Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006

This will be my last blogpost of 2006. By agreement with my family, I am going to take next week off, spending as little time online as humanly possible, and relaxing after the end of a term which has included at least 16 talks outside my home institution (and quite a few inside) as well as a period of six months during which I have made more than 165 blog posts. I think I have earned a short break. But have no fear, I will be back ready and rearing for conversation by early next year. I've already lined up some great interviews and have some cool topics in mind. There will also be some cool new announcements from the Comparative Media Studies community. Never a dull moment around here. I want to use this last post to provide a few updates and announcements -- especially concerning the podcasts of our events --- and then share a few thoughts about my recent venture into Teen Second Life thanks to the help of Barry Joseph and the other fine folks at Global Kids. (And I promise to answer or at least explain the title question by the end of this post).

CMS Announcements

We now have all but one of the webcasts of the Future of Entertainment conference up on line. That last one should be up soon.

We promised a while back that we would have a webcast version of Jesper Juul's talk, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" and that podcast went up earlier today. We are experimenting here -- and in the Futures of Entertainment content -- with video podcasting. All feedback on these efforts would be welcome.

I wanted to flag an upcoming event. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

The dates for this year's event will be Jan. 29-Feb.2.

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants. If you are interested in joining us, contact me at henry3@mit.edu. More details will be coming early next year.

Now About the Beard.

From the start, my beard seemed to be the object of fascination and speculation among the teens at Second Life. Barry Joseph told me about this interest following my participation in the MacArthur Foundation's announcement event earlier this term. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted my own avatar so I could enter Second Life and interact with these youth. One of them wanted to know how long it took me to grow my beard. In truth, that's not an easy question to answer. I have had a beard since I left the University of Iowa to start my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin. This means I have not shaved it off completely in almost 20 years. We have watched it grow from black to salt and pepper to grey over that time. Yet, since hair continually replaces itself, it is hard to know how long I have been growing the particular beard follicles which are currently attached to my face.

At one time, we even jokingly discussed making my beard available for distribution on Second Life, though so far this hasn't happened. Part of the issue is to figure out which beard length might be most popular -- the tightly trimmed Henry beard at the start of the term or the long and shaggy one by the end when my schedule has kept me from getting to a barbershop for a trim.

Last Wedsday night, I made my live public appearance on the Global Kids island in Teen Second Life to talk about games, learning, and popular culture. I wasn't surprised when one of the first questions I got asked was when and if I would have my beard put up in cornrows. It is an interesting question -- and one I am pondering deeply as I enter into the Holiday season. So, here's the heart of my response: I welcome any and all attempts to digitally doctor photographs of my beard. I especially throw this out as a challenge to teens in Second Life. If you want to use Photoshop to cornrow a picture of my beard or if you want to fix the beard on my avatar to have a funkier do, then it's fair game. And I promise to share the results here on the blog early next year. Think of it as a technical challenge: how to cornrow Henry's Beard.

My students have long tested their skills against the iconic quality of my persona --dressing up in Henry's costumes (complete with "suspenders of disbelief"), using Barbie Fashion Designer to put me in drag, doing graffiti on photographs of my bald head. So I welcome anyone from Teen Second Life to do their stuff!

How's this for the perfect narcissistic scenario: Last Saturday, I tried out my new avatar for the first time by beaming myself onto a desert corner of the Global Kids Island. I was going to stay for just a minute, try to work through some of the control mechanisms, make sure the connection works. There was no one else in the entire world that I saw on the screen. And then, out of nowhere, someone walks up and says "Are you really Henry Jenkins?" It turns out to be Mariel, a teenaged girl from Mexico City, who has been using some of her work for a school assignment. So, here we are: only two people in the whole world on a Saturday afternoon and one of them turns out to be a fan! It's probably the only time in my life that I hit 100% market recognition! It turns out that Mariel, who introduced me at the event on Wedsday, and asked really probing and intellectually sophisticated questions, is one of the closest readers of my work I've met in some time.

People have asked me why I wanted an avatar for my appearance on Second Life. This goes back to the meaning of the word, Avatar, which is a metaphor which has gotten lost as the word has taken on such common usage. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST: avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means "descent" (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God.

I remind us of this meaning half-ironically. I don't mean to imply that I am somehow a divine being taking earthly form. Rather, I mean to critique what happens when adult speak to youth much of the time. I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the MacArthur event because we -- the panelists -- were speaking from another order of representation (cinematically) in a world occupied by virtual beings. I wanted to get down to the same level (socially, representationally) with the community I was talking with. I think this is a real issue. Too often, adults talk about kids, maybe even speak to youth, but they don't talk with them. And becoming an avatar seemed like the best way to signal my desire to speak on the same level with my audience. Anyway, it made sense to me.

The whole experience was amazing. I will let you listen to the actual exchange which has been recorded and put on line if you wish. There's also a really wonderful video of highlights of the event which is now in circulation on YouTube. Frankly, I come off sounding much more coherent in the video than I did at the time. There was something truly overwhelming about the whole experience.

For one thing, I really am a newbie and so moving around in that body -- and indeed, remembering to keep moving -- was a challenge for me. At one point, I accidentally flew up, planted myself on the top of a sign suspended over the event, and couldn't figure out how to get down. I've had embarrassing experiences speaking before but none like that. At another point, I just slumped over in my chair because I didn't remember to keep poking at my avatar. There's a high learning curve here and doing your learning in public eye can be awkward. My students are talking about creating an animation sequence which has my characteristic hand gestures. Nobody has ever seen me speak for long without gesticulating wildly. I've got a ways to go before I blend fully and comfortably into my avatar but I was really taken with the sense of presence I felt interacting with all of the people attending the event from remote locations.

I kept getting distracted by the sheer array of avatars in attendance -- characters from anime, dancing Pandas in Ninja costumes, a monster from Will Wright's Spore... At one point I made a reference to the struggles City of Heroes had with Marvel over the fact that players might use their character design tools to create a knockoff of the Incredible Hulk and then looked out a moment later to find someone in the audience had turned themselves into the Hulk. And I was blown away by the fact that my avatar has much better moves on the dance floor than I've ever managed to master. He's one cool dude and I am, well, not. So, all in all, it was an amazing experience but I was not at my most articulate as one thing or another distracted me mid-sentence.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and to everyone who turned out to enjoy the show. I hope to have more chances to interact in Second Life in the coming year.

And to all of you who have read and contributed to the blog this year, thanks -- and best wishes on the holiday season.

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

My Adventures in Poland (Part One)

Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak are the two people who translated Convergence Culture into Polish as Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. This picture was taken when they were showing me around the old section of Warsaw. The building in the background is the Namiestnikowski Palace, where the President of Poland lives.

What follows are some highlights from the introduction I wrote for the Polish edition of the book. I have focused here primarily on some thoughts I shared with my new Polish readers about the global context within which the issues discussed in the book are operating. The original plan was to have a chapter focused entirely around globalization be part of Convergence Culture. Much of that material ended up being included as the "Pop Cosmopolitanism" essay in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, or developed through the sidebars in the book at the Animatrix and about anime fansubbing. But here, I tried to bring a few strands of my thoughts about global media change together.

Next time, I will offer more observations on digital and popular culture in Poland.

Welcome to Convergence Culture.

For those of you keeping score, The dotcom era has ended. The age of Social Networks and Mobile Media has emerged from its ashes. Blogging is thriving. Podcasting is on the rise. Everywhere you look the people are taking media in their own hands, speaking back to mass media, forming their own on-line communities, learning to think, work, and process culture in new ways.

We are no longer talking about a digital revolution, which envisioned new media displacing the old. We are now talking about media convergence, where old and new media interact in ever more complex ways, where every story, brand, sound, image, and relationship will play itself out across the maximum number of media channels and platforms.

We are no longer talking about interactive media technologies; we are talking about participatory culture. Talk to advertisers, media producers, network executives, game designers, fans, gamers and bloggers and they will all tell you that the consumer is gaining new visibility and new cultural influence in this emerging culture. This is at the heart of what some American observers are calling Web 2.0. Some of them are embracing this change with enormous excitement, others with great fear, none of them claim to fully understand what is going to happen next. The terms of our participation in this new convergence culture are very much under debate, being shaped by governmental policies and court decisions but also by choices being made both in corporate boardrooms and in teenager's bedrooms.

New media are being put out by technology companies and they are being redefined on the fly by various groups of consumers. Companies are trying to get ahead of the game by empowering their lead users, by allowing key fans and consumers to test their products before they even reach the market, and building on their insights to create a better mousetrap, build a better game, or produce a better television show. Media networks are trying new strategies to grab the attention of their viewers and insure longer term loyalty to their properties. As they do

so, viewers are every level are demanding the right to help shape the production and circulation of media content.

Sites like YouTube have emerged as meeting places between all kinds of different subcultures, fan communities, and participatory cultures, places where commercial and amateur media circulates side by side. They are producing their own stars and they are also turning out to be places where consumers re-evaluate network content, calling attention to moments on television which might otherwise have passed by without much comment. Online worlds, such as Second Life, are thriving based almost entirely on what people are calling consumer-generated content (though to reduce what happens there to content or describe the participants in these worlds simply as consumers is to grossly simplify what is taking place)....

Morover, these changes are occuring on a global level, impacting each country differently according to their own national cultures and traditions, but being felt around the world. There's a reason why they call it the World Wide Web. It is not simply that American media products are flowing into international markets -- this is scarcely news. More profound is the degree to which cultural goods from other parts of the world -- at the moment, especially from Asia -- are flowing into the American market at a rate so fast that it is breaking through the protective membrane constructed by American major media companies to block access to international competitors.

More and more American young people are embracing what I call pop cosmopolitanism -- seeking an escape from the paroachialism of their own cultures by embracing cultural materials from around the world. There is an ironic juxtaposition between an American government which acts more and more in unilateral terms and a younger American population which is embracing global media. I recently spoke to an American teenager who described this particular JPop group as her "favorite band in the whole wide world." Anyone who is the parent of an adolescent knows that's the way teenage girls have always talked. But this time, as I listened to her enthusiasm for a band which had no label and no distributor in the west, I thought she might be telling the truth. She had searched the world for a group that spoke to her and found it through networking with kids in Japan who shared her interests in anime, manga, and cosplay.

It isn't just that American youth are consuming more international media:they are also taking advantage of a network culture to engage on a regular basis with youth from around the world who share their common interests. I am struck by the story of Heather Lawver in the Harry Potter chapter of my book. When Warner Brothers first sought to shut down certain fan websites around their newly acquired franchise, they sent cease and desist letters to young people in parts of the world which would have once seemed very distant from their base. Yet, as Heather tells us, the word got back to their American fans almost instantly because they already participated in a global fan network. More recently, I watched fans of the American science fiction series, Stargate, mobilize fans to news of the series cancilation worldwide in just a few days time. They now understand television operating within a global framework, rallying fans in many different countries to put pressure on their local networks where the show is still thriving and using that economic clout to push the American producers to continue to generate new content.

In some ways, new media technologies are making more visible the kinds of cultural links that immigrants have long maintained back to their mother country. I see this pattern with my own students who have come to the United States for an education but still listen to radio stations, read newspapers, share music, and talk about fan cultures from back home. The web now serves the functions that ethnic grocery stores and community centers have long played in immigrant communities with one exception. The content is flowing from one community to another as people mix and match cultural materials with others from radically different backgrounds. I live in a dormatory at MIT and I have seen first hand the ways that media sharing is opening up students to new kinds of culture from around the world.

So, I have to confess that I wrote this book very much from an American perspective. My expertise is in American media and popular culture, though it is increasingly clear that one can no longer understand American media outside of a global context. I have never been to Poland and know only very little about your country. I hope to change this but for the moment, I can claim no particular expertise about the media changes that are impacting your corner of the planet. That said, I suspect much of what I write about here will sound familiar to anyone deeply immersed in popular media in any part of the world. Many of these same franchises are known in Poland -- either through American imports or through localization of larger multinational properties.

There are differences created as a result of different economic structures -- the difference between commercial and state run media production systems, for example, result in different opportunities and restrictions on participation. Some cultures have strong traditions of open debate and democratic citizenship; others have historically placed greater restrictions on what the public could see or say, but all of them are being rocked by a media culture which is more open and more participatory than anyone would have imagined a few decades ago. As the rate of internet access increases in countries around the world, they are one by one confronting some of the cultural, legal, economic, and educational challenges Convergence Culture records.

I am certain that there are new and innovative uses of media that have emerged among youth subcultures and fan communities in your country which are not yet known in our part of the world. But the key phrase here is "not yet known." As media flows more and more rapidly and fluidly across once rigid national borders, innovation on the grassroots level may still have a global impact. Throw a pebble in one part of the ocean and the ripples will eventually wash up

on every shore.

In the book's closing passages, I return to the issue of who gets to participate in the kind of robust participatory culture I am describing and who gets left out of the kinds of knowledge communities we are discussing. My own work has turned increasingly towards interest in media literacy as I am working with American foundations and educational institutions to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need to acquire in order to fully participate in convergence culture. In doing so, I hope to shift the conversation beyond talk of the digital divide which is so often defined purely in terms of technical access and onto the participation gap which is concerned with the skills and opportunities needed for young people to actively engage with the affordances of the new media landscape....

This is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Each country is facing these difficulties on their own terms, on their own time table, in their own way, and on their own terrain, yet all of us are struggling with how to insure that the increased power and knowledge being generated by emerging technologies and cultural practice can be spread across the population as a whole. My hope is that this book will help people to better understand the implications of this participation gap both in terms of their own national cultures and in a more global context.

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part One)

Cynthia and I are just back from Poland as of tonight. I hope to share some impressions of the trip as soon as I am able. In the meantime, the following post was written for the newsletter we send to C3 partners. When you write a book, you usually have no idea which ideas will get picked up or by which communities. That's part of the fun of sending your brain children out in the world. Today, I want to explore a case in point -- the ways that the idea of transmedia narrative in my new book, Convergence Culture, has started to evolve into a concept of transmedia planning as it has been taken up by bloggers interested in branding.

Convergence Culture itself deals with transmedia storytelling as an emerging

form of entertainment but never really addresses its application to branding. The chapter on transmedia storytelling immediately follows the book's discussion of American Idol, brand communities, affective economics, and product placement so the connection of ideas was there to be found but I did not myself put all of the pieces together.

The Further Adventures of Mr. Clean

Even before the book appeared in print, though, C3 researcher Grant McCracken published a series of blog posts exploring what my approach to transmedia might contribute to current thinking about brands:

In the old world of marketing, there wasn't much transmediation to speak of. Corporations made products, and informed the advertising agency, who in turn informed the consumer... The meanings went straight down a single shute. They did not run on several tracks.

McCracken focuses primarily on one aspect of the transmedia experience -- providing backstory. He questioned whether most brands have a sufficiently detailed backstory to generate the kind of consumer interest that give rise to fan communities around entertainment franchises:

For Mr. Clean there was no back story, no alternative endings, no competing interpretation. There was in fact no narrative to speak of. I think some consumers surmised that Mr. Clean was an uncorked genie, a creature out of Shahraza released from the lamp/bottle to put his magic at the disposal of the homemaker. In this case, the brand was actually removing meaning from the icon, not supplementing or multiplying this meaning.

Yet in a subsequent post, McCracken shows how easy it would be to flesh out the backstory of a seemingly empty icon:

It's not so hard to imagine Mr. Clean in more fully realized narrative terms: child of an orphanage in a French colony in North Africa (circa 1890), early childhood spend as a runner in a souk (market), taken in as a servant by a family of French nationals who holiday in Morocco and eventually he joins the household even when it is "at home" in France. In the late spring of 1907, "Gerard" is travelling back to Morocco to help to set up the summer home when (mon dieu!) he is kidnapped by pirates. Gerard sails for some years as a pirate and this allows him to built up a small store of wealth, and to return, eventually, to the souk where he buys a stock of carpets and a stall, marries his childhood sweetheart, and begins to raise a little batch of runners all his own. It is on one of his trips to replenish his supply of carpets that...

Would such a backstory enhance the brand experience? Perhaps. Especially if people find themselves wanting to find out more about this remarkable character and his many exotic adventures, if consumers seek more touch points with the brand, if they generate their own narratives about Gerard. Personally I am waiting to see the Mr. Clean/Jolly Green Giant slash genre emerge!

There have been good examples of tapping interest in characters to prolong our engagement. I am thinking of the Folger's Coffee campaign with Anthony Head, who went on to play Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here a story unfolded across a number of commercial installments -- following a fairly simple genre -- the romantic comedy. Could you imagine extending that outward into some kind of epistelary fiction? A series of love letters between the two in print or on the web, which come complete with coffee stains? Perhaps even some kind of game where the goal is help true love win out and good coffee taste find an appreciating consumer?

Yet, there is also a danger in too much specificity. We might start by pondering whether renaming Mr. Clean Gerard increases our engagement with the character or simply closes off a range of other possible associations. The most effective use of transmedia branding so far may be the BMW campaign, "The Hire," which unfolded first on the web (in the hands of some of the world's greatest filmmakers) and more recently in the comics (in the hands of some pretty damn gifted comics creators). Despite all of the screen time he enjoys, the central protagonist -- the driver -- receives very little characterization, allowing him to move fluidly across genres and across media platforms. He is more an observer figure than a protagonist: the goals of the guest stars set the terms for each new installment. One can encounter the episodes in any order, but there may be less motivation to try to find links across them.

Transmedia vs. Media Neutral

The relationship between transmedia entertainment and branding resurfaced recently in a much discussed post by Faris Yacob from the London-based Naked Communications group. Yacob embraces transmedia branding in contrast to what he sees as the media neutral approach that shapes much current thinking about branding:

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been media neutral planning. In essence, this is the belief that we should develop a single organising thought that iterates itself across any touchpoint - this was a reaction against previous models of integration that were often simply the dilution of a televisual creative idea across other channels that it wasn't necessarily suited to...The important point is that there is one idea being expressed in different ways. This is believed to be more effective as there are multiple encodings of the same idea, which reinforces the impact on the consumer.

Now then, let's think about transmedia planning. In this model, there would be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels could be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create an larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves. The beauty of this is that it is designed to generate brand communities, in the same way that The Matrix generates knowledge communities, as consumers come together to share elements of the narrative. It

has a word of mouth driver built in.

While McCracken's use of my transmedia concept emphasized back story, Yacob's version stresses world building and the social activity of consumers. His primary example turns out to be the alternative reality game, The Art of the Heist. It's worth recalling that I do discuss The Beast and I Love Bees in the context of my discussion of transmedia storytelling. Indeed, at the heart of my concept of transmedia is the distinction between cultural attractors -- works that draw like minded individuals together to form a community -- and cultural activators -- works that give these communities something to do. In a subsequent interview, Yacob fleshes out even more his idea about the role of the consumer in the process of transmedia branding:

I think consumers can handle more than a single core idea. In fact, I think in an age where increasingly consumers control the media the consume, and we can no longer simply interrupt, entertain for 25 seconds and then sell them something, then we have to offer them more than a core idea well told.

It's not about individuals responding to the whole world - it's about whether a community will adopt it. And groups naturally spring up around stories that have rich worlds to explore, discuss and share.

The industry seems obsessed by engagement at the moment - building / offering brand engagement. But from a person, or communities, point of view - why should they engage with brands unless there is some value in the engagement?

Consciously or unconsciously, Yacob is linkig my notion of transmedia entertainment with arguments about complexity in contemporary popular narrative made by Steven Johnson in his book, Everything Bad is Good For You, or C3 researcher Jason Mittell in his work on contemporary television narative. I see the kinds of complexity that Johnson and Mittell discuss as closely linked to the emergence of knowledge communities (or as Pierre Levy might call it, collective intelligence): a group of people, pooling their knowledge, working together, can process much greater complexity (indeed, demands much greater complexity) than an individual watching television alone in their living room. Transmedia entertainment simply pushes that search for complexity to the next level, spreading the information across multiple media platforms and thus providing an incentive for what Mimi Ito calls "hypersociality." The more people get absorbed into putting together these scattered bits of information, the more invested they are in the brand/fan narrative.

In a film franchise, what fuels this interest may be a story -- or more precisely, a fictional world rich enough to support a range of possible stories. But, one can imagine other structures of information generating similar interest -- we can't really call what motivates the Survivor spoilers I discuss earlier in Convergence Culture a story per se. One can imagine, for example, a trivia contest of some kind creating sufficient interest that people seek out information from multiple choices and pool data with others in their core community.

Legacy Characters and Rich History: How Soap Operas Must Capitalize on Their History (and Pay Attention to the Lessons of the WWE)

Sam Ford is the backbone of the Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Week in and week out, he pulls together some of the most important developments in the entertainment and media sector and offers his own insightful analysis of how they connect to the larger trends we have been researching for our clients. For those of you whose interests were perked by the conversations in and around the Futures of Entertainment conference, the C3 blog is a great place to go to learn more about user-generated content, fan and brand communities, transmedia storytelling, and so forth. There's much more there than I can possibly cover in this blog. I go for depth; Sam goes for breath--though, at his best, he achieves both.

Ford is a masters student in the Comparative Media Studies program who came to us with lots of experience as a small town journalist writing for his local newspaper in Western Kentucky. Ford wrote his undergraduate thesis about professional wrestling as a transmedia and fan phenomenon and is going to be teaching a class on the topic this spring. He is doing his thesis work trying to map some ways that soap operas in general and As The World Turns in particular can exploit aspects of convergence culture to broaden their market and to better satisfy the demands of their hardcore viewers. Like many of our students, he is using blogging to create some public discussion around his thesis ideas. In this case, he has posted a series of lengthy pieces on the C3 site which explore the ways soaps are going transmedia and interacting with their fan communities. I have asked Sam if we can reproduce these posts here in hopes that he may garner insights from my readers on his project.

Sam, by the way, has been nice enough to take over the management of this blog for the next few days while Cynthia and I have gone to Poland for the public debut of the Polish language edition of Convergence Culture -- my first translation. I will be speaking at a conference on the future of culture in Warsaw and will share some of my impressions when I get back.

Now, to turn it over to Sam:

By: Sam Ford

I originally wrote this piece over at the C3 blog at the beginning of November. Since that time, the episode that drove my initial writing has aired, and its success (or lack thereof) has driven a response that will be on the C3 site and will be cross-posted here on Friday. Also, Friday's post will pick up a variety of conversations that began in the comments section on the original post on the C3 blog which involved former Young and the Restless head writer Kay Alden and longtime soaps viewer and critic Lynn Liccardo, who are both serving as my thesis advisors (along with Henry and William Uricchio).

Luke and Laura have me thinking about soap operas and legacy characters and the importance of recognizing histories on shows that are fortunate enough to have a wealth of former content to draw from.

A lot of long-standing television forms have not completely grasped the idea that one of the most important selling tools they have is exactly what sets them apart from the more ephemeral primetime fare: longevity.

In this category, I'm talking about any type of program with deep archives but particularly thinking of daytime serial drama, the soap operas; professional wrestling; some long-standing news shows or features on other networks, anything that has been on the air for years, without an end in sight. These programs are special, with formats that have built within viewers the sense that, even if the program hits a down time, that its longevity and format will cause it to be around for years to come.

That's why I've made the argument with both pro wrestling programming and soap operas over the years that you can't really apply the term "jump the shark" to these shows because they have jumped the shark and back so many times over the past few decades. As the World Turns and Guiding Light have both been on the air every weekday and all year long for more than 50 years now, making PGP a brand renowned for longevity. And World Wrestling Entertainment's roots stretch back to 1963 as a regional broadcast, giving WWE a longstanding viewership history that few other primetime shows can match, other than news programs.

Yet, traditionally anyway, these shows only give a cursory glance to their history, instead relying on bragging about their history only in ambiguous terms from time-to-time.

WWE Finding the Right Direction with Legacy Content

Vince McMahon completely ignored wrestling history for a long time, and it made some degree of business sense when it came to the history of his competitors. He was trying to establish the WWE as the only wrestling history that matters. Now that he's pretty well won the game, though, now that he has established his wrestling empire as the owner of the country's primary wrestling brand, Vince has started to give more than just a passing glance at the wrestling archives.

Enter WWE 24/7 On Demand, which I've written about before. At the time, I wrote:

The point of all this? WWE has been able to draw on nostalgia in a way that appeals to a very concentrated group of fans, those who care enough about professional wrestling to throw down a few bucks a month to watch old pro wrestling programming, tape archives that were otherwise just sitting in a closet somewhere. It's an example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail, in that products like these can be profitable just by finding a fan base. Although the initial costs of digitizing and mapping out these tape libraries may put the product in the red, the long-term sustainability of this niche product should eventually turn a profit, especially considering that the footage can also be used for DVD releases, etc. (The company has found this out, especially with releasing multiple-disc sets of various wrestling personalities.)

And, the WWE has been able to pull in some fans who don't even watch the current product regularly but who love to see the wrestling of yesteryear. In fact, there are some people who are hostile against the company, who do not like Vince McMahon, but are willing to pay him for this archive, to remember wrestling from the regional era before what they see as his corrupting influence came through and changed pro wrestling.

On the other hand, soap operas don't really seem to "get it," as Vince would say. And it's not like Vince always has but rather that he has slowly come around to ways of educating current fans to care about wrestling history and then to promote that wrestling history with the 24/7 product, DVD releases, etc., in order to eventually make money off that content that was just collecting dust otherwise.

The Lesson for Soap Operas

The same needs to take place with soap operas. While every other television industry seems to make its name off target marketing and niche audiences when it comes to demographics, soap operas are the opposite. Almost everyone I know my age, male and female, who watch soaps do so because they started watching them with a relative growing up. In fact, almost everyone I know period started watching soaps this way. When the audience started falling off, soaps began to dumb down the shows' histories more and more, ignoring the past and worrying about losing viewers with such stuff. New characters with little history on the show started being the major focus, and veterans are lucky to make it on the screen a handful of times a month now on many shows.

Why? Soaps are losing their 18-49 female target demographic, and they are trying to appeal to them directly. But they don't understand the value of transgenerational marketing when it comes to soaps, and they've spent the last decade looking for a quick-fix for the target demographic when I believe they would have been better served focusing on improving creative and utilizing their history more effectively. Shows should bolster their longterm viewers' numbers and letting them act as their proselytizers for younger soap fans. In other words, if you hadn't lost grandma and mom, you would have been able to keep grandson or granddaughter.

Legacy Characters

How do you remedy that, though? Legacy characters. Acknowledging the history. Not only could soaps find more and more ways to make money off the show's archives (when you bring back a legacy character, release online content or DVDs that highlight the history of that characters, their interaction with others who are currently on the show, etc.), but they can also draw back in the prodigal sons and daughters who have drifted from the show by returning some familiar faces.

There has been a lot of talk in the soap fan communities and the industry in the past year about legacy characters and how their return can generate buzz for shows once again. A lot of these legacy characters are out of the demographic that the show is trying to reach, but...gasp...viewers seem to sometimes be interested in characters that aren't necessarily the same age as them, and--when it comes to the large families on most soap operas--these characters are woven into storylines of several generations of other characters on the show, leading to a show that is supposed to be multigenerational in its storylines in order to appeal to multiple generations of viewers.

Ed Martin with Media Village wrote about the return of Laura from the famed Luke and Laura couple on General Hospital and what it means to the show. Martin writes, "Francis' return as one of the most popular characters to ever emerge in daytime drama is worth noting because it calls attention (at a time when much attention is needed) to the enduring power not simply of daytime soap operas but to that of serialized programming overall and to broadcast television itself. Consider the enduring popularity of her character, Laura. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Laura's now-legendary wedding to Luke in a two-part 1981 episode that drew 30 million-plus viewers, still the record-holder for a daytime drama audience."

Later, he points out that this "is what a well-written, well-acted soap opera can do, a point well worth making at a time when most soap operas are fighting for their lives, the victims of repetitive writing, industry indifference, escalating competition from other media and, I am convinced, flawed audience measurement."

Martin shares an anecdote about younger viewers been involved with the storylines of older characters, saying, "Significantly, Alexis is not an ingénue. She's a middle-aged woman. And yet, young viewers remain heavily invested in her storylines. There's another industry perception smashed to bits. But that's a column for another day."

Nice to know that there's someone out there who agrees with me that soaps break the myth of niche demographics and that applying that rubric to soaps has been a driving force in diminishing the soaps audience.

Bringing Back the Prodigal Viewers

But what can shows do about it? Well...it seems fairly obvious, yet I'm afraid that it won't to most of the marketing folks. People like nostalgia. And the only way soaps are going to build their audience back up is first to get a great number of those people who have watched at some point in their lives back into the fold. And, gasp, the majority of those people need not be in the target demographic. I'm talking about getting grandmas and middle-aged mothers and fathers back into the show, so they can get back to work as your grassroots marketers to the younger generations.

And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. First, start by putting the veterans on the show more often, integrating them into storylines. A show like As the World Turns has a cast of Kim and Bob Hughes, Tom and Margo Hughes, Susan Stewart, Emma Snyder, Lucinda Walsh, etc., all characters who still have a lot to give and actors who are still able to carry scenes. I'm not saying that the shows have been completely inept at featuring them, but they haven't been great.

Don't be afraid to put Tom and Margo on the screen. Have young swindler Henry Coleman enter into an illicit affair with the older Lucinda Walsh, throwing the whole town off-balance. And so on. Bite the bullet and bring back Dr. John Dixon, a face many identified with ATWT for so many years. Sure, he's old, but that means that several generations of viewers will recognize him. Bring back some old favorites like Andy Dixon or Kirk Anderson...whatever happened to him, anyway? Dead or alive? After all, we found out that a smaller number of fans can nevertheless react very passionately when rumors start circulating that a longtime, yet neglected, character may be booted off the show--as was the case with rumors that Tom would be killed off on ATWT last year--and my post about the fan reaction generated more discussion than almost any post we've had on the C3 blog. Similarly, fans responded passionately about longtime character Hal Munson and his portrayer, Benjamin Hendrickson, after Hendrickson committed suicide earlier this year--the reaction shows both that fans care immensely about these longtime characters and felt a need to express their sympathy becuase they had grown close to the character over the years, and the actor's performances. And also look at how Ellen Dolan, who portrays Margo on ATWT, went directly to the fans to plead the case for better use of her character on the show (and her character has appeared more often in recent months, although that may just be a coincidence).

Then, by encouraging fans to promote the current storylines of these characters or one of their returns, by taking advantage and empowering the show's grassroots marketers, some of those old fans will come back into the fold. If they like what they see, they'll bring more back into the fold with them. And that leads to even more grassroots marketers. Then, they may start getting younger viewers tuning back in.

The problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well. One of the major problems is that a lot of writers currently with shows don't even know the shows' deep histories, since soap writers switch from show to show so often, it seems. But these shows need to get it together and take advantage of their greatest asset: their own histories.

The Best Marketing: Good and Consistent Storytelling

As I said, though, shows have to get good, and stay better for a while, before they can regain an audience. Word-of-mouth takes time. This type of approach needs a long-term commitment from the production companies and the network. The problem, though, is that trying one immediate fix after another in the soap industry for more than a decade now has led to continued decline in the numbers. If they had started this process a decade ago and focused on long-term growth, we might not be in the shape that so many creative direction changes and quick fixes have led to by this point.

In the end, the best marketing for a show is good quality. Soaps have the advantage of feeling permanent, and longstanding shows are probably not going to go off-the-air anytime soon. If shows start now with a more long-term approach to growth, incorporating the idea of taking greater advantage of the archives and bringing back legacy characters and empowering proselytizing among fans and the other ideas laid out here, then there may be a turnaround in numbers. But it's going to take a big shift in thinking from the current demographic-driven, short-term thinking that has guided the industry.

For those who are interested further in these ideas, feel free to contact me directly or read some of my previous posts on the soaps industry and pro wrestling industry at the C3 site. I'm teaching a class on pro wrestling and its cultural history here at MIT next semester, and my thesis research is on the current state of the soap opera industry and how using new technologies and the new relationships with fans can transform the genre and the industry in the 21st Century.

Thanks to Todd Cunningham with MTV Networks for bringing the return of Luke and Laura to my attention.

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

lloquium series featured a program about the production of Zigzag, the new video podcast which seeks to capture and convey some of the many fascinating aspects of life at MIT. This week's edition features a profile of the New Media Literacies Project. The video includes footage of several of our graduate students setting up to interview my colleague Beth Coleman for a forthcoming entry in our exemplar library project which will deal with DJs and music remixing practices. The center piece of the documentary, however, deals with the most recently added film in our collection which deals with the New York based Graffiti group, Tats Cru. This is a segment that cuts close to home for me. Indeed, many of the interview segments were shot in my living room. As some of you know, I am proud to have spent the last 12 years of my life as housemaster of an MIT dormitory known as Senior House. (Contrary to the name, the community includes a full range of undergraduates -- frosh to seniors -- and houses many of those at MIT who are interested in alternative cultures.) Tats Cru came to MIT in part at the request of our graduate resident tutors, Andrew "Zoz" Brooks who wanted help constructing a mural which would pay tribute to "Big Jimmy" Roberts, a long time night watchman who was much beloved among our residents and who passed away a few years ago. Our students have raised more than 50,000 dollars to create a scholarship in Big Jimmy's honor but they wanted an icon to help memorialize his role within the dorm. Since he worked between two dorms, the agreement was that they would paint a mural on canvas that would be portable and could spend part of the year in each location. Tats Cru came to MIT through help from the Creative Arts Council and Michelle Oshima and worked with our students to produce something that was worthy of Big Jimmy's memory. While the group was on campus, the graduate students on Project NML also filmed the production of the mural and conducted interviews to help explore graffiti as a form of creative expression.

The story of Tats Cru is a fascinating one: a group of former street artists who have become known around the world for their murals and graffiti, who work with local communities to create memory walls and who work with corporate clients to support their branding efforts. It's hard to pick any group of artists who better embody some of the contradictions which surround graffiti as a form of creative expression.

Grafitti is often discussed in terms of personal expression -- leaving one's own distinctive mark on the environment -- yet it also depends heavily on the trust and collaboration that emerges within the members of a particular Cru. Most of the exemplars so far have focused on individual artists. We very much wanted to examine here what it was like to produce art within a collective:

Nicer: Some of the things we use to do with the kids was: we'd have two guys working on the same name, and then I'll switch the papers and let them copy each other's work. And they would never get it the same. The way you do a circle is unique: it's your circle. No one else is going to copy it exactly the same. The way you create your own lettering, the way you sign your own name, even your signature or the way you write, it's so unique. It makes you an individual and you have to be proud of that.

Red: In this art form, from what I've learned, you gotta push forward. And you can't copy. I could sit there and try to copy Nicer's but it's not going to come out the same. I got to find my way and my defaults and push myself.

Nosm: Sometimes your brain is just empty, and then Nicer comes up with something: "Oh, I got this idea, I always wanted to do that." And then How comes to it and says, "yeah, we should add this and that." And then, next you see everybody's brainstorming, and we come up with a new idea for the mural.

Nicer: It's not any oil painter who can paint on the same canvas with another oil painter. And he'll paint something red and somebody else will go, "no, I want to change it blue." He'll catch some kind of fit, because he doesn't know how to work together with someone. Us, as a group, we've learned that already. And it hasn't been easy. There have been times when I've stepped back away from walls and looked and go, "wow, that red looks good." And then two guys will walk buy and one will stop and change it blue, and they'll walk away from each other. And I'll go, "uh, maybe it looks good blue." So I have to learn to trust their judgment. Because what better kind of artist can you get than a 6-headed, 12-armed monster artist?

Some of the best passages deal with the ways they seek inspiration from the culture around them:

Nicer: I grew up in a neighborhood in the '80s where there wasn't a lot of art programs. So I didn't have a lot of stuff to reference besides comic books. I would look at comic books and they would show me different colorings and outlines and characters and cartoons. And superheroes was a big thing to me. So I started young just tracing and drawing comics. As a teenager I started noticing some guys who were doing graffiti in my neighborhood, and they brought color to the walls: they would have fancy hand styles, and the lettering, the shapes, and the colors of their characters. So, I was drawn to it.

BG: It was already part of my neighborhood. That was, like, the culture. If you walked through the hallways, or walked through the streets of New York City, that's what you saw. And we took the trains, and you saw graffiti on the trains. So that was, like, the first opening of graffiti to me.

Nosm: I was born in Spain and grew up in Germany, and I've been in New York for about 7 years. Me and my brother was a little bit different because we started graffiti back in '88, '89. We saw a couple of books from New York, and we saw the movie Wild Style--it's a famous graffiti movie that is something like a documentary--and based on that, and based on our older friends who were tagging--that's like, writing your name all over the neighborhood--they were doing that and we just copied it. And after a couple of years we realized we could do more with it. Not only tags but also pieces, characters, you know, like faces and stuff like that.

Or consider this passage where Nicer talks about the ways that commercial art -- even advertising -- informs their graphic style:

Nicer: I get inspired by, like, looking at ads in magazines or just a stroll through a local supermarket. Look at the cereal boxes. Every cereal box has got funky lettering, and the coloring is bright, and it's calling the kids, "come eat me, come get me!" And if you look at the characters on these boxes, you know, like Captain Crunch and you got all these, like, Sugar Pops or... it's stylized for kids, but it's just fun. And sometimes we're looking for something fun to paint.

At the same time, they defend their work on the grounds that it introduces aesthetic experiences to people who would never feel comfortable just going inside a traditional art museum:

Nicer: I guess what we do is bring what's in galleries and what's in museums--which is art and color and technique and style--and we bring that to community walls or to neighborhoods that, you know, sometimes these kids in those neighborhoods never would have a chance to go see the MOMA or see the Louvre. So I guess, in a way, by us painting these murals in these communities is bringing a part of that art and culture into their lives.

Part of what's really exciting about these films is that they teach new ways of looking at graffiti as a meaningful form of cultural expression, providing illustrations of key terms and concepts from their world which will give students and teachers alike a vocabulary for talking about what's going on within this community.

Tats Cru doesn't engage in graffiti as a form of vandalism. Their art is authorized by the people who live in the communities being decorated. They often get invited in by the people who own the property to paint murals:

Bio: One of the big reasons that it started to gain popularity in the neighborhood was, it was a way to combat graffiti. Landlords and store owners were tired of going out on a weekly or daily basis to paint over tag signatures. But they noticed whenever we would paint a mural, it was colorful, it was attractive, but, I think, the selling point was that it would go untouched. No one would deface it or what have you. The other artists or the other graffiti artists would respect it. So they began to commission us in an effort to combat that problem.

Nicer: We sell space in communities. We find properties that are abandoned, or people are having problems keeping clean, and we make agreements with the property owners to let us use the space. And we'll keep the rest of the property clean or we'll pay rent on it. And then we'll go to these agencies and say, "listen, we have these walls." And we pick and choose what clients go on there. We're not going to go out and do tobacco or firearm companies, or big alcohol ads. We understand that, at the end of the day, we're the one's responsible for whatever images we put up there.

Yet, they also make clear that there are rules and ethical commitments even among those who produce unauthorized forms of graffiti:

Nicer: The rule is, the bigger, the more time it takes, gets the pass. So there's a pass you're given. Like if you had a throw-up, or two throw-ups and somebody did a simple style piece over it--which takes longer, there's usually like a few colors and fill it in, and an outline, and it takes more time and it's cleaner--so that stuff can go over throw-ups, because it takes more time and more skill. But if you did a throw-up over that, then you're gonna create a problem.

BG: Then you have a mural that will go over anything.

We understand graffiti to be perhaps the most controversial form of expression which we have explored through the exemplar library so far. Many see it as enhancing their community. Others see it as a form of visual clutter or as a form of vandalism. To help us better understand the controversy, we turned to a CMS alum Rekha Murthy, who did her thesis on the mediascape surrounding the Central Square area in Cambridge. Her work focused both on official media -- signage, newspapers, window displays in stores -- and unofficial media -- stickers, posters, handbills, and graffiti. We were lucky to have an expert within our own community who knew a great deal about the politics of street media. Here's some of what she had to say:

Rekha: It's illegal to poster or put stickers or graffiti in the city of Cambridge on any buildings or any surfaces without getting the approval of the city. So, obviously there's someone out there enforcing these laws. I would walk up and down the streets taking pictures for my thesis of different street media. And I would go back every couple of days or so and the whole streetscape would have changed. And I found this guy in the department of public works for the city of Cambridge, and he's actually very proud of his job.

And he said that he sees himself, actually, as helping free speech. The people who poster or who put this stuff up, you know the graffiti artists and sticker people, may just see him as someone who destroys. But he sees himself as keeping the streetscape clear so that more people can share it and more people can communicate.

There's something that I noticed in Central Square that really intrigued me. Something that I didn't go out to look for, but it kept coming back to me. And that was: people seem to respect what they like to look at. So it's not about what's legal or illegal all the time. Sometimes it's something grayer than that. You can't draw a line in it, you can't draw a box around it. It's just what people like or what the don't like, or what makes people feel OK or even happy, and what makes them feel like their neighborhood is going down the tubes.

There are people who set out to deface. There are people who really do vandalize. And they cost local business owners money. That said, there's this other group of people who want to self-express, but don't actually want to deface. And I saw in my research time and again that, some of the people that I spoke with said that they'd be perfectly happy to put art, if there were places on the streetscape that the city kind of made available. That, it didn't have to be unauthorized to be exciting or legitimate. That is just had to be in a place where people could actually see it, that implied it was being taken seriously, and that it was respected, and that there was something community about it.

We hope the documentaries will generate discussion about the borders between art and vandalism, getting people to think more deeply about what graffiti contributes to urban culture and how we might develop urban policies which support more forms of grassroots expression within our cities without necessarily bringing about property damage.

The interviews for this film were conducted by Henry Jenkins and Margaret Weigel. The documentary was edited by Neal Grigsby, a CMS graduate student, whose thesis work is focused on adolescence as a theme across many forms of contemporary media.

Catching Up: Mostly on Media Literacy

The New and Improved Henry Jenkins

I was so impressed by the experience of participating in the MacArthur Foundation's press event, which was partially held in the New York Museum of Natural History and partially held in Second Life, that I sought out Barry Joseph from Global Kids, an organization which regularly runs events through Teen Second Life, to see if there might be a way I could engage with their youth participants. My one concern, as a media scholar, had been that when we spoke in Second Life at the press event, we appeared as cinematic images and not as avatars.

So, in speaking with Joseph, we decided that I should get an avatar if I was going to relate to the Second Life youth on their own terms. Joseph was nice enough to volunteer to get some members of his group to create an avatar for me. Apparently, some of the youth had expressed a particular fascination with my beard and therefore wanted to be able to reproduce it and share it with their friends. (I wasn't sure which Henry beard they wanted since mine comes in various lengths from trim to shaggy depending on what point it is in the term and how hectic my life has been.)

This past weekend, Barry wrote to introduce me to the second Henry Jenkins. I have to say that I bonded instantly with this frisky fellow.

I have heard television puts ten pounds on you. It would appear that Second Life takes thirty or forty pounds off -- not to mention adding some of that vigor and vitality that has been worn away through many years of living the life of the jet setting academic.

Barry says they had two groups work on constructing me an avatar -- a group of adults known as The Magicians and several teens -- 1000 Carlos and Nik385 Doesberg -- and then they combined the best features of the two for the finished product. Thanks to everyone involved. It's been years since anyone has drawn a representation of me that didn't consist of a series of circles -- the bald head, the glasses, and the round little tummy. Indeed, some years ago, a whole Kindergarten class made Henry Jenkins masks by gluing string to paper plates! Even then, my beard was the subject of considerable fascination.

Barry and I are now working on the details of when and where I will be engaging with the Second Life Youth. I can't wait.

Media Snackers

Last week, I did a podcast interview with DK of the British media literacy group, Media Snackers. Here's how they describe their vision on their home page:

Remember the set menu of print, radio and television, delivered at specific times, for the masses and only in the ways the creators defined?

With the arrival of the Internet, digital TV, mobile phones, iPods, weblogs etc.--the media landscape has changed from the linear, to one of many layers, consumed by self-serving and empowered individuals.

Young people are the new 'WWW' generation--snacking whenever, wherever and whatever they like through the multi-channeled and many technological avenues available.

Creating as much as they consume--constantly hungry, always 'on' and totally self-serving!

The Media Snackers podcast series consists of ten minute conversations with leading media educators from around the world -- including, not coincidentally, one Barry Joseph from Global Kids (who always seems to be one step ahead of me!), Rob Williams, Benjamin Stokes, and a wealth of others from around the world. This is a great resource for ideas and insights into youth and new media.

There's also an excellent blog which includes some interesting discussion of major trends in this area. (I am certainly going to add it to my rss and blog list). Already, this blog has gotten me into trouble. They have a fascinating chart prepared by Gary Hays from Personalized Media, which shows the progression from Web 1.0 through to the future emergence of Web 3.0. I saw this chart the same week as The New York Times wrote an article claiming that Web 3.0 was right around the corner. Hosting a conference last weekend about the Futures of Entertainment, I couldn't resist leading our audience in a Countdown to Web 3.0 as a way of marking a transition from our own focus on social networks (web 2.0) into immersive worlds (web 3.0). I fear that this little stunt will follow me around for a while!

For the record, I am deeply suspicious of the whole Web 2.0/3.0 rhetoric. It implies dramatic breaks or ruptures in the media scene, when in fact, media change is gradual and there is a tendency for old media systems to linger even as new media systems are emerging. I do think that there are significant differences between the world of social networks and the world of immersive worlds. I have trouble imagining Second Life replacing all of the functions of the web, however, as might be applied by the Web 3.0 concept that seems to have taken root over the past few weeks. It is this idea of dramatic shifts that I was spoofing by doing a New Year's Eve style countdown to Web 3.0.

Learning Games to Go!

Finally, I wanted to share with you the latest podcasts produced for the Learning Games to Go Project -- a collaboration between the Education Arcade and Maryland Public Television. Previous podcasts have featured interviews with Scot Osterweill and the over-exposed Henry Jenkins. But, the newest one -- the first to include video content -- features Scot interacting with the CMS undergraduate and graduate students who are working on the Labyrinth game which I described here a few weeks ago. It gives you a real taste of the CMS community spirit as each of these creative individuals reflects on a toy or artifact that enabled playful learning and along the way give us a sense of what they didn't like about some of the educational games they played growing up.

Broadband and the Public Interest

The Comparative Media Studies graduate students have been discussing current policy debates around "net neutrality." The phrase, "net neutrality," is in broad circulation at the moment but I suspect many people out there are not familiar with the core terms of the debate or how it impacts them. Stephen J. Schultze, a first year CMS masters student, asked if he might share some of his perspectives on this issue. Schultze holds a 2002 BA in computer science and philosophy from Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI). Since graduation, Schultze served as a project director at the Public Radio Exchange in Cambridge, MA: "Through PRX, I've been closely involved with station consultations on issues of cross-media branding in podcasting and web strategy. I launched a project that provides stations with a customized, branded podcast interface for their listeners. We advise stations that their brand identity and relationships with listeners have become more important than ever in a multi-channel world." He has also collaborated on projects through the MIT Media Lab where he helped Carla Gomez-Monroy to build an experimental radio production system for Mexican diasporic communities in New York City. Schultze spends a lot of his time these days over at the Berkman Center at that other place up the road from us and has been involved in the organization of the Beyond Broadcasting conference (more on that later). He is currently working on a documentary about podcasting for the New Media Literacies Project. What follows are his thoughts about how the recent election returns are apt to impact the debates around net neutrality.

Broadband and the Public Interest

by Stephen J. Schultze

Telecommunications policy wasn't exactly a hot-button issue in the midterm elections, but the resulting power shift in Congress could affect the trajectory of the Internet for years to come. Most of us are fairly satisfied with our day-to-day Internet experience. Why involve the bureaucrats when things are working just fine?

The problem is that things aren't working just fine. When it comes to broadband, we are falling embarrassingly far behind much of the rest of the world. On the heels of the elections, FCC commissioner Michael Copps wrote an editorial in the Washington Post entitled "America's Internet Disconnect." He noted that according to one study of "digital opportunity," the US ranks 21st in the world, right behind Estonia. We rely on private companies operating according to their market interests to connect us, and these companies have become more consolidated and less competitive in the last several years. Unfortunately, our telecommunications policy has failed to address the market failure that has left millions of Americans with limited and expensive options for broadband access - or none at all.

In the weeks leading up to the elections, high drama unfolded in Congress as Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) attempted to capture support for a telecommunications bill that revised parts of our telecommunications law. The bill met with stiff resistance from advocates of something called "network neutrality." Net neutrality is the long-standing principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally without discriminating between who is sending it - a kind-of free speech clause for the net. A diverse group of supporters thinks that the issue is as important as the broadband access issues highlighted by Commissioner Copps. The Stevens bill, which would effectively prevent such neutrality, was barely blocked before the elections. Likewise, a merger between AT&T and Bellsouth has been stalled while FCC commissioners try to decide whether provisions like net neutrality should be imposed. Some representatives have suggested that the FCC wait to hear from the new neutrality-friendly Congress before making any decisions.

These two issues have a common lineage in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. At the time it passed, the Clinton-championed legislation was hailed as a deregulatory victory that would clear the way for technological innovation. By 1999, the Internet had taken off in unanticipated ways, and it was becoming clear that the bureaucratic intricacies of the Act were more hindrance than help. Justice Scalia noted, "It would be gross understatement to say that the 1996 Act is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction." The Act has contributed to a great deal of confusion about how to best encourage true competition that would help address commissioner Copps' concerns, and it set up the structure that allowed network neutrality to be challenged.

It is difficult these days to find praise of the 1996 Act, but Senator Stevens' bill takes a minimally reformative approach. A more radical strategy has been advocated by free-market think tanks that seek to do away with nearly all telecommunications regulation. They propose that issues be dealt with after the fact in antitrust-like fashion. This is an attractive approach to removing regulatory barriers to competition, and is seductively simple. The risk is that it trusts the market to do what is best for us. In this model, it is difficult to ensure access for poor communities, or to explain how principles of network neutrality will be upheld over the shareholders' desire to derive more revenue through discriminatory pricing. To be sure, the free-market crowd has well-considered answers to these and other challenges, but it is likely a moot point for now. The bill advocating this approach, which was championed by Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), had stalled in the 109th and is unlikely to progress in the 110th.

Instead, there are some signs that a different approach is gaining momentum. It lacks the simplicity of the free-market mantra, but appeals to an older principle in media policy. Since the Radio Act of 1927, our communications regulation has included language invoking the "public interest, convenience, and necessity." The "public interest" is a notoriously but necessarily slippery phrase. Over time, the implementation of the concept has eroded into little more than lame public service announcements and FCC indecency fines. The groundswell of support for net neutrality represents a remarkably successful invocation of the public interest in policy debate. It is particularly interesting because it draws its power from a broad-based grassroots coalition that has successfully stood up to heavily backed lobbyists and astroturf campaigns from the major telecommunications companies.

Network neutrality is not a clean-cut issue. There are legitimate quarrels with the proposals, which spur lively debate. However, the effort is remarkable example of citizens exercising their influence on media policy. They believe that neutrality is in their interest and they believe that they have the right to call for it. They are not simply consumers, as a simplistic version of the free-market approach might indicate. Instead, they have stood up for neutrality on principle and with the belief that a neutral Internet will have beneficial network effects that companies like AT&T and Comcast will not promote on their own.

Neutrality advocates are using the infrastructure of the Internet itself to build a broad base of support. They have formed partnerships that unite competitors like Google and Microsoft, and have brought together sometimes-adversaries like MoveOn and the Christian Coalition. They will have powerful allies in leadership of the 110th Congress - including incoming Speaker of the House Pelosi (D-CA) and incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), with the support of Representatives John Dingell (D-MI) and Ed Markey (D-MA) who will lead influential subcommittees.

The bigger task of developing a telecommunications regulation infrastructure that makes sense in a broadband world is considerably more difficult. The citizen-powered, public interest motivated, Internet-savvy crowd does not speak with one voice. It does not have much industry money at its disposal. It is not well versed in strategic influence. Nevertheless, it wields enormous power to the extent that it genuinely represents the citizenry. Few of those citizens would rank telecommunications policy in their top three voting priorities today, but the groundswell of support for network neutrality is a compelling model of public action. This is exciting in a moment when the upcoming changes in Congress overwhelmingly favor their cause. In short, these citizens believe that there is something special about media - and in particular the Internet - that gives the public the right to shape its direction. In this view, media is not just another private commodity. To reduce it to its instrumental market value is to risk turning into what Edward R. Murrow would call, "merely wires and lights in a box." Rather, they hold communication in common between them - whether it is public ownership of the airwaves, the wireline rights-of-way, or the discourse we co-create.

Youtube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

My very first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts? (based on my dissertation at Wisconsin), explored the impact of American vaudeville on early sound comedy, seeing variety performance as an important influence on the films of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen, Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn, Joe E. Brown, Wheeler and Woolsey, and a spate of other clowns and comics of the early 1930s. I confess that given my current research interests, I don't get very much demand to pontificate about the particulars of early 20th century popular theater. Yet, the other day, a journalist asked me to look at this OK Go music video, currently extremely popular on YouTube, as part of a story he was doing about the ways that digital distribution of content was impacting the recording industry. And I was suddenly struck by the ways that YouTube represents for the early 21st century what Vaudeville represented in the early 20th century.

Let me see if I can sketch some of the resemblances:

As the name suggests, the variety stage was based on the principle of constant variation and diversity. It represented a grab bag of the full range of cultural interests and obsessions of an age marked by dramatic social, cultural, and technological transformations. In the course of an evening, one might watch a Shakespearean actor do a soliloquy, a trained dog act, an opera recital, a juggler or acrobatic turn, a baggy pants comedian, an escape artist or magician, a tap dance performance, and some form of stupid human tricks (such as a guy with hammers on his shoes hopping around on a giant xylophone or an act where baboons play musical instruments). Similarly, YouTube brings together an equally ecclectic mix of content drawn from all corners of our culture and lays it out as if it were of equal interest and importance, trusting the individual user to determine the relative value of each entry.

Second, vaudeville performances were short modular units -- usually less than 20 minutes in length -- and much was written about how the demands of economy -- get in, score big, and get off -- impacted the aesthetic choices made. There was no time for elaborate characterization or plot development. Every element had to pull its own weight. Nothing that wasn't necessary for the overall emotional impact could survive. Again, one of the characteristics of YouTube has been this similar push to conciseness. In theory, content can be of any length. In reality, the stuff that gets passed around the most is short and streamlined. YouTube viewers get restless if anything lingers too long. And there is thus a similar emphasis on the immediate emotional impact.

Vaudeville was an actor-centered mode of production. There was no director who could build an ensemble piece. Actors chose their own material, refined their own skills, and lived and died entirely on the basis of their ability to connect one on one with the audience. It was a form which placed a high premium on virtuosity -- on the ability of the performer to impress the spectator with their mastery. Similarly, YouTube is a space of individualized expression. This video is about nothing if it isn't about the mastery and virtuosity of these young performers. We watch breathlessly to see what they will do next and if they can pull off a high risk performance.

As vaudeville goes to film, it encourages certain stylistic choices which preserve the integrity of individual performances -- so there is a tendency towards the long take so we can see for sure that the performer actually did what is being represented on the screen. Part of what impresses me about this video is that this elaborate set of stunts is performed in a single take so that any screw up will require the performers to start over from scratch. The newsman told me that it took fifty tries to complete this video.

Filmed vaudeville performances were also performed directly to the camera with the performers actively courting the attention and approval of the viewer. Again, there is no question of the camera here being part of an invisible fourth wall unobserved by the people on screen: these guys are performing for us and working their pants off to get our approval.

In a context of constant variation, the individual performer tried above all else to be memorable, which typically meant a strong reliance on spectacle and a desire to intensify emotional effects. Similarly, the YouTube performer wants to be so spectacular that you feel compelled to pass their content along to your friends. It depends upon extreme spectacles, shocks, and stunts (the Jackass side of the platform) to produce content that will move virally across the blogosphere. The best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared.

One of the tropes of the vaudeville stage was the interrupted act: i.e. the performer would fake a series of disruptions and distractions which threatened to destroy the carefully constructed performance, thus giving a sense of spontaneity which played up the liveness of the staged experience. Similarly, though clearly different, the YouTube performer courts a sense of the amateurish which also places a high emphasis on seeming spontaneity -- many videos are carefully staged so as to look unrehearsed. There is not necessarily a push towards liveness, but there is a push towards "realness" -- towards the idea that you can't believe what you are seeing really happened -- and as we are increasingly recognizing, we are often right. The YouTube performer stages "realness" and in the process, much that is "fake" passes as real.

The vaudeville act might also strive for a pattern of theme and variation -- choosing some everyday space or activity and then playing with all different permutations of it. As a good example of the vaudeville aesthetic, consider this juggling routine by W.C. Fields made available again, ironically enough, thanks to the magic of YouTube. It is this principle that shapes the OK Go treadmill video and left me thinking about the connections back to vaudeville.

Of course, vaudeville was not simply about human performance. During an age when new technologies were being invented and diffused at a rapid rate, vaudeville was also a site of technological virtuosity. Many of the new inventions of the period were first introduced to the public on the vaudeville stage -- most famously, in this country, cinema itself. The magician was an early adopter and adapter of technologies, using the sense of wonder that surrounded new mechanisms to astonish and baffle their patrons. Not surprisingly, then, something like vaudeville is resurfacing during another moment of rapid technological development and deployment.

Some YouTube content also involves spectacular use of technology, as in this video which I received from one of my students. Here, the basic mechanics of the racing game are hacked, producing a spectacular and sublime display of movement, which very much recalls the fascination with escalating chases which was part of the early cinema. The film historian Tom Gunning has talked about cinema at the turn of the century as a "cinema of attractions" and that term seems very apt for what draws us back again and again to YouTube.

Finally, vaudeville served a particular function during a phase of colonization and immigration. It brought people and traditions from exotic parts of the world to America and it staged the cultural differences which shaped the immigrant experience. By the same token, YouTube is a product of our current moment of globalization, where we are fascinated to discovery that young men in China are lip-syncing to American boy bands or where the openings to Japanese children's programs, otherwise unknown in the American context, may fascinated removed from their original context.

In the not too distant future, social historians will want to examine the current contents of YouTube as a microcosm of contemporary culture, much as vaudeville's popular performances still yield rich insights into the culture of the last turn of the century.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)

I spent Thursday in New York speaking on a panel with the University of Chicago's Nicole Pinkard and the University of Southern California's Mimi Ito as part of the public launch of the MacArthur Foundation's exciting slate of new initiatives in the area of youth, learning, and digital media. People interested in understanding the full context of this initiative should keep an eye on the Foundation's new blog. The event was simulcast on Second Life and on Teen Second Life.

This is the context in which we have been pursuing our own Project nml (New Media Literacies) initiatives which I have been discussing from time to time in this blog. The New York City press event was the launching point for a white paper which I wrote for MacArthur identifying what we see as the key social skills and cultural competencies which young people need to be full participants in convergence culture. In Convergence Culture, I devote one chapter to thinking about the impact of participatory culture on our current understandings of education. Here I -- and my collaborators Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison -- have been able to dig much deeper into the pedagogical implications of the world I discuss in the book as well as to lay out some of the key insights from contemporary research on informal learning, games-based pedagogy, online communities, and participatory culture.

My hope is that this white paper will spark conversations among educators at all levels -- in schools and in after school programs, in public institutions, and in churches and other community centers -- about how we need to change our practices to reflect the new ways that young people are engaging with the world around them.

In hopes of sparking such a conversation, I am publishing the white paper in installments through my blog. This first installment sets the stage, describing some of the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of our young people.

For those of you who are impatient and want to read the whole report at once, you can download it here.

The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture

"If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life."

-- New London Group

Ashley Richardson was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville. She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio. She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship, about how to ensure honest elections, and about the future of democracy in a digital age. Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, The Sims Online.

Heather Lawver was 14 years old. She wanted to help other young people improve their reading and writing skills. She established an online publication with a staff of more than 100 people across the world. Her project was embraced by teachers and integrated into their curriculum. She emerged as an important spokesperson in a national debate about intellectual property. The website Lawver created was a school newspaper for the fictional Hogwarts, the location for the popular Harry Potter books.

Blake Ross was 14 years old when he was hired for a summer internship at Netscape. By that point, he already had developed computer programming skills and published his own website. Frustrated by many of the corporate decisions made at Netscape, Ross decided to design his own web browser. Through the joint participation of thousands of other volunteer youth and adults working on his project worldwide, the Firefox web browser was born. Today, Firefox enjoys more than 60 times as many users as Netscape Navigator. By age 19, Ross had the venture capital needed to launch his own start-up company. His interest in computing was sparked by playing the popular video game, Sim City.

Josh Meeter was about to graduate from high school when he completed the claymation animation for Awards Showdown, which subsequent was widely circulated on the web. Meeter negotiated with composer John Williams for the rights to use excerpts from his film scores. By networking, he was able to convince Stephen Spielberg to watch the film, and it was later featured on the Spielberg's Dreamworks website. Meeter is now starting work on his first feature film.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are the future politicians, activists, educators, writers, entrepreneurs, and media makers. The skills they acquired--learning how to campaign and govern; how to read, write, edit, and defend civil liberties; how to program computers and run a business; how to make a movie and get it distributed--are the kinds of skills we might hope our best schools would teach. Yet, none of these activities took place in schools. Indeed, many of these youth were frustrated with school; some dropped out and others chose to graduate early. They developed much of the skill and knowledge through their participation in the informal learning communities of fans and gamers.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are exceptional individuals. In any given period, exceptional individuals will break all the rules and enjoy off-the-charts success--even at surprisingly young ages. But, Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are perhaps less exceptional than one might at first imagine.

According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project, more than one-half of all American teens--and 57 percent of teens who use the Internet--could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study, a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online with others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix online content.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, these activities are not restricted to white suburban males. In fact, urban youth (40 percent) are somewhat more likely than their suburban (28 percent) or rural (38 percent) counterparts to be media creators. Girls aged 15-17 (27 percent) are more likely than boys their age (17 percent) to be involved with blogging or other social activities online. The Pew researchers found no significant differences in participation by race-ethnicity.

If anything, the Pew study undercounts the number of American young people who are embracing the new participatory culture. The Pew study did not consider newer forms of expression, such as podcasting, game modding or machinima. Nor did it count other forms of creative expression and appropriation, such as music sampling in the hip hop community. These forms are highly technological but use other tools and tap other networks for their production and distribution. The study does not include even more widespread practices, such as computer or video gaming, that can require an extensive focus on constructing and performing as fictional personas. Our focus here is not on individual accomplishment but rather the emergence of a cultural context that supports widespread participation in the production and distribution of media.

Enabling Participation

"While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games-- and here they are already content producers. Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and policy agendas, are driving emerging media literacy. Through such uses, children are most engaged-- multi-tasking, becoming proficient at navigation and manoeuvre so as to win, judging their participation and that of others, etc.... In terms of personal development, identity, expression and their social consequences-- participation, social capital, civic culture- these are the activities that serve to network today's younger generation." -- Sonia Livingstone.

Participatory Culture

For the moment, let's define participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others

3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

4. Where members believe that their contributions matter

5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. The community itself, however, provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation. Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable on its own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth think about themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others.

Most public policy discussion of new media have centered on technologies--tools and their affordances. The computer is discussed as a magic black box with the potential to create a learning revolution (in the positive version) or a black hole that consumes resources that might better be devoted to traditional classroom activities (in the more critical version). Yet, as the quote above suggests, media operate in specific cultural and institutional contexts that determine how and why they are used. We may never know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest with no one around. But clearly, a computer does nothing in the absence of a user. The computer does not operate in a vacuum. Injecting digital technologies into the classroom necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology, changing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper, chalk and blackboard, books, films, and recordings.

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.

That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture. Many young people are already part of this process through:

Affiliations -- memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions -- producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving -- working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations -- Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

The MacArthur Foundation has launched an ambitious effort to document these activities and the roles they play in young people's lives. We do not want to preempt or duplicate that effort here. For the moment, it is sufficient to argue that each of these activities contains opportunities for learning, creative expression, civic engagement, political empowerment, and economic advancement.

Through these various forms of participatory culture, young people are acquiring skills that will serve them well in the future. Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate. A growing body of work has focused on the value of participatory culture and its long-term impact on children's understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Affinity Spaces

Many have argued that these new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments. James Paul Gee calls such informal learning cultures "affinity spaces," asking why people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks. Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, and because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others. For example, Rebecca Black finds that the "beta-reading" (or editorial feedback) provided by online fan communities helps contributors grow as writers, mastering not only the basic building blocks of sentence construction and narrative structure, but also pushing them to be close readers of the works that inspire them. Participants in the beta-reading process learn both by receiving feedback on their own work and by giving feedback to others, creating an ideal peer-to-peer learning community.

Affinity spaces are distinct from formal educational systems in several ways. While formal education is often conservative, the informal learning within popular culture is often experimental. While formal education is static, the informal learning within popular culture is innovative. The structures that sustain informal learning are more provisional, those supporting formal education are more institutional. Informal learning communities can evolve to respond to short-term needs and temporary interests, whereas the institutions supporting public education have remained little changed despite decades of school reform. Informal learning communities are ad hoc and localized; formal educational communities are bureaucratic and increasingly national in scope. We can move in and out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education.

Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments, from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge Andrew Blau's 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation:

The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers...A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.

Blau's report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy. Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.

David Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment.

"By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life that affect and concern them to a much greater extent than adults--most notably education--political debate is conducted almost entirely 'over their heads'"

Politics, as constructed by the news, becomes a spectator sport, something we watch but do not do. Yet, the new participatory culture offers many opportunities for youth to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders, even if sometimes only through the "second lives" offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities.

Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms. Today's children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later. The challenge is how to connect decisions in the context of our everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels. The step from watching television news and acting politically seems greater than the transition from being a political actor in a game world to acting politically in the "real world."

Participating in these affinity spaces also has economic implications. We suspect that young people who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greater comfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navigating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions about the quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. These claims are borne out by research conducted by Beck and Wade into the ways that early game play experiences affect subsequent work habits and professional activities. Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to taking risks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others and more willing to revise earlier assumptions.

This focus on the value of participating within the new media culture stands in striking contrast to recent reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation that have bemoaned the amount of time young people spend on "screen media." The Kaiser reports collapse a range of different media consumption and production activities into the general category of "screen time" without reflecting very deeply on the different degrees of social connectivity, creativity, and learning involved. We do not mean to dismiss the very real concerns they raise: that mediated experience may squeeze out time for other learning activities; that contemporary children often lack access to real world play spaces, with adverse health consequences, that adults may inadequately supervise and interact with children about the media they consume (and produce); or concerns about the moral values and commercialization in much contemporary entertainment. Yet, the focus on negative effects of media consumption offers an incomplete picture. These accounts do not appropriately value the skills and knowledge young people are gaining through their involvement with new media, and as a consequence, they may mislead us about the roles teachers and parents should play in helping children learn and grow.

"The Only Medium That Can Make You Blush in the Dark": Learning About Radio

"There are things about not being able to see someone who is talking that somehow gives you a much more direct link to that person than if you see their face. There's an awful lot of emotion conveyed in their voice and there's an awful lot of their personality conveyed in their voice. There's the obvious thing that you are able to create your own pictures in your head. It's also a lot more intimate. It's like someone is whispering to you in the dark. There was a guy at this radio festival I go to every year called the Third Coast International Audio Festival. One thing he said was radio was the only medium that can make you blush in the dark. You have to think about it for a moment but yeah, you can't read in the dark, you can't watch TV in the dark because it's emitting its own light, and it's true. It's like being at a slumber party all the time. It's really wonderful."

-- NPR reporter Sean Cole

Sean Cole is an award winning radio reporter, working out of WBUR in Boston, and producing content for such shows as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, and This American Life. He is also the subject of one of the exemplars we have produced as part of the MacArthur-funded Project NML. Previous entries here have described some of our goals for this project -- to expose young people to the choices that get made in the production of various forms of media, to provide them with role-models of what it might be like to create and distribute work in those media, to provide educators -- in school and out -- with a vocabulary for talking about and assessing student work within those media.

This profile of Sean Cole was produced by Comparative Media Studies graduate student Orit Kuritsky with assistance from CMS graduate student Amulya Gopalakrishnan. Kuritsky, herself, is an experienced media producer, having worked developing new formats, scripting and editing for children's television in her native Israel and in radio production here in the United States, She moved from intern into a producer position on The Connectiona syndicated talk show that aired from WBUR Boston before returning to graduate school. She has also been part of a team of our graduate students which has been working with the Terrascope Program in the Earth Sciences department at MIT to help scientist learn to communicate their ideas through radio. The students focused their energies this year on the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Chile in 1960 – the largest one ever documented. The students went to Chile during spring break to do interviews and collect sounds which would eventually be edited into a 23 minute piece dealing, as they put it, with “ecological, cultural and personal survival during a devastating earthquake and tsunami”. The piece aired on WMBR and is also available on the public radio exchange

In a recent e-mail, Kuritsky explained to me some of the factors that went into her choice of Cole as an exemplar subject:

I love to listen to him on the radio. His quirkiness, combined with genuine curiosity and wit, generate great radio pieces. And I'm not alone. He is regarded as one of the most interesting and unique voices in the world of public radio. He is a very warm, attitude-less person. When I was new at the station, besides simply being nice, he kept telling me that he also started as an intern, and that it took time for him to get a permanent position, all things I needed to hear at the time. I think this unassuming attitude, combined with willingness to give advice, translates well on the screen. Sean is technically savvy. Many highly regarded public radio reporters still send interview, narration and ambiance clips to their respective headquarters, where professional editors/engineers lace their pieces together. Sean insists on doing it himself. He is also active in online communities of radio enthusiasts (like transom and prx, commenting on othersÂ’ works and offering advice). In these regards, Sean represents where public radio is heading, or at least one among contradicting directions; younger, more personal, more participatory, more diverse.

Here, Kuritsky collaborated closely with Cole to help students develop a better understanding of what goes into the production of a segment for Morning Edition from its conceptualization and planning, through the collection of interviews and environmental sounds, the logging and selection of sounds, the scripting and editing process, and the final product. Like the Nick Bertozzi profile I showed here recently, this series of short digital films lays out the choices which shape the production process at every step along the way, offering very good professional advice to would be radio producers. Indeed, this advice seems particularly timely given the revival of interest in recorded sound production brought about by the emergence of podcasting.

Throughout the segment, Cole is passionate about radio as a medium -- as my opening quote above suggests -- and very attentive to the ways it differs from other ways of presenting the same material:

In print, you write a story and pepper it with quotes. In radio, the tape is everything. The tape is the structure of the story. It is the architecture, it's the skeleton of the story and the script is the muscle and sinew around it.

As students begin to watch these tapes of producers working in different media, we hope they will learn to think ethnographically. We want students to focus not just on what people are saying but how they say it. So, in the case of Sean Cole, part of the fascination is the ways that the kinds of metaphors which characterize NPR style emerge spontaneously throughout his interview. He speaks in the segment about the need to construct a conversational style for radio which is nevertheless concise, accurate, and evocative. Watching him talk in this extended interview, one can see how he has internalized this style and how it becomes a natural part of the way he engages with people around him.

Cole is very interested in getting youth not only to listen closely to the mix of sonic elements which constitute a radio segment but also to listen closely to their own physical surroundings. He talks about how radio producers seek to capture the characteristic sounds of a particular location -- whether it is the clacking of needles at a knitting convention or the burbling street noises which he acknowledges are something of a cliché in public radio work. This emphasis on hearing one's environment is consistent with the approach which Kuritsky had taken with the students in her own radio class:

We spent a lot of time in class listening to a variety of radio pieces and talking about them. It was striking at first to discover that the students are really not familiar with the medium (except as a vehicle for music), and have a very small vocabulary in their conceptual tool boxes to discuss it. This changed quickly as they listened to more pieces and became more sensitive to the elements of radio stories, how they work together, and how they react to them. Besides listening, students learned by doing; they created their own radio pieces, simple ones at first, and more complicated ones as final projects. (In order to do that, they had to master recording techniques and editing software, as well as develop their skills as interviewers and writers)

Throughout the series, we want very much to show the professional contexts in which these media artists produce their work, especially stressing forms of collaboration within the workplace. We feel schools put too much emphasis on individual creative expression and not enough on the ways people often work together to insure the production and distribution of art. Here's what Kuritsky had to say about her goals in depicting WBUR:

Despite the fact that Sean is very much self sufficient in his daily work it was important for me to portray him in context, banter from his boss included. (see chapter 9 “collaboration”.) It takes a certain personality, as well as certain socio-economic conditions for creative people to posit themselves as ‘artists’. Many people still need to work for organizations to make a living, and express, their creative skills. Working in organizations does not mean lack of creative freedom, but it certainly entails some give and take, which is reflected in this chapter and others.

Cole is a gifted storyteller, as the people who work with him are quick to tell us here, and this segment explodes with fascinating narratives about his experiences in the field. The primary focus is on a basic story in which he follows the evacuation route out of Boston being recommended by local government officials but along the way he also shares with us stories about Sherlock Holmes fans, about a young man who discovers the recycling of musical themes by Nickleback, and a range of other assignments on which he worked.

The goal of this project, however, is not simply to provide technical instruction to help young people become better media makers or to prepare them for professions in the media industry. We also want to heighten their awareness of the ethical issues which media makers face as they go about their work. We are especially proud of segment 8 in this series which deals with the choices Cole make in producing this segment: in particular, he has to think about the best way to preserve the original context and meaning of his interviewee's remarks, even as radio requires a ruthless pairing down of material. He encounters a situation where he could make a policeman he interviewed look foolish and has to decide the best way to preserve what the man was trying to communicate. Cole speaks forcefully about the responsibilities which reporters have to their subjects and the various professional procedures they follow in order to maintain the integrity and fairness of what they produce. This attention to journalistic ethics seems especially urgent at a time when so many young people are generating media through blogs or home pages or LJ entries without much oversight by adults. It is also urgently needed at a time when many young people are increasingly cynical about all forms of journalism, drawing limited distinction between the partisanship that often charges the blogosphere and more traditional forms of journalism. Cole makes it clear that all journalism involves making choices about how to represent what one has observed, that these choices are made by human beings who make mistakes, and that these choices have an impact on the people who they are representing through their work.

Much media literacy work has historically been concerned about the effects of media on the people who consume it. If I had my way, we would recenter those questions from media effects to media ethics, getting students to think through the choices they make as they generate and circulate their own media and the consequences of those choices on other people. Many of the same issues would resurface in such an approach but they would have greater immediacy as young people were actively involved in making choices about the kinds of media they are producing.

From a "Must Culture" to a "Can Culture": Legos and Lead Users

Joel Greenberg from the Austin-based GSD&M advertising firm is one of the fascinating people I am collaborating with on the Convergence Culture Consortium. Greenberg is a true believer in the collaborationist model I describe in my book and discussed here a while back. He's been putting together a series of podcasts called Friends Talking which interview some of the key thinkers in and out of industry on topics such as viral marketing, user-generated content, and community-based innovation. Greenberg brings in guests like The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Got Game's John Beck, Linden Lab's Philip Rosendale, and others, sits down with them for a substantive conversation about cutting edge issues, and then runs the entire conversation via his podcast . In the most recent installment, Greenberg focuses attention on the concept of lead users and applies it to examine the development of the new Lego Mindstorms NXT product which is being released in time for Christmas. Lead user innovation is a term most closely associated with my MIT colleague, Eric Von Hippel, who wrote a book, Democratizing Innovation, which should be better known among media scholars than it has been. Von Hippel's focus is innovation in manufacturing -- how companies are tapping insights from their consumers to produce more effective products -- but what he says has many implications for the kinds of fan communities that emerge around popular culture. Indeed, I learned of Von Hippel's work -- not through hallway conversations at MIT but because Robert Kozinets combined Von Hippel's work in management science and my work in fan studies to talk about consumerism around Star Trek in his dissertation.

Basically, Von Hippel is arguing that companies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users -- these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.

Inspired by an article in Wired, Greenberg sought out contact with some of the executives at Lego who are working on the new Mindstorms products. (Many will recall that the original insights that generated the Mindstorm series came from MIT Media Lab professor Seymour Papert, though adapted to the needs of the mass market. These tool kits which allow kids to do simple programming and build and control their own robots have been embraced in schools around the world.) When it came time to create the next product in the Mindstorm series, Lego pulled together some of the most innovative users of its products and incorporated them fully in the design process.

Attending a national conference and robotics competition in Austin, Greenberg was able to interview Soren Lund, the man Lego put in charge of the initiative and Ray Almgren, one of National Instruments' VP's who had worked closely with Lego to adapt their Labview software as the programming environment for Mindstorms. Lund speaks about the value of linking the "must culture" of a major corporation with the "can culture" which is emerging from the hobbyist and lead users within the networked community surrounding their products:

In a company, and this goes for pretty much every company, you have a must culture. That means, if I am your boss, I can tell you I want you to do this and that and maybe you are not really into it or maybe you have other priorities but as your boss, I can say you must do this. And if you say No, you're fired, right? Any company culture is a must culture, a must organization. You must do what I tell you to do. You can put it in a nicer way but that's how it works. With a community, it is a can organization. They can decide to do something. They can decide not to. You can't say to the guys in the community -- now you must help us in doing this and now you must.. Guess what, I'm out of here. I can't fire you because you are not part of the company. So, that is what is so valuable because they can keep pushing. They don't come up with what they think the average user needs or wants. They say as a member of the community what they want. I want it to do this. I want it to do that. I don't care about the rest. It's me. So you get honest and candid feedback from these guys focused only on what they are looking for and how it can be the best tool they can ever have. And they keep pushing. We've had interviews where we say thank you for the input on that topic but we must move on and the community has said no. We want this and they keep pushing....

For these guys, it has nothing to do with money. Their passion is building Mindstorms robots out of Lego bricks, programming them, hacking them, all of that stuff. so this is their favorite Hobby. For them, it doesn't get any better. Suddenly I can influence the product I like to work with. I may have my little fingers there on some of the development....then of course afterwards there is recognition among peers in the community.

What Lund has to say about Lego echoes what I report in Convergence Culture about the games industries. Will Wright, for example, told me that the game companies are now essentially competing to see which one can attract and sustain the most creative community since user-based innovation is the key to keeping a games franchise fresh and interesting over the long haul.

This is still so different from the relationship most television production units have with their fans, yet if they had more regular contact with their fans, they might learn to anticipate audience tastes and interests, producing episodes which better reflected the themes and characters that drive the community's passions towards a particular series. For example, in the mid-1980s, my work on fan cultures was showing me that fans were pushing hard for a more serialized approach to television narrative: they were reading even the most episodic series in terms of story arcs and program history. My work on Twin Peaks fans was showing that online communities would support much greater narrative complexity than current television was offering. And my work on fan video producers was showing that people wanted simple tools which would allow them to sample and remix television content as well as platforms by which they could share what they produced with the general public. It has taken a while for the rest of the viewing audience to catch up with where the fan community was at more than fifteen years ago but fan culture in the late 1980s looks very much like the television culture of today. What we are now calling Web 2.0 is simply fan culture without the stigma.

That said, the interview keeps circling back around what is the real sticking point in the conversation about lead user innovation: if consumers are helping to generate the intellectual property and helping to market the product, shouldn't they receive some economic return on their participation? Lund says No -- that this would fundamentally change their relationship to the company, turning everything back to work for hire and returning it to the "must culture" that shapes corporate life. Yet, skeptics might note that user-generated content taken to its logical extreme would result in cutbacks in the creative labor market as experienced professionals are displaced by grassroots volunteers. Lund is correct to depict lead users as having a strong desire to influence the decisions made by the companies that make the products they use and admire -- whether physical products like programmable bricks or cultural products like television shows. At the moment, they are grateful that people will simply listen to them and take their ideas seriously, especially given the history of not just neglect but open hostility to these grassroots communities. Yet, at what point, does this collaboration become exploitation? This is a core question all of us need to think through as we move towards a more collaborative and participatory culture.

Announcing: The Futures of Entertainment Conference

The Comparative Media Studies Program is proud to announce an exciting forthcoming conference, The Futures of Entertainment, to be held at MIT on Nov. 17 and 18. The event is designed to bring together leading thinkers from across the entertainment industry to speak about core issues around media convergence, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, and participatory culture. Speakers confirmed so far include The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Flickr's Caterina Fake, DC Comic's Paul Levitz, Warner Brother's Diane Nelson, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, social networking researcher danah boyd, television scholar Jason Mittell, and many others, including representatives from MTV, Cartoon Network, Bioware, and other leading companies in this space. The event is free and open to the public but we ask that you preregister since seating will be limited. The event is being hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's a more detailed description of the themes for the scheduled panels:

Television Futures

New distribution methods, new revenue strategies and changing modes of audience engagement are transforming how television works. Off- and post-broadcast markets make 'old' television valuable as a continuing source of income and suggest new ways to reach viewers. Digital video recorders threaten the 30-second commercial but offer the possibility of more detailed information about audience members. Some television producers may reach out to consumers directly rather than going through the networks and networks are using online distribution to generate buzz about new shows before they reach the air. Creative responses to these challenges are re-writing how we understand what was once just the box in the corner.

User-Generated Content

Media culture is becoming more participatory, rewriting the relations between media producers and consumers. New tools and distribution platforms, a changing cultural ethos, and innovative corporate approaches to user-generated content are turning viewers into active participants. Innovation may occur at the grassroots level yet influence decisions made within corporate media. Yet, are media companies ready for the grassroots creativity they are unleashing? What challenges does greater user-participation pose to both producers and audiences? What corporate policies enable or retard the growth of user-generated content?

Transmedia Properties

The cultural logic of convergence lends itself to a flow of narratives, characters, and worlds across media platforms. Moving beyond older models based on liscensed ancillary products, transmedia extensions are now seen as expanding the opportunities for storytelling, enabling new kinds of entertainment experiences, building up secondary characters or backstory. Transmedia extension may also create alternative openings for different market segments and enable more extensive contact with brands. The great potential of transmediation is to deepen audience engagement, but this requires greater awareness of the specific benefits of working within different platforms. How are media companies organizing the development of transmedia properties? How are storytellers taking advantage of the "expanded canvas" such an approach offers? How do transmedia strategies impact the new integration between brands and entertainment properties? What new expectations do transmedia properties place on consumers?

Fan Cultures

Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before. Some have argued that the practices of web 2.0 are really those of fan culture without the stigma. Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries. Fan affinity is being seized as a form of grassroots marketing, representing the bleeding edge of brand and property commitment. The sophistication of fan-created products rivals the professional products they honor, sometimes keeping defunct properties alive long after their shelf life might otherwise have expired. How is the increasing importance of fan behavior re-writing the media landscape? What kinds of accountability should media companies have to their most committed consumers? What kinds of value do fans create through their activities? What are the sources of tension that still exist between media producers, advertisers, and fans?

Not the Real World Anymore

Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of text-based Internet communities, online worlds represent new sites for considering questions of community and connectivity. Marked by user- creativity, online worlds balance, sometimes precariously, the rights of users with the rights of sponsoring organizations. As we move closer to the cyberpunk vision of a wholly parallel 'metaverse', questions of power, community, and property are coming to the fore.

More information is forthcoming but for some provisional information and to register for the event, check out this website. I hope to see many readers of the blog at this event which promises a front line perspective on many of the trends I discuss in the books.

For Those Who Live in Boston...

MIT COMMUNICATIONS FORUM Why Newspapers Matter

Thursday, October 5, 5-7 pm, Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab

Jerome Armstrong (Crashing the Gate), Pablo Boczkowski (Digitizing the News), Danta

Chinni (Project for Excellence in Journalism), David Thorburn, (MIT)

Working journalists, media critics and digital visionaries discuss the ongoing transformation and apparent decline of American newspapers. Topics to be addressed: the aging of the newspaper reader, the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, the fate of local news and the local newspaper, news and information in the networked future.

This is the third in a series of forums that asks Will Newspapers Survive? Also in the

series: The Emergence of Citizens' Media (Sept. 19), News, Information and the Wealth of Networks (Sept. 21).

Series co-sponsor: Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation

Forums are free and open to the public.

More information: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum

A reception in the lower atrium of the Media Lab follows the forum.

Multiplatform Entertainment: A View From China

Last week, I posted about the rapid speed with which television content has moved into new channels of distribution and the degree to which the American public seems to have embraced the ideal of rerun on demand, television for download, call it what you will. One of the key lessons of media studies is that the same technology may get adopted in different ways and at different speeds in different cultures around the world. This is one of the real value of taking a global perspective on media change. My post inspired one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students, Rena Huang, to post some thoughts on her blog about how this same process is playing itself out in China and I asked her if I could repost these remarks here. Huang is a second year Masters student who is doing a thesis on the growth of the Chinese animation industry and is working with CMS faculty memberJing Wang, the Chair of the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, to construct a digital archive of Chinese animation in collaboration with the Beijing Film Academy. She was also part of the team from our Convergence Culture Consortium who participated in Project Good Luck this summer helping to document mobile culture in China. For those who haven't checked that site in a bit, they are still uploading pictures and interviews from the trip, including an interesting exchange with the Back Dorm Boys, the Chinese students who became famous for their lip-sincing video at You-Tube.

The following was written by Rena Huang:

Henry's "television goes multiplatform" interests me a lot since when I was back in China for the summer, I heard a lot of talks about and saw some real happenings of TV on other platforms, but not quite the same kind of platform as described in Henry's article. There are less downloading (the legal kind) of TV programs in China for various reasons. The broadcasting system, which features an overabundance of similar TV channels and a relative shortage of original content, has made frequent program rerun on different channels a common practice. One who misses his or her favorite episodes can soon catch it up on other channels. I couldn't believe that during the summer, the Westward Journey series (which was premiered 20 years ago and I really love it), is being aired to audiences old and new, on at least ten different channels. It keeps you safe in the competition to show what others are showing if you don't have better things to show.

Much of the talks I heard about alternative forms of TV-watching came from the corporate and the government. The idea of watching TV on various mobile devices is being infused to the public with greater efforts.

Watching TV on your cell phone is one way to do it. Most people are aware of and are exciting about 3G technology, when they don't yet have to worry about their 3G phone bills. But the corporate goes the easier way. Video transmission technology that is being developed and deployed for mobile receiver in China is mainly the digital multimedia broadcasting mode, that is, to broadcast through terrestrial or satellite broadcasting system. This is what Japan and South Korea are employing in their mobile TV service. But it's not happening in the US, since unlike Europe and other parts of the world, the US has failed to allocate the two kinds of radio bands that are required for this kind of transmission. With this type of relatively low-cost technology, people can watch TV on mobiles devices such as cell phone, PDA, mobile TV, and so on, for FREE, which is one major reason why we're so optimistic about the future of mobile TV-watching in China.

If massive television watching on personal mobile devices such as a cell phone is still a talk, then watching TV on communal mobile devices is already an everyday experience for many urban Chinese. It's the mobile television on public transportation. Beijing All Media and Culture Group (BAMC), who owns Beijing Television and Beijing People Broadcasting Station, set up a mobile television company and started trial broadcasting in May 2004 on 1000 Beijing buses. As of this writing, they've laid 16,000 TV sets on 5000 buses, 5000 taxies, 1,000 government vehicles and 4 subway cars to air programs to 4.5 million audiences per day, and are planning more in more public spaces.

A direct incentive behind the Chinese government's support and advocate for this initiative is the 29th Olympics to be held in Beijing in 2008. "Watch the games while you are on the go" is the picture that has been unfolded in front of people for them to grab. It is planned that, by year 2008, mobile TV broadcasting will be available across the country for people to watch on their cell phones. But the government, of course, looks way beyond 2008. The infrastructure that remains after the game will put China well ahead of others in the development and application of such technology. I was so unused to the fact that I didn't need to worry about my cell phone signals any more when I was in Beijing, no matter how deep I was under the ground. Every corner of the city is covered with cell phone signals, and will be covered with TV signals soon.

But you may wonder now, what do people watch on these mobile media. As for BAMC, a major technology, as well as content, provider in Beijing area, they have 17 hours programs (including repeats) to show to bus passengers a day, some licensed, some home-made. These programs are mainly on entertainment, life style and travel, the fast food, grab 'n go type. One interesting portion of the show is the live broadcast of traffic situation in the city which taps into the traffic cameras set up by the police on major roads. Any accident happened on the road will be released to the audience within three minutes. And of course, there are commercials and other sort of weird things. Once I noticed there was an interactive game playing on the TV screen while I was sitting on the bus. People called in to play a quick game using their phones. It costs 1.5 yuan per minute for the call, and you can win gifts. I was amazed to see that every 1 out 3 or 4 players won a big award of 80 or 120 yuan. How could the host make money? "You believe that those are real people winning? The TV is just playing tricks and trying to hook callers innocent like you!" my husband laughed at me.

Yes, that was stupid of me believing that you can actually make a fortune by playing games with mobile TV. It's true that, unlike in the US where people download and watch what they demand, here we don't have much control over where we would like to watch, nor what we can watch. A Beijing bus commuter actually went so far as to sue the bus company for "imposing TV commercials" on him when he doesn't want to see them. And he lost the lawsuit of course, since "there is no law saying that buses are not allowed to carry advertisement". He can go on to complain with the Administration of Environment, the judge suggested, if he feels bothered by the noise made by the bus TV. I don't think he can win that complaint either, 'cause for me at least, the audio of the bus TV is hardly recognizable on noisy roads and crowded buses of Beijing.