater stirred up our emotions in response to imaginary events and thus dulled our sensitivities to things that really mattered. The exaggerated emotions of the stage were more memorable and seductive than the events of the mundane world. Shakespeare had to struggle against these fears (and the reform movements they inspired) in Elizabethan England just as Rockstar Games has to confront them today. With games, the line between player and spectator blurs. The reformers warn that games are more harmful than television because kids enact anti-social behavior rather than simply witnessing it. Then as now, defenders of the theater question whether role-playing constitutes deception, since consumers and performers develop a basic competency in distinguishing between representations and reality. The ancient Greeks did not respond emotionally to the spectacle of Oedipus gouging out his eyes the same way that they would have react to a similar event in the agora. Through exploring these alternative realities, spectators learned to reflect more deeply on their own experiences and values. Aristotle knew that rule-breaking (in theater) was actually a powerful means of rule-enforcement, reaffirming social norms by representing their transgression. The anti-theater argument depends on obscuring such distinctions. Earlier reformers debated whether actresses committed adultery when they kissed (or even spoke words of love) on stage. Yet, the use of avatars in games represents one more line of separation between reality Consider the slips between fantasy and reality which occurs in this statement by anti-game activist David Grossman: "When I played caps with Billy when I was a kid, I said, 'Bang, Bang, I gotcha.' Billy said, "No, you didn't." So I smacked him with my cap gun. He cried. I got in big trouble....I learned that Billy is real and that when I hurt Billy I am going to get in trouble. Now, I play the video game, and I blow Billy's stinkin' head off thousands of times. Do I get in trouble? No, I get points for it." Isn't blowing off Billy's head in a game more like saying "Bang, Bang, I gotcha" than like clubbing him? And wouldn't the kid get in trouble -- not score points -- if he actually decapitated his friend? Play, reality -- no difference. Like their ancient counterparts, these modern critics either do not grasp or intentionally misrepresent the nature of role-playing. Some things never change.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
April 17, 2007
Applied Game Theory, R.I.P. 1: Melodrama and RealismFor the past five years (more or less), Kurt Squire and I have written a monthly column, "Applied Game Theory," for Computer Games Magazine. We recently learned that the publication is going out of business. Computer Games Magazine will be missed. It had a great bunch of columnists and writers and really took games seriously as an emerging form of expression, writing thoughtful reviews and well-informed opinion pieces. Unfortunately, if my experience was any indication, it didn't necessarily reach engaged readers. I have met only two or three people who mentioned reading the columns in the five years that we were writing them, compared to the clear evidence of reader engagement with what's going on in the blog. Given that, I thought I might share a few of the highpoints of the columns off and on for the next few weeks. Today's selections deal with aspects of game aesthetics -- specifically with the relationship of melodrama to game design and with the concept of realism as it applies to games. Enjoy! Games and the Melodramatic Imagination Want to design a game to make us cry? Study melodrama. Don't snicker, o ye hardcore gamers. Although we associate melodrama with the soap opera -- that is, "girly stuff", melodrama has appealed as much to men as to women. Sports films like The Natural or Seabiscuit are classic examples of this, and in fact, most action-oriented genres are rooted in traditions from 19th century melodrama. The best contemporary directors of melodrama might include James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, and John Woo, directors who combine action elements with character moments to generate a constantly high-level of emotional engagement. Consider this passage from Cameron's The Abyss during which the male and female protagonist find themselves trapped in a rapidly flooding compartment with only one helmet and oxygen tank. Games include puzzles like this all the time, but few have achieved the emotional impact of this sequence. Cameron deepens the emotional impact of this basic situation through a series of melodramatic devices: Playing with gender roles (the woman allows herself to go into hyperthermia in hopes that her ex-husband, the stronger swimmer can pull her to safety and revive her), dramatic gestures (the look of panic in her face as she starts to drown and the slow plummet of her hand as she gasps her last breath), emotionally amplifying secondary characters (the crew back on the ship who are upset about the woman's choice and work hard to revive her), abrupt shifts of fortune (a last minute recovery just as we are convinced she is good and truly dead), performance cues (the rasping of the husband's throat as he screams for help), and an overarching emotional logic (she is brought back to life not by scientific equipment, but by human passion as her ex-husband slaps her, demanding that she not accept death). When the scene ends, absorbed audiences gasp because they forgot to breathe. Classic melodrama depends upon dynamism, always sustaining the action at the moment of maximum emotional impact. Critics might argue that these conventions are unique to film, but most melodramatic techniques are within reach of today's game designer. The intensity and scriptedness of a scene like this couldn't be sustained for 40 hours, but it could be a key sequence driving other events. Classic melodrama understood the need to alternate between down time and emotional crisis points, using abrupt shifts between emotional tones and tempos to further agitating the spectator. And, we often associate melodrama with impassioned and frenzied speech, yet it could also work purely in pantomime, relying on dramatic gestures and atmospheric design  a technique platform games do well for fun or whimsy (think Psychonauts), but few games use for melodramatic effect.
One lesson that game designers could take from classic melodrama is to recognize the vital roles that third party characters play in reflecting back and amplifying the underlying emotions of a sequence. Imagine a scene from television drama where a mother and father fight in front of their child. Some of the emotions will be carried by the active characters as they hurl words at each other which express tension and antagonism. But much more is carried by the response of the child, cowering in the corner with fear as the fight intensifies, perhaps giving a hopeful look for reconciliation. Classic melodrama contrasted the actions of the protagonists and antagonists with their impact on more passive characters, helping us to feel a greater stake in what is occurring. Games, historically, have remained so focused on the core conflict that they spend little time developing these kinds of reactive third party characters with most NPC seemingly oblivious to what's happening around them. Finally, the term melodrama originally referred to drama with music, and we often associate melodrama with swelling orchestration. Yet, melodrama also depends on the quality of performer's voices (especially the inarticulate squeaks, grunts, and rasps which show the human body pushed beyond endurance) and by other expressive aspects of the soundscape (the howling wind, the clanking shutters, and so forth) -- elements that survival horror games use to convey fear, but are rarely used for other emotions. Game designers can not expect to achieve melodramatic impact if they continue to shortchange the audiotrack. Want to design a game that will make players cry? Study melodrama.
April 16, 2007
What's Coming Next? Self-Definition and Accomplishment through the Construction of the Netflix QueueIn my graduate proseminar on media theory and methods, I spend a great deal of time getting students to think about how they can draw on their own personal experiences and interactions with media to inform their scholarship. This was a central theme in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, which I co-edited with Jane Shattuc and Tara McPherson, which urges scholars to address the "culture that sticks to your skin," (a phrase inspired by Bruce Sterling's reference in Mirrorshades to "tech that sticks to your skin.") By this, we meant culture that is part of our everyday life, culture which provokes us either positively or negatively. The goal is to move cultural studies away from a language of distanced observation and towards an engagement that is up front and personal. It doesn't mean that we want only writing from fans (though of course it's no secret that I value the kinds of perspectives which fans bring to a topic.) It could also be a perspective that is antagonistic but open about its antagonism. It means being honest about where you are writing from and using a language which reflects your personal stakes in your topic. Popular culture is defined in part by its immediacy and it is not clear that one can meaningfully understand how it works or what it does without stepping at least temporarily into the realm of the proximate and the passionate. But it is not an easy thing to combine autobiography and theory effectively. I want to have my students struggle with what it means to balance these two pulls, to learn to reconcile these different languages and genre expectations through their writing. The students tell me that this is often the most challenging assignment they confront in the course. I have been grading these papers this weekend. Today, I wanted to share with you one of the papers to emerge from this assignment, with the permission, of course, of its author -- Debora Lui, who is a first years masters student in the Comparative Media Studies Program and one of the filmmakers working on the Project nml exemplar library. I felt that this particular essay would be of interest to my regular readers. What's Coming Next? Self-Definition and Accomplishment through the Construction of the Netflix Queue To this day, I have still remained a loyal subscriber of the service despite the rise of stronger competitors like Blockbuster (with its coupons for free in-store rentals) and the more hip GreenCine (with its Indie movie lists and user blogs). But what was it about that particular time and situation that allowed Netflix to become such an intrinsic part of my life? The website provides a very simple, yet seemingly generic service. The basic gist of Netflix (according to the simple "instructions" listed on their website) is that you create list of DVDs you want to watch online, you wait for them to be sent to you, watch them, and then return the DVDs through the mail. It is not apparent, then, why I felt such an attachment to Netflix in particular or why the service had such an exceptional hold on me. After closer examination, however, I realized there are three aspects of Netflix that allowed it become such an integral part of my life, my constant guide and companion. First, Netflix provided me a source for continuous escapism; second, it gave me a never-failing sense of accomplishment; and third, it allowed me a platform for on-going identity construction and reconstruction.
April 13, 2007
Why Media Studies Should Pay More Attention to Christian Media...I have been pleasantly surprised by how much interest has been generated by last week's announcement in the blog that Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum was hosting a special event focused on Evangelicals and the media. So, I wanted to be sure to let you know that the webcast version of the event is now available. Some people have asked why our program would help to host such an event. There are a number of reasons why media scholars should care more about the use of media by this particular population: 1. This event brought together representatives of two of the largest and most influential media ministries operating today -- James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. While they often operate in a world apart from mainstream commercial media, their work has enormous reach. For example, Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 20 million copies, making it the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, though many of those copies sold through Wall-Mart or Christian bookstores 2. As Diane Winston explained during her opening remarks at the Forum, Evangelical Christians have been key innovators in their use of emerging media technologies, tapping every available channel in their effort to spread the Gospel around the world. I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups -- evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public. 3. Anyone who wants to understand how niche media works in this country needs to understand what's going on in Christian media. It's hard to call Christians a subculture when most studies suggest that the vast majority of Americans claim some religious faith and most claim to belong to some mainstream Christian denomination. Yet, because the most hardcore members of these groups feel alienated from much of commercial popular culture, they have created their own alternative cultural sphere -- producing their own television programs, films, 4. While we often talk about "conservative Christians" as if the evangelical movement spoke with one voice, the term evangelical actually describes a range of different religious, cultural, and political perspectives, as was clear as we begin to see the contrast of perspectives between the two media ministers who spoke on this panel. One important educational function an event like this can play is helping people to recognize and understand the diversity of the 5. Academic institutions may have an important role to play in supporting and sustaining conversations between conservatives and liberals in the face of the growing divisiveness of American politics. I am eager to use some of the programming we do through CMS to bring together people who may come from fundamentally different ideological perspectives in a context where we can have a civil conversation designed to help us understand what others believe and why they believe it. I was personally very pleased with the tone of the conversation -- the questions from the floor were smart and respectful and the speakers saw this as an occasion to encourage reflection and dialog rather than as a chance to prostheltize to our community. Indeed, I think in this context, the speakers were more frank in addressing core concerns than they would have in a more confrontational context, allowing us to get a better glimpse into how they think about and deploy media. I should acknowledge that Timothy Stoneman, currently a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society program was the person who first proposed this session and assisted in recruiting the speakers. He is doing interesting work about the use of radio by evangelical missionaries, a project which sheds light on a somewhat earlier chapter in the history of Christian media. By the way, we've gotten questions about whether our sessions with Jim Ross and Mick Foley, recent guests to the CMS program from World Wrestling Entertainment, will be available via podcast. We have fallen a little behind putting up the podcasts on the web due to a range of other activities but these events were recorded and I will let readers know when they go up on our site. Meanwhile, if Christian media is not interesting to you, might I suggest checking out the podcast of advertising guru Alan Moore's recent talk at the CMS program. Moore's work will be familiar to readers of this blog through an interview I did with him earlier this year. [Note: This post originally misidentified Dr. Dobson as Charles rather than James. I don't know where my brain was at since I have been following James Dobson since the 1970s. I might have crossed him with Charles Stanley, who was the minister of a mega-church in Atlanta when I was growing up. Sorry for the confusion.
April 12, 2007
Notes from a New World: An Interview with Wagner James Au (Part Two)Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Wagner James Au, a longtime reporter on games and games culture, who is currently finishing up a book about his experiences as an "embedded journalist" in Second Life, New World Notes. Yesterday,he shared some of his thoughts about the nature of Second Life and about how he came to become some involved in this story. Today, I have asked him to respond to some of the issues which have surfaced in recent debates about the "value" of virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular. I first met Au some years ago when he was writing a engaging little fantasy spoofing the news that Julia Roberts was a closet gamer (a fan of Halo, in fact). He had decided that "Professor Jenkins," the mild mannered protagonist who appears in accounts of my testimony before the U..S. Senate Commerce Committee and my savaging on Donahue (see Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers for the sordid details), might be an ideal figure to make an appearance inside the story and help account for Julia's fixation on violent entertainment. In his original draft, he even included a brief sexual encounter between Prof. Jenkins and America's Sweetheart (well, he had her plant a loving kiss on the top of my bald head, to be more precise) which got "censored" from the version of the story that finally appeared in Salon. All that was left was a reference to my surely uncontroversial claim that Julia Roberts is a "hotie," something I would never say, of course, but which does reflect my long-standing fascination with her screen career. As it happens, he had come to the right place, since one of my first claims to fame was that I was a student teacher for American History at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia and that Julia Roberts, then a young drama geek, was a student in my class. If memory serves me correctly, I sent Julia to the principal's office for talking during class and barely missed out on the chance to see her in a high school production. So, when he heard the news, Au asked me to write my own version -- still tongue in cheek -- about the truth behind the story of Ms. Robert's fixation on Halo:
I have served as a source off and on for other, more weighty stories that Au has covered in the games space and we were lucky enough to have him speak about his perspectives on multiplayer games and learning during one of the Education Arcade conferences, which we hosted as part of E3. I consistently find him one of the most informed reporters covering games today and so I am delighted to get a chance to share this interview with you. You have, of course, been following the ongoing debate about the "value" of Second Life. How much weight -- positively or negatively-- should we place on the issue of subscriber numbers in terms of evaluating what is going on in Second Life? Are there other measures or criteria we should be using? The numbers do matter. The growth of Second Life will determine whether it becomes an important but relatively niche platform, or evolves, as some (including myself) have suggested, into an essential part of the Net's next generation. The conclusion of your book deals with the future of Second Life -- which might be seen as a core concern of the debate. How would you respond to Shirkey's argument that World of Warcraft represents a much more viable model for online experience than Second Life?
April 11, 2007
Notes from a New World: Interview with Wagner James Au (Part One)I have been using this blog, off and on, across the past few months, to focus attention and generate debate about Second Life as a particularly rich example of participatory culture. Those who have followed this blog over time will have read my response to Clay Shirkey's critique of Second Life, my conversation with Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the co-Author of a new book on virtual worlds, and my response to questions about the relationship between Second Life and real world politics. Today, I want to continue this consideration of Second Life with an interview with Wagner James Au, the author of a forthcoming book, New World Notes, which describes his experiences as an "embedded journalist" covering the early days of Second Life. Au had contacted me in response to some of my earlier posts on this topic and I asked if he'd be willing to share some of his thoughts to my readers. Here's what his online biography says:
Today, we open the interview with some discussion of his experiences covering Second Life and his general perspective about the mix of factors which is pushing this particular corner of the multiverse into the center of discussions about virtual worlds. Tomorrow, he will weigh in more directly on the three way debate between Jenkins, Shirkey, and Beth Coleman. For those who'd like to read more of his thoughts on Second Life, I'd recommend checking out "Taking New World Notes" which appeared in First Monday. Can you tell us about how you came to become an "embedded journalist" in Second Life? In the spring of 2003, Linden Lab gave me a demo of SL, then in early Beta. They brought me in, I think, because I'd recently written for Salon about the potential of user-created content in the "mod" culture of games, and Will Wright's emphasis on that (subsequently discarded) feature for The Sims Online. But during the demo, Linden Vice President Robin Harper suggested something else. What if I wrote *for* them, within the world, as a journalist-- an embedded journalist, as it were? (I had full editorial control on the stories I pursued and wrote about, I should add, with the only prior restraints asked of me that I be scrupulously fair when reporting on disputes between Residents.) In early 2006, I left to write my book about Second Life for HarperCollins, and continue my reporting on my own independent blog, New World Notes . Can you give us some sense of the shape of your forthcoming book? What are the It'll track the develop of Second Life both as a world and a Web 2.0 phenomenon, weaving a lot of the stories I've written for New World Notes into a broader and expanded narrative. Why do you think Second Life has generated such interest (some would say Hype) in recent months? How does this hype distort the actual nature of the experience? Is there any aspect of Second Life that you think has been underhyped and under reported? Right now there are two conversations about Second Life going on. The first involves all the numerous real world companies setting up shop in SL, coupled to mainstream news reports about the world that are, of course, introductory, and focus fairly consistently on the money-making opportunities. This is almost entirely the source of the backlash and hype in the pejorative sense. It's also the surface narrative which, while part of the SL phenomenon, does more to occlude the deeper activity going on. The second conversation, by contrast, involves all the grassroots user-created content which is merging the world with the broader web, creating a more robust world in a roleplaying sense, while also evolving it into a platform for real world applications. That's the main story, in my opinion, the one I try to tell on New Worlds Notes, and the one which accounts for Second Life's consistent, steady growth. It's not a function of media and corporate interest. The Sims Online was featured on the cover of Newsweek, was a spinoff to the most popular computer game franchises of all time, and attracted several major corporations who wanted to promote their brands within it, but without Second Life's user-created content or IP rights policy or robust virtual-to-real economy, growth stagnated months after launch.
April 10, 2007
How to Become a Compulsive Workaholic With No Life... Or The Secrets Behind My SuccessNancy Baym from Online Fandom has tagged me with the "Simply Successful Secrets" meme. I am supposed to tell you some of the secrets behind my success. I was tempted to say that one of the secrets is that I never respond to blog memes, chain letters, pyramid schemes, letters from Africans who want to promise me a portion of their national treasury, and venture capitalists who think that I might have a strong interest in their next project if I only set aside an hour or two to consult with them for free. By riding my life of such things, I discover I have many more hours in the day than most of my friends. But then I took a niceness pill and decided that it was only fair that Nancy tagged me since I tagged her a few months ago in response to the Five Things You Don't Know About Me meme. I also figure that this is an aspect of the communal and informal nature of the blogosphere that people stop what they are doing, suspend the normal topics of their blogs, and write personal things because someone essentially dared them to do so. It's hard to imagine anything would happen if at the end of this post I tagged Dan Rather, John Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, or Simon Cowell. None of these people have sufficient control over their own output to be able to put the social obligations represented by such memes ahead of institutional expectations. So, you want to know how I succeed at doing the broad range of things I write about here. Well, let me give you a clue. These are the things I wanted to do this weekend: Go to see Grindhouse at the Boston Common Theater. Keep in mind the myth that I get paid to watch movies and television, read comics, and play video games. I could in theory count any of the above as work but it is all less pressing than the things I ended up spending the weekend doing. Instead, these are some of the things that I did do this weekend (from a list of more than 47 items): Write the welcome letter to those attending the Media in Transition 5 conference. You know you work too hard when you think the best thing about weekends is that you don't have any meetings and so you can really get work done. In other words, if you want to know the secret of my success, talk to Doctor Faustus. So, you can follow the advice below if you wish but keep in mind that, as the title of this post suggests, doing so will probably suck the blood out of your body and turn you into a compulsive workaholic. Read the following at your own risk.
April 9, 2007
Dissecting a Media ScareShortly before I went on break, someone e-mailed me a segment from WDAZ News (Grand Forks, North Dakota) focused on the "newest youth trend" -- "Emo" (or as the reporter helpfully explains, "emotional people.") It struck me as a textbook example of the ways that youth subcultures get misrepresented on television news and the ways that adult anxieties about kids who don't look, dress, and act "normal" get turned into hysteria by misreporting. I have long argued that we need media literacy for adults far more urgently than we need it for kids, so I figured we might use this space to collectively dissect this video and the various ways that it constructs Emos* as a threat to public safety. So, dear viewers, let me invite you to join me in a game of what's wrong with this picture? 1. Look closely -- there were no actual Emos consulted in the production of this segment. The reporter spoke with a local police officer who emerges here as the expert on this youth trend (despite the fact that he knew nothing of the subculture before his daughter told him about Emos) and then went to the local high school, talked to a few "average" students about what they think about those "other" kids who are all "emotional" and stuff. This means one of several possibilities: the reporter couldn't find any actual Emo in Grand Fork; the reporter has no idea what an Emo looks like; and the reporter couldn't care less if there are any actual Emos who might have a point of view in this story. (Of course, given how subculture members most often get treated on news segments like this one, this may be a blessing in disguise!) 2. Literal mindedness is the hallmark of most coverage of youth subcultures. Subcultures adopt often hyperbolic style to express their resistance to dominant culture but it is not a simple matter to understand what that style means and one should be highly reluctant to ascribe any single meaning to the style. In this case, though, the reporter isn't even responding to any actual subcultural practices: they are responding -- let's assume unknowingly-- to parodies of the subculture created by outsiders who themselves know little about what's going on. I took a look at some of the sites which flash quickly across the screen during the segment -- Insta Emo Kit -- for example and it is clear that they are as close to a checklist of what you have to do to become a good little Emo as George W. and his classmates red the Preppy Handbook to figure out how to get through Yale. We fill out check lists for a great many reasons. As a native Southerner, I am sucker for checklists that start with "15 reasons you may be a redneck" for example. But most of them are not exactly a guiding set of principles by which we organize our existence or rank ourselves. Subcultures don't typically come with membership cards and instructional manuals and if you think you found one, I'd be looking for the little emoticons that demonstrate that more than likely the author is smiling at you. Consider, for example, this passage from the site: The height of achievement for an emo boy is to live to forty while mooching off his parents and clutching their inheritance. This will allow the emo boy to go to emo concerts in the future and listen to the same old derivative music that got its start in the punk movement back in the 70's. Ah, we mean the 90's. If any emo music you listen to has its roots in anything before 1998, then you're old school and therefore not emo. Does this sound like something that was written by a leader of the Emo movement? Or for that matter, by anyone even remotely sympathetic to the Emo subculture? Is it possible that the reporter didn't bother to read the website that the story suggests is the key to understanding Emos? 3. The next step is to remove the subculture from any larger historical or cultural context. Maybe there were no Emos in North Dakota until a few months ago. Maybe the reporter is looking for that extra-timely factor that gives a story like this one a sense of urgency and might even push us towards a crisis mentality. Nothing like this has ever happened in North Dakota before and by jiminy, we've got to put a stop to it right away. 4. The next step is to link the subculture to some risky behavior -- in this case, the reporter makes literal the old journalist story, "If it bleeds, it leads" by equating being an Emo with cutting. There is no actual evidence beyond a few sketchy websites to demonstrate any direct links between the two. There's no attempt to figure out how common such practices might be within this community. There's no recognition that cutting is a symptom of clinical depression which occurs across many different segments of the population. It is simply taken as given that if your son or daughter goes all Emo on you, there's a high likelihood they are going to be looking for a way to cut themselves up. 5. Recanting is always helpful. Pay attention to the rather gothy girl in this segment who starts out trying to offer some sympathetic account of why these kids act the way they do and then uses every trick in the book to disassociate herself from being seen as an emo. If even your friends won't stand by you, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you, or at least that's the logic the newscasters are using. Note also the opportunistic use of quotations: does this girl really think that cutting yourself is just another form of creative expression or was that a slip of the tongue that the journalists are using here to create a through-line for their piece? *I should warn you that I have had very little exposure to Emo culture myself but you don't have to know much to see how badly they are being misrepresented here. A reader notes that they are usually called Emo or Emo Kids, not Emos. I have left the text as is so it doesn't render the comment senseless but know that you probably shouldn't trust me on the plural form. I haven't gone back to check the video but I am pretty sure they do use Emos throughout.
April 6, 2007
Behind the Scenes: Super Deluxe"We're Super Deluxe. And by God, We're going to make you laugh." -- taken from the Super Deluxe webpage. Super Deluxe is a new comedy site launched by Turner Broadcasting in January of this year. The site promises a mix of original professional content with community tools which will allow people to share amateur produced videos. It might be seen as one of the first of what are likely to be a series of attempts by major media producers to create their own YouTube like sites which combine authorized commercial content with fan generated materials. In this case, the site is targeting comedy as a genre that is likely to support both commercial and amateur produced material of high quality -- with their understanding of comedy including a fair amount of animation as well. As the press release announcing the service explained:
The featured content on the site at the moment is quirky, original, and engaging. Consider, for example, a range of shorts featuring somewhat fractured versions of American presidents, contemporary and historical (with the idea of failed presidents a strangely recurring theme across much of the content produced so far).
"Don't Recognize Me" depicts U.S. Grant, riding across the countryside on his motorcycle, hoping to meet some folks who don't know he was once a less than spectacularly successful president. "President's Day," produced by the fine folks at Fark, shows us what happens when a bunch of the guys -- all former presidents -- help Lincoln celebrate his birthday at the local bowling alley. Along for the ride are Taft and Polk, who are perhaps not the A List of former presidents, but they know how to show a guy a good time. W's World (Kyle Boyd) features George Bush and his side kicks, Condy "Brown" Rice and a pot-smoking baby elephant, as they seek to deploy the same principles to the oil lands in Alaska that have proven so successful in Iraq. These videos give you a sample of the range of commercially produced content being showcased on the site. James DiStefano and Erlene Zierke, two of the young masterminds behind Super Deluxe, agreed to answer some of my questions about the site. (I should disclose that Turner is a member of our Convergence Culture Consortium). In what follows, they discuss the nature of their site and its relationship to user generated content and the fan culture that is growing up around certain forms of comedy. Some people have described the site as an alternative to YouTube except that YouTube is a general interest site where-as Super Deluxe focuses on a specific genre of entertainment. That's where I decided to start the interview. What do you see as the advantages of specialization over generalization? The clearest advantage is the ability to create and maintain a brand. Sites that generalize lack a voice or a distinct feel. During our design phase, many of our potential users said they only went to these sites when guided by a link shared through email or IM. Many users cited a difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff in such a large library of clips. And why this particular specialization? Comedy is a genre that bends nicely to the constraints of the online medium. Short clips seem to work best on the Internet for a variety of reasons. If users don't like the video size, video quality, or content, they have the ability to move away to any other destination in the time it takes to click a mouse or search Google. With comedy, you can grab someone's attention in the first 10 to 15 seconds and have a pretty good shot of keeping them for the duration of a video. In other genres, it is difficult to establish compelling characters or interesting plot lines in the short amount of time we have to grab someone's attention.What developments in the area of comedy are feeding into the development of Super Deluxe? Where is your content coming from? What trends in the culture are you tapping? We're catering to the 'openness' of our audience's expectations and tastes. We encourage our artists by not imposing strict restrictions or lengthy approval processes; this approach lends itself to experimentation. In doing so, we've built a library of original and exclusive content unlike many other video sites. That's been an essential part of attracting interest in this space. On Super Deluxe, it isn't necessary for our sensibilities to have broad appeal; we don't have to create a sitcom that appeals to the juicy part of the bell curve in order to gain an audience. A Super Deluxe viewer can construct their own path through the network, watch what they want, participate how they want, and discard what doesn't interest them.
April 5, 2007
The Bastard Son of ComedyIn my Media Theory and Methods graduate proseminar, I have an assignment each year that asks graduate students to do interviews with media producers. This assignment has two goals: the first clearly is to give them experience conducting interviews, a key skill for many of the kinds of research projects we conduct through the program; the second is to get them to think about the role which theory plays outside of academic spaces. I am inspired here by the work of Thomas McLaughlin who has published a book on what he calls vernacular theory. For him vernacular theory refers to any kind of theory produced outside of the academic environment -- including the theory produced by such groups as expert practioners (such as the media makers included in these projects), fans, activists, visionaries, anyone who needs to make generalizations about media (either implicitly or explicitly) in the course of their work. Through this assignment, I push my students out of the classroom and into the streets. Through the years, students have done profiles on the people who design shop window displays, on game designers and musicians, on ministers as they prepare sermons, or in the case of one of my students this term, on a local standup commedian who shares his thought about his craft. I thought I would share with my readers the following essay by one of the first year CMS Masters students about the vernacular theory of comedy. I found it very interesting given that some of my own earliest scholarship dealt with the interface between vaudeville and film comedy. So much remains constant over decades of practice in this space, so much here speaks to the core theories of comedy which we teach in literature or film courses on the genre. So I figured this might be useful or interesting to many of you. andres lombana I arrived at the Gamble Mansion at 5 Commonwealth Avenue at 6:00 p.m. I entered using the main door, registered myself in the front desk and got into an opulent Louis XV style room in the first floor. The room was illuminated by many candelabra lamps attached to the walls and one big chandelier that was hanging from the center of a very high ceiling. The room had a marble fire place framed by two white columns and a gigantic mirror over it. The wooden floor was shining and contrasted with seven empty metallic chairs that were arranged in a semicircle. A buffoon and a drummer harlequin were entertaining a young lady; they were the motif of the wallpaper that covered the entire room. Dana Jay Bein was there, standing up behind an amplifier and a microphone, drinking a medium size Starbucks coffee and typing something in his cellphone. We had an appointment to talk about comedy and I did not expect to have such a luxury setting for our interview. But it happened that the Boston Center for Adult Education, where Dana teaches a stand-up comedy class, is located in this historic building. "Comedy comes from the darkest moments of human day to day life" Dana stated. "Comedy is like no other" he continued, "it started as tragedy but now you are putting it out there as humor." From his point of view, failure and pain were in the origin of comedy. "Everybody has that instinct to laugh of other people failures, or even your own failures. You see somebody gets splashed by a car driven into a big puddle in a rainy day, and one of your instincts is to laugh" he said. Comedy is an honest and truly defensive mechanism against the tragedy of life. "I think you have to make it funny otherwise it hurts too much. Your honest painful experiences can be brought to the stage and can be shown to people as an honest expression of comedy" Bein claimed. "Comedy did something for me personally, it allowed me to turn things around" he added. "Self-deprecation" is the key concept for understanding Dana Jay Bein's approach to comedy. "I was introverted as a child, so self-deprecation became my defense mechanism in middle school and high school" he said. "Self-deprecation is rooted in people making fun of you. The only way to really defeat other people making fun of you is to get on the board and start to make fun of yourself, kind of show them that it doesn't bother you" he added. "Then, self-deprecation comes to the next level when you find your own voice in that self-deprecation." Nowadays, Bein takes "self- deprecation" as the most effective way to connect with his audience. "I make fun of myself and not only does it make the audience comfortable of who I am as a performer but it also gives me the green light to make fun of other things as well" he said.
April 4, 2007
Big Games with Big GoalsLast September, the Project nml team went to the Come Out and Play Festival in New York City, cameras in hand, ready to document the so-called Big Game Movement. The finished product, the latest in our series of films for the Project nml exemplar library, recently went up on the web and will be relevant to my many readers who are interested in the serious games movement more generally. What's a big game? Here's the provisional definition offered by some of our supporting materials: Games for big groups of people in real world spaces (such as a park or the
As the documentary continues, McGonigal becomes a key spokesperson describing the kinds of learning which can occur through engagement with these kinds of large scale games:
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
April 3, 2007
Sanjaya Malakar, Leroy Jenkins, and The Power to Negate
As a long-time American Idol fan, I am watching the current controversy about Sanjaya Malakar with morbid fascination. For those of you who are not following the plot, Malakar is a relatively untalented contestant who is surviving week after week as much more widely praised rivals are biting the dust. Simon Cowell this week went so far as to suggest that nothing which the producers on the show said about his performance would make any difference in the outcome of the voting: "I don't think it matters anymore what we have to say, actually. I genuinely don't. I think you are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck!" Elsewhere, Cowell has fanned the flames by threatening to quit American Idol if Sanjaya wins. Regular readers of this blog will have already suspected some of the forces going on behind the scenes here to essentially "spoil" American Idol and can only imagine the choice words that Simon and the other judges are uttering behind the scenes. I reported here last summer about a group called Vote for the Worst which has adopted an interventionist stance towards reality television programs. The group has taken credit in the past for the surprising longevity of AI contestants, such as Scott Savol and Bucky Covington[See note at end of post], as well as having gotten a number of lackluster contestants onto Big Brother's All Stars series last summer. Here's what the group has posted over on their home page: Why do we do it? During the initial auditions, the producers of Idol only let certain people through. Many good people are turned away and many bad singers are kept around to see Simon, Paula, and Randy so that America will be entertained. They have a point: research suggests that American Idol attracts essentially two different viewerships. There are people who watch the first part of the series -- up until Hollywood -- enjoying the "gong show" like segments where bad singers get spotlighted. (That's why William Hung remains one of the most infamous contestants to ever appear on the show and why the producers consistently replay the footage of his mangled and tone-deaf performance of "She Bangs.") And then there are the people who tune in once the producers have gotten all of that out of their system to watch the talented few compete, get feedback, and try to win the hearts of the American public. So, it is hard for the producers to claim that "vote for the worst" is not in the spirit of the show. The Vote for the Worst fans are simply acting out of turn, asserting their own right to pick which bad singers should get on the air and how long they should last. Vote for the Worst, by itself, probably doesn't have the clout to really carry this very far, in the end, but this time around, the site has won the support of Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed "King of All Media," who is using his satellite radio program to encourage listeners to vote to keep Sanjaya on the show. Stern has drawn real blood in the past. In 1998, Stern ran a successful effort to get a regular on his program, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, selected as one of People Magazine's list of the most beautiful people in the world. This was an early experiment in the use of the web to encourage reader participation. Hank won over Leo DeCaprio, the pretty boy actor who was then riding high off his Titanic appearance, and the dwarf got a lot angrier and perhaps a little drunker when the magazine refused to feature him inside the print edition of their publication.
April 2, 2007
Fluffing Up My Site...Well, I am now back from Spring Break and I have put my fancy Easter Bonnet on! As you will have noticed by now, the blog has undergone a face lift while I was off line last week. I launched the blog last June, somewhat experimentally, not putting a lot of time into the design of the page, indeed, simply using a basic template offered by Movable Type. Once the blog took off, I've meant to do something to make it a bit more professionally polished but frankly, I had grown attached to the informality of the original design. Over the past few months, I have been working with Geoffrey Long, a CMS Masters Student, to develop a look and feel for the site which preserves the familiarity of the original but gave it a little more polish. I hope you like the results. Long by the way has also been responsible for the redesign of the Comparative Media Studies homepage and for the logos for the Convergence Culture Consortium and is currently finishing up work on the MIT Literature Section home page. He's certainly left his mark as a designer on MIT! And his thesis research which centers on transmedia storytelling, negative capability, and the Jim Henson Company will make his own kind of splash before much longer. Since our launch last June, I have made more than 250 posts. The blog has attracted almost 800 links to date, suggesting the level of interest it has generated from my fellow bloggers. It's been a wild and wonderful ride so far, enhanced in part by the contributions of my diverse and passionate readers. I figured I'd use today's post just to catch up on some loose ends. Those of you who are interested in my work on New Media Literacies might be interested in this video-podcast from my recent talk at Middlebury College, hosted by regular blog reader and contributor Jason Mittell. The talk, "What Constitutes Literacy in the 21st Century," walks through some of the key ideas from the MacArthur white paper which I posted last fall. It is very similar to talks I have been making across the country on new media literacies but given the talk's location, I couldn't resist saying a few things about the efforts of Middlebury College History faculty to ban the use of wikipedia in student research. The MIT Communications Forum has posted audio webcasts from their first two events so far this term. In mid-Feburary, the first Forum of the term featured two members of the MIT Literature Faculty, Diana Henderson and Peter Donaldson, (also both faculty who contribute to the Comparative Media Studies Program), talking about their research into what the program billed as "Remixing Shakespeare." The speakers lived up to the title with Henderson sharing her thoughts about the ways that Shakespeare plays have been transformed by generation after generation of artists, drawing on her recently published book, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Donaldson shared with the group some of his recent research on Shakespeare on YouTube, suggesting ways that the video sharing service has both made historic performances more widely available than ever before, and encouraged people to integrate the Bard's words more fully into their own expressive lives. A month or so back, I conducted a conversation with Frank Moss, the Director of the MIT Media Lab, about some of the directions being taken by recent work at the lab. I can't tell you how many times through the years that I have been introduced as the director of the MIT Media Lab. It seems to confuse people that MIT has more than one program with media in the title in a way that it doesn't confused them to have multiple programs with the word, engineering, in their titles! I have to say how much I have come to respect Moss and the new directions he is taking the lab. During this event, he shared some of his vision for the lab's future as well as presenting demonstrations of work the lab is doing in the area of low-cost computing, personal expression tools, smart cars, and prosthetics, all part of a larger vision of using technology to enhance human experience. Those of you who are in Boston might want to check out a Forum which will be held this coming Thursday, April 5, in 5-7 pm, 3-270, focused on Evangelicals and the Media. Here's what the Communication Forum site tells us about the planned event: American Evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to the Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today Evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. This forum convenes speakers from the academy and Evangelical community to discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement's use of media technologies. Those of you who are not in the Boston area can anticipate the webcast going up on the Communication Forum website within a week or so after the event. In preparation for this event, my students and I will be watching some examples of evangelical media this week in our Media Theory and Methods prosem, including some work on youth and popular culture produced by Charles Dobson's organization and reading a selection from Heather Hendershott's Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and the Conservative Evangelical Culture. Hendershott writes about evangelical culture as an outsider but nevertheless shows respect for their beliefs and for the complexity of their cultural production. This book inspired and informed my discussion of the struggles over Harry Potter in Convergence Culture.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More about Henry Jenkins is available here. 
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