Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nine, Part One): Derek Kompare and Cynthia Walker

CW: Hi, I'm Cynthia Walker. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, where I teach a variety of courses including journalism, public relations, media literacy, film history, broadcast studies and scriptwriting. I have also been a professional journalist and critic for 35 years and currently, I cover professional regional theater for The Home News Tribune, a daily newspaper in Central New Jersey. I earned my MA in Media Studies from the New School in New York City, way back in the 1980s when such programs were few and far between, and received my Ph.D. in Communication from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) at Rutgers University. Before coming to St. Peter's, I served as assistant director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers, designing and piloting media education curriculum and professional development courses for middle schools in New Jersey.

I discovered media fandom in the mid-1980s, at a time when folks were just moving away from mimeographed newsletters to printed zines. I had loved the 1960s spy series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., since I first watched it at age 11. (You can find my essay on that experience here so I was excited to attend a Creation Con at which Robert Vaughn was a guest star in order to see him in person. There, I met Nan, who eventually became my good friend and fanfiction collaborator. She was the one who told me about fanzines and pointed me toward U.N.C.L.E. fandom. I began writing a collection of short stories and novels based on U.N.C.L.E. which eventually became a popular long-running consistent universe that's still being published and expanded, both in print zines and on the net. The rest, as they say, is history.

I guess because I've straddled boundaries and have found myself in both the creative/producer and audience positions, sometimes even simultaneously, I've always been fascinated by the interaction between various groups in the media process. My Ph.D. dissertation, A Dialogic Approach to Creativity in Mass Communication proposed a collaborative model of mass communication, using The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as a case study. What I tried to demonstrate through the model and a systematic unpacking of MFU as a cultural site, was my view that the ultimate meaning of a cultural text (re-conceptualized as a "work/text") is the result of the many dialogues that occur, often simultaneously, between and among the various collective parties involved in the mass communication process.

DK: I'm Derek Kompare, assistant professor of Cinema-Television in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. I've taught courses in recent years in media and culture, television history, television criticism, media globalization, and specific film and television genres (focusing on science fiction, and, this fall, crime television). I did my graduate study in the Comm Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s, where I was trained in a variety of theoretical approaches (cultural studies, feminism, formalist film theory, political economy, post-structuralism) and research methods (primarily historiography and textual analysis).

Because of this range of theory and method, I've always been most interested in studying practices and processes of what could loosely be called "mediation," i.e., how particular media forms develop in particular historical, cultural, and industrial contexts. My 1999 dissertation traced the genesis of a particularly taken-for-granted form, the TV rerun, as an important vehicle for industrial exploitation and cultural significance in the late 20th century. In revising it for my book Rerun Nation (2005), I expanded its range backwards and forwards, connecting the development of copyright in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the formation of the DVD box set in the 21st. This experience reinforced for me how every cultural form has, to poach some Foucault, archaeologies of discourses, weaving throughout time and space. In other words, every cultural form comes from multiple, and often contentious, sources of power and signification.

I'm currently researching "television authorship" as a specific cultural form with its own "archaeologies." I don't wish to resurrect auteurism, but rather probe how versions of auteurist discourses have shaped television culture, and the television industry, over the past thirty years. Who gets to be a "television author"? What power, if any, does that category wield? How is it crafted and challenged over time and through different contexts?

This interest has led me back to where I came from, I suppose: fandom. Not fan studies, fandom. I had always been fascinated with film, TV, and genre fiction growing up, and pretty solidly self-identified as a "fan" around the age of 14. Indeed, as the intro to Rerun Nation makes clear, I was fascinated by TV reruns from even before then. My ur-texts in this regard are Doctor Who and Star Trek. Throughout high school and college, I joined organizations, subscribed to newsletters and zines, and attended my first cons. Middle-aged women, primarily, introduced me to the intricacies of fandom (Doctor Who in particular was dominated by women fans in the US at the time), and supplied me with APAs, fanfic (including slash), and fanvids well before I read Textual Poachers in grad school.

Still, although I considered myself a fan, and was actively familiar with several fandoms and forms till the late 90s (recruiting a few people into fandom along the way), I suppose I was never really immersed in it (more of a "wader"). I was an active reader, viewer, and commenter, but never actually wrote fanfic, nor planned cons, nor made it a central part of my life at that time (you can read some of my thoughts about this over on this reply on Kristina Busse's blog). Since then, I've been much more of a "tertiary fan," minimally active on one online forum (Outpost Gallifrey), attending the Gallifrey con in LA off and on, and maintaining contact with some of my original, 1980s fan friends.

The persistence of Doctor Who fandom in the 1990s, and its role in reviving the series on British TV in 2005 (along with the whole academic Buffy hurricane, demise of Star Trek, and unlikely revival of Battlestar Galactica), led me to think more about the conjunction of fans and "professional" modes of creative production. I saw existing models of fan studies as unable to move much beyond a binary construction of "fans" and "producers," that, to me, seemed a relic of a different age of media production and reception (the 1970s and 1980s), and instead approached the problem from the perspective of "mediation," not favoring, or assuming what "fans" and "producers" are, but looking at how those categories are being actively constructed and challenged.

And then Nina posted her response to MIT 5, and I realized I'd been missing (or had taken for granted, perhaps) the different constructions of these categories going on in different corners of fandom, and had been neglecting the issue of gender in particular (at least in fandom; ask me about Amy Sherman-Palladino!). And so now here I am, still hoping to complicate the binary of "fans" and "producers," but more interested in various fannish conceptions of these categories than I was a few months back.

Fans and Producers

CW: Although we're from different cohorts (some of those middle aged women were no doubt my friends), we do have similar backgrounds and interests. Star Trek, Dr. Who and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are some of the oldest fandoms with long, multi-decade histories.

I do most certainly agree that the binary construction of fans and producers doesn't work any more, and my point in using a historic series like MFU as a case study was to show that probably it never did. It's like the old linear sender-message-receiver with a feedback loop that I still see being taught in introductory Communication courses. I don't know if the media process has really changed but certainly our conceptualization of it has.

I prefer to think of a cultural site like MFU as the result of a many creative dialogues between and among many parties (some of whom are collective) and these parties often change places. Thus, any party or parties might find themselves in the role of either writer or reader at any given point in time. Writers become readers and vice versa, just as producers become audiences and vice versa.

Another concept that interests me (and, I suspect, it interests you, too) is how the arrival of the Internet and digital technology is redefining what Josh Meyrowitz called "a sense of place." Fan efforts like fanfiction, machinima, the Star Trek New Voyages and the like on one side and commercial efforts like FanLib on the other seem to be blurring the line ---if there was, indeed, a line to begin with.

DK: I'm certain some of those women were at least known to you. That was one of the things that most impressed me at the time: that there were networks of fans sharing interests, copying zines and vids, hosting parties, and welcoming newbies, all over the world. Fandom continues to have this sense of "fan generations," as a fantastic family lineage, as people and texts and forms and such are continually "passed down" and revised over time.

I have to say as well that, while there certainly were some men in these fandoms (back in the 80s-early 90s), most of the organization, production, and action was done by women. I thus never really got socialized as a "fanboy," at least in the stereotypical, Kevin Smith-is-God sense of the term. It's interesting in this regard to note that Doctor Who fandom in the US has been predominately female, while in the UK it has long been overwhelmingly male (and hegemonically gay at that, at least over the past 15 years or so). It just shows how contexts, while not everything, are certainly pretty damn important.

Men Collect, Women Create?

CW: You mention that most of the organization, production and action was done by women. That was my perception as well. Ten years ago, I did a quantitative study of MFU fandom that I've shared with you. The response rate was very good, and I managed to capture at least a third or more of the entire fandom. There were two main findings. The first was that individual fans appeared to move along a continuum of involvement motivated by two factors: interest in the source text and community. The second finding was not one I expected at that time: that is, that men and women had different fan experiences. They might have the same level of interest in the source text (and in MFU, particularly, that interest was --- and remains ---very high and intense), but they took part in different activities. I know it's become a cliche that men collect, women create, but I must admit, that's exactly what I found. At that time, MFU fandom was about one- third male (I suspect that's still true today, although the percentage may be even a bit higher). The earliest active MFU fans were actually male, but the gender balance began to tip in the mid-to-late 1970s to female fans, who ran the fan organization, wrote, edited and published the first fan stories, organized the occasional cons (although the guys attended in respectable numbers) and eventually, set up and moderated the discussion lists. In our fandom, there is a contingent of prominent male fans who, through various means, acquired most of the actual props and collections of merchandise from the series. One is the author of a behind-the-scenes book, which, after over 20 years, is still in print. But with only one prominent exception and a few dabblers, almost all the fanfiction is written by women.

In addition to focusing on different fan activities, I also discovered that women fans simply had more fan friends ---a lot more. It's unclear whether they were more involved because they had more friends in fandom, or, they had more friends in fandom because they were more involved.

I'm planning to conduct the same study again this year to see what changes there have been in the fandom. I suspect there have been some, but I also expect that these two main findings will hold. Mind you, I don't expect that they necessarily can be generalized across individual fandoms, because each fandom, depending upon many factors including when it came into existence, has a character unique unto itself.

DK: As your U.N.C.L.E. work showed, contexts continually shift around texts, and the cultural life of any artifact is always going to entail different kinds of interests converging and, as you said, having "creative dialogues." In that case, the series has long been maintained by its fans and creators in concert (more or less), especially in lieu of wider distribution. I think every media fandom has these kinds of exchanges, actually, where discourses and categories bounce between and among fans and (for want of a better term) producers. This never happens the same way twice, and many (maybe most) of these exchanges are framed by the economic interests of the parent company (i.e., how can these fans generate some more revenue for us), but there are "dialogues," before, during, and after a series has run.

What some fans call the "source text" doesn't just appear out of the blue, after all, but is already the polysemic result of loads of writing, revising, meetings with executives, casting sessions, "tone meetings," editing sessions, and everything else. And that's just to get a pilot shot, let alone on the schedule. And even at this point, fans may already be being listened to. For example, if Bjo Trimble's first-person account of everyday life on the Star Trek set in 1966 is to be believed, fans were already ensconced into the lifeblood of the series from day one.

CW: Yes, and for that, we have Gene Roddenberry to thank who actively recruited audiences even before Star Trek was on the air. What folks may not realize is that he wasn't the first producer to reach out to active, dedicated audiences. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which pre-dated Trek by two years, inspired an intense reaction by young people, those in high school and college. TV Guide called it "The Cult of Millions" and producer Norman Felton wrote a memo to NBC's vice president of programming that U.N.C.L.E. fans were reacting to the show in a way not quite seen before: "They talk about the program with other fans, and go beyond that: they proselytize, they want to convert non-viewers." There are actually a number of close connections between MFU and Trek. On the creative side, not only had Roddenberry worked for Norman Felton and MFU's other creator, Sam Rolfe, but the two series employed many of the same writers, directors, production crew members and actors. On the fan side, both series drew their first audiences from the science fiction community, and Bjo Trimble, the godmother of Trek fandom and David McDaniel, an SF fan who wrote the most popular pro-published U.N.C.L.E. novels and helped establish MFU fandom's first fan-run organization, were roommates for a time. In both Trek and MFU, the fans and the professional creators established ties to each other fairly early on.

DK: Today this happens as well, but the Internet has produced a new "sense of place," as you put it, in this regard. It's long been stated among online fans how the 'net is like a 24/7 con. It's also a 24/7 pitch session, gossip den, and critics' corner, where boundaries are blurred, and they can't keep you off the Paramount lot (or, metaphorically, playing with the prop room and the actors' trailers). Online, "producers" are the folks on the Lost writing staff who snoop around fan forums under pseudonyms. However, "producers" are also the folks online who start fanfic ezines, organize fanvid production, rally writers and readers, and host fanart shows.

Like you said, the line's not only blurred, it may not have even existed. That said, as the FanLib saga has indicated, some factions of The Powers That Be (TPTB) do want to (re)draw the line, on their terms, turning these dialogues into a purely economic market, with little to no understanding of fandom on its own terms. I will always argue that this isn't even remotely a universal stance of everyone in the Industry, but it is very much the official Party Line of (say) CBS, Disney, or Time Warner: fans are consumers and/or potential suppliers. Note that this is still (STILL!) the dominant construction of "The Fan" in mainstream media, as if to route any kind of creative act right back towards serving the brand.

CW: That reminds me of the story, which Engel repeated in his book, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek of George Lucas asking Roddenberry what to do about all the unauthorized fan activity surrounding Star Wars. Roddenberry said to do nothing, that the fans would make him rich.

DK: Interesting story about Roddenberry and Lucas. Both them and fandom were moving into uncharted waters at the time, so Roddenberry's advice makes sense. Still, it's significant that his advice was about how to "get rich," and that he was right! It would be interesting to analyze how this changed rapidly in the 1980s, as Paramount slowly wrested control of the franchise (and, to an extent, its relationship with its fans) from Roddenberry.

I'm interested in how these uses and conceptions of each category have developed since then, and especially over the past decade or so. How might dialogues between the shifting categories (as opposed to rigid binary) of "fans" and "producers" help move us to another context of creativity and collaboration?

The existence of fandom itself is a major change in this relationship, as "producers" now routinely claim some kind of "fan" credentials. I think this has come about mostly because of the changing status of television in general. People, including ostensible television writers, can admit a much greater affinity and interest in TV per se than they could have done 30 years ago. An interest in TV is more legitimate now than then; a "fannish" interest even more so, depending on the genre. Joss Whedon, to cite the most prominent example, has been the poster child of this phenomenon.

That said, as has come up at other times in these discussions, there's a significant difference between claiming to be a fan, and actually participating in fandom. However, I think this difference shouldn't be measured as much in material as in discursive terms (which always work back around to material terms, I suppose). Terms like "fan," "author," "creator," "artist," "visionary," "punk," "geek," etc. are strategically and tactically deployed by and around particular figures, and for particular audiences. There are major differences between being described as a "fan" in a New York Times interview, at a Santa Monica screenwriting seminar, in a network planning meeting, at a con panel, or in an LJ post (just to name a handful of venues). Each instance attaches a different meaning to the term "fan" (and every other descriptor), working to position the figure and the reader/viewer/audience in different ways.

Moreover, depending on the figure and their contractual obligations, the iterations of "fan" may be tightly policed. For example, the BBC forbids any of the primary production personnel (including cast) on Doctor Who from attending conventions or participating in any fan venue. At the same time, though, series writers like Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman are granted free rein, and have routinely gone to cons and interacted with fans online and in person for years (dating back to when they were "just" fans in the 1980s). To go back a while, even Ron Moore, back when he was just a guy on the TNG staff in 1990, was still able to schmooze with the fans and get geeked up about the narrative and relationship possibilities of the Enterprise-C crew (from "Yesterday's Enterprise").

Still, there's a sense among some fans that these people aren't really fans, and that whenever they claim to be, it's all PR. My response is that while PR is certainly real, it's not an all-purpose screen. Most of these folks do have fannish passions and perspectives; a few of them even share them openly. Granted, these perspectives may not always jibe with yours or mine, and their very definition of fandom might not match your or my experiences (i.e., most of them seem to be stereotypical "fanboys," and none of them seem to be stereotypical "fangirls"). But that's no reason to dismiss everything they do or say as mere blather from TPTB!

Answering Questions From a Snowman: The YouTube Debate and Its Aftermath

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman." -- Mitt Romney

I promised some reflections about the YouTube presidential debate almost a week ago but something has kept getting in the way. I almost decided to forget about it but in the past few days, the issue has resurfaced as the Republican candidates are doing a little dance about who will or will not participate in CNN's planned GOP YouTube debate in September. So far, only two Republican candidates have agreed to participate. I've been having fun challenging folks to guess which ones they are. The answer will be later in this post.

Some had predicted that the use of YouTube in a presidential debate was something of a gimmick or a cross-branding opportunity for CNN and Google. It was certainly both of those, but it may represent something more than that, a shift in the nature of public debates in the campaign process as profound in its way as the emergence of the Town Hall Debate format in the 1990s.

Let's consider the classic debate format where established journalists, sworn to some degree of political neutrality, ask candidates questions. This format has some strengths and some limitations. In theory, the questions asked are well informed because the people asking them are focused full time on following the campaign and the candidates and understand what topics are most likely to establish the contrast between the political figures on the stage. At the same time, the questions asked are likely to reflect an "inside the beltway" perspective -- that is, they reflect the world view of a specific political class which may or may not reflect the full range of issues that the American people want addressed.

The process maintains a certain aura around the political process: celebrity journalists ask questions of celebrity politicians in a world totally sealed off from the everyday experience of the voters. One consequence of this format is that the candidates tend to empty the questioner from the equation. One addresses the question; one ignores the person who asks the question.

This construct sounds more "rational" or "neutral" but it also makes it much easier for the candidate to reframe the question to suit their own purposes. There is no penalty for ignoring the motives behind the question because, in the end, the claim is that there are no motives behind the question. This has in the past gotten some political leaders in trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the famous moment while Michael Dukakis was asked how he would respond if his wife was raped and murdered and he offered a fairly bloodless critique of the death penalty as a matter of public policy. The questioner was trying to get at the human side of his perspective on the issue and he got criticized for being cold and calculating, yet the fact that he ignored the human dimensions of the question was in many ways a product of the presumed "neutrality" of the professional debate format.

In the 1990s, an alternative -- the town hall meeting debate -- emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question -- and why they ask it -- is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective -- the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can't get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses -- Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were "individuals" who "made a difference."

What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying "I feel your pain" a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

Clinton recognized early on the emerging paradigm of narrowcasting, using the town hall meeting in relation to specific audiences on specific cable outlets -- for example, African Americans on the Arsenio Hall show, young voters on MTV, or southern voters on the Nashville Network. In each case, he was able to signal his knowledge of specific issues and respect for specific challenges confronting this constituencies. People today remember Clinton playing the sax on late night television; they forget that it came at the end of almost an hour of thoughtful discussion of race and class in America in the wake of Rodney King and the LA Riots at a time when the mainstream media was only interested in asking him about his sex life. No candidate has ever been as effective at Clinton at responding to the particularities of the town hall meeting format but it has emerged as a standard part of the campaign process ever since and for good reason, because there is both symbolic and substantive importance to how well candidates interact with these diverse constituencies.

There are some core limits to this format. The questions come in a context which is deeply intimidating to non-professionals and thus it preserves an aura surrounding the candidates. Only certain kinds of questions get asked because only certain issues are appropriate to this format. The questions get asked with a certain degree of awe even when the voter is skeptical of the answers they are receiving.

So, this brings us to the YouTube format which seems significant in a number of levels. First, the people asking the questions are speaking from their own homes or from other spaces that they have chosen to embody the issues they want the candidates to address. The language is more informal, the questions are more personal, the tone is less reverent, and the result forces the political candidates to alter their established scripts. (And of course, let's not forget the role which CNN played in curating the set of questions presented. I was prepared to trash CNN for playing it safe but in fact, they chose some of the more provocative submissions here and these videos have emerged at the center of the controversy around the debate.)

here were moments early in the YouTube debate where the candidates were sticking to their sound bytes and talking points, despite the very different tone and context of this debate. More than anything else, this called attention to the gap between the ways everyday people speak and the lofty rhetoric of contemporary politics. What seemed relatively natural in a conversation between professionals felt truly disconnected from the YouTube participants. Then, as the evening went along, we saw the candidates one by one step out tentatively and then more assuredly onto thin ice, trying to find a new language by which to express their issues and to form a new relationship to the voters.

We certainly saw signs of the old townhall meeting format both in the style and tone of some of the more "serious minded" questions and in terms of the ways that the candidates were careful to address the person behind the question -- as in the constant salutes to the servicemen. But something else was also occurring, as when Joe Biden offered his relatively acerbic and unguarded perceptions of the gun lover who called his automatic weapon his "baby."

I was fascinated with the exchange about the minimum wage. One of the viewers asked the candidates whether they could and would live on minimum wage as president. Many of them were quick to agree to these terms -- my hopes that this might become a reality have been shattered by the fact that most of the mainstream media never even reported on this round of questions, focusing instead on the more conventional disagreement between Clinton and Obama about whether they would meet with foreign leaders. Chris Dodd won points for his honest response that he couldn't afford to support two college bound offspring on minimum wage, an answer that brought him closer to the level of the average middle class voter. And Obama carried the round by acknowledging that it would relatively easy for people who had money in the bank (not to mention free food and lodging) to live on mimimum wage and something different if you had no resources to fall back on.

By bringing the cameras into their homes, the voters were forcing the candidates to respond to the contexts in which they live. We saw this occur again and again -- not just the well publicized cases of the social workers in Darfur or the cancer patient who removed her wigs, but in the more subtle ways that we get a glimpse of the domestic spaces in the background of most of the videos. The result was a debate which felt closer to the lived experience of voters, which took on some of the informality, intimacy, and humor one associates with YouTube at its best.

To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of the broadcast came when the candidates were asked to submit their own YouTube style videos. Here, we had a chance to see how the campaigns perceived the properties of this new participatory culture. Some of the candidates did embrace the new political language (notably Chris Dodd and John Edwards, who both had fun with public comments about their hair) or tried for a more down to earth style (as in Hillary Clinton's use of hand lettered and hand flipped signs, which unintentionally mirrored the style of one of the user-generated videos on the same program.) Many of the others simply recycled videos produced for broadcast media which came across as too polished for this new context. And Dennis Kucinich, the man who once brought a visual aid to a radio debate, seemed to confuse YouTube for a late night informercial. Oh, well. He demonstrates yet again that he is a nerd, perhaps even a dork, but not a geek.

All of this brings us to the issue of the snowman which seems to have caused Mitt Romney and many of the conservative pundits so much anxiety. Keep in mind that the snowman animation was used to frame a substantive question about global warming. In this case, then, it wasn't what was being asked but how it was being asked or who was asking it that posed a challenge to establishment sensibilities. The snowman spot was a spoof of the whole process of having the questioner embody the issue and the whole ways in which children as used as foils for political rhetoric, as figures for imagined or dreaded futures for the society at large.

But it also represented a shift away from embodying issues and towards dramatizing them. I was surprised we didn't see more or this -- more use of video montages or projected images in the background, illustrating the topics in a way that went beyond what could be done by a live person standing in an auditorium during a live debate. I suspect we will see more such videos in future debates because they show the full potential of this new format. Now, keep in mind that political leaders have never had any problem dramatizing issues during their own campaign advertisements -- even the use of personification or animation would not be that unusual in the history of political advertisements. Such images have long been seen as appropriate ways for campaigns to address voters, so why should they be seen as inappropriate as a means of voters to question candidates?

From the start, it had been predicted that Democrats would fare better in this new format than Republicans, just as historically they have fared better in the town hall meeting format. This format is consistent with the populist messages that are adopted by many Democratic politicians and the format itself seems to embody a particular conception of America which emerges from Identity politics (though, as my example of the way Reagan used something similar to focus on individual rather than governmental response, suggests that this is simply one of many ways that this format might be framed). So, is it any surprise that Romney and other GOP candidates are developing cold feet about appearing in this much more unpredictable format.

Not surprisingly, while Romney and Guiliani have been pulling back, McCain is pushing ahead. This approach is closer to the old "Straight Talk Express" bus that he used 8 years ago than anything he had embraced in this campaign cycle. Right now, the guy needs a miracle just to stay in a race and perhaps being willing to engage with the public via new media may represent the best way to set himself apart from the other frontrunners. The other GOP candidate embracing the format is Ron Paul, the former Libertarian Party candidate, and the Republican who so far seems to be have a much stronger base of support online than off, in part because the web offers more traction for low budget campaigns and anti-establishment figures.

Within the GOP, the debate about YouTube debates is shaping into a referendum about the role of web 2.0 in the political process. Here's how Time sums up the issues:

Patrick Ruffini, a G.O.P. online political strategist, wrote on his blog: "It's stuff like this that will set the G.O.P. back an election cycle or more on the Internet." Democratic consultants are rubbing their hands together at being able to portray their general election rivals as being -- as one put it to me -- "afraid of snowmen" or simply ignorant of techonologies that many Americans use on a daily basis. Indeed, Governor Romney today, in the context of evincing concern over Internet predators, supported that suspicion: "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000," he said, mistaking the debate co-sponsor for the social network MySpace, which has recently done a purge of sex offenders from its rolls.

Hmmm. MySpace, YouTube, what's the difference?

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series from Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad). In the first section, she described the context in which Russian-language fandom operates including consideration of issues of intellectual property, translation, and the relationship of fandom to other changes in Russian culture in the post-Cold War era. In this next section, she deals directly with various forms of fan creative expression and the picture she paints shows both strong parallels to western fan culture but also significant differences. For those of you who are just coming to the blog through links on one or another Harry Potter fan site, you might be interested to check out my own thoughts about Harry Potter fan culture from earlier this summer.

"Professor Snape's Dungeons"

Translation was also one of the channels for fan fiction to find its way into Russian Harry Potter fandom: in 2001 fandom was mostly discussing the available four novels and their Russian versions, but by 2002 it already was busy reading at least two competing translations of Cassandra Claire's then work in progress, The Draco Trilogy. 'People's Translation' were among the first sites to open a fan fiction section, which hosted both translated fic and the infamous Harry Potter and Phoenix from the Order - written by the author named Constance Ice, this work is considered to be the first honest-to-Merlin Harry Potter fan fiction written in the Russian language (yet some claim that this title belongs to Harry Potter and the Order of the Broom, a parody fic posted by an anonymous author at Harry Potter Research Institute).

Approximately at the same time, a number of Snape fans joined efforts and started an on-line role playing game, which went on for a number of years at a site called 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'. The game's central character, Severus Snape - a brooding, Byronic hero - was mostly busy saving the world at various points in history and all damsels in distress he could find along the way. In the end, Professor Snape (or S.S., as he is referred to throughout the game) 'rebuilds the Tower of Babylon and finds Light'. This massive on-line project featured not only the text itself, but also some skillful artwork, analytical materials and carefully-collected soundtrack. The project also clearly outgrew itself: in 2003 the game, complete with sounds and fanart, was privately published as a set of 3 multimedia disks, and 2005 marked the appearance of a very impressive velvet-bound volume, Liber Lux et Tenebrae.

The picture below shows the book (part I) in its dust cover, and a random artwork spread; a curious reader will also make out the characters' names, which, for some reason, were left in English.

There are three reasons I am mentioning this project here: firstly, it included most of the fandom's big names of then (and of now); secondly, it set another mark as far as the tradition of publishing fan fiction is concerned; and thirdly, long before the appearance of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince it established a very specific interpretation of the character of Severus Snape - the one that would gradually become all but canonic for a multitude of Russian Snape fans, even though they might have never heard of 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'.

The Shock of Slash

By 2003 fandom was already flourishing: it thrived on sites and forums; it was writing and translating fan fiction; it had its own version of the infamous Restricted Section; and it had discovered slash. As many other fannish concepts, the concept of slash came as is: through reading and translating of Western fan fiction and analytical materials. The new genre immediately acquired both dedicated followers and avid haters, and while it would be wrong to say that it split fandom in two, it did cause some distress along the way. Some people never caught up, and the general level of intolerance to slash and queer readings of the source text is still higher in Russian-language fandom than in English-language one. Intolerance in fandom comes from intolerance in society: until 1991, homosexuality had been a criminal offence; no wonder many still consider 'queer' offensive, the ban might have been lifted, but little has been done to promote tolerance and understanding. Slash in Russia is not taken for granted and in most cases requires a very open mind set from its readers, but in the end of the day, it does help to change personal attitude to queer people outside fandom, thus performing this huge educational function that might not be central to this genre as it is perceived by English-speaking fans.

It was not only slash that came into Russian-language fandom through translating fan fiction and participating in English-language communities: most of the terms (in/out of character, Mary Sue, hurt/comfort, etc.), popular pairings and pairing names (Pumpkin Pie; Snape/Hermione; Harry/Draco), clichés and ideas were also borrowed almost instantaneously. In October 2003, in the steps of Nimbus 2003, the first-ever Harry Potter fancon, the Institute of European Cultures at the Russian State Humanitarian University organized an unofficial academic Harry Potter event for adults, entitled Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the Philosopher's Chamber. No more than forty people gathered for the conference, most of them were presenters, only three people were presenting on the issues of fandom (the rest were deconstructing canon) and only two were not from Moscow. A very subdued and, at the same time, fascinating event, it still remains the only Harry Potter conference of its kind ever held in Russia. This past spring a number of Snape fans did gather in St. Petersburg to discuss their favorite character and present some few papers on the subject, but the event was not exactly advertised or open.

Russians And Global Fan Culture

While fan fiction and translation are thriving, and even vidding has recently become very popular, fanart is virtually non-existent in the Russian Harry Potter fandom. Those Russian-language artists who create something of interest prefer to participate in English-language communities for want of greater audience and appreciation: they may speak Russian or be physically located in Russia, but in reality they do not belong to this particular national fandom. Fans, on the other hand, troll foreign sites and communities for art they like and therefore do not really have the need for fanart that is produced 'domestically'. Since not everybody can speak English and thus navigate a foreign fanart site, since 'art belongs to people' and 'everything belongs to everybody on the Internet anyways', until very recently it has been a common practice to share your findings with your part of fandom; normally, the sharing would take the form of mass hotlinking, which brought the wrath of several well-known foreign artists on Russian fandom in general.

Russian fans are gradually catching up with essential netiquette, but sometimes still forget to ask when taking a fan fic for translation, for example: the most recent scandal involving translated fan fiction and Russian fans revolved around the 'table of proposed translations' that somebody had fished out off fanrus.com forums. A more detailed account of the run-in can be found here. It is fascinating how quickly Western fandom assumes the position of copyright holders whose rights have been violated and starts issuing C&D disclaimers in Russian against possible offenders. On the other side of the conflict, many of community moderators and site owners who cater to Russian-language fandom try to enforce the ask-first-translate-later and no-hotlinking rules to the best of their ability, and explain as clearly that 'grassroots communism' does not really apply to the way fandom operates on-line. In general, however, Russian fans still exercise more collective ownership towards the texts they are fannish about - be it canon or fan fiction: much as translation is a Pavlovian reaction to any text in foreign language (for a variety of reasons, including the language teaching methods practiced in Russia), taking and sharing with their own is a similar type of reaction to any text or piece of art that we are fascinated with; and in this respect translation is central to Russian fandom as it is the ultimate act of possession and making something one's own, domesticating it.

Potter-Mouthed Jokes

So far, the only popular fannish practice in Russian fandom that falls outside the pattern of translating, role-playing, or borrowing is telling various jokes about characters from canon: a practice that has deep historical roots, since jokes have always been an integral part of people's popular narrative in this country, and there is hardly a historical figure, popular character, or politician who hasn't made it into joke. In fact, it is considered that one has not become truly popular until there are jokes made about them. One of such popular Potter-related jokes takes on the connection between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter:

"Frodo throws The One Ring into the flames. He exhales deeply and turns to go, as a bespectacled boy on a broomstick sweeps by, clutching something in his fist. 'Got' ya!' shouts Harry Potter with glee."

Another joke explores the complex relationship in the house of Malfoys, raising the theme of infidelity:

"'Narcissa, a couple of words'

'Yes, Lucius?'

'Avada Kedavra!'"

There are countless of other jokes: some original, some of them versions of older jokes with names substituted to fit new canon, some of them popularized sentences from various collections of quotes from badfics. Every fan fiction site nowadays hosts a collection of Potter-related jokes, those jokes are frequently exchanged between fans both on- and off-line constitute a powerful comic relief device: a number of Book Seven jokes are already circulating among the disappointed fans.

Parody is another 'specialty' of the Russian Harry Potter fandom and industry. In fan fiction, 'crack fics' (humorous stories exploring this or that fannish cliché) are a more common occurrence here than there are in the West, and source text parody is not unheard of: by some accounts, it was exactly the parody of the yet unwritten Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that became the first ever fan fiction written in Russian for this fandom. A more curious - and somewhat transcending fandom - case is presented when we look at the Harry Potter parodies that are published professionally in this country. There are several books written in the recent years that position themselves as 'anti-Harry Potter' or 'Harry Potter for Russians', yet there are only two whose authors claim parodies: the Porry Gatter series and Tanya Grotter.

The Strange Case of Tanya Grotter

Although Porry Gatter may not strike just everybody as particularly witty or funny, that it is a parody there can be no doubt; it is Tanya Grotter, first written in 2002 by Dmitry Yemetz and published by EKSMO publishing house that raised serious concerns of J.K. Rowling's representatives both in Russia and abroad. While there are numerous jokes in the text, Tanya Grotter does look more like a re-write, not unlike those by Volkov or Tolstoy: the first two Tanya Grotter books repeat the corresponding volumes of the original Harry Potter series verbatim, only the school of magic is located in Russia and the main character is a Russian girl. ROSMAN publishing house had initiated linguistic expertise of the text, which concluded that Tanya Grotter was a plagiarized version of Harry Potter, yet EKSMO dismissed all allegations, and no domestic legal action taken against them had ever been completed. EKSMO and Yemetz had to stand trial, however, when they made an attempt to translate the book and sell it abroad. The 2003 trial in the Netherlands ruled copyright infringement and banned the book from being sold outside Russia. Later Tanya Grotter books bore little resemblance to the original series, Yemetz continued in this stead for a couple of more years and eventually started a new series about a different character.

The story of Tanya Grotter doesn't end here: During the years this book has acquired a small fandom of its own - in parts, it overlaps with Harry Potter fandom (in a sense that a fan of Tanya Grotter is almost always a fan of Harry Potter as well, and the sites that cater for Harry Potter normally have a section dedicated to Tanya Grotter), in parts, it establishes its own presence, but it does exist and it does produce fantext. This past spring EKSMO publishing house had selected several of Tanya Grotter fan fics for publication and printed them in one bound volume that was released under the general umbrella of Tanya Grotter franchise. Whether or not the authors of fan fics were asked or informed about this is still unclear: when confronted about that during the Q&A session held in one of the stores, EKSMO representatives immediately proceeded to answering the other question. Moreover, the fics were published as is - that is, no editing had been done, out of context, and with no introduction save for small blurb (along the lines of 'fan fiction is fiction written by fans') on the cover. The book was thrashed by critics and not embraced by fans: a failure by all accounts, but a fine and interesting conclusion of a long-established tradition of published fan fiction in Russia.

Postscript

As I am writing this, the Russian Harry Potter fandom is still in uproar. The anticipation had been extremely charged and with the arrival of the final installment, tensions ran even higher. Some hated the new book, some denied its existence to the point of publicly burning their copy (this last movement raised a little wave of both approval and outrage of its own), yet most of us loved it. Many got their books lining up with other fans at midnight in bookstores across the world: I myself had extended my stay in the U.S. until July 22nd and invited my best friend so we could join the party and get the long-awaited copies. There was a feeling of 'being in this together', and in this respect - despite complicated translation games, the history of publishing the 'unpublishable', the 'art belongs to people' that still governs our attitude to all things fannish - we are not much different from all other Harry Potter fans across the world, not really. We would also like to join all other fans across the world and wish both J.K. Rowling and Harry a very happy birthday:

С Днем Рождения, Гарри и тетя Ро! Спасибо за книгу!

***

For more information on the history of Russian-language fandom in general, see fanhistory: it really is a fantastic resource for those who are curious about further details and want to know whether their fandom is represented in Russia. The site is in English.

I also encourage the members of other national fandom to take a look at the new project, fanlinguistics, and contribute to its development.

I would like to thank my speedy betas and everybody who has participated in this somewhat lengthy discussion of the mysterious ways of the Russian Harry Potter fandom. I would also like to thank Henry for this opportunity to talk about my fandom, and for his patience: this article should have seen light long ago.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part One)

In honor of J.K. Rowling's birthday, I will begin the week by running a two part series about Harry Potter fandom in Russia, written by Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad), where she is completing her doctorate. It is perhaps fitting that the last time I saw Ksenia, we were both waiting in line together at the MIT COOP bookstore around midnight, waiting for the clerks to pass us our eagerly awaited copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. When I got my copy, I wandered off into the night in a daze and forgot to say goodbye. My wife and I took our his and hers copies back to Senior Haus with us and climbed into the hammock we have in our backyard, reading by flashlight as late into the night as we could muster, and then waking up at the first daylight to push on through. Our son was nice enough to bring us meals so we could shut out the entire world and just immerse ourselves into Rowling's world. And I am happy to say that we finished the books before the day was over.

Upon returning to Russia, Ksenia has sent me a long awaited series of blog posts describing what she calls Russian Language Harry Potter fandom. It's a fascinating account of what cultural theorists like to call glocalization -- suggesting that while Harry Potter is read around the world, local conditions of production and reception, including in this case especially issues around copyright and translation, shape how it gets read and in what contexts. Ksenia's first installment takes us through the history of Lord of the Rings fandom in her country which in many ways set the stage for what happened with the Potter books and then discusses the centrality of translation to sustaining and energizing the fan culture. (Of course, it helps that Ksenia's primary research background is in translation studies.) Next time, we will get deeper into fan fiction and other forms of fan cultural production in Russia.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom

by Ksenia Prassolova

The first thing that should be said about Russian fandom is that it exists. It may come as a surprising and as a somewhat baffling statement, but not many people within English-language fandom realize that fandom is an international phenomenon, and even those who do understand the international part would still cling to the "exotic" image of Russia that doesn't really go together with something as native to the Western grassroots culture as fandom. Truth is, however, that ever since the Iron Curtain fell Russia has been doing its damnedest to catch up with the West: legally, politically, and culturally; new values were both imposed from the top and picked up eagerly by the young people who didn't exactly want to associate themselves with the Soviet past and had no romantic recollections of it.

Because both the concept of fandom and its practices were borrowed as is, what we now know as 'Russian fandom' is not, on a general level, that different from its American counterpart. Demographically, we share the same patterns: people of both sexes and of all ages discuss canon, those who are involved in writing fan fiction are mostly female (according to anecdotal accounts), and those who write slash are almost exclusively female. Most discussions and creative work used to concentrate on several sites and forums, but with mass migration to blogs Russians moved to livejournal.com and diary.ru (a Russian blogging facility). In fact, in Russia we rarely even call our fandom 'Russian', we call it 'Russian-language', because this implies that fandom is a universal concept that merely varies to a larger or lesser degree from one national 'incarnation' to another. Harry Potter fan fiction posted on hogwartsnet.ru is very similar to that posted on fanfiction.net - genres, clichés, slash and all; fanart is scarce, but fanvids created by Russians are pretty similar those created in the West; we do have ship wars just like everybody else and just like everybody else we were eager to find out whether Snape was good or evil.

I would be very far from truthful, though, if I said that there were absolutely no differences between the way fandom works in Russia and the way it works in the English-language community, borrowed concept or no. The differences are firmly in place and are due to a combination of historic, linguistic and cultural factors. In this post I will try to concentrate on the most notable of them. I will be mostly talking about the Harry Potter fandom, since this is the one I have first-hand knowledge of, yet one has to start somewhere, and in 'our' beginning there was Tolkien. The beginning, however, didn't happen until 1975.

Tolkien Apocrypha

Fandom-wise, Lord of the Rings was for Russians what Star Trek was for Americans. It also happened much later, and the gap between the emergence of canon and appearance of consolidated fannish activity around this canon was much wider in case of Lord of the Rings in Russia. This canon that started them all entered the Soviet scene gradually and in a most fascinating way. The first Russian translation of Lord of the Ringswas started in 1975 by A. Gruzberg, a linguist from Perm, and appeared in 1978; the entire trilogy was written by hand and was only available to friends and acquaintances of the translator. Later on it was transported to Leningrad, where it was published in Samizdat in 1981 (source). The first attempt at official translation followed shortly - in 1982 - and was comprised of two books, The Hobbit and The Fellowship, translated by by V. Muravjev and A.Kistjakovsky. This translation was abandoned, and the official Russian version of the trilogy was only published as late as 1990. By the time it happened the trilogy had already acquired a fair number of followers (those responsible for the non-official translations, for one) who would engage in a variety of fannish activities: from song and poetry writing to live action role playing games, which became extremely popular among the fans. In fact, the Hobbit Games of the beginning 1990-s were so well known that 'being fannish' is still associated with role-playing and Lord of the Rings in certain circles of fandom.

There are many reasons for Lord of the Rings to have become popular when it did in the Soviet Union and - later - the new Russian Federation. It was the only source of its kind available to Russians at that time: while the Soviet readers had enjoyed the long and rich tradition of science-fiction and gathered around what was known as KLFs (Clubs of Science-Fiction Readers), the genre of fantasy was relatively new. With it came new feelings and new attitude to the source text: I am not saying that the possibility of escapism was the only reason Tolkien's work became popular with Russian readers, but the bread lines of the late 80-s and early 90-s definitely were part of the equation. Apart from role-playing games, the fans of Tolkien would write verses and songs, learn Elven languages, and write what they called 'apocrypha': fan fiction that fell under the category of alternative history or alternative universe. By that time fan fiction had already been widely known abroad, and Western fandom started the colonization of the Internet, but international cross-fandom communication was scarce, and the name for this practice was re-invented rather than borrowed. The term 'fan fiction' has later been re-introduced into the Russian fandom, and there is now a lot of confusion as to whether 'apocrypha' are, in fact, fan fiction or fall into some specific category of fan writing. The debate continues, and no definite conclusion has been reached.

"Art Belongs to People"

An even more interesting question arises when we examine how those apocrypha/fan fiction works were distributed or, really, published before the Internet came along. Again, let us consider the history: the oft-cited quote of Vladimir Lenin's, "Art Belongs to People" pretty much determined the attitude to common cultural property in the Soviet Union. Communism in general (in its part where private property was dismissed) and that 'art belongs to people' motto in particular, became a convenient excuse for translating and/or re-writing ideologically safe yet culturally important content from the West. Two most notable examples of re-writing original content under the new name were Volkov's Wizard of the Emerald City trilogy, based on the Wizard of Oz, and Alexei Tolstoy's Buratino, based on Pinocchio (both published in 1936).

The interesting thing about the two was that although original creators were credited in the books and the tales were more translations than re-writes, their covers still bore those Russian authors' names. Many Russian kids, me included, first learned that there had been some Western original only long after reading the stories themselves, or never learned at all. In other, not as dire, cases the translators would get if not all, but at least as much credit as original creators. Thus, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Russians would distinguish between 'Zakhoder's Alice', 'Nabokov's Anya' and 'Carroll's Alice in Wonderland', the latter being a common referral to a bunch of academic translations.

This mindset, in which culture was considered a common good for everybody to benefit from, held fast and strong even after the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention 1793. Moreover, the 70-s and the 80-s brought the flourishing of 'Samizdat' - a non-official publishing and distribution network reserved for rare and censored literary and research content. Samizdat took many forms, from almost professional copying and binding to photographing pages and distributing the resulting pictures. Although Samizdat was a full-bodied publishing and distribution network for the underground, it was mostly used to deal with 'serious', 'original' content. Thus, while fans were able to write and share stories between themselves, they were - for the most part - unable to turn their individual networks into fanzine production because they simply didn't have the access to the necessary equipment. When the 90-s came, and suddenly the market was flooded with start-ups looking for profit, it was only logical that some fans sought to bring fan fiction to the printing press. Profit was, of course, as much of a consideration for those fans as the lack of an adequate fannish distribution network. By that time, the laws had been changed (and the new legislation had been adopted - almost verbatim - from the West), yet the values stayed, so the new publishing houses didn't think twice when presented with an opportunity to publish work based on popular sources.

The first fan fiction published in post-Soviet Russia was a collection of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories from the Novossibirsk society of Conan Doyle fans. This precedent, the lack of fannish distribution network, and a certain disregard for the new law lead to the appearance of a far more curious publication: Nick Perumov's Ring of Darkness - a novel-length fan fic set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Here is what Nick himself has to say on the process of publication:

"On October 16, 1991 , the contract on my book was signed with "Kavkazskaya biblioteka" publishing house. Royalties for my book amounted to a huge for that time sum of 75000 rubles, calculated according to the norms of Writers' Union . Many times I was asked one and the same question, how it could be possible for an unknown writer to be published without any connexions in the publishing house; be published in the period of total collapse and food cards. Now, ten years later I can't give the proper answer. I guess that such a phantastic affairs was possible due to the chaos and disturbance of early 1990s. Another favourable moment was in 1996, it was the First boom of the Russian fantastics. Anyways, "The Ring of Darkness" then caled "Pescending of Darkness" was published in "Kavkazskaya biblioteka". How it could have happend is another pair of shoes. " ( source)

It is interesting that while the content of Perumov's published fan fic is still a subject of fierce debate among Tolkien fans and followers, the legality of the publication is rarely questioned, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no legal action against Mr. Perumov or his publishing house(s); moreover, his Tolkien-based novels are still popular and are re-printed on a regular basis. The initial 1993 publication set another precedent, and other Lord of the Rings fan fiction shortly followed after The Ring of Darkness, most notable of them, of course, is Black Book of Arda - a Silmarillion-inspired alternative universe that tells the story of Arda from the point of view of its Evil.

As of the end of 1990-s Russian fans migrated to the Internet en masse. Shortly after that we finally caught up with Harry Potter, and then it was about translation all over again.

Potter Comes to Russia

First published in Britain in 1997, Harry Potter only appeared in Russian in 2000: Maria Spivak founded the 'Harry Potter Research Institute' (formerly located at www.harrypotter.ru) and posted the Russian translations of books one and two; Pauline started the 'People's Translation Project' and her team came up with their version of book one; and, finally, ROSMAN publishing house hired Igor Oransky to create the official version of the first book in Russian. Of all three translations, it was the official that was the sloppiest in its quality and latest in its arrival: by the time it was published fandom had already finished reading Spivak's rendition of Chamber of Secrets. Thus, two things happened in 2000: ROSMAN had lost the moment forever, and translation games began.

ROSMAN could not account for the relative unpopularity of Harry Potter in Russia (compared to the Potter-craze that took over the world, the success of this book in our country was modest at best) and kept changing translators: Oransky was dismissed after book one, and Marina Litvinova, a well-known Shakespearian scholar and a professional translator herself, was hired to work on books two through four. Of the three volumes she had translated, only The Prisoner of Azkaban did not receive annual mock award for the worst translation (Chamber of Secrets) or the worst editing job (Goblet of Fire). After it became known that Litvinova had not translated book four, but instead turned it into a seminar for her students (effectively letting her students translate it for her), a scandal broke out and ROSMAN was forced to change translators yet again. This time, Viktor Golyshev, Vladimir Bobkov, Leonid Motylev - all famous for their work as translators of sci-fi classics - were asked to do the job. They did a fine enough rendition of book five, but didn't linger for book six: to translate Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, ROSMAN invited Sergey Ilyin, who was best known for his fantastic work with Nabokov's texts and Maya Lakhuti - a very talented translator of children's literature. Again, this team did a good job and a decent translation, but by that time it had already been six books too late.

The People's Translation Project

In the meantime, fandom was eagerly looking for flaws in official versions and engaging in translation projects of their own. Inspired by Maria Spivak, the 'People's Translation Project', high regard for translators in our country and the nagging 'I can do that, too' feeling, fans started to create both individual (Fleur, Yuri Machkasov) and collective (Snitch, The Phoenix Team, Harry-Hermione.net, HP Christmas Forum) translation projects, and by the time Half-blood Prince was released in Russia in December 2005, there had already been nine (sic!) independent translations on the Web, some of them completed not a week after the July 16 release of the English version. When the final Harry Potter book leaked five days before the official release, a new translation project made it their goal to have the initial job done by July 21.They succeded, which sets a curious record: an amateur translation appears before official translators' names are announced. This is a new project, too, the one that has not been working on any of the previous Potter installments. We already know of at least four projects that are continuing their work, and of two projects that have just started with book seven, and it is safe to assume there will be more of them. Understandably, amateur translation is a widely discussed phenomenon, and two main questions arise in all discussions: that of legality and that of quality.

Under the provisions of article 19 (p.2) of Federal Copyright Law, translation is 'fair use' as long as it is done for educational purposes and the length - or amount - of the translation suits the immediate educational need. That is, I can use Harry Potter in classroom during my 'Theory and Practice of Translation' class, but I am not supposed to have my students translate the entire series. One can, however, justify translating the entire book for the purpose of self-education: in fact, I know of at least three individuals who did translate books five and six to learn English better, and succeeded. While you can, arguably, translate books one through seven and get away with it, you can not share the result of your work. As of 2003, representatives of J.K.Rowling have been sending out C&D letters to various translation-related sites, which always resulted in the removal of translations from public view. At this point, however, sending C&D letters is like trying to stop an avalanche: the amateur translation projects multiply against all odds. For a number of reasons (the poor quality of the official translation; its late arrival; the translation tradition in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; a growing number of Russians with a fair command of foreign languages; etc.), translation has become one of the games fandom plays: it is now as integral part of what we do as fans as fan fiction, fan art, filking or creating fanvids. In fact, once the name of the project, 'people's translation' is now a name of the practice that spread across fandoms: it applies to any fan translation project, in which not one, but several individuals are doing a fast collaborative translation and editing work. Normally, there would be 10 to 20 people working on a translation, the same people would then beta-read and edit each other's work, then a draft version would be compiled, which goes to the final editing and proof-reading performed by one or two individuals - usually those who are in charge of the project. It is their job to ensure smooth communication on the forum, to find substitutes if one or more of the translators have dropped out, and to mediate conflicts; and whether the team produces quality results depends on the leader.

People engage in amateur translation for various reasons: some want to improve their English, some want to improve the overall quality of the Russian Potterverse, some find that translation is a good way to participate in fandom. Whatever the reason, the issue of the quality of the result is quite important. The thing that is important to understand here is that not all amateur translation is done by amateurs. Many of the fan translators I know are also professional translators in their non-fannish lives, so they, at least, know what they are doing. As shown by Oransky and Litvinova, it is not always that a professional translator will produce good results: one also needs dedication and fascination with the source, and fans do tend to have those aplenty, so when it does come down to amateurs doing the job, their lack of skill or knowledge is often compensated by extensive teamwork, networking and overflowing enthusiasm. The results vary from 'extremely unreadable' or 'unfinished' to 'way better than the official', and each non-English-reading fan often finds themselves supporting this or that amateur translation. The choice has to be made, for instance, when writing fan fiction - because names are translated differently - or when just discussing the source text: it is considered traditional in our fandom to stick with one or the other translation and defend it against the opponents when the time comes. Nowadays there is a growing number of people who prefer reading the original and are able to do that, but some of them, too, fall into temptation and either side with one project or start their own.

Most of those translation projects exist online and do not overstep the boundaries of fandom. To date, there are only two exceptions from this general rule: a translation of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, made by the Snitch project, which was stolen from the translators, printed in Latvia and sold in Belarus a couple of months before the official Russian release; and a fan-made Russian version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, printed, bound and distributed in Israel. The appearance of the latter is especially curious if one takes into account the fact that neither of Rowling's Comic Relief books has been translated officially: the only two existing versions available to Russian-language readers come from the People's Translation project and that unknown Israeli source. The pictures below show the comparison of the spread and cover of the fake (top) and real (bottom) editions of Half-blood Prince.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part Two): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea

Issue Three: Race, Nation, Sexual Orientation, and Fandom Derecho: In Round Three, Part One, Robin Reid wrote, "nobody's mentioning 'race,' ethnicity, sexuality, not even as an 'academic' project or area of analysis." I'd like to investigate these topics within fandom from an autobiographical perspective, but I hope that you'll jump in (and others will, too, in the Comments section) and contribute your own analyses, either autobiographical or not, of these issues.

I'm Filipino-American, first generation (though I usually call it Gen 1.5, b/c we moved to the U.S. when I was three years old), and from the start, my media fandom was informed by (inter)nationalism and race. The Philippines was a colony of the U.S. from 1898 through 1946, and U.S. media has long been extraordinarily popular and influential in Filipino culture. My older siblings were avid fans of Star Trek, The Big Valley, The Green Hornet, Wild, Wild West, and other syndicated U.S. TV shows for years before they stepped foot in the U.S. Star Trek was singled out by my family as our totem show, and I'm certain that for young Asian children, engaging deeply with an American TV show about long-distance travel, and a U.S.(S.) starship where there was assumed equality not only between races and sexes, but between humans and aliens, plus the fact that one of the featured characters was Asian (Sulu) and another was Asian-esque (Spock), factored into their enthusiasm for emigrating to America. Popular media was the first way that my three brothers and two sisters understood the U.S., and media continued to guide our decisions (we decided to move to L.A. because of Disneyland, of course) and to inform how we navigated U.S. society and culture. I grew up in a very racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood, and pop culture was my go-to resource when encountering difference (when you're six years old and you eat different foods than the kid next door and you can't pronounce each other's last names correctly and you don't understand the languages that your respective parents speak, all you've got is your Raiders of the Lost Ark Atari game, and that counts for a great deal). A lot of recent Filipino and Filipino-American media productions address (directly or indirectly) the huge role that American media plays in Filipino/American life, and U.S. sci-fi/fantasy in particular has deep roots in Fil/Am culture. I am eager to write a substantial piece on how American sci-fi influences the immigrant imaginary, both before and after immigration, because there's something deeply poetic and simultaneously troubling about how a media text like Star Trek can offer first-generation Americans so much hope and so many advantages, some of which turn out to be real, and some of which turn out to be cruelly illusory.

As for my experiences of race and sexual orientation in fandom: I must say that it's wonderful to enjoy fanfic that ships non-white/interracial (sometimes non-human/interspecies) pairings, just as it is to enjoy fic about same-sex ships. I've never read slash fic (amazing, I know, but true), but I am a fan of some fem-slash, and some of my favorite ships involve non-white characters. And why did I write that "it's wonderful to enjoy" such fics? Not only because experiencing pleasure from stories (or from anything) is terrific, but because, as a non-white person, I am asked so often to identify with white characters, to feel deeply for them and become attached to their psyches and emotions, that I think it is important for fan producers (whether white or not, whether in fic or vids or any other genre) to play around with diversity, and allow fans ample opportunity to cross-identify, and to find pleasure in those cross-identifications, occasionally in the way that I *have* to all the time. Because fan productions are where marginal characters and marginal or non-canonical pairings can get lots of play, plenty of "airtime," loads of attention, analysis, interpretation, dissection. And I think when I, a straight woman, find myself identifying with a female character who feels desire for another woman, that (for me) non-normative desire teaches me to be more humane, because I can be more sympathetic with lesbian desire irl. And I think when a white person finds himself or herself identifying with non-white characters, that can teach him or her to be more humane as well. I may be overestimating the power of both desire and identification to change people's deeply embedded knee-jerk beliefs about people who are not of their race or sexual orientation. But I want to make the point that fan productions are about play and emotional affect, and I think that irrational and subconscious biases about race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation will more easily dissipated through play and affect than through official channels of education, or through any legal measure that censors speech. Fan productions have the power to liberate people from the prison of their "normal" desires. Fans' enthusiasm for concentrating on the abnormal and marginalized, their eagerness to develop the minor characters and to explore potential (but as-yet-unrealized) pairings, gives them a special and wonderful power, which I hope more and more fans use. Fan productions will not be sufficient to save the world from irrational prejudice, but they can possibly play a vital role in expanding the worldviews of individual consumers of their works.

McCrea: I come from a mixed-language background grew up in a number of different places - and I'm very much a subscriber to the notion that media fandom creates cross-cultural forms of communication by which people can inter-relate, as I had to negotiate different languages at an early age. To this day, I find a strange affinity with cartoons in languages I cannot understand; what is left is a supersurface of images, sights and experiences that have to be read physically before they can come in culturally. This has translated with a continuing fascination with say, music videos from the Middle East or European community television. All you have is aesthetics, until the language begins to sink in. So it was through these sliding layers of aesthetics that media gender became a bit unstuck for me early on; there was no one image of men or women by which to grow up around and reflect, but many across different culture and countries; there was the weird obsession of the English with the quasi-mythical Jimmy Somerville, the bizarre fixation of the French on Serge Gainsbourg and the Australian adoration of Paul Hogan. Culture was a costume play; nothing could be truly 'genuine' because everything seemed so cultural and staged early on. And so fandom was always underwritten by a search for not so much identity, but citizenship. The idea of a nostalgia without a origin-place (as I've talked about with reference to Jiwon Ahn's article on manga and anime) is very dear to me in that sense. This is not to suggest anything as severe as Brian Benben's character in the 90s show Dream On, who could only relate to the world through semblences to Gilda, Hogan's Heroes and Gilligan's Island. Moreso a deference to the situations of fandom in order to know where you were in the first place. Like many teenagers of the time, something clicked in me when I was first exposed to the hyperviolence of Manga Entertainment's first wave of video releases in the West - an event which is yet to be unpacked properly - although I have just began to read Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination by Anne Allison which looks spectacular in that regard.

I've never delved into the world of fan-fiction much, simply because my chosen fandoms probably don't inspire people to write - I came into science-fiction too late and the spectre of happening across slash fiction always chased me off the proverbial reserve. I spent some time going along to events such as live callback screenings such as those for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blues Brothers or more recently, Showgirls and Starship Troopers, and found that this kind of hyperkinetic cross-text fandom was closer to how I saw and felt my way through media. Comic fandom is interesting in this regard, because so many of those who regularly read comics consider themselves able to participate, or are actively participating in the culture by writing, drawing, putting out zines, websites - to a large extent, being a comics fan (or say, RPG player) requires a depth participation model. A marginal but highly pertinent practice is Youtube Poop, which is highly condensed, lowest-common-denominator video mashups using lowest possible grade source material (full-motion video clips from bad video games and television spin-offs) until you're left with something that chases a notion of zero-sum fandom. A show, a feeling, but little else. Its now a cottage genre on Youtube, populated by a cadre of master poopers and a few dozen more wannabees (myself included). What I like about this type of fandom is that the anarchy of media sensations is immediately registerable.

Derecho: Before I riff on your excellent insights, I just want to clarify something about my earlier post. I'd like to state, for the record, that I am well aware that there is a lot of stereotyping, exoticizing and sexualizing of Otherness in fandom and fan productions; of course, as with all cultural creations, many authors infuse their works with bias and prejudice. And we all know that fan texts are not always resistant (as several participants in this discussion have already mentioned), but often reproduce existing social conditions. However, beyond the "many" and "often" are some very interesting opportunities for cross-identification and perspective-shifting in fandom.

I really enjoy your ideas of "culture as a costume play" and "nostalgia without an origin-place" b/c they are so counter (and complementary) to analyses like Paddy Scannell's, Jesús Martin-Barbero's, John Ellis's, and John Hartley's, which all emphasize mass media as the site of national identity. "Television is one of the prime sites upon which a given nation is constructed for its members," Hartley wrote 30 years ago, and Martin-Barbero (about 20 years ago) wrote about communication technologies allowing "a space of identification," providing "the experience of encounter and of solidarity" with fellow citizens. Of course, all of these ideas build on Anderson's notion of imagined communities (so widely accepted that I think the phrase no longer needs quotation marks). But what do we make of the international, cross-language, queer-identification fandoms? We who know fandom know that the idea that U.S. mass culture permeating other national cultures is not a one-way street; many nations' media are reaching other nations' audiences and finding fans. Witness the rise of Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, and more to come next season) and BBC comedies and reality shows (Footballers' Wives, The Office, Pop Idol) being repackaged and "Americanized" - "glocalized," as Yeidy Rivero and others say - for U.S. networks. I'm intimidated even by the notion of a project that would attempt to quantify how much influence Japanese media has had on American youth culture in the last 20 years (although that project probably does exist and is being carried out successfully as I type this). Does this mean that media production is a new global currency, that "cultural capital" is rivaling other kinds of capital (and cultural capital definitely translates into financial capital, media products being of supreme importance to national export revenues)? And where does this currency market leave countries that are net-importers of media? It's interesting that the U.S. is no longer holding the only hypodermic needle, but does that mean we should throw out every aspect of the needle model because of that? India, Japan, China, Britain, and Colombia (and other Latin American nations) are now major exporters of media; are these nations affecting other national cultures in the same way that the U.S. did during its long reign of media supremacy? Are Indian or Japanese "values," dreamscapes, and hero-types becoming more broadly known and aspired-to? It would be very interesting if this were the case. However, I feel like a stronger argument could be made that the master currency is still American, that just as Hollywood Westerns adapted and translated Japanese samurai films and appropriated the values encoded therein, American media continues to filter in the messages from outside that it finds suitable, leaving American sensibilities for the most part unaffected by its touches with foreign productions. Even as I hypothesize a "filtering" process, however, I am not even sure how the mechanics of such "filtering" work. In the selection of which works get wide distribution? In the fact that the kung-fu and Hong Kong action movies that Americans can buy on DVD are the ones that Harvey Weinstein (as educated by Quentin Tarantino) likes? And if so, is that selectiveness so bad (I personally think Tarantino has excellent taste in kung-fu films)? Of course, the fact that much of the world's media now exists on pirate networks - and is therefore accessible outside of official mass distribution channels - allows those who become hard-core fans of any one national cinema to bypass any filtering done by their "home" nation, and access the types of texts they love much more directly and quickly, in far greater volume. So, once again, fannish interest - the drive of the collector, what Derrida calls "archive fever" - seems to open up spaces and experiences where more global sensibilities (more than average, anyway) can form.

McCrea: Great points, and this is the flipside to the piracy debate. Underneath all of this prevaricating about who owns what, there are genuinely massive shifts in media consumption occuring. As recently as last month, there were 40 people seeding a torrent file of Kenneth Anger films taken from various sources, and I wondered to myself who these 40 people were, on one hand sharing some amazing films with the world, on the other causing the legendary struggle of Anger to get recompense for his work to go on.

Media is a nation. I am a big fan of Hartley and Ellis myself and find myself still referring to them for precisely these passages about nationhood for a key point of technological change - the dawning of the VHS era. I'm lucky enough to have a bundle of old Sight and Sound issues from the late 70s and early 80s in which you can witness stories of technology overwhelm the stories of Britishness. A reader's letter in the first issue of 1979 mentions that film is 'an American technology built for the American mind' and as superstitious as that is, I find myself thinking about media technology's naturalism and own belonging-ness. One book I can highly recommend on this is the somewhat weird but utterly brilliant The Death of Cinema by Paolo Cherchi Usai, which details how cinema comes to chase an ideal image.

Language is still the viral path along which culture travels; here, Australian television is American television with a side-dish of local content. We even have our own public figures like Mark Philipoussis unable to get a show here shipped over there to make a reality television show to ship back to us as late night dross. And yet, locally made shows still dominate ratings if not the schedule, even if they are glocalised formulas.

Finally, with our friend Quentin, you are right - his film taste isn't so bad. It is however, somewhat concerning that films needs a 'Quentin Tarantino presents' sticker in order to be accessible or readable. The process is as you say, Derrida's archive fever, where his films (and those of Kevin Smith and the other nerd-gen directors) become nodes of references for films which then feed and harvest the cult energy. A re-release of the Sonny Chiba classic The Streetfighter featured a yellow and black background to capitalise on the popularity of Kill Bill, closing the circle of referentiality. Its here that you see fandom cross position descriptions with the curator and all kinds of re-internationalising take place.

Issue Four: The Problem of Intellectual Property

McCrea: I consider the continuing adherence to the term 'intellectual property' to be one of the most delirious elements of contemporary media scholarship. Whose property? Is there a deed involved? Why should I respect it; to whose benefit do I curtail the movements of my intellect? Even more disturbing is the subtle shift to use the term 'IP', which is not, I would argue, a mere abbreviation. It is the turning of a concept into linguistic voodoo - suddenly Harry Potter is not a universe, a realm, a world or a space - its somebody's IP. It belongs. It is owned. This runs counter to so much that media scholarship has been pointing to as the open, democratic states of fandom that we're faced with a media landscape that is so much more open than it was 20 years ago in many sense, but for some reason we have allowed corporate marketing terminology to permeate right through to the membrane of our work.

When Sara Andrews, a player of the online game/life destroyer World of Warcraft advertised for a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in-game, the powers that be at Blizzard Games moved first to censure her (and later relented, it should be said) on the grounds that her discussion thereof breached the bounds of their intellectual property. It was merely shorthand for an unwillingness to accept diversity; play, but don't really play. Experiment, but only within the frame. Make friends, but only in character. This abuse of the very concept of a cultural product needs to become a discussion again, because it feels that while we have so much more access to so much more media, our ability to intervene in media along the lines of fandom, parody and social interaction may actually be less available than it was a generation ago. The largest tension is, as always, gender and sexuality subversion - read, but don't read too much. Of course there has been a great body of work since the early days of fandom on how we negotiate with those who produce mainstream culture, the owners of this property - but there is still a great deal left in order that people acting creatively with products that were advertised into their lives are permanently left alone. The freedom of interpretation seems so inalienable, but for a disturbing amount of people, especially those without the benefit of a Bill of Rights, it has to come second to the arcane needs of some nervous legal department whose own grasp of the culture they influence seems so often ill-informed.

Derecho: This is a huge issue, and Lessig and Boyle, and their articulations of "free culture" and "cultural environmentalism," have been critical for scholars (of both law and culture) who are interested in fighting media corporations' extraordinary expansion of the concept of copyright and Intellectual Property over the last 30 years. I'm sure the work of Creative Commons, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse are well-known enough to go without mentioning, but I mention them anyway b/c they offer some of the best resources for fans who receive Cease & Desist letters or just plain want to know what's already been written and done about incidents like the one you mention, where players/users/readers/viewers/consumers find their media interactions restricted, constrained, and otherwise censored (or at least threatened, as Andrews was, with censorship).

Your plea for fans to be "left permanently alone" summarizes in three words the structure of feeling of most active media users' discourse. I love your pointing out that the insidiously "subtle shift to use the term 'IP'" is "linguistic voodoo" - that reminds me of Marx's critique of words that name money, like "pounds," "dollars," "francs," as "cabbalistic signs," which gives an incredible power to the signifier (money, or in your example, the term "IP") and distracting people from thinking about the signified (value, or in your example, rightful possession). I would like to add one plea to yours; mine is directed at all of the terrific media scholars participating in, and reading, this discussion. Even though cultural scholars have written a lot of great arguments regarding, as you say, the "open, democratic states of fandom," and legal scholars have written a great deal about the necessity of better legal protections for media fans' "fair use" (or, conversely, less power given over to media corporations by Congressional Acts like the DMCA and the CTEA), media scholars and legal scholars need to talk more to each other. The work of Sida Vaidhyanathan and Andrew Ross has been really useful for demonstrating how "cross-overs" can happen, but more people need to build on their examples. It is absolutely critical that the next time a case as important as Eldred v. Ashcroft comes before the U.S. Supreme Court, the representative of fans/users/consumers is ready with a response to a statement like the one Justice Kennedy made to Lessig, which was basically that he didn't see how copyright extension "has impeded progress in science and the useful arts." Lessig has written that he feels that he missed his opportunity to win the Eldred case when he responded to Kennedy. His response was, "Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all." Lessig tried to redirect Kennedy's question, rather than giving (this is a quote from Lessig) "the right answer [which] was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm." It's the job of media scholars, much more so than lawyers, to clearly define what is at stake for culture and society when cultural productions are unfairly restricted. I hope that, over the next few years, our field manages to publish so many great and powerful arguments for media users to be "left permanently alone" that any lawyer handling an IP or copyright case will have those arguments on the tip of her tongue when going before a court.

McCrea: That is really the key issue; availability of public discourse. Recently, an Australian man called Hew Griffiths was extridited from his house in country NSW and thrown in an American jail, for the crimes of piracy through his group DrinkorDie. The charges claim that millions of dollars worth of software and media files were served from his computers and no doubt the powers that be will follow the criminal case with a civil one. There is one extraordinary element:

Hew Griffith is not American. He has never been to America. He has no relations in America. Most of the people downloading from his site were Australian. So how is it that the RIAA and MPAA were able to subvert the very notions of citizenry and sovereignty all the way from their star chambers deep underground in the US? How is it that no sane person stood up in the courtroom and pointed out that by alledging illegal downloads to have the same monetary value as a physical object you devour any notion of collective decency attached to the navigation of the media landscape?

The potential space of academics is as you suggest, to be the authority that helps protects fans from these outfits. It would be grand if we turned around to the RIAA and MPAA and quite sternly reminded them that they own and sell cultural products, but that is all. Their unwillingness to even properly recompense artists and producers of the income they illegally press gang out of radio stations through their SoundExchange program is just another recent example of their ghoulish, baroque concept of their rights over the media they sell. We should terrify them, and right now I doubt that any significant figure involved in letting billionaires sue the poor would consider an academic public figure any speedbump to their vampirism. And yet even children could work it out; all use is fair use unless you begin to make money out of it. Then you're a thief. Not before.

Fandom is a key staging ground for all of this, as its a type of fandom that is being sold and reinterpreted and another type that is being squashed. The type that articulates itself through a thousand official products is exalted while the creative, anarchic, sometimes weird acts of fans is thrown into the pits below. There is nothing subtle about that shift; its an ongoing degeneration of our media landscape - piracy issues and fandom regulation are dovetailing unpleasantly.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part One): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea

Introductions Abigail Derecho: I am currently completing a dissertation at Northwestern University in the Comparative Literary Studies department. I am a media studies scholar, specializing in digital culture, and therefore, while most Comp Lit grad students at NU have a home department in a national language/lit (German, French, Slavic, etc.), my home department is Radio/Television/Film. My dissertation is called "Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Early Digital Remix," and it focuses on two of the earliest remix genres and their origins in minority discourse. Digital sampling was innovated by African Americans, and online fan fiction was pioneered by women, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. I examine how both remix genres were subjected to a great deal of censorship, both external and internal, very soon after they appeared, and I tie the censorship of remix to censorship discourses that circulated in U.S. culture and society at the same time that remix was being invented (the crack/gangs/guns panic that fueled anti-rap and other anti-music campaigns, the anti-pornography movement whose arguments were echoed in flame wars around explicitly sexual fan fiction). I will begin a tenure-track position at Columbia College Chicago, in the Cultural Studies program, this fall.

In addition to being an active fan and fan fiction author for many years, for the past two years I have been working on something called "Media Theater." I have written and produced two multimedia plays that are attempts to combine live performance with new media in ways that foreground how intricately multiple media are incorporated into the everyday lives of millions of people - how we perceive reality, how we form memories, how we learn to love and despise each other. Some of my fan fiction is accessible here. Some of my academic work, and information about my media theater productions, is accessible here. Also, I was fortunate enough to have an essay of mine, "Archontic Literature" (very kindly referenced in an earlier Round of this discussion by Catherine Tosenberger [Catherine, please e-mail me about your theory of "recursive" literature]) included in the terrific collection edited by K. Hellekson and K. Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. I'd like to express my gratitude to Kristina Busse and Henry Jenkins for organizing this important discussion, and for inviting me to take part, and thanks also to all the participants in this discussion (past and future), including those who have posted or will post comments, for making this such a productive and valuable exchange.

Christian McCrea: You may know me from such films as "Virtual Murder" (probably co-starring Micheal Nouri) and "The Second Life of Christian Lefebvre"....ahem. I am also in the twilight phase of a PhD dissertation, duly supervised by the very patient Angela Ndalianis in the Screen Studies department of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. My PhD is called "Playland: The Sensory Materialism of Computer and Videogames", which undertakes to form a critical account for the sometimes invisible but always vital relationship between the aesthetics of technologies and the cultural traces left by people using them. Using games as a point of first contact between the two, I am also deeply interested and invested in the cultures of technology, research into fan cultures, the poetics of technology, opportunities afforded by digital art and pranksterism, piracy and information control pressures, etc.

I have recently taken a position at Swinburne University of Technology here in Melbourne Australia, as a Lecturer In Games and Interactivity. The Swinburne Games program is the country's leading games school, and I will be working to expand the types of work students do into serious and critical games. I have published work on games and other media in a variety of academic fora, and also work as an writer and essayist for sites such as The Escapist, curatorial writer for the Australian Centre of the Moving Image and maintain a website, Wolves Evolve.

Issue One: Covering Women

Derecho: I'd like to address gender bias in the media industry, in "mainstream fan" writing about media, and in academic writing about media. I'll give an example of bias in each of these fields:

1) I saw Live Free or Die Hard recently. As a "die hard" fan of the first film in the series, I thought LFoDH was a thoughtful and exciting return to the elements that made Die Hard a classic. Leaving the theater, though, I realized that one of the key aspects of the film that made it pleasurable for me was the character Lucy - John McClane's now-grown daughter - who, whlie serving as a key plot point (the usual "damsel in distress"), did not have very much screen time. Another part of the film I liked was the new character Matt Farrell, the hacker-geek who becomes McClane's sidekick. And I read several critics' reviews pointing out that Matt is basically the fans' stand-in. Matt expresses the awe, fear, and affection for McClane that the audience feels, and for the most part he is "tagging along for the ride," just like the audience does. Matt also gets to have a little hint of a romantic spark with Lucy McClane, who is basically a younger female version of her father. So I thought, Huh, Matt is a stand-in for all fans, male and female, b/c both men and women fans are techies, like Matt (much of fandom taking place on the Internet), and both men and women fans love McClane and want to go along for the ride. But only male fans get to see themselves up on that screen in the persona/avatar of Matt Farrell, and they get to see their stand-in "get" (romantically) a McClane of his own (we women used to have Holly, John's wife, to identify with, but since Die Hard 3, she's been literally out of the picture). Women fans, otoh, have to do the usual queer identification, seeing our desires acted out by a young male character. And/or, we can see ourselves in Lucy, whose persona and story we would have to greatly develop/augment using our own imaginations (by ourselves, in conversation with other fans, or in fanfic) due to her underdevelopment in the film. Either way, women fans don't get very much consideration in this, or most, action films. It's clear that our dollars, our attention, and our interest are being courted, and that Lucy, Matt, and their incipient romantic involvement, are, at least in part, aimed at us. But while male audience members get huge chunks of meaty text thrown at them, stuff they can relate to and easily identify with, stuff that reminds them of their own libidinal desires and fantasies and offers them vicarious fulfillment of these wants and needs, women in the audience get scraps. We make the most out of these scraps -- that's what imagination and fan productions are for -- but the studios, for the most part, doesn't think to throw us more than these.

What troubles me about this long-standing situation is that women definitely go to, and love, action movies. Have we had an alternative in any given summer since Jaws and Star Wars? Either we love action blockbusters, or we don't go to the movies. So when I think about how women make the most of the few female characters and their supporting-role status in action films, I think we're doing a lot of work, and doing a great job creating a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of very little. All the female fan concentration on Arwen and Eowyn in the LoTR films, on Linda Hamilton's buff and awesome (but still supporting) character Sarah Connor in T2, on Rogue and Mystique and other X-Women, on Trinity in The Matrix, is about making the most of the tiny shout-outs to female audiences that big action movies - the biggest-grossing, and thus most important (for the industry) products generated by the motion picture industry today - give to their women and girl fans. Of course, lots of women don't care about whether there are well-written and significant women characters in a movie, they don't need that to have fun at a film. They are the lucky ones, since the movie industry is therefore giving them what they want and all they need. But the rest of us are grateful for the Alien series, for Keira Knightley's character in the PoTC movies, for Princess Leia, who is central to the plot of SW and always proactive (unlike her wimpy mother). If Disney, of all studios, knows enough about girl and women audience members to allow a character like Elizabeth Swann to develop and mature over the course of a trilogy, if Disney can allow a black woman to be a powerful goddess and can stand to have two women pirate captains (and one of them Chinese) in the council of pirates, then other studios and other producers can try just as hard. Jason Mittell, in Round One, Part One of this discussion, summarized what he called "the old saw about children's programming": "girls will consume work pitched at both genders, while the boys only concern themselves with boy-stuff." If this is true, then girls are by far the more valuable consumers of media (since they will be good customers of twice the volume of stuff as boys), and media corporations should take the wishes, proclivities, taste cultures, and interests of their best consumers into account.

2) In the latest issue of WIRED (July 2007), Optimus Prime, my favorite character from my favorite cartoon ever, Transformers, is on the cover. Here are some excerpts from the article about the new Transformers movie: "They started as toys for boys," "Boys ages 5 to 11 -- and it *was* boys -- faithfully tuned in week after week to watch the saga of these doughty bots," "For nearly two decades...sons of Prime waited for Papa Bot," "Thus [with Transformers] began the cyber-outsourcing of masculine heroism, a process that would eventually, inextricably, link Y chromosome to Xbox," "man-children of a certain age look to this Transformers movie...for redemption, as men." So, I, a hard-core fan of Transformers ever since I was a little girl, am excluded over and over again by this article. It's not just this one article or writer that concerns me, it's the way this environment of geeky, technologically-themed, toy-oriented pleasure is often assumed to be a 100% masculine domain. I don't think the statement "Girls like robot characters" would surprise anyone. Girls like all kinds of characters; they play video games; they watch sci-fi/action/adventure movies and TV, they read comic books. And then they grow up to be women media-studies scholars ;). But the mainstream press, written by non-academic fans, consistently associates certain media - and I don't just mean films, here, but technology of all sorts, from Blackberries to C++ to robots - with masculinity. What is sad about this is how much potential mass media has for serving as common ground between people of differing genders, races, ages, nationalities, sexual orientations, geographic locations, political affiliations. When I read, in the Transformers WIRED article, the writer's opinion that "Prime practically step-parented the latchkey kids of the mid-80s," I related to that. I remember that feeling of being home alone, just me and the TV, and those awesome giant robots, and how Optimus Prime taught me so much about what was right and wrong, what was courage and what was cowardice, when to show mercy and when to be strong. I thought, If I met that writer, he and I would have a lot to talk about, since we have some deep and important childhood experiences in common. But when the writer went on to define Prime as exclusively a role model for young boys, I stopped having that thought of common ground and mutually resonant experiences. Mass media fandom can and should be the grounds for discussions in which many, many people (masses of people, in fact) can participate. But there are gender-based, race-based, nationality-based, and sexuality-based assumptions and stereotypes that permeate media journalism which cuts such possibilities short.

3) Some recent media scholarship also shows these biases. Last year, a well-respected media studies professor from a prestigious U.S. university visited Northwestern, and I heard his paper on how a critically acclaimed television serial drama resembled an intricate and complex game, because certain plot elements repeated every season (though in different guises), and because the viewer had to keep track of everything that had happened in the past in order to fully comprehend each new episode. I asked him how his "game theory" regarding this television show differed from the basic structure of daytime drama (soap opera). He had no answer for me. Why? Because he had not considered that the aspects that he most enjoyed of an Emmy-winning, "quality" primetime cable television program were actually appropriated from cultural productions that have much less cultural capital in the world of media studies: soap operas. I very much agree with C. Lee Harrington's statement in Round Six, Part One: "I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!!" I would like to see, in accordance with some of Kristina's arguments in her review of MiT5, more male media studies scholars engaging with media analyses of women's genres and women's styles of media consumption/engagement/participation. Of course, many men in media studies do this already. But currently, male scholars can still ignore huge areas of women-oriented media scholarship without thinking or blinking - their ignorance is still very normal.

And to bring this back to the first example of gender bias I gave, that practiced by movie studios and media corporations: Daytime drama has undergone a serious decline in ratings over the past decade, and I attribute this mostly to network executives' lack of investment in, and lack of knowledge of, the soap genre. As a result, soap fans (of which I am one) have engaged in more heated battles, meaning mail/e-mail campaigns, phone campaigns, and massive flame wars online, over the last 10 years, than I have ever seen in any other fandoms. Soap fans fight TPTB (producers, writers, network execs) for story changes, and they fight with each other because they feel that no one is really getting the quality or kinds of storytelling that they want, so fan groups that have different interests are mutually regarded as "competition" for the networks' attention. So far, the networks haven't responded to fans' demands for improved (i.e., better-written) stories and for more respect for show history. The soaps continue to go down in quality, and viewers continue to tune out. Meanwhile, all of prime time has co-opted the technique of seriality which daytime dramas spent decades developing and enriching - all reality shows are soaps, most prime-time dramas are soaps or have some serial elements, and many prime-time sitcoms (Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother) have multi-episode, sometimes multi-season story arcs. Millions of women fans spent years and years contributing to writers' knowledge of how to make seriality work. Their input and feedback, manifested in a multitude of activities from their mere viewership to their fannish activities, helped to build up that store of knowledge, helped to program those data banks. Not only do those fans get zero credit, but the soap-y shows that women now watch on prime-time - Prison Break, 24 - are much more geared towards male audiences and male interests than towards women audiences and women interests. Again (see my above point), it isn't that women can't or don't enjoy male-oriented programming. But women fans lost good soap operas, which were dramas dedicated to women's enjoyment, and we did not gain the equivalent in serial prime time.

McCrea: I'll expand in turn on the major points you've explored, Abigail; I think you've traced some of the most interesting elements of media culture for this discussion. First, action cinema, then Transformers and tech culture, then the gendering of media culture in academia and finally, television culture.

Action Cinema: Leading up to the release of Live Free or Die Hard (or bizarrely, Die Hard 4.0 for non-Americans), I was pondering some of the same issues - it was obvious that these younger characters had been supplanted to build a bridge between the necessary elements of Bruce Wills and large things being on fire and a more modern audience for whom things being on fire doesn't mean what it used to. I wonder if a similar committee process went into Terminator 3; "oh these aging men don't appeal to anybody anymore, but we need them for the brand - let's stick in a couple of young people." It all seems so neat and pat by comparison to the situation presented in the first Die Hard; trashy white-bread American thrashes European chap who has read a book or two. In the new iteration, it barely feels like the same 'man' is being pressed into the situations. So I wonder to whom precisely the film is directed, or to who the 'fan' is in the discourse of the Die Hard universe. I'm sure that for the marketing boffins involved, for whom the Die Hard IP (I term I want to come back to later), there was a sense of needing to create generational upheaval, and character multiplicity. This may not seem like the most obivous of connections, but I felt a similarity to Blade III: Trinity, where younger, hipper characters stood in for fans of the first films. Nor it is explicity new, as later films in the Death Wish and Dirty Harry series began to expand their fictions beyond the original frame to talk to fans more directly. Robocop 3, Aliens Vs. Predator and a few others are barely readable outside of this rearticulation-through-fandom. I think what you've identified is that this gendering - or repurposing of gender - is often the first port of call. In many instances, the role of women in driving narrative is complicated as the primary male characters age and give way to older generations.

Theories of and around action films that consider gender (and I'm thinking of the work of Yvonne Tasker and Robin Wood first but not exclusively) situate the crux of things in the appreciative look of the audience - and as you say, filmgoers looking for female characters in action films often have to make a great deal out of very little. Which is precisely where the most energetic forms of fanwork emerge. I used to call fan-produced media 'antimedia' because they act much like an antibody to the processes of the original text, but more interesting is this semiotic chase. Anime fans chase the unarticulated sexuality and imagery; Lord of the Rings fans chase the unexplored world detail - each fandom weaves according to the material its given. Which is why, returning to Die Hard, I almost felt I was watched a 'fan generation' film, a post-Tarantino and Peter Jackson - cinema that can never be formed without a knowing wink.(Henry Jenkins' article on Tarantino and digital cinema got me thinking here) Len Wiseman's other directorial work being Underworld, and Underworld: Evolution, you can see that he has been there to witness Hollywood's push to re-gender action cinema. But how successful are Lara Croft, Resident Evil, Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet as new approaches to gender? Since I'm not a fan of leaving rhetorical questions open, I'll just go right ahead and score them a D minus. And in each case, you can see similar patterns; films with strong female heroes aimed at a fannish audience (some more sexually precise than others), and then, non-existent fan interest. At least Red Sonja got a cult thing going.

Transformers: As a latch-key kid myself whose family moved a great deal, the common ground of toys and computer games was the first and most important bridge to building any friendship with other kids. The fact that I had a small number of Transformers with me meant that I could instantly communicate through that common reverie and instant nostalgia. There is a fantastic and little-read article by Jiwon Ahn on anime that uses the phrase "common nostalgia latent across boundaries". The upshot is that morning cartoons are not (or were not) so neatly divided across gender lines. I'm not sure how to navigate the terminology, but while Transformers is less gendered than some other series of the time (the farcical ultramasculity of Centurions: Power Extreme, GI Joe and M.A.S.K., for example, is stark), the inclusion of Arcee and Elita One in the Transformers universe hardly counts as a even distribution of archetypes. (side note: the "Female Transformers" page on Wikipedia is worth a visit.)

Media Culture and Academia: I was lucky enough to speak at MiT3 in 2003. I landed in Boston without a working credit card and so sat in my hostel's common room experiecing first-hand the wonders of late-night inner-city television as I pondered my fate. What had been romanticised my entire life, etched marvellously by the "I'd Buy That For A Dollar" guy in the first Robocop, was first and foremost an incredibly gendered experience. The undulation of girls, of both the regular and 'gone wild' persuasions, on and around Snoop Dogg, actually took up what seemed like hours for some baroque and indiscernable DVD purchasing scheme being advertised. In between, grimy-mustached salesmen demanded I bring in my used cars for "Caaaaysh!" What struck me about the kind of television being studied by the participants at MiT3 across the river, was that it was, by comparison, very safe. Buffy, Angel, etc were reaching a kind of critical mass and people spoke of them with a kind of reverence and awe - look at the progressive themes these shows offer, look at the kinds of people who invest so much in them. That kind of scholarship is still very very important, but I could not but wonder why the orgiastic hyper-sexualised world of Snoop Dogg didn't get a mention, or even Jackass for that matter. In the final keynote session, which was stunning and remarkable for many reasons, was a panel between a pair of experienced executives and Toby Miller. Someone asked a question about why the conference was so gendered; why the guests were men, why there was no discussion of gender power in so many of the panels, etc... (I know these questions can bore a lot of people but I always think its great to hear that discussion come up.) While the other panellists demurred a little, Toby Miller did something which I consider extraordinarily brave - he answered the question head on. His response was that, for the most part, televisions are assembled and moulded by women in Southeast Asia. They come to the West, on which all our shows and our fandoms are generated. Then, they are shipped back to the daughters of the women who assembled them, so they can pick diodes from the quarter-mile deep piles of electronic rubbish for just enough money to pay for their parent's healthcare. In a final session that had some strident questions, this was met with a kind of slow dawning applause - definitely a WWE-style "holy shit!" moment. His point was that way underneath even the most nuanced approach to the content of television, we still have to account for the materiality of culture.

Television Culture: Your analysis of the shifting relationships of producers and fans is absolutely spot-on. I think books like Convergence Culture by our friend Henry do a great job of highlighting all the key movements in these as-yet unformed forces; but its the type of shift in aesthetics that fills in the gaps and the outcomes of those shifts we will see first. I am a fan of 50s-60s-70s television, especially action and mystery serials from the UK like The Prisoner and The Avengers, from which my understanding of modern television is still deeply affected. There was then, and I think its visible again admist the web of ARGs, online polls, semi-official blogs, a deep insecurity on the part of television producers about how to keep an audience interested. Soaps have always been at the cutting-edge of audience relations, because changes can be brought on rapidly, characters changed to suit responses with no disruption to 'flow'. And soon, the soap model may be all that traditional television has left, now that the DVD virus is infecting so much else. I maintain that one of the most complex and least understood television forms is professional wrestling. Despite its visibility and notoriety, wrestling has garnered very little critical attention with the notable exceptions being thankfully of exceptional clarity and depth. The gendering of wrestling is absurd, carnivalesque, grotesque, implies horrifically regressive roles for women and all non-masculine figures - and is still leagues ahead in terms of sexual reference than the bulk of television. I certainly subscribe to the notion that wrestling constitutes a masculine melodrama - and the deaths of Owen Hart and Chris Benoit are necessarily included here - as the drama of the 'kayfabe' stage rotates and wheels in independent ways to the actual televisual frame. Sometimes we are allowed to peer behind the curtain, other times it is reinforced. However, melodrama isn't merely a gendering type of address, it is a pervasive method for the production of genre itself - under melodramatic sensibilities, all kinds of other spaces can open up. So when you scratch the surface (or the baby oil) of wrestling, you find legion upon legion of female fans, running websites, organising events and working throughout the industry. The type of experience you're talking about when Bull Nakano almost decapitates her opponent at Summerslam is obviously very different than an intelligently thought out drama series, but no less vital in the articulation of our appreciation of culture.

Derecho: Christian, it's a pleasure to read your thoughts on these matters. Our opinions overlap on many points, for instance, your (generous) grade of D minus for studios' attempts to build female-action-hero franchises. In a sense, those films are the exceptions that prove the rule: If *that's* what the industry produces when it greenlights movies that put female action heroines front-and-center, no wonder they do such a botched, half-assed job with the girl (I use this word purposefully) characters they throw in to male-action-hero films. I'm well aware, though, that female action heroine movies are built to attract male audiences, not to give female viewers opportunities for identification. There is a sense in which the placement of girl characters (love interests, damsels-in-distress) in male-oriented media function in a similar way to product placement. Corporate sponsors get a shot or two of their product; women get a few lines of dialogue from a female character; and the rest of the movie, which is most of the movie (the guy-kicking-ass part) is the "real" fiction, the core, authentic text. You mention T3 and Blade:Trinity, in addition to the new Die Hard, bringing in younger characters in order to create a bridge between older fans and newer audiences. One thing that is striking about all three franchises is that, while one of the younger characters added is a woman, none of the older characters are. In both the Terminator films and in DH, there was, at some point, a leading woman who was a peer or opposite of the leading man. Well, I know it's no surprise that in mainstream U.S. films, older women no longer even count as viable plot points - this just reinforces the fact that all the younger female characters in T3, B:T, and LFoDH, while I found all of them to be written as "strong," "tough," and "capable," are there specifically because of their hot bods.

It's interesting what you say about morning cartoons being not as neatly divided across gender lines. We should really ask Justine Cassell more about this, she's the expert on childhood play, gender, and technology. I know she has co-written on the subject with HJ, and her article (written with Meg Cramer) on "Moral Panics about Girls Online" might be interesting to you. I checked out the Female Transformers page on the main Wiki, and was struck by the fact that someone has tagged it with the infamous "fancruft" label, and therefore the page may be deleted in a couple of days. Of course, tons of stuff gets excoriated for being fancruft, but for some reason I was particularly peeved that this page, which simply lists the female Transformers, when and in which cartoon series they appeared, and their roles in various plotlines, as "not encyclopedic." The Wiki pages on the male Transformers are less well-organized by far than the Female Transformers page, but the ones about the males count as "encyclopedic"? Luckily, Teletraan-1 (the Transformers Wiki) has no such flags on their several pages regarding Female Transformers (individually and as a "species"). It always amazes me how fan communities have to continually splinter in more and more specifically focused groups, just in order to avoid being censored in some way. Just to enjoy the freedom to like what they like, fans create enclaves for themselves that are narrower and more exclusive all the time. How much can matter be broken down? Into a gazillion quarks? By the time we're all done, there will be more fandoms than quarks in this universe. I mean, multiverse :).

You end with sports and wrestling and female fandom, and it's great because it's very close to the point I made earlier about women and "guy" movies. Yes, women watch sports; many women love sports; many women are huge fans of sports. Sports, action films, much of primetime serial TV, and those commercials you saw (Snoop and his "orgiastic hypersexualized world,"), and Jackass (which you mentioned as having a relationship to the commercials - interesting!), all are performances of hypermasculinity. You used the term "carnavalesque." There is something beyond - in addition to - the repetition inherent in ritual, and the community element of being a fan of these displays, that attracts men and women. The emphatic enactment of hypersexuality is clearly a lure to both men and women. And so I am intrigued by your notion of wrestling as a "masculine melodrama," because I think there is something in that which could explain so much of how and why women are (learn to be?) fans of male-gendered media texts (which constitute the vast majority of all media texts). Perhaps girls and women learn to play with, and learn to extract pleasure from (it is both play and work), male-oriented media by constructing melodramatic narratives from, in, and around them. Perhaps this is the one "sop" that male-oriented media has learned to give to women: to give women the tools to read maleness and masculinity as equally melodramatic as any soap opera, even while insisting that it must be consistently male/masculine performances that women watch. And perhaps at some level (as you say, "under melodramatic sensibilities, all kinds of other spaces can open up"), women fans appreciate the fact that they can read these texts as yielding a kind of satisfaction classically associated with women (melodrama) at the same moment that the texts hyper-perform, over-perform, masculinity. For some fans, perhaps this is an appreciation of irony; for others, it might just be an appreciation for opposites uniting, the point at which men's love of violent spectacle and women's love of psychological and emotional drama touch.

Issue Two: The History of Remix Culture

Derecho: I'll begin this topic with my "soapbox" speech, a statement of one of the central claims of my dissertation: digital remix culture owes a substantial debt to minority discourse. Three genres of digital remix were pioneered between 1986 and 1996: digital music sampling, video game mods, and online fanfic. Of those three, the first was the invention of African American men (most of them were men, not all) and the third was the invention of white American women (most of them were white, most of them were women, not all). It's very important to me, and other feminist (male and female) media scholars as well, that the history of women's new media innovations does not get buried. In Round Two, Part One, Louisa Stein wrote that "female authorship and innovation in fan communities...were always heavily technologically engaged, from the use of multiple VCRs to facilitate the complex process of pre-digital vidding to the extremely belabored process of putting out zines pre-internet...Now that fandom has moved online, technological innovation...w/i the context of female communities continues to expand." It is vital that we media (especially digital media) scholars depict accurately the history of women media fans as not only highly competent, but inventive in their uses of a wide array of technological platforms and tools. There is nothing "belated" about women fans' involvement with technology; in fact, as Louisa and I argue, women fans were making good use of the most sophisticated tools at their disposal prior to the advent of digital culture, and as soon as new media became available (and Usenet was not even widely available), women thoroughly exploited its possibilities. For all who might think that posting X-Files fanfic to the ATXC board did not really constitute a technological innovation, I say this: the ATXC and its successor, the Ephemeral/Gossamer archival system, have proven over the last dozen years that a simple open-source PHP archive of HTML documents will outlast a lot of other hypermedia creations. While gamers hunt down emulators, fans of hypertext literature long for a working installation disk of Mac Classic OS, and digital historians cry over numerous broken links and four-year-old Flash animation that just never loads all the way, readers of online fan fiction sit back and enjoy the plain-and-simple HTML, reliably archived and presented in neat rows and columns for their pleasurable consumption for years to come. If that isn't technical genius, I don't know what is.

McCrea

: In the arena of games, the gendering of media is - still - perhaps the most pervasive and least addressed aspect of cultural influence. Just flicking through T.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds highlights just how affronted producers of games can be when you point out that loaded imagery limits access. On the flipside, female game fandom has become a corporate product via funded clans such as the Frag Dolls. It is precisely at the point of production, or remix, that new ways of thinking about digital culture open up. There is a sense in Taylor's book, and I think its quite true, that the gendering of technology is not just particularly male, but more to the point, 'invisible-male'. For a producer of technology, remixer or otherwise inclined media activator who also happens to be a woman, there is still as of 2007, a persistent cloud of gender surprise. Gender surprise is something we could classify as a news-borne toxin by which part of the undertow of their work will have to be superscribed with 'its not just for girls anymore.' If this were limited to publicly-visible news reports or the like, this would be fine, but the toxin still exists across fields of art and academia as well, as I think you've highlighted in your earlier discussion of television viewing habits. Being a sort of self-proclaimed intellectual and political carbunkle, I have the inclination to say that part of the position description of a media academic or researcher is the continuing struggle to evolve the discourses in the public sphere - in other words, bring out the hammer when stupid things are said, and make a noise when something substantial arrives. So I really want to underline with a thick pen what you began with: "digital remix culture owes a substantial debt to minority discourse." Its worth printing out and nailing to the wall of every institution and academic hall that has any investment in technology. The only thing to add is that these aren't seperate issues - gender positioning, race vocalisation and technology - no matter how hard we may try to dehistoricize them like that; the energy and force by which remixes and all forms of contra-digital experimentation happen simply won't, can't, will never come from wealthy people getting wealthier. It's people that got cut out, cutting their way back in - cheaply, quickly, running across back fences and leaping across borders in ways that seem alien to anybody working within a strict system of cultural distribution. The reason I skipped between games and these thoughts is because its so visible there; when I played artist and curator Rebecca Cannon's machinima film The Buff and the Brutal to third year students in one of my courses, many of them responded with "well, its clearly just a feminist take on game culture". The operative word being 'just'; what an extraordinary position for students to be in; their access to game aesthetics being stitched to an assumption that all non-standard, non-white, non-male referents are protestative, 'just' exterior and minor. Talk about there being a lot of work left to do! The male-invisible subject reappears, and I don't think equipping the discussions of technology as phallocentric is enough; what we're staring at is the growth of a new generation whose reflections of technology may in fact be less equipped to concieve of equal gender and race access than our own. I think about this a lot, and I hope I'm dreadfully wrong. DJ Spooky's new essay and song coming out of the Venice Biannale is a great adjunct to this discussion.

Derecho: Word, word, and word to all of that. I appreciate a great deal of DJ Spooky's work, and thanks so much for the link to The Buff and the Brutal. I wish that Chinese-Austrian video artist Jun Yang's remix videos were more widely available, they are similar to Spooky's in that they are essays in which Yang narrates, over all these disparate clips, his experiences as a bicultural migrant consumer of (predominantly U.S.) media. One issue I run into when teaching and writing about digital remix is that often, race and gender are not explicitly foregrounded by the "non-standard, non-white, non-male" producers. I love works by "non-standard" remix artists that *don't* make the author's race, gender, or nation of origin immediately apparent, because that's a different kind of invisibility (maybe one that can even be interpreted as a critique of, or response to, the "invisible-white-male" kind) that disallows a kneejerk reaction like the one your students gave to Cannon's piece. On the other hand, the reason why I call it an "issue" in teaching and writing, is that with pieces that announce their authors as minorities, the reader can grab hold of something in that text right away - your students know at least to start their brains thinking about feminism. When I teach Shelley Jackson, Anne-Marie Schleiner, or Public Enemy, discussions of race and gender in digital culture spark to life right away. But when I show Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's DAKOTA (a remix of Pound's Cantos), or DJ Qbert's Wave Twisters (this is a link to an article in Remix, not to the content from the CD or DVD), or Brian Kim Stefans' Vaneigem Series (a "detournement" of NYT articles using text from The Revolution of Everyday Life), it's harder to get learners to think and talk about how those works emerge from a female (in the case of [half of] YHCHI), Asian, or Asian American experience. Of course, it's way more rewarding, too - but it takes work to prevent the discussion from falling right away into a New Critical approach ("This isn't about race or gender or nationality, why bring those into it?").

MORE TO COME

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. What follows is the second installment. I am being pressed for time this morning but hope to add a few comments to this post later today about last night's debate. You only briefly touch upon the rise of news comedy shows like The Daily Showand The Colbert Report. Do you see such programs as a positive force in American democracy? How do you respond to those who feel that the blurring

between news and politics trivializes the political process? What role does

comedy play in the kinds of popular politics you are advocating?

I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As someone on the Left it is refreshing to see a progressive viewpoint expressed (even if only expressed ironically) in a way that makes me laugh and gives me pleasure. I also think that Stewart and Colbert's use of humor can be deeply subversive: they use ridicule to show how ridiculous "serious politics" is, much in the same way that Jonathan Swift's "modest" proposal in 1729 made the "rational" case for solving the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating them. The political process is already a joke, these guys are merely recognizing it for what it is.

In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth. However, it's still unclear that ironic joking leads to the sort of popular response I'm hypothesizing above. It can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for it to get a good laugh out of it all. To paraphrase the philosopher Walter Benjamin: we can learn to find pleasure in our own destruction.

However, I think we need to take Stewart at his word: he's just an entertainer. It's really up to the rest of us to answer the questions he poses. Sometimes I think we ask too much of culture: we expect it to solve our political problems for us. I don't think it can do this. It can create openings, give us insight, provide us with tools, but the rest is a political process that counts on all of us.

You contrast the ways that FDR spoke to the American public with the ways that George W. Bush addresses us during his weekly radio-casts. What do you see as

the primary differences? Most contemporary politicians who attempt to

"explain" complex policy issues in the way FDR did get accused of being

"wonks." What steps do you think could be taken to create a new political

rhetoric which embraces the ideal of an informed public but doesn?t come

across as patronizing or pedantic?

The brilliance of FDR is that he and his New Deal administration, like King and his fellow organizers, recognized the necessity of spectacle in politics. Because of this they worked hard to re-imagine spectacle in a way that could fit progressive, democratic ends. The 1920s were an era much like our own in its worship of celebrity: a mediated world of movie stars on the silver screen and sports heroes in the new photo-tabloids. But instead of merely condemning this state of affairs, New Deal artists and administrators re-imagined it, using photographs sponsored by the Farm Securities Agency and murals painted by artists of the Works Progress Administration to recognize and display a different sort of American: the dust bowl farmer, the southern share cropper, the factory worker, the rootless migrant. By creating these counter-spectacles they tried to turn the public gaze from stars to everyday (albeit romanticized) people, essentially redefining "The People" in the popular imagination. Make no mistake, this was a deeply political move, as valorizing everyday people was essential for garnering political support for New Deal political and economic programs.

Roosevelt's "fireside chats" also put the lie to the myth that spectacle has to run against reason. Over thirty times during his presidency FDR addressed the American public on the radio. He would always begin these speeches with a warm "My friends." But what followed this simple greeting was a sophisticated explanation of the crises the country faced: the banking collapse, currency concerns, the judiciary, world war. This was propaganda. The speeches were scripted by playwrights who dramatized the case for the president's politics, and FDR spoke to people's fears and desires in a folksy, personalized language, but these fireside chats also took for granted that citizens could be reasoning beings with the ability to understand complex issues. In other words FDR believed that rationality and emotion could exist side by side.

I wish contemporary politicians would learn from this. Instead, we get the "man of reason" like John Kerry, or the "man of fantasy" aka George W. Bush. Politicians need to understand - in a way that I think many producers of pop culture already do - that you can speak to reason and fantasy simultaneously. It's an Enlightenment myth that truth is self-evident: that all you need to do is lay out the facts of your argument and immediately people will acknowledge and embrace it. What FDR and King understood is that the truth needs help. It needs stories told about it, works of art made of it, it needs to use symbols and be embedded in myths that people find meaningful. It needs to be yelled from the mountaintops. The truth needs help, but helping it along doesn't mean abandoning it.

You discuss the public desire for recognition as the flip side of their

relationship to celebrity culture. What lessons might progressives draw from

reality television about this desire for recognition?

If there are two things that those on the Left love to hate (while secretly enjoying) it's celebrity culture and reality TV. These play to the our most base political desires: celebration of an ersatz aristocracy and cutthroat competition; the driving fantasies of Feudalism and Capitalism respectively. True, true. But it's a mistake to write them off as just that, for they also manifest another popular dream: the desire to be seen. What do stars have that we don't? Wealth and beauty, yes, but also something more important: they are recognized. What is reality TV about? The chance for someone like us to be recognized.

What sort of a politics can be based in a recognition that we desperately what to be recognized? First off, policies that make it easier to be seen and heard. Community TV, micro radio, free internet access, net neutrality, and so on. If the populist Huey Long once called for a "chicken in every pot," in the mass mediated age our slogan ought to be "every person an image." But it goes deeper than this, for the popular desire is not just about being seen as an image on a screen. This, in some ways, is just a metaphor for a far deeper desire: being recognized for who we are and what we are, our opinions and our talents -- and this is the core of democracy.

The democracy we have today has little place for our opinions and talents. Our opinions show up as abstract polling data, and the only talents our political process asks for is our skill at forking over money to professional activists and campaigns or our dexterity in pulling a voting lever. This professionalization of politics, whereby democracy becomes the business of lobbyists, fund raisers, and image consultants, has fundamentally alienated the citizenry from their own democracy. It's no wonder that we turn to culture to find these dreams of recognition expressed.

This issue really gets to the core of my Dream. My book is about learning from popular culture and constructing ethical spectacles, but the lessons that I hope are learned will lead far further than making better advertisements or staging better protests for progressive political causes (though that wouldn't hurt). What I'm arguing for in my book is a reconfiguration of political thought, a sort of "dreampolitik" that recognizes that dreams and desires, ones that are currently manifested in pop culture, need to be an integral part of our democratic politics.

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)

Tonight, at 7 p.m. est, CNN will host a debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, aired live from South Carolina. There have already been several previous debates during which American citizens could get an early look at Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the other contenders for the nomination. What makes this debate interesting is that average citizens were invited to submit their questions for the debate via YouTube. Last week, I appeared on Talk of the Nation with David Bohrman, the guy from CNN who has been given the task to select the questions that actually reach the air, and Joshua Levy, a political blogger (TechPresident.com). We learned that there had been, at that point, more than 1500 questions submitted and that the CNN staff was shifting through them to decide which ones should be asked the candidates. You might want to take some time today to sample the kinds of questions submitted in their raw form. They reflect two of the dominant modes of production for YouTube. On the one hand, there are straight to camera confessionals -- often deadly serious, frequently deeply personal, made by people who embody the issues they are discussing. These videos reflect the ways that Americans are taught, via television, to speak to presidential candidates and more often than not, they reflect the same agenda that has shaped previous debates. The CNN spokesperson did say that there were certain topics, Darfur for example, which cropped up much more often among viewers than among professional journalists. But, for the most part, these questions reflect the prevailing tone and style of American political discourse. The second set are parodies and satires -- often bitingly irreverent, borrowing the language of popular culture to challenge the pomposity of the debate format. Sometimes, they spoof the very idea that citizens should be made to embody their questions -- as in this video where a guy dressed like a Viking asks a question about immigration or consider this question from a LA based "celebrity". Sometimes, they make fun of what kinds of questions deserved discussion in this format -- as in this video about alien invasions. Sometimes, they make use of borrowed footage -- as in this JibJab style segment featuring a George W. impersonator.

It is going to be interesting, then, to see what kinds of selections the network makes amongst all of this material: will they naturally go towards those that adopt the discourses of respectful citizens and identity politics? Will they ask more or less the same questions that we've heard in the previous debates, only this time spoken through the mouths of YouTube fans? Or will some of the more wacky segments make their way into the air? And if they do, how will the candidates react and how will the pundits respond? As I wrote last week, we are seeing a consistent insertion of the discourse of participatory culture into the political process this campaign season in an attempt to reach voters who would normally tune out debates and that's what makes this particular set of exchanges so interesting.

To help us get into the spirit of the YouTube debate, I am featuring today an interview with Stephen Duncombe, the author of an important new book about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy which I have mentioned here several times already -- Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. I have incorporated this paragraph from Duncombe's book in a number of talks I've given over the last few months and it is suggestive of the provocative nature of his argument:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

Duncombe's previous books, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, have been important contributions to our understanding of contemporary cultural politics, albeit aimed at academic readers primarily. Duncombe himself has been active in a number of key political movements in New York City, where he teaches, and describes some of those experiences in Dream. With this book, he has produced a text which will be read well beyond the academic realm and could provide us with a handbook for understanding why this current campaign is making such vivid and interesting use of a rhetoric informed by our experiences with participatory culture. Check out his website for more information on the book.

Throughout the book, you embrace a politics based on spectacle. How do you

define spectacle? What do you see as the defining characteristics of

progressive spectacle and how would it differ from more conservative forms of

spectacle?

I guess I'd define spectacle as a dream performed, or perhaps, a fantasy on display. Spectacle animates an abstraction and realizes what reality often times cannot represent. But I also like to use the term in a broader way: to describe a way of making an argument, not through appeals to reason and fact (though these certainly can, and should, be part of spectacle) but through stories and myth, imagination and fantasy. This definition covers what I call ethical spectacles, but also describes spectacles with less scruples: those engineered by the Nazis at Nuremberg, conjured up by creative directors on Madison Avenue or staged by Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. So what separates my "ethical" spectacles from these? It's a complicated question and I spend about a third of my book exploring it, but if I had to sum up the core value of an ethical spectacle in one word it would be this: democracy.

Most spectacles are anti-democratic. They are about one-way communication flows and predictable responses. "They" engineer the look and feel and message of the spectacle and "we" - the spectators - respond in a predetermined fashion. If this type of spectacle is successful we give our consent or support: we march in lines and vote for the Party or buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it is always someone else's dream. Ethical spectacle follows a different formula. It's a spectacle where the lines between those who create and those who spectate are blurred, one which is dreamt up, executed, and acted upon by its participants. This makes for a sloppy sort of spectacle, one where spectators are also actors, where the mechanics of the staging is obvious to all involved, and where meanings and outcomes are not predetermined, but isn't this also the definition of democracy?

There's also another key difference between the spectacle I'm advocating for and that which we are used to experiencing: reality. Most spectacle is using fantasy as a replacement for reality. Think of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln. This was an attempt (imagineered by an ex-TV producer named Scott Sforza) to replace reality with fantasy: our president is a warrior prince, not a combat dodger; the war in Iraq is won, not just beginning. The approach I'm advocating for deals with reality differently, using spectacle to dramatize the real, not cover it over.

A great example of this is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. He went into Birmingham knowing the violent, racist reputation of the chief of police. In fact, he counted on it. And "Bull" Connor acted out his part: jailing school kids, turning fire hoses on picketers, letting dogs loose on peaceful protesters, and so on, creating those iconic images of the civil rights movement, and publicizing to a world media the reality of racism in the United States. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil Rights Act passed the next year. It's also no coincidence that the footage of Top Gun W couldn't be used by the Republicans a year after the staged landing; the deadly reality of the continuing war had leaked through the staged fantasy. As the presidential namesake of the aircraft carrier that Bush landed on once said: "You can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Ethical spectacle fools no one. It is at its best when it is obvious what it is: just a spectacle. Like the architecture of Las Vegas or the campy performance of pro wrestling, one can also stage spectacles that don't pretend to be reality but wear their constructed nature on their sleeve. They are spectacles which present themselves as spectacles. As such, these dreams performed become, in their own way, real. Illusion may be a necessary part of politics but delusion need not be.

Your book poses some sharp criticisms of the kinds of political rhetoric which

has emerged from "mainstream" perspectives within the Democratic Party. For

example, you characterize progressive critics, such as Hillary Clinton or Joseph

Leiberman, who embrace a "culture war" rhetoric as playing into conservative

stereotypes of "well-mannered, well-dressed, liberal elites,"

"busybodies" and "condescending experts" who want to use the power of

government to enforce their tastes upon society. Why do you think Democratic

leaders have been so quick to embrace a form of politics which is so strongly

opposed to popular culture and what do you see of the benefits of shifting the

terms of the debate?

One of my friends, the activist David Solnit, once said: "all politics is theatre, just some of it is bad theatre." When it comes to popular culture, the Democrats seem clueless about their public image. Take Senator Hillary Clinton's press conference condemning Grand Theft Auto for example. Here she was, before an international media, playing out the Right's stereotype of the Left: a bunch of superior sounding, out-of-touch, elites telling the rest of us what's good for us, and then using government regulation to make sure we can't decide for ourselves. Karl Rove couldn't have asked for anything better (Nor could Rockstar Games since that press conference likely sold boku copies of GTA/SA as people hurried out for a taste of forbidden fruit).

Why the Dems are so clueless is a bit of a mystery. Part of it has to do with the history of Liberalism in this country which comes out of elite reform movements like Prohibition (a once progressive idea, along with eugenics!) as much as it arises out of labor and social movements (both of which are more interested in equality and justice than morality and culture). But this shying away from pop culture, I think, also has a lot to do with an abiding Enlightenment faith in the superiority of rationality and reason, and a deep suspicion of desire and fantasy - the very things, of course, which drive pop culture. This is a political problem since so much of politics is based in fantasy and desire and Liberals these days are simply not very skilled in operating on this terrain. This split between rationality and fantasy is also a false one, these forces don't inhabit separate spheres, they coexist and intermingle in all of us. It's the old, and tired, mind/body split. It's time to move on.

You describe popular culture as a "ready-made laboratory" for studying the

"dreams" of the American public. Why do you think progressive politics have

been so disdainful of popular culture? How do you respond to critics who might

argue that your arguments place too great a trust in market forces? You write,

for example, "If culture stays, and sells, it means that it somehow resonates

with the popular will. And anyone interested in democratic politics ignores such

enthusiasm at his or her peril."

The biggest problem with ignoring popular culture, politically speaking, is not that you turn off this or that group of fans (the Dems could alienate every single NASCAR fan in the entire country and still sweep the elections), but that you ignore this powerful indicator of people's dreams and desires. As the great political commentator Walter Lippmann once argued, politicians don't need to think much of popular culture, but they do need to think a lot about it.

I have a lot of problems living in a consumer capitalist culture, and my own cultural upbringing was in the decidedly anti-market world of punk rock, but even I recognize the value of appreciating popular culture in a society like ours. Unlike culture patronized by the aristocracy or funded by the state, commercial culture has to appeal to a wide enough audience to make it a profitable business. Yes, this appeal is not pure: marketing and star power can make any movie a hit the first weekend, but for that movie to still be selling the second and third it had better resonate with the popular will. So if you want to figure out what ideas and aspirations are resonating with the public a good place to start is with popular culture.

But, and this is a big but, the hit movie is not what we should be paying attention to -- we need to dig deeper. What we really need to explore are the dreams at the root of the hit movie. That movie is only one manifestation of our desires, and a commercially acceptable one at that, we need to think of others. Take a hit movie like the original Matrix. As a fan I can appreciate it as exciting entertainment, but as a politico I'm interested in what it says about us as a people: our striving for personal power and to be part of a rebellious community, our desire to stick it to the man and reveal the truth, (not to mention our love of cool toys and stylish outfits). Once you understand these forces you can do other things with them. Pop culture is just one expression of our dreams, a progressive political system that empowers people, builds community, fights power and reveals the truth -- might be another.<.blockquote>

So far, we are seeing some signs of a more playful style of activism is having

an impact on the upcoming presidential election. Witness the spoof of the Apple

1984 campaign, "Obama Girl", or for that matter, the video in which Hillary

and Bill spoof the Sopranos. What do you think this YouTube based politics

might suggest about the potentials or limits of a politics which draws its

images and language from popular culture?

I think you explore this far deeper, and far better, than I do Henry, but it seems to me that accessible media production technology, the semiotic tool box we've all built from our life-long immersion in pop culture, and the new distribution apparatus like YouTube, have immense political potential. MoveOn.org demonstrated this in their "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign. They asked their audience to make an anti-Bush advertisement -- and received more than 1,500 of them, many of them better than anything a professional production house could create. This demonstrates the awesome power - and talent - of the "audience." This is, um, "poaching" at its best: political "fans" tapping into popular desire and, using pop culture language, delivering, a different message. At its worst this pop culture poaching leads to the Hillary Clinton Soprano's ad: using all the style of popular culture but ignoring the deep seated reasons that such a series was popular. Clinton's approach is just using pop culture a gimmick.

One of the things that interests me most about the explosion of media production is the multiplicity of messages and meanings that political campaigns have to contend with. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy (George Washington was accused of being the corrupter of a washerwoman's daughter), and the swiftboating of John Kerry was just a high-tech version. What is new this election cycle is the direct impact, not of opposing professional campaigns, but of political fans. We've already seen how fans of Barack Obama have used pop culture tropes to make him into a sex symbol and render Hillary Clinton as Big Sister. Political campaigns are just going to have to make peace with the fact that they can not control their message, and that the message is going to be determined, in part, by their fans. This means that "unacceptable" material is going to be part of the political discussion and decision making.

We can either bemoan this fact: the debasement of the political process and so on, or we can look for what might be more positive aspects. It could be argued that one of the things that's wrong with electoral politics today is that what is considered "expectable" is determined by professional pundits, big media and those who make large campaign contributions. Consequently, what is of interest to the majority of us is left out of the discussion. Certainly, Obama Girl isn't opening up a substantive political discussion of anything, but it's very existence, and its popularity, suggests that we, the people, want something else, something more, than the sanitized, pre-packaged, content-free politician packages we've gotten in the past.

There's no doubt that reducing serious politicians like Obama to a stud and Clinton to Big Sister debases politics, playing into old stereotypes about the sexuality of Black men and the controlling nature of professional women. But as the means of mediated spectacle production and distribution continue to be democratized, I have faith that what will develop is a sort of bell curve of meaning. There will be offensive and malicious media spectacles as outliers on either side, but the critical mass of the center will open up substantive issues of political interest to the majority of citizens. Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? This is merely democracy in the age of the mediated image.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seven, Part Two): Kristina Busse and Cornel Sandvoss

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL CTD.:

Kristina: Moreover, I worry that it'll be impossible to talk about the subcultural phenomenon that I would define as fandom if that term is already used for a much broader, less intense engagement.

Cornel: I would argue the answer already lies in what you are saying here though: if we want to talk about subcultural phenomena, let's call them precisely that: subcultures. On many occasions fan cultures and subcultures correspond, even become interchangeable, but there are clearly also fans and aspects of fandom that do not fit into a subcultural mold. So I fail to see the benefit in equating subculture and fan cultures a priori.

Kristina: I do understand that the psychological engagement with a text can be very intense, even in the absence of others to share that particular affect, that obsessional focus. Moreover, both community interaction and this affect exist on a continuum (changing between different people and even within a person over time). And I understand that it is important to study the individual and how emotional investment in a text gets created, played out, shared. I think it's important to look at the range of fannish engagement and affect, but why can't we do so with the community rather than the individual at the center? If I look at the lonely fan reading/watching/enjoying their text, I think of them as fannish because they're participating in an imagined community of other fans. [The best example in my area would be lurkers, who do not actively interact and are thus not part of the community per se, but who very clearly often think of themselves as part of the community--I guess we could think of it as parasocial relations with other fans?]

Cornel: If we speak about psychological categories such as affect, pleasure and fantasy, these are of course by definition constituted on the level of the individual. This doesn't mean that there cannot at least potentially be a communal context to the constitution of fan pleasures but ultimately it is manifested on an intrapersonal not interpersonal level.

Kristina: I don't want to sound like I want to forego the study of the individual fan in favor of a sole focus on the community, because that's not really what I'm saying here. What I'm worried about in terms of research focus is actually the fan academic parallel to what I'm worried about in terms of definitions of fandom: focusing on the more mainstream, more palatable fan may risk the erasure/ignoring of the less easily acceptable or explainable one.

Cornel: I understand and share your concern, but I just wonder what's more palatable here. Within the context of media and cultural studies, the study of the 'mainstream" (whatever that exactly may be) seems to me in fact much rarer and more adventurous as it appears to be often irreconcilable with dominant paradigms and ideological positions in the field. Where, for example, are those studies of Britney Spears fans, those of Hello and other celebrity gossip magazines or of Hollyoaks (a painful teen soap on British Channel 4 that lends itself rather less to forms of cultural appreciation than say, Dawson's Creek)? Or to hammer home the point, studies of fans of the various call-in quiz channels that have mushroomed in Europe in the past five years?

Kristina: Likewise, I fear that studies of the individual fan and his affect may eclipse those of fan communities, especially when the former may focus on male fans and the latter on females; especially when the affect in the former is individual and personal and in the latter is collective and communal (and, in collectivities that form around responses not valued by the dominant culture, may quite often become political as a result); especially when the former is done by male academics with status in the academy and the latter by females more likely to not have that status.

Cornel: I really don't see the need to compare or benefit in thinking about one eclipsing the other - this would imply a strange scarcity of spaces of academic debate. And I don't think this reflects any sort of structural and gendered power differences with higher education. I think we are hard pressed to find many people engaged in fan studies with any particular status in the academy in any case. And I know you are not suggesting it, but just to be categorical about this: I think it would more than insulting if anyone suggested that male scholars in our fields would disregard the work by female colleagues. Of course there are academic fashions which come and go in circles but I would suggest that we can't explain them in terms of gender, nor is work on fan communities being marginalized. On the contrary, I think following Henry's work, it still very much shapes the canon of the field.

Kristina: I'm only beginning to look into the role of affect and its potential political agency, but my friend Alexis Lothian, with whom I just finished writing an essay (together with Robin Reid) on slash as "queer female space," has been influencing my thinking on the social and political implications of shared/sharing affect. She argues, for example, "that communal articulations of affect, where reactions are shared and discussed, might be locations where the political implications of affect can get hashed out." In that vein, we are rethinking, for example, how "squee"--all too often seen as infantilizing--can actually be a site for embracing one's emotional responses, especially for women who've always prided themselves in their analytic abilities, maturity, etc. Especially when looking at fandom as a space for articulation of non-mainstream ideas and emotions, the role of affect intersects with the political. And I wonder whether it can be so on a purely personal level or whether subcultural characteristics are already communal and community-focused.

In particular, then, I am interested in the way affect functions in conjunction with others, either by sharing one's emotional investment in the text with the community or, even more interesting, I think, the way the community filters, increases, and shapes the text and the fannish affect. (In other words, watching a new episode for me gets affected by my knowledge that I will have others who may also have seen a particular moment and I will be able to share it. Moreover, it is in the analysis and talking and squeeing about it, in the rewriting and the iconing that the text itself becomes *more*, and it is via this shared discussion and shared emotional engagement that the text itself changes.]

Cornel: I don't disagree here....but let's come back to that when looking at texts.

HEIMAT

Kristina: One of the most often heard narratives in my corner of fandom (i.e., slash media fandom) is that of coming home. I like the way you've established the notion of Heimat in Fans, but I think I'd like to add that a sense of "coming home" quite often is intimately tied up with other fans (i.e., I feel like coming home often occurs in the finding of likeminded people--even if that community is totally imaginary). Moreover, I'd consider Heimat by definition a thing of some permanence, so that the narratives I've told and heard is by fans who are FIAWOL, who have found their tribe, so to speak and know they won't leave.

In my essay on the topic I linked to above, I connect being a fan to identity politics, and I think it could be useful to look at the debates in other areas that have had to face the theoretical and personal issues connected to identity politics. In the essay, I was mostly concerned with matters of inclusion and exclusion (are you a fan because you say you are/others say you are/what is gained and lost by declaring that identity/ etc.), but here I'm wondering whether the identity construction of being a fan may in and of itself create an affective space of belonging.

And I think it is that space that I may be vigorously protecting here. I fear that by expanding the terminology of fan to include virtually everyone (whether by including all sorts of fannish behavior as Jenkins does or by redefining it to focus on individual behavior so that most passionate textual engagements become "fannish"), the danger may be that 'real' fans are marginalized yet again. In other words, by focusing on what Rebecca Tushnet has called "normal-folks-with-benefits," I see my own more involved and more invested community fully overshadowed (as has happened with vidding vis a vis machinima) or be redefined as outcasts yet again. That latter fear is what I tried to describe in my short paper for Flow:

As media texts are more widely disseminated and construct their audiences in ever more fan-like ways at the same time as fannish activities become both more visible and more legitimate, the distinctions between creators and viewers, between casual viewers and fans is changing. It would be easy to see these changes as having the potential to create an idyllic convergence playground. The fannish community, however, would have to disavow those parts that do not please the owners of the media product (J.K. Rowling, George Lucas). Certain groups of fans can become legit if and only if they follow certain ideas, don't become too rebellious, too pornographic, don't read the text too much against the grain. That seems a price too high to pay. (source)

Cornel: I agree with your instance on fandom as a space worth defending from commercial interest - even if this might be ultimately a futile struggle. However, I would also add that Heimat is an ambivalent term. It is of course not only 'home', but an imagined space, a vision of belonging - ultimately a fantasy, if one that is indispensable in creating a necessary sense of security; and hence it is ultimately a fantasy that therefore, even if constructed in a communal context, is an inherent individual act of imagination. But what matters more - and here I would point to Dave Morley's recent work over the past decade in particular - home and Heimat are also always rooted in forms of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, of creating an (imagined) Other, which is excluded from the space we call home. And it the potential lack of engagement with the textual Other in fandom, which I am interested in Fans: The Mirror of Consumption.

FANTEXT

Kristina: The other term that really drives home to me just how different our approaches and goals are is the concept of the *fantext*. In fact, it was upon reading your definition of the fantext and comparing it to mine that it suddenly occurred to me why I felt like we disagreed at a most basic level even though I'd nod along when reading Fans most of the time. I think our object of study is ultimately different, or rather, the focus of what we find central is different: you are interested in the individual and his/her relationship to the text while I'm interested in individuals as members of a community and their relationship to that community.

In a way, then, the source text has shifted emphasis and moved into originary (in some cases, only catalyst) function whereas fan discourses and interaction are what continues to sustain the fannish investment and affect. And I'm beginning to wonder, if we're somehow looking at two related (and clearly intersecting) groups that nevertheless differ not only in modes of engagement but also objects of affect. A solitary fan, after all, remains attached to the source text itself only. A community may do so as well, but added to that are the investment in other fans, the shared affect with its increased feedback loop (i.e., shared squee tends to be louder).

At the most extreme end, then, is the fan I'm most interested in, who's ultimately more invested in the community than the source, the fan who defines herself as a slash fan rather than a show specific fan, the fan (like me?) who'll take the fanfic rather than the show on the island. It's those fans I've studied in my research on popslash where I've argued that it is the fan-fan interaction and friendships rather than the para-social interaction between fan and celebrity that is central in popslash fandom("I'm Jealous of the Fake Me"). As such, I view the community as a social network that encourages fans to explore their identities, desires, and sexualities, more so in relation with one another than with the star himself.

So, while I'm really interested in what you say about affect, to me the investment in the community must always be acknowledged (even if that community is virtual or the interaction wholly one-sided) alongside the involvement with the source text. [Because I'm not sure one would exist without the other, i.e., I'm not sure if we could conceive of fans if all we ever saw were individuals. Or, said differently, while a specific fan's engagement may only be in accessing web sites, reading spoilers, etc., someone who more than likely *is* more community connected created those web sites, found and shared those spoilers.]

Cornel: I am not sure I follow your conclusion in the last paragraph. I think you are right that we have focused on different segments of the fan spectrum, but I don't, for example, have a sole interest in atomised fans. Moreover, I think whatever the levels of communal engagement are in an individual's fandom, there are communalities that mean that the term 'fan' has conceptual currency across the spectrum and the process of reading, crucially, is one of them. This leads me to one what I see as a central challenge of contemporary fan studies and indeed audience studies as such (and this is a point on which I think we agree): the need to reconceptualise the notion of texts and textual boundaries in mediated communication. Slash and fan fic you mention are of course texts as well, whether we call them paratexts or give them a different term (indeed as you suggest they often replace the urtext as the focus of fans' reading. Jonathan, for example should be credited out for a range of insightful articles and chapters on how we can conceptualise and address (fan) texts in intertextual space of (mass) media consumption and I should mention others here such as Matt Hills, Chris Scodari, etc. In many ways I think reconceptualisng the text as object of fandom in the triangle of individual, its social networks and different media is the real challenge we face - gender of course shapes and informs this triangle but I don't think it is the single outstanding theme at heart of understanding contemporary fandom and fan cultures.

On that note, having opened with an unashamed plug, I will end with yet another one: It would be great to continue these insightful and lively discussions online as well as offline and I would like to use the opportunity to invite individual papers and panel proposals on this and related fields for the next conference of the International Communication Association in Montreal in May 2008 for which I am the programme planer for the Popular Communication Division. The number of sessions available to us will as always depends on the number of division members we have, so to all those who are ICA members already and those considering joining (you get not only cheaper conference registration but an awful lot of journals for your bucks!) please join the Popular Communication division or renew your division membership if you already are a member. Included in the annual fee of $8 is also a free online subscription of Popular Communication. I hope both the division and the journal will provide additional spaces for these debates - helping to makes sure that rather than feeling that different foci and traditions in the field of fan studies need to compete with each other, we create a forum in which different and diverging voices are heard.

Kristina: Thanks, Cornel, for responding in depth to what was, in effect, a monologue on my part (though hopefully engaging with your previous writing). I am very much looking forward to having a dialog with both you and the readers in the blog/LJ comments. I do want to complement your plug with another, however: many of us--be they grad students, independent scholars, or fan scholars not actually affiliated with academia at all--cannot afford conferences. What many of us have and are doing instead is use the Internet and its ability to connect and allow us to have these conversations and debates. In fact, to me these summer debates have been doing exactly that--connecting people, and I hope they'll continue to do so and that these unconnected spaces we've been inhabiting will continue to merge.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seven, Part One): Kristina Busse and Cornell Sandvoss

INTRODUCTION

Kristina:

I have a PhD in English from Tulane University and teach as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. I have been reading and writing on fan fiction since 1999 and have published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan culture, including on Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction, popslash, and fandom as queer female space. I coedited with Karen Hellekson, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland 2006) and am currently coauthoring a book-length study with Louisa Stein on fan artifacts and new media. I write about fan fiction and fandom and fan communities incessantly on my fannish LiveJournal.

The fact that I am an independent scholar is, in many ways, central to my work, because I have specific and quite personal reasons to be interested in the line between professional and amateur, fan writing and pro writing, and the way these get defined in various communities. Despite my disciplinary training and record of publication, I am not paid for my work, which makes me an adjunct--in my academic work of teaching as well as research. In a way, then, my academic work functions like fan work: I do not receive any financial recompense nor does its ideal value (line in CV) contribute to my gaining material benefit.

So, I straddle the line between amateur and professional in a keener way than most. Also, my central mode of fannish engagement is through meta, the grass-roots version of academic criticism, where I am seen as an academic outsider by many fans. By contrast, I cannot quite partake in the proper academic channels and thus feel fannish outsider within academia. This ambiguous position makes me keenly aware of the way my academic work replicates the contested relationship to capitalism and professionalism that fan work (and the fans creating it) exemplifies.

.

Cornel: Hello, I should briefly introduce myself as well at this point. I have published on fan audiences in a number of articles and three books, A Game of Two Halves (Routledge, 2003) which focuses solely on football (soccer) fandom - a possibly rather alien topic to most readers of this blog, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Polity Press, 2005) and more recently had the good fortune to be asked by Jonathan Gray and Lee Harrington to co-edit an anthology previously mentioned here and entitled Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007) which features a wide range of, I think, important contributions by many scholars in the field. In fact Lee, Jonathan and I enjoyed the experience so much that we have gone on to follow in the footsteps of Sharon Mazzarella and Norma Pecora as the editors of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture. I mention this here as we initially thought that we might attract a greater number of papers dedicated to the study of fans and fan cultures given our own backgrounds, but this hasn't quite materialised yet. So please see this an invitation to all scholars out there to consider the journal as a potential publication outlet for their research in the field - needless to say, whichever side of this debate they are on (if indeed there are sides...)!

I am also Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Surrey (UK), but, like Kristina, I am a German exile. I'm not sure this actually matters at all - or rather hope it doesn't (though that is admittedly a rather German thing to say) other than in two respects: a.) in terms of the conceptual and theoretical foundations which in my case tend to draw fairly heavily on German literary, cultural and social theory such as the Frankfurt School and Constance School and b.) in giving us an outsider perspectives on many of the dominant Anglo-American (and let's add Australian) discourses in the field. There are of course always differences in personal taste and genre preferences but I am always struck at how certain instances of popular American television are assumed to be universally known and appreciated. I say this not to complain about a lack of intercultural awareness of fan scholars to whom English is their native language, but because it has shaped my interest and journey through the field. Over the years I have read many studies of fan cultures whose central texts I were and sometimes continue to be been unfamiliar with. This may be a rather heretical admission, but I have to out myself as someone who had read Matt Hills's or John Tulloch's work on Dr Who, long before I had ever seen a single episode. And just to offend the American crowd here as well, when reading the earlier rounds of this discussion, I had to google 'Firefly' - I simply had never seen it. I would like to plea that none of this is ignorance - indeed it would not deter me in the least from enthusiastically reading a study on, say, Firefly fans. But it does mean that my interest in this study and others is not one in particular fan audiences or cultures in and for themselves, but about what these studies tell us about the micro and macro conditions and parameters of (everyday) life in a mediated world and the interplay between structure and agency that takes place within such frames. Anyway, we can return to this kind of Sinnfrage of fan studies later, if you like.

Before we kick start this week's debate, I should say a word or two about the format, however. Owing to my own unavailability earlier this month (the usual excuses are other publication deadlines, exam boards, etc.) and the fact that Kristina was much more organised in writing up her thoughts an earlier stage (and is currently travelling in Europe) the following takes the shape of Kristina outlining her thoughts on the debate and my post hoc replies. Kristina is thus left with the power of agenda setting whereas I enjoyed the right of the last reply.

MALE AND FEMALE FANNISH BEHAVIOR:

Kristina: I feel on some level like we are the exemplar of what I've been shorthanding as the fanboy/fangirl split, and I think it might be useful to both articulate what those differences might be but also to complicate them once we've done so. One of the complaints I've heard most about trying to divvy up fan studies along gender lines (or even daring to suggest that gender might be an issue!) is that that there are too many exceptions to even try to establish categories or definitions. Moreover, I'll start by making a quite enormous collapse that we may have to discuss down the line, namely, I sketch behavior onto gender. In a way, when I personally talk about fanboys and fangirls, it's much less about actual biobodies than it is about certain ways of engaging with source texts and certain ways of theorizing and studying fans. And I may be totally wrong when actually looking at demographics!

But in my home, fannish behavior looks as follows: my husband watches Doctor Who quite passionately. He taped every episode when younger, bought all the tapes, and now owns all the DVDs. Most evenings more or less as long as I've known him, he will sit and watch a couple of episodes--in recent years with our kids. When my older one turned 4, he wanted a Doctor Who birthday party, and it was hard to explain to him that the doctor and Buzz Lightyear weren't quite the same *g* My husband also collects D&D material, less for playing and more as a collector's item. He certainly is quite invested in these texts, both emotionally and financially, but it is the texts and objects rather than other fans that are the center of his focus. Meanwhile, I started defining myself years ago as "a fan of fans," i.e., while I have fallen for a number of media texts over the years, most recently, Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural, my primary fannish engagement is the community and its products, my primary investment time and my primary reward friendships and fannish creative and intellectual artifacts. Or, said differently, when I answer the often voiced question of what I'd take on the proverbial island, it's always the fan creations, never the TV show.

Now, clearly the dynamic in our household is neither universal nor generalizable, but reading Textual Poachers and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities on the one hand and Fan Cultures and Fans on the other, I do begin to wonder whether my family's gendering is not that unusual after all. Now, fanfiction communities are particularly invested in community and fan-created artifacts, so that using that as my measuring stick might be unfair and methodologically problematic. After all, what about the many communities that are predominantly male? What about the lonely fangirl reading her favorite book over and over again all by herself? And even dividing it into a blunt collecting/analyzing versus creating might leave out entire communities of women who debate technical details and men who create emotionally involved works of art.

Cornel: Yes, I think these are very valid points. I actually struggle with the usefulness of introducing gender here as the key dividing line between fans and fan scholars alike and can only echo Will Brooker's earlier comments. I think there are two different questions: The first one is whether we can distinguish between types of either male and female fan behaviour or, secondly, between types of male and female approaches to the study of fandom. Both, in my eyes, are unsustainably essentialist suggestions which I outright reject. You already mentioned a few examples as far as fan behaviour is concerned and we could compile an almost endless list here: consider for example Vermorel and Vermorel's (1985) distinctly private fan fantasies written more often that not by female fans (or indeed fan girls given their age!); conversely, communal consumption contexts are at the heart of many distinctly male fan cultures in, say, sports fandom. Very much the same applies to the academic study of fans and fandom: if there are distinctly male and female approaches these would not correspond with respective foci on individual fans on the one hand and fan communities on the other - let's not forget that Henry has of course laid the foundations and established the canon in the study of fandom as an interpretive community. Even if there was a correlation between these positions and the gender of particular scholars, it would be a yet greater challenge to argue that this is not a coincidental correlation but grounded in quintessential gender differences.

In the earlier rounds of this discussion, the question of gender and fandom was linked to race by one contributor who remarked that however commendable it may be not wanting to distinguish on the grounds of race, it nevertheless constitutes a very real barrier in people's lives. This is of course true, and I think the analogy is interesting, but the conclusion is ultimately erroneous. Let's think this analogy through for and imagine we would suggest that there are forms of 'white' and 'black' fandom. This would be nothing short of utterly racist! However, this doesn't mean that race and ethnicity are not one of the many socio-demographic lines that structure given fan cultures, impact upon audiences' choices of objects of fandom and inform cultural and cultural hierarchies associated with fandom (remember Thornton's revealing documentation and analysis of the discrimination faced by black adolescent males in 1990s UK club culture). Equally, gender (alongside class and other vectors of social stratification) is one of various important social and cultural parameter that structure fandom, as it is indeed a faultline in the divisions of power in contemporary society and hence naturally constitutes a key concern of fan studies. Yet, this is a far cry from overburdening gender by making it the organising principle of a fundamental and essentialist dichotomy of fan audiences.

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL:

Kristina: And yet I can't shake this (possibly mistaken) belief that there *is* a gendered tendency--if not in the fans then maybe in the academics? Given that you and I probably fit into both categories, it seems like we should maybe begin by defining our terms, because that's where for me the first (and possibly biggest) disconnect and differentiation takes place. You define *fandom* as "the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text" (8). In so doing, you clearly shift the emphasis from community to individual: "this focus on communities and tightly networked fans fails to conceptualize important aspects of the relationship between the modern self, identity and popular culture which forms my particular concern here" (5).

To me, on the other hand, the terms mean quite different things. Fandom, to me, requires a community and participation in that community--and possibly self identification with that community. [And I feel the need to insert here that when I talk about "community" I clearly do not think of it as a monolithic entity but rather as always a collection of different and differing, complex and contradictory communities, where fans may be members of many communities over time and even simultaneously.] I'll just cite myself here since I think my short essay Fandom-is-a-Way-of-Life versus Watercooler Discussion; or, The Geek Hierarchy as Fannish Identity Politics articulates my very objection:

I want to suggest that we distinguish between fan and fandom as well as acknowledge that there are different trajectories that combine into levels of fannishness. In other words, an intense emotional investment in a media text that is wholly singular may create a fan but does not make the individual part of a larger fandom, whereas a person enacting fannish behavior may not define him- or herself as a fan. It thus might be useful to consider the overlapping but not interdependent axes of investment and involvement as two factors that can define fannish engagement. Moreover, we need to consider models that can differentiate between people who are fans of a specific text, those that define themselves as fans per se, and those that are members of fandom.

Cornel: I actually don't agree that I shift the emphasis from communities to the individual. I tried to broaden our definition of what we call fandom and who we call fans, yet in doing so I do not exclude the established body of work focusing on fan communities which is in particular associated with what Jonathan, Lee and I have described as the 'first wave of fan studies'. Rather I, as have indeed others, included fields of audience studies which, to my mind, are also of importance and warrant further study. And I think there is a certain logic in accepting to recognise those people who call themselves fans - whether they meaningfully participate in interpretive communities or not - as fans, as indeed others who may shun the label but display very similar forms of textual attachment, communal engagement or textual activity.

I think while widely used, Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst's (Audiences, Sage 1998) highly useful taxonomy of different fan audiences deserves yet greater attention in this context, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic (from a UK vantage point that is). While Matt Hills has rightly pointed to some issues concerning the terminology Abercrombie and Longhurst employed, they provide a very useful map of the last field of popular audiences which helps us to juxtapose and position various studies of different fan groups and cultures meaningfully in relation to each other. In some of these studies, in particular those focusing on whom Abercrombie and Longhurst describe as 'enthusiasts', the emphasis will be very much on community, in others it won't. I think both are about fans, both are engaging in different forms of fandom, but at the same time, they are different forms of engagement with different social and cultural consequences. I think this only underlines the significance of studying fandom across the spectrum of audiences or popular media.

Kristina: On the other hand, there is also a spectrum between the individual fan who has a deep investment in the beloved text and the people with a more casual enjoyment, and it is that distinction that seems crucial to me. As a result, I do wonder whether just liking a show, following a sports team, or listening to a band isn't a type of activity that is so universal that the category of fan becomes emptied out. I don't want to border police and define who gets to be called a fan and who doesn't, but I fear that an all-too-inclusive definition would become useless for any study or categorization if the definition were so wide that noone would *not* be included. If fan simply denotes someone liking something, then there's really no need to create a separate category.

Cornel: I am not sure why the fact that many of us, maybe all, are fans in one form or another "empties out" the term. I would make a similar point here as in my discussion of Fiske's (1992) essay that moves towards a normative definition of fans: I can't see any benefit in using a definition that corresponds with pre-formulated expectations. Put more crudely than you are suggesting (but it illustrates the point), if we define fans as "good consumers', then naturally only "good consumers" are fans!

I think this is not so much a question of who is a fan but when we are a fan. Saying that most of us are fans doesn't mean we are all fans all the time, but rather that being a fan describes a particular segment of our engagement with media and those around us - an engagement that I would argue derives its significance not least from the fact that it spills over into other social and cultural fields, in the way the reading position of the fan is more and more evident (or maybe we just more and more realise it is) in other fields of cultural and political engagement (see Jonathan's essay in Fandom for example).

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series elaborating on comments I made to Mother Jones as part of their special Democracy 2.0 issue. Today, I take up a few more of the many implications of this interplay between participatory culture and participatory democracy. Democracy and the Participation Gap

While I remain firm in my belief that, as I explained here some months ago, the rise of participatory culture has the potential to renew participatory democracy, I remain concerned about the participation gap, those who lack the technical access, the cultural competencies, and the sense of empowerment needed to fully participate in this new political culture.

MJ: Are there elements about the use of technology that could make the political process less democratic?

HJ: If the central conversation about the election is only online, rather than through broadcast television, large numbers of people will simply not have access to what the candidates are saying. So, for some people, this campaign is going to be more accessible than ever before. They have access to more information; they can drill deeper; they can maintain regular contact with the campaign; they can interact with other supporters and so forth. For others, who have no access or limited access to the Internet, moving all this activity online suggests that they don't count, their voices don't matter. They have no access to the information to make reliable decisions. And it's not the campaigns who are doing that, so much as broadcast television, which is decreasing the coverage that it provides of the party conventions. It's local newspapers that are cutting back the number of pages devoted to candidates for office. Those are the things that make the use of new media less democratic, because they are falling back on the presence of the new media to justify cutting back on basic information sources that citizens who don't have online access would rely on to follow the political process....

Whenever we look towards new and emerging platforms as a resource for democracy, we must at the same time consider who is being left behind. And I do see dangers at a moment when mainstream media is cutting down on its news coverage of the presidential nominating process and much of the information is moving to cable or digital media. The people who are going to have to work hardest to get access to information and participate within the process are going to be those who have historically felt the most disenfranchised in the first place. The move towards digital campaigning may capture the imagination of many young voters but it may also exclude many low income participants.

Social Networks as Political Interfaces

My conversation with Mother Jones turned towards the use of social networking sites, another major innovation in this year's campaign:

HJ: I think some of it has to do with the use of MySpace by the Obama campaign, which is something that I don't think is necessarily being [deployed] by the other campaigns as effectively yet--[Obama's supporters show] an understanding of how you use social networking to reach young voters. It's not about bringing people to your site and keeping them there; it's about giving people the resources to take your message with them wherever they want to go. It's allowing people to befriend the Obama campaign via MySpace and the other social networking pages. It's really clever because it makes the social affiliation of the campaign much more visible, and it allows all those people to connect to each other and feel a sense of affiliation, as opposed to simply receiving a message from on high. That's why the anti-Hillary 1984 campaign commercial that circulated was so much more credible than the one that reacted to it, because there is a sense of the Clinton campaign speaking to us from a contained space as opposed to breaking free of that and creating a new relationship with the voters.

In many ways, the interfaces campaigns adopt model their idea about the relationship between political leaders and citizens. I have long felt that the most authoritarian candidates tend to have top-down structures built into their web presences, where-as those candidates who want to establish a more dialogic relationship are drawn towards community-building and networking capacities on their sites. Most of the media attention on the campaign's use of MySpace has focused exclusively on the direct links the campaign is creating with individual voters, but it is part of the nature of social networks that it is also enabling supporters to connect to each other without going through a central hub and it remains to be seen how this impacts the campaign. It's interesting to think about Hillary's use of campaign videos in this way. Supporters see these videos as the later day equivalent of the Fire Side Chat. I get the analogy. FDR used radio, then a relatively new political platform, to speak directly to Americans in their living rooms and adopted a frank, informal, and conversational tone appropriate to the nature of such an exchange. In many ways, Hillary Clinton is adopting that same tone in her confessional-style videos -- which would seem totally appropriate for an era of broadcasting but which now seem much too one-directional to work in a networked culture.

Credability, Partisanship, and Wiki-Politics

As the interview continued, Mother Jones asked me about issues of credibility given the ways that videos and other content now circulates well beyond its original context and given what I have said here about the likelihoods that many of the videos will attempt to mask their origins.

MJ: What effects is this going to ultimately have on how people filter the information that they're getting through this media? Eventually, will they simply disbelieve anything they see?

HJ: I think there's going to be skepticism and not cynicism. We should be skeptical of the sources of information that come to us via these grassroots channels. At the same time, we've seen these emerging knowledge cultures, these sort of large-scale grassroots communities that pull in information and debunk these things in very quick order. The turnaround is really fast, and for those people who are wired, that flow of information is surprisingly effective, what people are calling "collective intelligence," the ability of people to collectively pool their knowledge and share what they found. And I think that, actually, collective intelligence is a profoundly democratic process. It's social at its root, and it allows people to form communities around debating political issues and how the candidates are representing themselves to the public. It makes us less susceptible to negative campaign advertising than we've been before.

MJ: How sophisticated do you think online media consumers are at this stage? And to what degree are these collective intelligence systems currently up to the task of catching misleading information?

HJ: The answer to the first question is relatively sophisticated. If we make our political process more like Wikipedia, then I think we create the space that's needed for people to pull knowledge and form a consensus and weed through conflicting evidence. I think we're not quite there yet. I think the interesting thing is how much this next campaign cycle accelerates the process of people moving from playing with collective intelligence to deploying collective intelligence as a source of political power. I think that's what we're going to see unfolding in the next couple of years. And I don't know if we're ready for the task yet, but I think we're going to grow up pretty fast.

The reference to Wikipedia, here, picks up on something I said earlier in the conversation which is missing from the web transcript but was quoted in the print magazine:

The blogosphere has done a really bad job in general of finding a common space between disagreeing parties. It probably does contribute to the further partisanization of American politics. Wikipedia represents the alternative model, one where people from different political backgrounds could work together. But it depends on the willingness of the candidates and the campaigns to try to come up with a purple strategy as opposed to a red-vs-blue strategy.

Without idealizing Wikipedia, the group has developed a series of ethical norms about how to deal with conflicting views or competing claims which could be a good model for how people of good will but opposing perspective might work together to reshape the political process. We have created a climate in this country which makes it difficult if not impossible for either political party to govern because both are preoccupied with winning.

My reference here to a Purple strategy is a gesture towards a well publicized map produced in the aftermath of the last election which tried to represent the balance of votes in each state based on a blending of red and blue. No state is pure blue or red, despite our most common ways of depicting election results. In fact, many of the individual states are closely balanced. Showing them as purple states helps reveal some of the commonalities between different regions of the country rather than focusing purely on divisions. And so some political commentators have started to talk about "purple strategy" and you can see signs of this "purple strategy" emerging from candidates such as Obama in the Democratic Party or Hucklebee in the GOP. My fantasy was that campaigns might use wikis to try to identify points of consensus which could be used to broaden their political base, rather than deploying bloggers to try to draw blood from the opposing camp.

Interestingly, Mother Jones also spoke with Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales to get his perspective:

JW: One of the concerns people have had about blogs is that they are going to have a very divisive influence because people only read blogs that they agree with, and they won't get their news from the mainstream media, which are supposed to be neutral. But you see a couple of things happening. First, blogs are hardly the only form of new media. People come to Wikipedia all the time, which is quite clearly as neutral as anything can be, I think. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. At Wikipedia itself, we are now seeing a large volume of information being created that has been put through an extensive process of compromise, with people from very diverse viewpoints really hammering away at it to find some compromised view that everybody is satisfied with.

Also, you see people who are really active in reading blogs do end up reading opinions that they disagree with because bloggers get into arguments and link up back and forth and have those debates. So people do get exposed to alternative viewpoints, far more than they would if they had one source of information. I think it's pretty clear that people are getting better information than they used to.

I hope to write more about the use of new media in the campaign in the coming months.

A Valuable Resource

In parting, let me do a shout out to a very interesting project focused on the role of media in presidential campaigns, produced by Project Look Sharp. If you are an educator, you can download here a range of images, sound files, and videos going back across the entire history of the nation, which you can use in talking with your students about the political process. I was lucky enough to see a presentation by Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp at the Alliance for a Media Literate America last month and being the political campaign buff that I was, had a grand time seeing the materials they had collected -- from images of 19th century street parades to the fireside chats, from Nixon's Checkers speech to Saturday Night Live spoofs of the presidential debates.

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part One)

I am proud to be featured as one of the experts on new media and American politics featured in the August 2007 issue of Mother Jones, alongside such notaries as Howard Dean and his former campaign director Joe Trippi, A-list blogger Jerome Armstrong, digerati Esther Dyson, legal theorist Lawrence Lessig, conservative icon Grover Norquist, Moveon.org's Eli Pariser, Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales, and author David Weinberger (Everything is Miscelaneous). The magazine is taking inventory of the ways that new media tools and techniques are reshaping the campaign process, looking back at the 2004 campaign and forward to the current political season. Even if you read the printed edition of the magazine, you should check out their web edition which includes more extensive versions of the interviews quoted in their articles. I was bemused that the quotations from me they selected for use in the magazine emphasized some of the concerns I have about the current shape of online democracy, leaving me looking like one of the crankiest people they interviewed. I have to say that playing the part of a pessimist in a publication like Mother Jones is a most familiar position for me, given my reputation as a critical utopianist. But, I tend to spell out the positives and negatives in interviews -- most of the time, they go with my most wide-eyed comments and this time, they emphasize some of my worries. I thought I would share some of what I said here and offer a few more thoughts about the role which new media is playing in the presidential campaign so far. Some of it builds on ideas I first introduced in my Technology Review column, "Photoshop for Democracy," and developed more fully in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

One thing to keep in mind: campaigns are often early adopters and adapters of new media technologies as they seek new interfaces with potential voters. The most innovative use of new and emerging technologies comes from insurgent or dark horse candidates who are trying to get their message out with limited funds and have less to lose from taking risks. If what they do seems to work, you will see it taken up in the next campaign cycle by more established and thus more tactically conservative candidates. So, for example, last go around, Howard Dean's campaign staff went for broke in their use of platforms like Meetup to organize face to face meetings with voters, of blogs to give voters a greater sense of access to the candidates and the campaigns, and the use of the web to raise money from smaller donors. By this election cycle, all of these tactics are taken for granted and they are being used by pretty much every candidate in the race. This go around, the newer tactics have to do with social network sites, such as Myspace, to create a stronger sense of affiliation with the campaign and the use of YouTube and other video sites to distribute content. Further out on the horizon might be the use of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, to allow candidates to "meet personally" with key leaders scattered around the country or the use of Wiki software to allow citizens to play a stronger role in shaping the candidate's platform and position papers. (So far, we are not seeing major candidates adopt these later approaches, but the campaign is young and anything can happen.)

Politics YouTube Style

All of this, however, frames this from the wrong angle though, since it keeps us focused on what the candidates and their campaign staff is doing, while as my response to this first question suggests a lot of what is most interesting in the campaigns is emerging bottom up -- from citizens taking media in their own hands.

MJ: What areas do you think are going to be the most ripe for experimentation and innovation?

HJ: I think a lot of it is not going to be through campaigns but through loosely affiliated organizations. We saw this last time with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Texans for Truth. Those are examples where the candidates lost control of their own campaigns to some degree, or at least maintained a level of plausible deniability. I think the most interesting work I saw during the last election cycle came out of True Majority, an organization that was using appropriation and transformation of popular culture to reach younger voters in a hipper way. I wrote about the role of what I call "Photoshop for Democracy," which is the use of Photoshop collages as a kind of grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. What happens when you tap popular culture, you pull politics much closer to people's everyday lives. So, I'm very interested in the ways those kinds of new uses of media touch both campaigns and citizen groups and the uneasy relationship between the two. The positive side is that it gets more citizens involved; it develops a more playful language; it produces a more engaged electorate; it transforms the language of politics. The downside is that checks on negative campaigning break down completely, and that's what we saw the last time with the Swift Boat Veterans: They went lower faster than any campaign would have been able to do on their own.

A key phrase in this passage was "plausible deniability." I think the rise of citizen media makes it possible for campaigns to keep certain supporters at arms length, allowing them to do some of the dirty business of the campaign while allowing the candidate to deny any and all association. Candidates are required to verbally endorse all paid advertisements sponsored by their campaigns, where-as these are the kinds of spots they can deny. We don't know for sure what, if any, involvement the Obama campaign had, for example, in the distribution of the anti-Hillary mashup of the Apple 1984 campaign, though Mother Jones includes an interview with Phil de Vellis, its creator, who had this to say about the video:

MJ: I'm sure you are aware of the skepticism surrounding the situation-that people just don't believe that there was no campaign involvement. You lived with an Obama PR flack.

PD: I'm friends with people on every campaign. Politics is a really small world-it's really like junior high. The [Obama] campaign was not involved in it at all. As soon as they found out, I left the company. I think Obama's a great guy, and I think he's running a great campaign, but that doesn't make me officially part of the campaign. But am I connected on one of these trees that connects all the great rock bands-like the drummer of Pink Floyd is also in Supertramp. Yeah, there's some of that. But I have the capability to do that on my own and the ability to get it out there. I'm kind of a utility player. I can do it all. I can also just shut up and watch the fireworks go off and that's what I did.

MJ: In your response on Huffington Post, you said you wanted to express your feelings about the Democratic primary and also to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. And in light of what's happened recently with Obama's MySpace page, how does a campaign harness the power of that citizen without it getting completely out of control?

PD: They can't-the game really has changed. They can't exercise the same amount of control over the campaign. During the Dean campaign, nobody ever said, "Oh, look at what your crazy supporter did." Reporters were interested in the technology and never really read anything people were writing-and they were writing really crazy things. So I would say it's probably best to encourage supporters to go out there and be advocates and at some point, [candidates] are going to have to distance themselves if it's not what they intended.

I suspect we are going to be tracing story after story like this throughout the forthcoming campaign -- videos produced by supporters who may or may not have direct links to the campaign. Such videos will have the look and feel of those produced on the most grassroots level, even if some of them -- like the notorious Al Gore's Penguin Army -- turn out to be produced by top-flight agencies. In the past few months, we've seen some fascinating examples of how videos can function in the campaign -- from the sexy Obama Girl video to the videos being produced by Firefighters to challenge Rudy Guiliani's attempts to capitalize on his role in 9/11. (Could firefighters be the new Swift Boat Captains?) Interestingly enough, we are even seeing the idea of "fan parody" move from the fringes of the last campaign to the absolute center -- witness Bill and Hillary's participation in a video spoofing The Sopranos (which was itself a promotion for their do it yourself campaign theme song competition.) These videos are both interesting because of their style (the use of parody as a vehicle for mainstream political discourse) and because of the mode of their circulation (becoming something that supporters can actively spread across cyberspace). As I told Mother Jones, "The video's becoming the modern equivalent of the campaign button -- something you wear, you display on your blog to spread the message to your friends and neighbors."

Lawrence Lessig also discusses the role of parody, appropriation, and grassroots video production within the political process:

Lawrence Lessig: The campaigns are realizing that if last election was defined by Swift Boat, this election there will be a million Swift Boats. There will be content showing up that will be much more interesting and watched by many more people than what the campaigns are creating. That changes the way that presidential campaigns are defined, where they buy up as much of the speaking space as possible. No one yet knows how this is going to play out.

In the analog world, it wasn't really that anyone was stopping ordinary people from becoming political actors, it was that the costs of doing so were so much larger. The technology is unleashing a capacity for speaking that before was suppressed by economic constraint. Now people can speak in lots of ways they never before could have, because the economic opportunity was denied to them.

MJ: So what does that mean for the quality of the conversation? Not that it's a really high bar.

LL: If you look at the top 100 things on YouTube or Google it's not like it's compelling art. There's going to be a lot of questions about whether it's compelling politics either. We can still play ugly in lots of ways, but the traditional ways of playing ugly are sort of over. This medium is only a medium if people are interested, and we'll get as good as we deserve.

Navigating a "Remarkable Wilderness": In Tribute to Peter Lyman

When Peter Lyman passed away several weeks ago, after a long struggle with cancer, his students and colleagues paid tribute by revising his Wikipedia page. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had spent his lifetime helping us to better understand how we live with information and information technologies. Peter was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information and a former university librarian. I didn't know Lyman well, we met only a few times, but I have come to know and admire many of his students and through them, I have been touched by his passing. Today, I want to pay tribute to Peter and all those who have worked through him. The world is a better place because he spent time with us. The man I remember was soft-spoken, gentle, and nurturing, but also someone who was full of intellectual curiosity and a passion for learning. I did not meet him in good times -- he was already struggling to maintain his professional life in the face of the treatments he was undergoing for his illness -- and yet I remember him as a man who was full of joy and courage and who was still at the very center of the community of scholars he had helped to create.

The first time I saw Peter Lyman, he was speaking before the governing board of the MacArthur Foundation at a meeting held inside the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and describing the work that his team had done through the How Much Information Project, a multi-year initiative which he ran with Hal Varian. The How Much Information Project sought to identify how much new information emerged per year and which spoke to the challenges we face in being able to process all of that new data. Looking to confirm my memories of this research, I found the Executive Summary on the project's home page. Here's some of what Peter and his team found:

Print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections....

The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.

How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper....

Information explosion? We estimate that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002....

Information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

These statistics were staggering when I first heard them, giving a count (although one so vast that it is beyond my comprehension) of the amount of data -- good, bad, and indifferent -- we pour into the media-stream on a regular basis. This research helps us to understand the overwhelming challenges we face as a society in weighing the information that passes between us and placing even a small portion of it in a meaningful context.

Yet, as someone who cared deeply about libraries and the kinds of learning cultures they fostered, Peter was concerned about this information overload but also in his own quiet way set to work to shore up the structures we as human beings create to help us confront these insurmountable challenges.

Looking to get closer to Peter, I stumbled upon a 1998 talk he presented on "Designing Libraries to Be Learning Communities: Toward an Ecology of Places for Learning." Here are a few excerpts which give a taste of his perspective on the human dimensions of information:

Today we speak of people in the library as "users." The term, "user" suggests that it is the relationship to the information technology that is central, just as the term "reader" used to refer to a relationship to printed collections. While this is certainly a valid perspective, there is a certain social isolation implicit in each of these terms, suggesting that the library is a public place where strangers might gather to work side by side in peace, but remain strangers. And clearly, the creation of a public place within which such peaceful strangers might dwell is a substantial achievement in an urban civilization. But while some people can learn some things alone by reading books or computers, much learning is collaborative and tacit, and requires a social dimension as much as it requires access to information. While individual people do come to libraries in order to find answers to informational questions (or perhaps to be entertained, overcome loneliness, or get out of the rain), information is often only a necessary but insufficient condition for learning. Beyond information alone, learning may require the exchange of information between individuals, and ultimately a sense of membership in a community of learners....Digital libraries are often described as 'information resources' yet it is difficult to use digital information, for it provides no sense of place. It has no boundaries, for in principal every networked information resource may be linked to every other, and indeed many encompass the globe. The structure of digital information is defined by technical standards, but unlike print or other media, there is no authority in cyberspace that might determine the quality of information....Information is not a landscape; it is a remarkable wilderness, needing the vision of a technological Capacity Brown.

These two passages are taken from a document which seeks to explain to librarians in technically precise and yet accessible terms the nature of the new digital landscape. Yet, the tone of this passage suggests the human touch which Peter Lyman brought to his work -- the wry acknowledgement that people go to libraries for reasons beyond reading the Great Works of Western Civilization, the focus on the social life of information and the fascination with the very human structures we create for processing and engaging with the very inhuman amount of information that passes between us. For him, libraries were not simply data bases but were fundamentally cultural institutions and learning wasn't simply what occurred within the single, isolated mind but what passed between minds and formed the basis of our social contact with each other. These are powerful ideas that we lose track of at our own peril and they were at the heart of what Peter Lyman contributed to the world -- someone who understand the nature of our changing mediascape and yet also held onto the traditional values which have long shaped human societies.

Another of Peter's essays spoke about "the poetics of the future," analyzing the various metaphors -- Information Highways, Digital Libraries, and Virtual Communities -- which we deployed to make sense of our new and evolving relationship to information technologies. Throughout this powerful essay, he insists that we should discuss our relationship with information as "citizens" and not simply "consumers" and demanding that we address such matters out of a concern for social justice and out of our highest hopes for the kind of world we want to inhabit in the future. Peter wrote:

Highways and libraries are useful metaphors, but are taken from an industrial society, and related to networked information only in their functions of transportation and information management. The term, community, originally referred to social relationships in feudal villages and if anything, modern life in an urban industrial society is marked by a lack of community. I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with the use of metaphor in general -- indeed, poetic thinking is among our most important resources -- but the subject may deserve better poets and poetry. Thus my project today is to test these three metaphors, to see how well they function as heuristics for thinking about economic and social justice in the information age.

After a precise and thoughtful analysis of these three well worn metaphors, he concludes with a call for new imagery: "Poetry comes from the street, and the second research task I propose that we jointly undertake is to listen to the language of cyberspace for new poetry, new images that will take us farther than the noble but tired language of industrial society we now use."

I am not sure whether the search for social justice or for "new poetry" led him to focus on youth and their relationship to digital learning in the final years of his life: I suspect a combination of the two. But it was in that context that I met Peter. Along with Mimi Ito, Peter was the director of the Digital Youth Project, a three year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which explores how kids use media in their everyday lives. I had a chance to watch Mimi, Peter, and the researchers on their team present the first year's findings from this research and have followed it closely ever since. I know I will be reporting on their findings in the future here in the blog. As a group, the team is exploring young people's use of Wikipedia and Live Journal, their engagement with anime, fan video, music mashups, multiplayer games, and fan fiction, all topics of interest to regular readers of this blog. I have come to consider them to be the sister project of our own Project nml, part of the powerful social network of researchers from around the country and across a range of disciplines that the MacArthur Foundation has brought together through their concerted effort to understand and help to shape the kinds of informal learning that kids engage with as they travel across the new media landscape.

Peter's presence will be missed as his team, and the MacArthur network more generally, takes the next steps towards redefining how we think about youth, informal learning, and participatory culture. Yet, there's no question that his early interventions will have pushed all of us towards a greater understanding of the human dimensions of information technologies and perhaps nudged us to keep an eye open for the "new poetry" that is emerging as kids take these media in their own hands.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part Two): Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington

Sam Ford: I know that a lot of the people following this debate might not be that interested in soaps in particular, but I am interested in the differences in discussing fan culture when it shifts from being a conversation primarily about fan fiction, which many of the back-and-forths have so far. How do we measure creativity in relation to fan communities? My understanding is that most people would agree that fan fiction only retains its full meaning and resonance within the community that it is produced in, and the social specificity of creative output is no different in the soap opera fan communities we have been discussing, but the output is often much different--criticism, debate, parody, discussion, continuity-maintenance, historical perspective...these are very creative processes that seem to be the prevalent forms of fan output for soap opera fandom. To move toward your discussion of sports and media fans, I think the question you pose is one relevant to this series as a whole and one which various contributors have touched on in one way or another. Are we looking at the difference in male and female fan responses or in the responses of scholarship on fans, or can you really separate the two? As you imply in your question, there is some difficulty in separating the two, and perhaps the body of academic work on soap opera fandom, television fandom, fan fiction communities, sports fandom, and so on are shaped greatly by the gendered perspectives, and the respective genders, of those who have been most prevalent in those fields. It is important to realize this may be the case, while not making that the totalizing explanation for differences in sports fandom and sports fan studies, when compared to media fandom.

My work on pro wrestling goes between the two, in that it is sports entertainment, a blending of media fandom and sports fandom, and a blending between male-gendered sports and female-gendered soap opera. In wrestling, I have found that there at least seems to be a significant amount of fan fiction compared to soaps, even though the WWE likewise has five hours of weekly television content, perhaps because wrestling does provide a lot of negative capability, to steal a term from Geoff Long's posts two weeks ago, for fans to fill in, because it does not provide the off-stage relationships among characters and/or their portrayers. As Sue Clerc has written about, wrestling fan fiction plays an interesting blend between concentrating on the characters and the "real people" who play their parts, just as wrestling blurs those distinctions itself.

Of course, it's important to note that the fan fiction of wrestling is a very largely driven by females, while male fan expression in online fan community form has often

manifested itself in a blend of role-playing and fantasy sports in which wrestling fans enter fantasy leagues and role-play various wrestlers to compete with one another. These e-mail federations, or fantasy leagues, involve quite a bit of creativity, but it manifests itself much differently than in the off- screen relationships so often portrayed in the more explicit fan fiction. These, of course, are very gendered responses to the program, and there is very little formal overlap between the two wrestling fan fiction communities.

You raise some interesting questions about celebrity in relation to sports as well. I don't particularly know that "celebrification" is necessarily gendered female, although there is often more talk of "role models" when it comes to male celebrity. But I do think that you are right that the particular pleasures or draws of sports may be seen as different. In the wrestling world, John Cena would be a particularly good example.

Because some more traditional fans view him as lacking the technical skills of some

other wrestling stars, he is actively disliked be a particular portion of the crowd, his

"haters." To another very large portion of the audience, often identified as primarily female adults and younger fans, he is greatly loved and admired, and the theory has

often been an emphasis on skill among the active adult male fan base and an emphasis on star image and charisma among female fans, children, and more casual wrestling fans. I'm not saying it breaks that easily into those binaries, but it is intriguing in relation to the question you pose.

C. Lee Harrington: One of the dimensions of creativity often left out of discussions is fan fantasies -- here I mean those that take place only in the confines of one's brain, not shared with others via discussion, fiction, debate, research interview, etc. We all know fantasizing exists but unless it manifests itself in some

representational form visible to others we tend to overlook it (in recent research particularly).

Most studies of fandom tend to rely on at least some form of visible expression. I wonder sometimes about the (in)accessibility of fans who experience and express their fandom only to their own selves......and I'm one of those people, mostly. I'd rather watch my favorite TV programs alone than with others, I don't talk about them online and rarely with friends (though our office staff and faculty have regular Wed morning discussions about Dancing with the Stars and American Idol, perhaps my proudest accomplishment as department chair), and I don't participate in most other creative activities that tend to be the hallmarks of fandom. I wonder if my own research design approach would capture me as a fan :-) Auto- ethnography, anyone...?

To go back to the gender question, yes, the gender of scholars vs. gender of fans vs. gendered nature of texts etc. raise all sorts of complicated questions, and the discussions these past few weeks have been really illuminating. I guess I was thinking with celebrification (in the context of sport) that once we're down the road of transforming athletes into stars, we somehow move them from the world of sport to the world of celebrity, a gendered shift in many people's eyes.

I'm remembering the Olympics a few rounds back (I'm forgetting the year) when the network (NBC?) for the first time did "behind the scenes" of athletes' lives to draw in female viewership. Novel at the time but it's obviously become standard because it altered demos exactly how producers wanted. Not hard to speculate how Emmitt Smith's appearance (and well-deserved win!) on Dancing altered his public perception and fan base. Obviously some of our readers out there know much more about celebrification in the sport context than I do.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I know you share my hope our back- and-forth has been useful for those involved in the discussion this summer and those following the discussion. Since soap opera fandom, sports fandom, and pro wrestling fandom are quite different than many of the fan activities and genres that have been discussed here in the past few weeks, I at least hope that we have emphasized that there is some great work on fandom in the body of work on soap operas and pro wrestling, and that there is a whole other world of sports fandom out there that speak to many of these issues and that would be of great interest.

When the precursor to this series started after the Media in Transition conference and through Kristina Busse's site, we started discussing how my own focus on soap opera

fandom provided a much different perspective on many of the media-related questions posed in this discussion about fandom. I have taken a Convergence Culture approach to what is primarily a female genre, soap opera, which would seem to some a male bent on a female fandom. However, as your work pointed out over a decade ago, a producer/consumer perspective is quite different in the fan world of soaps. While it is quite true that fans often set themselves against TPTB in soaps for not respecting a show's history, this relationship also manifests itself in relation to soap opera's marginality, just as pro wrestling fandom does. Even as producers and consumers bicker about one another from time-to-time, they may very well be the first to defend the others to outsiders. That produces that "family reunion" atmosphere and that much different dynamic.

Soaps also have a larger proportion of female creators in executive and high creative position to correspond with the large female fan base, so gendered discussions of producers and consumers and the power dynamics of their interaction is quite different than in a variety of fandoms in which examining interpersonal relationships in greater detail is reading against the text. Further, the volume of soaps text mitigates the need for fan fiction to fill in the gaps, so fan creativity manifests itself in so many other ways.

Sports and pro wrestling provide the other side of this coin, but as Henry's work points out, wrestling marries a predominantly male fan base and cast to a feminine serialized drama form. And I think it's important to realize that there are a significant portion of soap opera fans who are male, just as there are a large portion of female wrestling fans. These surplus audiences, in the eyes of those worried about target demographics, are still important parts of the fan community and must be included in these discussions, rather than stereotyping the audience as somehow monolithic.

I know that this conversation exists in some ways as an outlier to a fanboy/fangirl discussion, but I hope that will be its strength rather than its weakness. Lee, I know that you are headed out for travels, so we'll end the conversation at this point, and I'll continue the conversation through the comments on Henry's blog and in LiveJournal.

Lee will be joining us in the comments section when she returns from her travels later this month.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part One): Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington

C. Lee Harrington: Hi everyone. This has been an interesting set of discussions thus far -- Sam and I are happy to contribute. We'll follow the general norm by beginning with introductions. I've been engaged in audience/fan studies since the early 1990s, with most of my work co-authored with Denise Bielby. Our interest in fan studies grew out of our long term soap opera-watching habit. I don't remember how long Denise has been watching, but I started watching soaps in the late 1970s and have been an enthusiastic follower ever since (mostly ABC soaps, with some years watching DOOL).

When I was in grad school at UCSB in the late 1980s (Denise is on the faculty there), we went to a General Hospital fan club luncheon, were fascinated by the entire experience, and decided to study the soap fan culture. Our book Soap Fans was published a few years after Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon- Smith's Enterprising Women, among other important work of the late 80s/early 90s, which heavily influenced the way I thought about audience/fans.

We wrote the book in the pre-widespread-Internet-use era (some soap fans were on BBSs but not many), and soap fandom has changed a lot since then (as you write about, Sam). Since Soap Fans, I've done work on the Bianca coming-out storyline on All My Children and have recently worked on aspects of global fandom (with Denise and Kim Schimmel), among other projects. Inspired by Chris Scodari's work, I've also become interested in gerontological issues in soap operas, though my project is in the very early stages.

I have to say that Denise and I are of the generation of scholars who did NOT identify ourselves as soap fans in our work....I think we may have mentioned our own love of soaps to people we interviewed for our various projects (memory is hazy) but I don't think we've ever declared our own fandom in print (memory is hazy here as well, unfortunately). In part this is simply a generational issue, as Henry and others have written/spoken about, in part (for me at least) it's how I construct my own fan identity (as private, rather than publicly experienced/expressed). Denise and I DO have a picture of ourselves in our book though we don't identify who we are in the caption (it amused us at the time, I recall, though it seems less amusing now for some reason).

I also have to say, as Sean Griffin mentioned several weeks ago, that I have not personally encountered the gender issues that launched this discussion series. I'm not quite sure why....maybe because most of my work is based on soap opera, maybe because the gender neutrality of my name leads lots of people to assume I'm male rather than female (a gender issue in its own right, obviously, and one I've dealt with all my life), maybe because I keep a very low profile at conferences and am a miserable networker, so don't end up engaged in some of the firestorms of academia.

Sam Ford: I'm honored to be contributing to this conversation with Lee, who was among the scholars whose work I encountered regularly while working on my Master's thesis. I am a 2007 graduate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, and I think my personal background is important in positioning me in this discussion of fan studies, since I have a much shorter duration as a fan studies scholar.

I graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree and four intersecting majors--English, mass communication, communication studies, and news/editorial journalism-- and a minor in film studies, in three separate departments (Department of English, Department of Communication, and School of Journalism and Broadcasting). As part of my undergraduate honors thesis, I was interested in tackling my own personal interest in professional wrestling as a self-professed fan through each of the three lenses that had been presented to me in these three departments.

My final project was primarily a collection of three essays on pro wrestling, each written through an advisor in a different department, and each with a different citation style and theoretical lens. One was a textual analysis of masculinity in relation to pro wrestling character/performer Mick Foley; another was an industry analysis of World Wrestling Entertainment and how the company diversified its output through multiple media platforms; and the third was a primarily qualitative ethnography of pro wrestling fans, gathered from interview 50 fans at five live wrestling events of various sizes. Each of those projects have been in various stages of publication during my time at MIT, since I came straight from undergraduate to graduate school.

When I came here, I decided to tackle another of my "lovemarks," so to speak, and the other side of perhaps the same gendered coin: soap operas. As those who follow the blog I run for the Convergence Culture Consortium or my guest posts here on Henry's blog in the past, I've found a variety of correlations between soap opera fandom and pro wrestling fandom, and the place of both in relation to both fan studies and questions of cultural taste.

I first encountered the CMS program here at MIT and Henry Jenkins' work through his essays on pro wrestling, which introduced me to Textual Poachers and the fan studies perspective from there. Henry served as a member of my thesis committee, and Convergence Culture was admittedly the major inspiration for my Master's thesis on the soap opera As the World Turns and soap opera fans, along with Nancy Baym's Tune In, Log On.

I have chosen in all my work to make my own fandom an explicit part of my writing, but that very much has to do with generational differences and the work that came before me. I struggled for a long time myself with notions of an "objective" and detached academic voice and my own need for expressing my fandom and my personal motivations for these studies. However, to be fair, Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise do admit to your own fandom in the introduction, even if it does not become infused in your writing as a whole.

Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise write, "Soaps are at the absolute bottom of the television hierarchy, lumped with game shows and professional wrestling in terms of their perceived moral worth" (5). You also write that you have not personally encountered the gender issues being raised in discussion here. I hope we will address these two issues, which I feel are quite related in greater detail, because I find that studies of pro wrestling fandom (and there are quite a few) and of soaps fandom have existed outside of the "mainstream" of fan studies research, and perhaps the gendered focus of both have colored their place in the history of fan studies.

Wrestling is at an interesting place between sports fan studies and media fandom, while being a male scholar studying soap opera fan communities has been illuminating. Of course, it's a farce that there is not a sizable female audience for pro wrestling, as well as a significant portion of male soap opera fans, but they are both quite gendered in terms of industry focus and the predominant fan base.

Finally, you mention your own lack of experience with many of the gender issues in fan studies that launched this series. I feel much the same way. Perhaps it's because I spent a significant portion of the past two years working within and looking at a predominantly female fan community and an industry in which women hold a number of key industry positions.

But I was fascinated, as I delved into these discussion of fan fiction and fan communities versus user-generated content and producer/consumer interaction that, in some ways, studying producer/ consumer interaction was considered by many to be a male perspective on fandom, as opposed to fan activities that are further removed from the commercial contexts of media production. Lee, I know that your book with Denise focuses on soap fans and their relationship with the industry and soap texts in a largely pre-Internet world, so I was curious about your thoughts on the gendered-ness of commercial and non-commercial examples of fan expression within fan studies.

C. Lee Harrington: Ah, so Denise and I *do* mention our fandom in the introduction of our book -- good! I guess I could have walked four steps and plucked the book off the bookshelves, but....thanks Sam. I think you're absolutely correct that studies of pro wrestling fandom and soap fandom have existed outside the mainstream of fan studies, and their gendered focus is an interesting question.

I've been intrigued by the various debates in recent fan studies about whether (or to what extent) genre continues to matter. I understand and agree that the fan experience (subjectively at least) can transcend the fan object but I also think genre still matters in shaping fandom. Twenty years into researching soaps, I'm still fascinated by how unique they are as texts (which you write about, Sam) and the kind of challenges that uniqueness presents both to the industry and to scholars (not to mention to fans).

To get to your question in a roundabout way, one of the unique aspects of open-ended serials is the relentless flow of the text, and I think soap fan expression has been constrained by that. The types of activities Henry and Camille and others were writing about in early 1990s -- fanfic, fan art etc. -- simply were not being practiced by soap fans. There was just no need. A new episode of the text was coming every day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. There was less need to "fill in the gaps," so to speak, so fans were engaging in other types of expression -- private fantasizing, gossiping with friends, reading mags, etc. The industry is in trouble in part because of this relentlessness.....Making time for a new episode every day (day after day etc.) is exhausting for people, even longterm fans like me. You do a

wonderful job with this topic in your thesis....The point being that in the early 1990s at least, soap fans' expressions had more to do with genre than gender (not to say the genre isn't gendered, of course). Has that changed, do you think?

I also wanted to comment on your observation that many in fan studies consider studying producer/consumer interaction to be a male perspective on fandom. One of the things Denise and I were fascinated by at the first GH fan club luncheon we went to was the level of intimacy between actors and fans -- some of it contrived, but not all of it.

I had just finished reading Josh Gamson's book on celebrity culture in which he uses a metaphor of the "hunt," which seemed entirely appropriate to the entertainment realm he was writing about and wholly inappropriate to the soap realm, where decades spent acting on soaps and decades spent watching the same soap lends to a different relationship between the production team and fans/audiences (with actors being in a weird middle realm). Producers have a different type of engagement with longterm Guiding Light viewers than they do with Lost viewers.....Perhaps the presumed gendered-ness of studying production/consumption relations is based on presumptions about the producer/consumer relationship, which might also be shaped by genre (gendered though it is)....?

And having typed this, I'm not entirely sure I addressed the question you actually asked.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I think the frequency and duration of soap opera texts certainly alters the fan experience significantly. Several of these debates about fan studies have centered on fan fiction in one form or another, but as you point out, fan fiction is not one of the predominant forms of expression within soap opera fandom. That's not to say that soap opera fan fiction does not exist at all, but most of the creative output of the fan community is centered on criticism, alternate storyline suggestions, parodies, speculation, nostalgia for prior storylines, contextualizing current events based on the collective memory of the fandom, etc. These are all creative activities, to be sure, but they predominate soaps fandom much more than fan fiction.

I think you may be right that genre has quite a lot to do with this, and primarily the frequency of the text. With 250 new hour-long episodes per year (for every soap other than The Bold and the Beautiful), there are much fewer holes to be filled into the text. Plus, while a lot of fan fiction served to humanize or explore the interpersonal relationships that were not the main focuses of many of the primetime shows that drew the most fan fiction, soap operas are explicitly about these relationships among an ensemble cast.

There are still gaps to be filled in, however, and soap operas are such immersive texts that they actively invite fans to do so, since they are what Robert C. Allen calls overcoded narratives. Since there are so many characters and parts of town fleshed out over the course of decades, but no explicit connections are made as to the geography of the town in many cases, fan activity and creativity often comes through group speculation about the fictional world rather than fan fiction or fan art. Fans make a collective effort in online forums to construct, maintain, and critique the writers' job of the most important aspect of soap opera storytelling to many fans--continuity. With such a massive text, the collective discussion of continuity takes up a significant portion of the creative energy of the fandom, much as they do in comic books and other immersive story worlds, to use a term from my thesis work.

You raise an interesting point regarding the producer/consumer relationship both in your book and in your response here, Lee. Perhaps because soaps are considered niche in terms of cultural taste, it helps shape this sense of camaraderie among fans and producers. That's not to say that soaps fans are not often quite critical of "the powers that be," or "the idiots in charge," and this aspect has probably become more pronounced and explicit now that the Internet facilitates discussions of the creative powers among a large group of fans who are more aware than ever not just of the on-air talent but the creative shifts behind-the-scenes.

Still, I have been to fan events in recent years and still agree that there is this sense of respect and familiarity between actors and fans at soaps events that does extend beyond that celebrity craze. Perhaps this is most true with actors, in that the actors on most soaps have been the constants, and fans are more connected to the actors portraying the roles, and the characters, than they are to the particular creative team, since many in the fan community may have been watching the show longer than anyone on the creative team has been involved with the program.

Thus, longtime characters, and their portrayers, share a veteran status with the show that even most of the creative staff does not have in many of these cases. And that probably explains why soap fans spend so much time guarding the continuity of their shows because of a perceived personal ownership of the text based, in part, on their own seniority in following and knowing the text.

But, speaking of these differences between gender and genre, I know that you have been spending a significant amount of time recently comparing media fandom studies with sports fan studies. Do you suppose many of the differences in sports fan studies to be based more on genre--"real" versus fictional, a higher level of cultural respect vis-a-vis soap opera fandom for sports, etc.--or on gender, since sports fandom has traditionally been considered predominantly male, in comparison to soaps fandom being traditionally considered primarily female?

C. Lee Harrington: Sam, I'm glad you brought up Allen's book -- it's such a fabulous exploration of both the literary and industrial aspects of soaps and seems under-cited in soap audience/ fan research these days. His observation that soap narratives are over-coded, and non-watchers assumptions that they're vastly under-coded, is one of the most interesting aspects of the genre, I think. It's always been difficult to explain to non-watchers how utterly complicated soap texts are, and because longstanding stylistic and production codes can make them appear simplistically plot-driven, their complexity often goes unrecognized. I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!! I really like your term immersive story

worlds in this context, by the way.

I agree with you that it's primarily actors and fans in concert who protect the continuity and integrity of the characters and communities, since production, directing writing teams change so rapidly.....I wanted to add that one of the interesting intimacies in the world of soaps (compared to other entertainment realms) is the place of academic critique within it. I have been surprised at times how welcoming the soap press is to academic commentary on storylines and issues. In part this helps legitimize the industry, of course, but to continue the metaphor of the family reunion which Denise and I used in our book, it allows academics (especially those sympathetic to the genre) to have a seat at the table.

In terms of your question re: sport/media fans, are we talking about the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fan studies or the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fandom? Or both? I have to say at the outset that I am NOT a sport fan scholar so anything I say here is my educated guess....and hopefully we have some readers here who can help us think this through (my recent work is very much from a media-not- sport perspective). Certainly in the West at least, sport fandom is historically male but contemporary fandom even of traditionally masculine sports no longer is, necessarily. Doesn't the NFL say that close to 50% of its fans are female? And I wonder what the gender breakdown is for fans of NASCAR vs. fans for indivdual NASCAR drivers.....? Maybe this is not so much about genre OR gender, per se, but about the increasing celebrification of sport stars....? Is celebrification generally understood as a feminine process (not in any essential way, of course)....?

MORE TO COME

Don't forget to check out the Live Journal site for active discussion of the contents of this post.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Five, Part Two): Geoffrey Long and Catherine Tosenberger

Where the Wind Blows: The Matter of Authorship Geoffrey: Ah, so we've arrived at the point in this academic conversation when we both devolve into real, true fanboy/fangirl engagement -- what the hell is up with that Supernatural "prequel" comic anyway? The art is horrible and the writing isn't much better! I swear to God, I was so stoked when I found the first issue at my comic shop, but when I got it home and cracked it open I was so disappointed that I didn't even bother to finish reading it. Ugh.

A-hem. Back to the topic at hand...

I think this is one area where my own experience as a storyteller colors my attitude towards hierarchies of canon and authorship. When I tell a story, I'm creating a group of characters, a world in which they'll exist, and the series of events that will happen to them. I am the author of that story, and these are my creations. If someone else wants to tell a story featuring my characters, it feels like it should be up to me to determine whether or not the events they describe are actually 'canon' or not. If I accept those events as canon, I'm also granting that person the right to be considered an author of this narrative -- literally 'authorizing' them. If I don't, then I have options. I can sue, in an attempt to make sure that no one else plays with my toys, but I personally firmly believe that this is a bad way to go unless someone's making money off of my work illegally or that they're passing off what they're creating as official canon. A better option is to acknowledge the existence of that story as fan fiction, and recognize that it exists in a sort of orbit around the original creation. This is where things get particularly messy -- is it "equally viable as literature", or is it permanently tainted as a 'lesser' creation, since that person didn't invent that story from whole cloth? How much distance from the original creation is required for something to be considered viable as literature?

Bookstores are filled with accepted literature that openly declare themselves to be reinterpretations of a classic, but there's still a distinct difference between Margaret Mitchell's 1939 novel Gone with the Wind, Alexandra Ripley's 1991 Scarlett, Alice Randall's 1992 The Wind Done Gone, and a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader. Interestingly, while both books hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller lists, Wikipedia includes Ripley's Scarlett, which is a direct continuation of Gone with the Wind, in the 'fan fiction' category and Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of the story from the point of view of the slaves, in the 'parodies' category. This suggests that the popular perception of both works is as 'second-tier' creations, despite the fact that Publisher's Weekly referred to The Wind Done Gone as "a spirited reimagination of Mitchell's world, dependent on its predecessor for its context but independent in form and voice". To my mind, The Wind Done Gone is still lessened somewhat by its not being a wholly independent creation, but it is executed with enough originality and style that it can be considered viable as literature. In other words, it can stand on its own two feet. Scarlett, on the other hand, can't make the same claim, and therefore suffers from the same drop in perceived validity as most fan fiction.

Were I Margaret Mitchell, I would most likely insist that Scarlett is an unauthorized piece of fanfic and should only be distributed via unofficial channels, but that The Wind Done Gone is different enough that it's a sort of 'alternate reality' spin on my characters. I might still ask for a cut of the profits, since Randall is still using my copyrighted work as a jump-off point, but that it's a distinct enough creation that it's unlikely to be confused for my own stuff... Maybe. It's a fascinating hypothetical. Regarding the Scarlett/Vader slash, I think that such a thing would be hard to take seriously unless it was done very, very, very, very well. (Bonus points to the first reader who posts such a mash-up to YouTube.)

As for how transmedia narratives affect these interpretations, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. I tend to look at transmedia extensions along a primarily timeline-based set of axes, so that negative capability tends to refer to events in characters' pasts or futures that haven't been explored by the story yet. To my mind, most slash fiction isn't meant to be considered in-canon, whereas transmedia narratives use negative capability to hint at events that have happened (or will happen) in-canon. In particular, most slash fiction that I've seen doesn't aim to fill in chronological gaps so much as posit a kind of "What If?" re-interpretation, but I'm not at all comfortable making sweeping claims about this. What do you think?

Catherine: Oh, god, if we're going to talk about the comics, we'll be here till next MONTH at least. So I shall wrench myself away and ask, devolve? I'm usually in that headspace of fangirl enthusiasm, only changing my language to reflect the audience and circumstances; or maybe that's just my excuse for sticking a, well, "discussion" might be overstating it, but a something about "Luscious" Malfoy and his pimp cane into my dissertation. Pimp canes aside, I'm uncomfortable with drawing a strict demarcation between "academic" responses and "fannish" responses, because at least for me, they're really not all that different -- I respond intellectually *and* emotionally *and* libidinally *and* et cetera to things I'm interested in; as I said, the issue is one of language, and the context in which I use that language -- I pretty freely mix up stereotypically "academic" and "fannish" modes of discourse in both settings, usually unconsciously. (My academic writing has been criticized for being flippant, but I don't think that has anything to do with some kind of "inappropriate" leakage of fan discourse; my non-fannish dissertation director has a similar style, which means he doesn't stop me when I do it.) And I really wonder if we can even talk about fannish discourse as if it's a coherent thing -- there's the stereotype of pure emotionalism, sure, but intellectual engagement is as much a part of fandom as lustful/geekish squeeing. Fan discourse contains multitudes of acceptable dicourses, and the ratio of analysis to squee (or whatever) is determined by context and the individual fan.

As for issues of authorship and ownership, I am a hardcore reader-response person: if you want interpretive control over something, don't ever let anyone else see it. I think creators, as creators, get to determine what specific texts count as Official, but beyond that, very little. They create the planet, and get to decide what stuff is officially on the planet, but don't get to decide what others *think* of that planet, or from imagining all kinds of things about the planet. Once that text goes out into the world, other people get their grubby little minds all over it, and the creator loses interpretive control. As for how much weight I give a creator's reading of the text -- the creator is exceptionally well-informed, but that doesn't mean that her reading is the only one, or even the "best" one, whatever that means. I'm a storyteller too, and for me, the inevitable ceding of control does cause me anxiety, but it's also one of the most exciting parts of the whole process.

As for the concept of "lesser" creations, to my mind, you picked some not-very-good examples -- never mind Gone With the Wind, there are backs of cereal boxes superior to Scarlett! More seriously, I think it's interesting that your examples were a sequel and a parody, neither of which are really representative of the bulk of fanfic -- fanfic can certainly be a sequel or a parody, but many fans don't tend to present their work that way.

And you also named them as "interpretations" -- what's fanfic, then? Geraldine Brooks' March, which just won the Pulitzer, follows the exploits of a minor character in a pre-existing work, which is a classic fanfictional setup. Gregory Maguire's Wicked is villain-rehabilitation that would do a Draco fan proud. But then, I think "Sirius and Remus should totally be doing it" is an interpretation of the Potter texts -- whether the author frames it as a reading of Rowling's canon or as simply a setup for a story.

Also, Scarlett/Vader ain't slash unless one of them gets a sex change, through whatever means you desire -- slash is homoerotic romance. (I totally want to see that YouTube video, though!)

Whether it fills in chronological gaps depends on the writer, the story, the pairing, the fandom, etc. Slash is a HUGE category, and the only narrative constant is that it features a romance between two characters of the same gender. I know misapprehension of slash as practiced by female fans isn't, like, a generally or exclusive fanboy thing, but Will Brooker said a few days ago that he thinks of slash as being primarily about the writing -- his comment was, "By that logic, maybe someone who reads a lot of novels is a novelist; but OK." And that is in complete opposition to the way a lot of slashers understand themselves -- slash is about writing, but it's also about reading, of the text and of the slash fanfic. Slash fans who don't write fic are still "slashers," because they're still reading the text in a slashy way, and thinking and talking about it, and reading the fanfic. I think the engagement with fanfictional interpretations of the text is what distinguishes a slashy reading from a plain "queer" reading, though the two readings might look identical on the surface. As it happens, I'm both a writer and reader of slash, but I was a slasher before I wrote my first slash story.

While we're on the subject of definitions, it's funny how we're approaching the category of "literature" -- you're saying, "if it meets these aesthetic criteria, it's viable literature, even if it isn't 'original'" while I'm going, "Originality, of the 'I made it up all by my lonesome!' sort, is a seriously problematic criterion for 'viable literature.'" Forgive me if I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're positing "lack of original characters" as a defect that can be compensated for by good writing, yes?

My position is completely different -- I think the use of other people's characters, etc. can be a source of artistic strength, and enables writers to engage in particular artistic moves, and create artistic effects, that are difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish in "original" fiction. For example, recursive/archontic/fanfictional lit lends itself to feats of compression that would be impossible in a non-recursive text: a line in a Harry Potter story as seemingly innocuous as "Ginny was keeping a diary again," conveys, to a clued-in reader, an entire *world* of ominousness that would take a writer of original fiction a much longer time to set up. I quoted Sheenagh Pugh, earlier, who talks about the possibility for "shorthand, allusion, and irony" in fanfictional texts; it's not like original fiction doesn't make use of those, but you can use them *differently* when you know your audience knows the text you're responding to. It's the most extreme form of intertextuality -- all literature refers to other literature, nothing exists in a vacuum -- and fully exploits all the possibilities afforded by a knowledgeable audience. What do you think? Aside from the fact that we both need to stop ending our screeds with that phrase?

Fan Fiction as Literature?

Geoffrey: First, a giant 'mea culpa' regarding some of the things in my last email. For starters, my using 'slash' to describe a hetero hook-up was a big smack-your-head "duh, I knew that" moment. (I have officially revealed my outsider/n00b status in fanfic studies. Curses!) Also, to clarify, by 'devolve into real, true fanboy/fangirl engagement' I only meant shifting into more casual language and analysis instead of the more highfalutin' "academic" language. I share your attitude towards academic writing -- as Henry will certainly attest, the majority of my thesis was written as playfully and as casually as I could get away with...

As for the rest, you're right -- I could have picked better examples, and I could have made my case more clearly. Again, mea culpa! I'm having trouble putting my finger on what exactly it would take to make a piece of fanfic considered 'literature' in the popular sense -- not just to have fanfic as a form be recognized as having the potential to be literature, or to have a piece of already-qualified literature be understood as fanfic (as with March, which has now been added to my to-read pile, thanks for that), but to have a piece of Harry Potter fanfic be declared literature.

I'm wondering if the use of existing characters, especially contemporary characters, might prove problematic in the same way that Warhol's use of a can of soup, or Duchamp's use of a urinal, renders those works problematic to a certain audience. Some audiences completely accept those pieces as art, but others will never consider them to be of the same caliber as the Mona Lisa because of their unorthodox origins. Is that the distinction that makes it problematic? The 'quality' of the source material? Would fanfic about Jesus or the characters from Little Women be more widely accepted as viable literature than fanfic about Draco or the Winchesters?

I'm also struggling to figure out where something like Arkham Asylum fits into this. Arkham Asylum is, after all, "just" a Batman story, but the style and quality of its art and its language seem to make it more viable for consideration as art. It's not fanfic, of course, but it does use existing characters, so that might help us narrow this down a bit. What do you think?

Catherine: Since we're talking language, I have my own mea culpa: I should have clarified that I tend to use "literature" in a very broad "written prose, poetry, and drama" sense (and yes I know that's vague), and not as a term that marks artistic quality (i.e., "This isn't just a romance novel, it's literature!" -- a statement that makes me want to throw things). For me, fanfiction *is* literature -- it's written fiction -- that's not commercially published. I can see why there are those connotations, though; commercial publication lends such an aura of... respectability. It's been vetted by somebody, somewhere, who decided that *this* story was fit to sell. But "possibly commercially successful" and "aesthetically successful" are not the same thing. But the thing is, just because fanfiction hasn't -- and often can't, when we're talking about fanfic for in-copyright texts -- be commercially published, that doesn't mean it somehow isn't literature, and has no chance of being *good* literature, at that. All those recursive/archontic texts we've listed that have been commercially published are recursive to source texts that are a) out of copyright, and b) well-known enough to ensure a sizable clued-in audience. Also, the ones we named were all novels; while there are certainly a number of novel-length fanfics, there's an enormous amount of short stories, novellas, drabbles, even poems -- all of which are even more difficult to sell, even if they could be published.

There's also the fact that fanfiction is often not just responding to the source text, but to the *fandom* -- the conglomeration of fanfic, canon discussion, fanfiction critique, squee, character-bashing, and so on, that makes up the discourse of a fandom. Kristina will love me for this: a lot -- not all, but a lot -- of fanfiction is so deeply embedded within its particular community context that it's difficult or impossible to really understand it without *also* being embedded in that context. Therefore, a lot of fanfic can't be published because it appeals to a far too specific niche audience, sometimes one that only consists of only a few people, to risk commercial publication.

The audience for Supernatural is enough to support, say, a gen tie-in novel, but what about the audience for explicit Wincest? But just because it's "unpublishable" doesn't make it "bad literature," or, to my mind, "not literature at all." And it's not that published literature *doesn't* appeal to highly specific forms of cultural literacy: genre fiction is an obvious example, but so is, say, Joyce, for whom there's an entire cottage industry churning out guides to Ulysses ("first, read the Odyssey"). It's just there are certain forms that publishers are willing and able to gamble on, and a lot of fanfiction isn't it -- but that doesn't make it *bad*.

Geoffrey: Well, yeah, under that definition, sure, fanfic is literature! I'm glad you went into the concept of traditional publishing as a vetting process, since that was something that I really wanted to address. As you noted, all too often the 'traditional publishing process' simply fails to meet the interests of the reading public, for various reasons.

A lot of the time, a written piece of work is declined by a publisher not because it's particularly poorly written, but because the publisher doesn't perceive a market for it -- and, of course, this is in no way restricted to just TV shows. I think fanfic tends to get a bad rap because a casual fan might wander into a fanfic site, read some slash fiction and run screaming, or read a particularly silly piece of fanfic and not take the rest seriously. These are the fanfic sections that explore the more radical ends of the "what ifs", but what about fanfic that deliberately maintains the tone of the 'parent' text and simply fills a narrative void that whatever corporate Powers That Be simply don't view as sufficiently profitable? Obviously building a system to cater to explicit Wincest fans is tricky as hell, but if Supernatural's ratings were too low for the show to be renewed next season, how would you build a system for fanfic to officially serve as a continuation for just such a cancelled series?

Catherine: The thing is, is that I really don't know how much the idea of being "validated," as it were, by the Official Copyright Holders or whomever, is what most fans want -- or, at least, what they're aiming for. There is an enormous amount of pleasure to be had in the concept of *playing* with these characters, with this world, as a perfectly legitimate activity in and of itself; the stamp of canon approval might be nice, but it isn't *necessary*.

Fandom is a free space, in a way that commercial publishing is not, and many fans relish the freedom. This is why there are thriving online fanfic communities even for texts that are out of copyright, and therefore the fanfic *could* be published. Some fans would like to publish their fanfic, but I think it's very important to remember that not everyone in fandom is looking for that kind of "canonical support."

Wiki-Fic?

Geoffrey: True, such a system certainly wouldn't be for everyone -- while some musical artists like Trent Reznor are posting their tracks online for fans to remix and pass around, other musicians and fans alike find such behavior unimaginable. "We don't need your permission" is often a rallying cry for the fiercely independent (and go, folks, go), but some would-be creators do want permission.

Despite the object lessons gleaned from the widespread derision of Fanlib.com earlier on this blog, I think such a system could be developed to give fans of a property an official, legal way to share their creations -- and to give newcomers the encouragement they'd need to start. If I ever create a set of characters or a world that gains a strong fan following, after I'd told the story that I wanted to tell I'd be extremely interested in setting up a site where fans could not only write and share their own "further adventures of" stories, but perhaps have the opportunity to vote on what fan-generated stories would become canon moving forward. Can you imagine, as an author, coming back to your own creations one, three, five, ten years later and finding out what happened in your characters' lives? Further, can you imagine then having to qualify to write another story with your own characters? If Lucas had to undergo such a process before the prequels were greenlit, would we have been subjected to Jar-Jar Binks? How long would Jar-Jar survive in a democratically-determined Star Wars canon?

A similar situation actually happened to the Wachowski Brothers when The Matrix MMO went online. During the course of the game, a bunch of players managed to orchestrate the death of Morpheus. Under the "old rules", creators might have rebooted the server, ignored the event, or, as in the case of the assassination of Lord British in Ultima Online, banned the players responsible. The Wachowskis, however, were intrigued by this turn of events and simply made it canon. What would happen if that sort of attitude were more widespread? Would the generation, evaluation, and incorporation of fan contributions into narrative canon in effect become a plausible model for interactive narratives, and would we, as audiences, be willing to subject ourselves to this sort of "WikiFic"?

Catherine: I don't know - while I think, in theory, that that kind of collaborative world-building is cool, I have serious doubts about the way it would work in practice; I think institutionalizing the fanfic, holding the bone out to fans that their stories, if they're *really special*, might become canon is a way of shutting down creativity, because then everyone's competing to be Prom Queen. Not that fandom is all sunshine and daisies until a creator starts meddling, and there's certainly some jockeying for closeness to the creators in some segments of fandom, but. Something like that would really narrow down all that lovely negative capability that gives fanfic writers their space to work. Everyone loves seeing their pet theories/interpretations validated by canon, but not all fans are comfortable with the concept of that much cross-pollination between creators and fandom: some people have very strong views that canon is Their Space, and fandom is Our Space.

I think that's an extreme position to take; especially since, in genres that are known for accruing fandoms, like sci-fi and fantasy, lots of creators were participants in fandom before creating new material. I also think it's ridiculous to pretend that stories posted on the Internet for public consumption are somehow magically invisible to creators - and fandom is way too useful to creators, if they want to gauge how the most dedicated segment of their audience is actually responding to the show/book/etc. However, I do think the Their Space/Our Space people have a good point - things can get ugly in cases where there's lots of creator/fan interaction, especially when the creator objects to certain types of fan stories being told. It all depends on the circumstances, and the individual creators involved; I wouldn't want to posit your setup as some kind of ideal model. Even shoutouts in canon to fans skeeves some folks out. It depends on the fandom, the creators, the individual fans.

Anyway, it can be fun to see those nods, but it isn't necessary. Even if there were no shoutouts, people would still be writing the Harry/Draco or Buffy/Giles or Cuddy/Cameron, because they can and want to. In Harry Potter, people write EPICS about characters whose only appearance is in a list of names at Sorting Time. Fans don't *need* validation from the creators to produce their stuff - again, it's nice when your favorite character or ship or theory plays the way you want it to in canon, but *not* getting what you want from canon has yet to stop fans - that's often a motivating factor for fanfic in the first place!

Isn't that the whole point of negative capability -- that there are possibilities that aren't being explicitly addressed? "Wikific" - great term - could be a fun idea for some people in some circumstances, but I think trying to make that the norm would, essentially, cut fanfic off at the knees by robbing it of its anarchic power. And when you factor in that fanfic is primarily written by women, and companies that distribute creators' material are still dominated by men, even if an individual text isn't male-centered or produced - well, it makes getting co-opted by the Man uncomfortably literal.

Geoffrey: All excellent points, especially the bits about the phantom stories of VC Andrews. When I was a kid I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries, and I was shattered when I discovered that Franklin W. Dixon had not actually written hundreds of stories of Frank and Joe over the better part of a century. (There's a story right there -- the epic tale of an immortal children's adventure-book writer... Hob Gadling maintaining the same pseudonym for 500 years -- ONLY HIS PUBLISHER KNOWS... Hmm...)

I suppose, at the end of the day, what it all boils down to for me is the impossible cat-herding of getting everyone to agree on what degree of validation fanfic needs, or even wants. The camp that feels that any story set to paper (or screen or whatever) is equally valid as literature understandably screams, "Validation? We don't need no steenkin' validation!" These firebrands have a more punk, DIY mentality towards the creation of fanfic, and that's cool. Where I think we run into trouble is when this group gets aggregated with another, more traditional camp that wants to see fanfic considered as not just literature, but valid candidates for Literature, wants to see the integration of fanon into canon, and so on. I still think this latter camp faces the same challenges as Warhol's soup cans due to the popular shift in mindset required; just as the public struggled to accept Pop Art as Art, this camp faces an uphill battle getting fanfic accepted not as derivative literature but as Literature.

Personally, I have a foot in both camps -- I think that, just like comics, fanfic should be considered as literature, but in order for it to transcend literature and achieve Literature, the key is going to be artful execution and style, as is seen in March---- -or The Wind Done Gone. This, of course, teeters on the edge of the same intellectual wankery that's plagued Art and Literature and so on for years... Is fandom as a whole willing to surrender its punk respectability in exchange for consideration as Literature?

I think fandom should abandon this whole attempt to achieve acceptance and let its freak flag fly -- do its own thing, celebrate its independence and free-for-all mentality and focus on creating the greatest, craziest, most imaginative, most fulfilling, and just plain best work that it possibly can, and then force academia to recognize that as undeniably Art or Literature or whatever. That worked for Art Spiegelman and Maus, for Neil Gaiman and Sandman, and video games are trending that way with things like Myst, Shadow of the Colossus and even the Columbine game that got banned from the festivals.

As for negative capability, I think the fun is in filling in the gaps as a reader with your own imagination, and then seeing how closely the author's eventual revelations resemble your guesses. The desire to find that out drives further consumption and exploration of the author's work, which is both entertaining for the audience (minus missteps like midichlorians, of course) and fiscally rewarding for the author. I think the trouble that fanfic poses for this model isn't the sharing of these audience-generated guesses, hypotheses and explorations, but the attempt to obliterate the elevation of the author's position, of canon. If my story about how Draco Malfoy meets his death at Harry's hands is considered of equal value to where J. K. Rowling takes the story, then this 'game' loses its 'win' condition. It's more democratic, perhaps, but personally speaking I'd be really sad to lose that enjoyment -- and, as someone who has always wanted to be a storyteller, I think losing the elevated status of 'authorship' would be a sad thing indeed.

Finally, as for gender... Is my way of thinking about fandom and negative capability inherently colored by the fact that my reproductive organs are on the outside instead of the inside? Is my preference for stories that fill in the gaps about events, characters or places over stories that fill in the gaps about interpersonal relationships and contingencies somehow imprinted on the same strands of my DNA that make my arms and chest furry, or imprinted on my brain by the same social structures that taught me to wear black T-shirts and jeans instead of sundresses and flip-flops on the weekends? I honestly don't know. It's a fascinating, complicated and dangerous area of thought.

What I do know is that I'm a feminist, but I'm also a straight white guy. I'd like to sign off by asking that people remember to consider whether the gender-based assertions flying around the room mightn't be just as sexist as the systems they're railing against. Personally, what I'd like to see is a race- and gender-blind meritocracy, but I'm enough of a realist to realize that may be unattainable. Still, people should never be denied opportunities or respect just because they're female, because they're African- -American, because they're Asian, because they're overweight, because they're underweight, because they're redheads, because they're blonde, because they're Catholic, because they're Wiccan, because they're homosexual, because they're heterosexual, because they're male, because they're Caucasian, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. When we consider gender in fan studies, we all too often run the risk of making grand statements like "fanfic is written by women and the system is dominated by men, so this is clearly a case of The Man keeping womyn down", which makes us straight white guys cringe, no matter whose 'camp' we're in. As is everything everywhere, life is just more complicated than such oversimplifications can accurately represent ? and, at the end of the day, no one likes to feel like they're being reduced to an Other.

Catherine: I am totally punk rock, man. The do-it-your-own-damn-self mentality of fandom is its greatest strength, and the source of its freedom. But the thing is, I *don't* think that's incompatible with capital-l Literature at all; maybe it's because my background is in folklore, but I see absolutely no reason why institutional approval should function as some kind of prerequisite for serious consideration of something as a "legitimate" work of art. And the reason I keep harping on Respectable Literary Precedent for fanfic is to show that hey, using other people's characters is *already* something that capital-L literature does, and has been doing for a long time; therefore, it's disingenuous to try and keep fanfic out of consideration in those aesthetic wankery stakes. Because there is a lot of seriously good fanfic out there, and the writers deserve to be recognized as the artists they are.

And while it's nice to wish for a happy idealistic future where everyone sings "Up With People," I think it's extremely important to pay attention to issues of gender, race, class, sexuality -- all of these have affected who has ACCESS to that institutional approval that we've been tossing around. Fandom is a space where people who have historically been denied access to institutional narrative creation have said, "Well, then, we'll tell this story OUR WAY."

That's not to say that every single instance of fanfic is motivated by sticking it to the Man -- it is FAN fiction, after all. But the collective impact of fandom is forcing us to reassess what we mean when we talk about "authorial ownership," and who gets to benefit from that. The Internet has exacerbated fandom's anarchic tendencies, and all those old cultural hierarchies -- creator/consumer, male/female, straight/queer, art/crap -- are getting shaken up. And they have to be.

In fandom, you don't have to be anointed by the Official Culture Industry to be an artist, to share your work and have it be appreciated. You don't have to passively accept the stories you're being told, but can take them and play with them in your own way. People have been doing that for a long, long time, but the only stuff we ever got to see was that of the cultural elites, who were allowed to distribute their work for reasons not entirely based on aesthetic merit. Now, *you* get to show your stuff, too. And while I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to plug yourself into Officialdom, the point about fandom is that you don't have to, and a lot of the time, you can't. And that can be a position of strength and freedom, and that's something that should be celebrated.

WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART TWO)

RETHINKING EXPERTISE At a time when schools still emphasize the autonomous learner and most kinds of research collaboration get classified as cheating, the Wikipedia movement emphasizes a new kind of knowledge production Pierre Levy has described as collective intelligence. As Levy notes, collective intelligence exploits the potential of network culture to allow many different minds operating in many different contexts to work together to solve problems that are more challenging than any of them could master as individuals. In such a world, he tells us, nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment's notice.

Indeed, such groups are strongly motivated to seek out problems that are sufficiently challenging that they can engage as many members as possible:

"Members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore...Not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development....Unanswered questions will create tension with cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required."

What holds a knowledge community together is not the possession of knowledge -- which can be relatively static -- but the social process of acquiring knowledge -- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties. The Wikipedians bond by working together to fill gaps in their collective knowledge.

Wikipedian Kevin Driscoll proposes a suggestive analogy for thinking about such collaboration:

"The only thing that i can think of in my life that's similar in an "off-the-internet" kind of way is sometimes when you go to the beach there will be a bunch of people making a sand castle. And you can just come over and start making another part of the sand castle and then join them together. And then somebody sees like "wow those guys are making a huge sand castle." And then they get involved and then the thing gets so big, you might not even ask the other peoples' names. You still built the thing together. And nobody owns that sand castle. You all built it together. You're all proud of it. And you all get the benefit of each other's work so you're all really relying on each other. And Wikipedia is like that sand castle except no ocean is going to wash Wikipedia away."

Part of what young people can learn through contributing to, or even consuming, Wikipedia is what it is like to work together within a knowledge culture.

It might be helpful to trace some of the ways that this idea of a knowledge-generating culture contrasts with what Peter Walsh has called the Expert paradigm:

1. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which can be mastered by an individual. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence are open-ended and profoundly interdisciplinary.

2. In the expert paradigm, there are some people who know things and others who don't. A collective intelligence assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis.

3. The expert paradigm uses rules about how you access and process information, rules which are established through traditional disciplines. Within the collective intelligence model, each participant applies their own rules, works the data through their own processes, some of which are more convincing than others, but none of which are wrong at face value. Debates about rules are part of the process by which knowledge gets generated.

4. Experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual which designates them as among those who have mastered a particular domain, most often through formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system and knowledge that comes from real life experience may be highly valued.

(These ideas are developed more fully in the Survivor chapter of Convergence Culture.)

Learning how to weigh different claims about expertise should be part of Hobbe's "informed skepticism." We might, for example, ask young people to talk through the differences in the kinds of expertise displayed by a couch and a ballplayer, a librarian and a researcher, an actor and a director, a mechanic and a race car driver, an architect and a construction worker, or a biologist and a nurse. Some of these people gained their expertise from formal education, other through practical experience; they know different things because they play different roles in a shared process; and having all of these people contribute to the production of knowledge is likely to result in richer and more valuable insights than weighing one's perspective above the others. At the moment, I am playing the part of an expert in writing this article. Perhaps some individual readers see themselves as having greater expertise than I do and at least some cases, they may be right. But there's no question that there is more knowledge in the combined readership of this article than I have at the time I am writing it. The Wikipedia movement is allowing people with very different backgrounds to work together to share what they know with each other.

Of course, Wikipedia is simply one of a broad range of online activities that involve the collaborative and coordinated production and circulation of knowledge. For example, alternative reality games -- large-scale informational scavenger hunts -- are being designed so that they occupy the interests of several hundred players working together: any given problem might require a mix of skills and knowledge drawn across different disciplines and domains. Writers

like Steven Johnson and Jason Mittell have shown that television narratives are becoming increasingly complex, involving many different characters and subplots, as they are being consumed in very active and collaborative ways by online fan communities.

Games researcher T.L. Taylor has shown how the guild structure of a massively multiplayer game such as World of Warcraft may encourage people with very different skills to work together to meet challenges that are designed for this kind of coordinated activity; the community may develop its own mods and toolkits that help them to monitor and organize such large-scale activities. Similar tools, institutions, and practices have emerged around Wikipedia as the community has sought to flag problems to be addressed and identify people with the skills and knowledge needed to solve them. The Wikipedians we interviewed stressed the broad range of skills needed for the project to succeed.

Participating in the Wikipedia community helps young people to think about their own roles as researchers and writers in new ways. On the one hand, they are encouraged to take an inventory of what they know and what they can contribute. The school expects every student to master the same content, while Wikipedia allows students to think about their own particular skills, knowledge, and experience. Wikipedia invites youth to imagine what it might mean to consider themselves as experts on some small corner of the universe. As they collect and communicate what they know, they are forced to think of themselves writing to a public. This is no longer about finding the right answer to get a grade on an asignment but producing credible information that others can count upon when they deploy it in some other real world context.

On the other hand, participants are encouraged to see themselves as members of a knowledge community and to trust their collaborators to fill in information they don't know and challenge their claims about the world. Composition theorist Kenneth A. Brufee has emphasized the power of collaborative writing to change how young people think about the relationship between readers and writers:

"Most of us are not in the habit of thinking about writing nonfoundationally as a collaborative process, a distanced or displaced conversation among peers in which we construct knowledge. We tend to think of writing foundationally as a private, solitary, 'expressive' act in which language is a conduit from solitary mind to solitary mind....When each solitary reader in the socially unrelated aggregate reads what we write, what happens, we suppose, is that another mind 'absorbs' the thoughts we express in writing. Our goal is to distinguish our own distinct, individual point of view from other people's points of view and demonstrate our individual authority....Once we understand writing in a nonfoundational way as a social, collaborative, constructive conversational act, however, what we think we are doing when we write changes dramatically. The individualist, expressive, contentious, foundational story we have been telling ourselves about writing seems motivated by socially dubious (perhaps even socially immature) self-aggrandizement.... We use a language that is neither a private means of expression nor a transparent, objective medium of exchange, but a community construct. It constitutes, defines, and maintains the knowledge community that fashions it. We write either to maintain our membership in communities we are already members of, to invite and help other people to join communities we are members of, or to make ourselves acceptable to communities we are not yet members of. "

Contributing to the Wikipedia might encourage students to adopt the very different kinds of rhetorical goals and mindset Brufee claims emerges through collaborative writing activities.

Again and again, the Wikipedians we interviewed for our documentary made reference to certain shared principles that shapes the group's activities and offers a framework for adjudicating disputes. Rather than arguing each point, the group agrees to work together to insure that all points of view get heard. This is what Wikipedians call adopting a "neutral point of view", which is understood here as a goal or ideal shaping the writing process as much or more than it is seen as a property that can be achieved by any given entry.

This focus on neutrality takes on special importance when we consider the global context within which the Wikipedia operates. While Wikipedia projects are being created within a broad array of different languages, many of which are dominated by a single national context, all of these groups want to insure that their perspectives are fairly represented in the most widely consulted English language edition. So, we might consider the very different way than a topic like the Winter War, the Russian invasion of Finland during the Second World War, gets represented in Russian and Finnish history textbooks as opposed to the challenges of producing an account acceptable to Russians, Finns, Germans, Americans, and everyone else within the shared space of the English language Wikipedia. Mastering the protocols concerning "neutrality," then, might provide young people with good skills at navigating across the cultural differences that they will encounter elsewhere in the digital domain. Network culture is bring people together who would never have interacted face to face given geographic distances but who now must work together to achieve shared goals.

What Knowledge Counts...

The decentralized nature of knowledge production in the Wikipedia movement results in some surprising gaps and excesses. Historian Roy Rosenzweig notes,

"It devotes 3,500 words to the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, more than it gives to President Woodrow Wilson (3,200); American National Biography Online provides a more proportionate (from a conventional historical perspective) coverage of 1,900 words for Asimov and 7,800 for Wilson."

Rosenzweig models one of the core critical activities that students might perform in examining Wikipedia: systematically comparing how the same topic gets dealt with within traditional and emergent kinds of reference works. In doing so, we can flag the selection process which goes into the production of any kind of texts. How do we decide how much space to devote to any given topic?

Remember that the relationship of space to prioritization operates differently within the economy of scarcity that dominated print culture and the plentitude that surrounds a digital resource. The amount of space given a topic in a printed encyclopedia reflected its relative importance because space cost money. Wikipedia space is free and unlimited so the amount of space devoted to a given topic might reflect a range of other factors, including how much the community knows or feels able to communicate about the subject, how many people know about the topic, and what kinds of contexts this information gets used. There isn't someone out there -- an editor or publisher -- deciding how much space to grant a given topic, though the group may sometimesprune entries that they feel are over-inflated. Rather, someone who cares deeply about a subject takes the first crack towards writing an entry and others who share her interests may also contribute, thus often swelling its word count.

The Wikipedians discuss this issue in terms of what they call "systemic bias." Our documentary on Wikipedia features the following exchange between Wikipedians Mark Pellegrini and Jim Giles:

Jim Giles: Some groups of people really like Wikipedia, like scientists, computer programmers, mathematicians. Technically-minded people seem to like Wikipedia. So they write really good articles. So on those topics, Wikipedia is likely be stronger than on say, poetry.

Mark Pellegrini: It's called a systemic bias is how we refer to it as. We, originally our draw was, yeah, people who are really technologically savvy, you know, white males in the Western world. And so the hope is that as we get larger, the systemic bias will kind of go away.

The greater focused place on a science fiction writer over an American president reflects this systemic bias: early participants in the Wikipedia project were more likely to reflect the biases and values of geek culture. The solution, the Wikipedians argue, is to become more inclusive, to draw together a more diverse range of participants, and thus to expand what

topics get discussed and what kinds of information get included. Collective intelligence places new emphasis upon diversity: the more diverse the participants, the richer the final outcome.

Accordingly, the Wikipedians argue that the question isn't what knowledge matters but rather what knowledge matters to whom under what circumstances for what purposes. Indeed, the whole point is to produce a work which can serve many different purposes and thus which may offer many different structures of information. This is consistent with what David Weinberger argues in his new book, Everything is Miscelaneous; one of the defining characteristics of a networked culture is that it enables information to be configured and reconfigured in many different ways:

"It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest....It's not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else's experience. It's how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links... A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself."

While networked culture will generate many different institutions and social structures which individually and collectively help us to sort through information, the final decision about which process works rests not with traditional gatekeepers but with the community of participants.

The Wikipedia Project's openness to knowledge not valued in academic settings, for example, has made it possible for young people to more actively contribute:

Ndesanjo Macha: Most of the kids who come to our Boys and Girls Club are very very good consumers of information tools and knowledge. They know how to chat, how to email, how to do MySpace, Facebook, how to play video [and] computer games, very very good consumers. But they're not producers of knowledge and information. And if knowledge and information are going to be the key elements that are going to define this moment of history, I think it's very very important for kids in schools to start being producers of these things.

Andrea Forte: So one of the things that happens on Wikipedia that makes it different from other encyclopedias is [that] people start writing about popular culture. So this is an area where young people far far outstrip their older peers when it comes to being able to contribute new knowledge about the world.

Kevin Driscoll: Some of my students are super big fans of a T.V. show or a sports team. And I think that those two are things that people document really heavily. Because what happens is that there's a new--another football game every week. And there's another episode of the TV show. So there's something new to add to the Wikipedia entry.

Similarly, people from different class, race, religious, ethnic, and gender backgrounds will choose to write about different topics, including many which are under-represented in standard reference works. This again places new emphasis upon the problems caused by the participation gap: by locking some segments of our society (let alone the world's population) out of full participation online, we deny the society at large access to the things they know and the ways they know them.

As Levy suggests, a knowledge culture sees such gaps as an incitement to activity. It is certainly valid to ask what information is not included in the Wikipedia and why. However, critics then should roll up their sleeves and taking responsibility for making sure that topics that matter to them gets full and adequate representation

At their most passionate, they see Wikipedia as part of a larger process of insuring a more democratic culture by taking seriously what each member has to contribute:

Joe Abraham: The idea that a few "experts" tell us how we should live our lives,what battles we should fight in, is going to, I think, go by the wayside and we as a collective community, as a democracy, as a world of equals will decide together where we should go and what we should learn. "Raymond's law," that is destined to be one of the great comments of history, which is funny because it's a rather geeky expression: "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." That if enough people are looking at something, that you will find the bugs--the errors. And once you identify the error, you will almost always very quickly find the solution.

Mark Pellegrini: If you look at the "What the Wikipedia is Not," it says "Wikipedia is not experiment in democracy" and I know that because I wrote it! But it has the trappings of democracy, which is to say it's driven by the collective will of the people.

Joe Abraham: What makes a democracy so different is that each of us has our hand on the wheel of the ship of state.

Kevin Driscoll: I imagine that Wikipedia is the beginning of a much larger movement for us to be sharing our knowledge with one another in a real, world-wide way. So there are all of these parts of our culture and parts of our society that have not yet been experimented-on the way that the encyclopedia was experimented-on. And Wikipedia proves that it's possible to find a different way to build these things--a cooperative way--that people who don't ever meet each other can work together. But I believe that this idea will endure, because it's so powerful. And people care about it so much. And when you see that happening, that is something that can't be beat.

If we understand the Wikipedia movement as fostering civic engagement, then it becomes all the more important that we insure the diversity of participation. We should take steps through classroom and after school activities to broaden who gets to participate in this process of knowledge production and evaluation.

Wrapping Up

I have tried to suggest throughout this essay that the Wikipedian movement might be one space where young people could acquire the kinds of social skills and cultural competencies necessary to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape. The Wikipedia movement is a place where young people and adults work together to achieve shared goals. The group itself has worked to make its standards, practices and protocols as transparent as possible, giving us the tools we need to evaluate the information the group produces. Wikipedia assumes an active reader who asks questions about the factual claims presented, the evidence supporting the claims and the sources that were consulted.

In particular, I have identified several key skills which are potentially enhanced through active engagement with Wikipedia:

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

But, we need to help our students to develop a larger context for identifying the strengths and limitations of its particular model for knowledge production. As we do so, we need to return to the core questions which Project Look Sharp has central to the Media Literacy movement and rethink them in relation to this changing context of media production, circulation, and consumption.

1. Who made - and who sponsored - this message, and for what purpose? In this case, we need to understand this question from the perspective not of someone who is consuming media produced elsewhere but of someone who is invited to actively participate in the production and circulation of media content.

2. Who is the target audience, and how is the message specifically tailored to them? In this case, we need to focus on the sets of norms and shared ideologies that are shaping the Wikipedia movement.

3. What are the different techniques used to inform, persuade, entertain, and attract attention? In this case, we need to focus on the rhetorical tools which establish credability or motivate participation.

4.What messages are communicated (and/or implied) about certain people, places, events, behaviors, lifestyles, etc.? In this case, we need to consider the different kinds of expertise that different participants in the Wikipedia movement bring to the project, looking at the ways that these diverse perspectives get negotiated through the production of any given article.

5. How current, accurate, and credible is the information in this message? In this case, we need to focus attention on the devices which make the research process more transparent and the ways we need to deploy them to test the reliability of the information.

6. What is left out of this message that might be important to know? In this case, we need to reflect on the systemic biases of the project and how they emerge from the participation gap and from other obstacles which limit individuals ability to access technologies and participate within networked culture.

Clearly, the media literacy community has lots of work to do if we are going to develop as rich and nuanced an understanding of Wikipedia as we have created together over the past several decades around older media forms such as print advertising or television news. But I hope that this article -- and the documentaries and curricular guides being produced by Project nml -- will represent a step towards integrating Wikipedia into the range of topics that media literacy education seeks to address.

Special Thanks to Alice Robison, Neal Grigsby, and Anna Van Somerin for their help in developing and presenting this paper and to the MacArthur Foundation for their ongoing support of Project nml.

Since I am getting a new influx of readers from the Media Literacy world as a result of my talk on Monday, I wanted to provide a few links to earlier posts which may be of interest to you:

Behind the Scenes at MyPopStudio

Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education

What DOPA Means for Education

Cory Doctorow as Exemplar

The Education of Sky McCloud

Making Comics

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

Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape

In YoYogi Park

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier

The Sony Games Workshop

The Merits of Nitpicking

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer

Big Games with Big Goals

Of course, most of the other topics we cover here are also very relevent to media literacy instructors so I hope you will browse a bit and then settle down as regular readers.

WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART ONE)

The following is based on the keynote lecture which I presented on Monday at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis. A more polished version of this talk will eventually appear in the media literacy journal, The Journal of Media Literacy, but I am offering this in a rawer, less processed form now in hopes of getting some more feedback from my readers and also of making this available to the conference attendees. Watch for a notice here later this summer when the exemplar about Wikipedia goes on line. n Fall 2006, Vermont's Middlebury College found itself the center of a national controversy when its history department took a public stand against students referencing Wikipedia in their research papers. The ban had been inspired by one faculty member's discovery that a large number of his students were making the same factual error (dealing with the role of Jesuits during the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th century Japan) which could be traced back to a bit of misinformation found in one entry of the online encyclopedia. Despite the publicity that surrounded it, the statement was scarcely a condemnation of Wikipedia: "Whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful, it nonetheless suffers inevitably from inaccuracies deriving in large measure from its unique manner of compilation." Students were asked to take responsibility for the reliability and credibility of the information they used in their papers; Students were told not to use Wikipedia as a scholarly source.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, publicly supported the Middlebury History Department's decision: "Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested -- students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn't be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either. If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don't listen to rock'n'roll either." Despite Wales's statement, Middlebury's announced policy inspired a series of national editorials:leading journalists and scholars weighed in on the perceived merits of the Wikipedia and on the credibility of online information more generally. The Middlebury History faculty were cast as poster children in the backlash against Web 2.0 and its claims about the "wisdom of crowds."

Wales's analogy between Wikipedia and "Rock'n'Roll" suggests that the Wikipedia debate has also become emblematic of the divide separating the generation that grew up in a world where digital and mobile technologies are commonplace from their parents, teachers, and school administrators for whom many of these technologies still feel alien. As Jonathan Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, wrote in an op-ed piece published on the eve of this conference,

"The real gap between tomorrow's digital haves and have-nots will be a lag in competence and confidence in the fast-paced variegated digital universe building and breeding outside schoolhouse walls.... Today's digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem- solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too... In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing."

Responding to these challenges, the MacArthur Foundation has committed 50 million dollars over the next five years to support research which will help us understand the informal learning which takes place as children interact within the new media landscape and how we might draw on the best practices that emerge from these new participatory cultures as we redesign school and after-school programs. I was part of a team of MIT based researchers which drafted a white paper that accompanied the MacArthur announcement and sought to identify some of the core social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to be full participants in this new media environment. And I am the principle investigator for Project nml, a MacArthur funded effort to develop resources to support the teaching of these skills through in school and after school programs. As it happens, we are just now completing a documentary about the Wikipedia movement and an accompanying curricular guide. This documentary is one of a number of short films produced for online distribution through the Project nml exemplar library.

Here, I will draw on the interviews and research behind the documentary to explore what Wikipedia (and the debate around it) might tell us about the new media literacies. Through looking more closely at what young people need to know about Wikipedia, I hope to suggest some of the continuities (and differences) between this emerging work on New Media Literacies and the kinds of concerns that have occupied the Media Literacy community over the past few decades.

THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES

According to a recent study from the Pew Center for Internet & American Life, more than half of all teens have generated media content and roughly a third of teens online have shared content they produced with others. In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures. A participatory culture is one where there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, where there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others, where there is some kind of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced gets passed along to newbies and novices, where members feel that their contributions matter, where members feel some degree of social connection with each other at least to the degree to which they care what other people think about what they have created.

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these emergent forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude towards intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which kids will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter schools and workplaces.

Not all of these skills are dramatically new -- they are extensions on or elaborations of aspects of traditional research methods, text-based literacies, and critical analysis that have long been valued within formal education. In some cases, these skills have taken on new importance as young people move into emerging media institutions and practices. In some cases, these new technologies have enabled shifts in how we as a society produced, dissect, and circulate information. Those interested in reviewing the full framework should download the report.

While some have argued that these new media skills represent the different mindsets of "digital natives and digital immigrants", that analogy breaks down for us on several levels. First, the participatory cultures we are describing are ones where teens and adults interact but with less fixed and hierarchical relations than found in formal education. It is a space where youth and adults learn from each other, but it would be wrong to see young people as creating these new institutions and practices totally outside of engagement with adults. Second, the "digital natives" analogy implies that these skills are uniformly possessed by all members of this generation; instead, young people have unequal access to the technologies and cultural practices out of which these skills are emerging and so we are facing a growing participation gap in terms of familiarity with basic tools or core cultural competencies.

Even if we see young people as acquiring some of these skills on their own, outside of formal educational institutions, there's still a strong role for adults to play in insuring that young people develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the place of media in their lives and engage in meaningful reflection about the ethical choices they make as media producers and participants in online communities. While the MacArthur researchers take serious youth innovations through media and respect the meaningful role that these experiences play in young people's social and cultural lives, they also value what teachers, parents, librarians, youth workers, and others bring to the conversation. We want to help these adults respond to the changing circumstances young people face in a period of prolonged and profound media change. It is our belief that these new media literacies need to inform all aspects of the educational curriculum; they represent a paradigm shift in how we teach English, social science, science, math, and the other schoolroom subjects. If these skills are going to reach every American young people, it is going to require the active participation of collaboration of all of those individuals and institutions who impact young people's moral, intellectual, social, and cultural development.

Our initial report raised three core concerns, which suggest the need for policy and pedagogical interventions:

1. The Participation Gap -- the unequal access of youths to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge which will prepare them for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

2. The Transparency Problem -- The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shapes our perceptions of the world.

3. The Ethics Challenge -- The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization which might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

Educators need to work together to insure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, has the ability to articulate their understanding of the way that media shapes our perceptions of the world, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards which should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities.

This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and afterschool programs to foster what we are calling the new media literacies -- a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.Just as earlier efforts at media literacy wanted to help young people to understand their roles as media consumers and producers, we want to help young people better understand their roles as participants in this emerging digital culture.

In the discussion of Wikipedia that follows, I am going to be emphasizing four of the eleven skills we identify in our report:

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

Wikipedia Reconsidered

Many educators express concern about young people's increased reliance on Wikipedia as a resource for their homework assignments and research projects. These teachers worry that youth aren't developing an appropriate level of skepticism about the kinds of information found on this particular site. There are legitimate concerns about the credibility of online information and the breakdown of traditional notions of expertise which should be debated. Our documentary project, and this article, reflects our assumption that these vital debates need to be shaped by a clearer picture of the Wikipedia movement. Our ultimate goal is not to convince you to use Wikipedia in your classes, but rather to argue that in a world where many young people are turning to this as a key source for information, educators need to understand what is going on well enough to offer them meaningful advice and guidance.

Much as educators responded to the debates in the 1990s about "political correctness" and multiculturalism by arguing that we should "teach the debate," today's educators should help young people to understand competing arguments about the value of Wikipedia. In this context,

it is not enough to construct policies restricting the use of Wikipedia as a source if we don't help foster the skills young people need in order to critically engage with a site which has become so central to their online lives.

I am reminded of a powerful statement by Renee Hobbes about the role that media literacy education should play in shaping young people's relationship to news and information:

"Some students, when asked to ask questions about the believability of media texts, may respond from deep within the familiar adolescent state of alienation and mistrust. In a more or less conscious way, they may answer, "I can't believe in any of this information. Nothing is believable." This cynical perspective is the antithesis of what the educational experience strives to foster. It is informed skepticism and a sense of the power of communication as a form of action to transform and shape society that educators hope to impart to students."

The same might be said of teachers and their relationship to Wikipedia: educators need to adopted an "informed skepticism" rather than a dismissive attitude. Wikipedia is a very rich site for teaching young people about many of those things that have historically been at the heart of the media literacy movement but we can only capitalize on its potentials if we understand how it works and what it is trying to do.

Here's what the About Wikipedia site tells us about the project:

"There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 5,300,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there are 1,843,251 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia."

All of this development has occurred since Wikipedia launched in 200. This volunteer army of writers, editors, and fact-checkers has been supervised, if we can use that word, by a paid staff of roughly five people. So much negative attention has been directed against Wikipedia that it is easy to forget the idealistic goal which motivates all of this activity. As Jimmy Wales explains, "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

Wikipedia has benefited enormously from its use of the encyclopedia analogy. People already know what an encyclopedia looks like; they start from a shared understanding of the kinds of information it contains, language it deploys, and functions it serves. This familiarity with basic genre conventions allows large numbers of people to roll up their sleeves and starting working and even more people to go to use Wikipedia as a central reference work.

Yet, like most analogies, calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia clarifies some aspects of the phenomenon while obscuring others. Describing it as an encyclopedia emphasizes Wikipedia as a product rather than focusing attention on the ongoing process by which its community pools information, debates what knowledge matters, and vets competing truth claims. Encyclopedias we have known in the past were depositories of an always already completed process of writing and research.

Wikipedia is something different. Andrea Forte, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher who has studied Wikipedia, told our production team,

"When you first come to Wikipedia, it really seems like a collection of articles. It seems like a bunch of pages about different topics. Now when you talk to people who are very involved in Wikpedia, it becomes a collection of people who are carrying out a project....Wikipedia was a place where people were coming together to write about the world and figure out what's true about the world and what kinds of facts are important to know about the world. These are the kinds of things I think students should be doing."

Critics also argue that the analogy to an encylopedia is misleading. Robert McHenry, a former editor of the Encyclopedia Britanica, argues,

"To the ordinary user, the turmoil and uncertainty that may lurk beneath the surface of a Wikipedia article are invisible. He or she arrives at a Wikipedia article via Google, perhaps, and sees that it is part of what claims to be an "encyclopedia". This is a word that carries a powerful connotation of reliability. The typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do."

Surely, the appropriate response to the problem which McHenry identifies is not to turn our backs on the enormous value of the Wikipedia project but rather to help young people place Wikipedia in a larger context, developing a deeper understanding of the process by which the its information is being produced and consumed. Wikipedians would push us further, arguing that we also should develop a more critical perspective on other, more traditional sources of information. If McHenry is correct that most people don't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, that should be an indictment of how our schools teach research skills, not an excuse to blindly accept Britanica.

The Wikipedians sought to make the production of knowledge more transparent to everyday people. The practices around Wikipedia preserve traces of the disputes and disagreements that typically go on behind the scenes through the editorial processes that shape traditional reference works. Jason Mittell, a media studies professor at Middlebury College, explains,

"Wikipedia is transparent in its goals and rules, explicitly listing its policies and guidelines. As far as I know, other encyclopedias offer no such reflexivity as to what they are, how they work, and what type of content and form they follow. As an educator, transparency provides an excellent teaching opportunity to get students to reflect on sources and their usage."

Mittell's blog documents some of the teachable moments as his students tried their hands at producing their own Wikipedia entires:

Aaron was one of the first to dive into Wikipedia, choosing to edit an entry on a Columbian volcano that he'd previously written a research paper about. As he blogged about his experiences, the act of becoming an editor made feel invested in a topic that he'd otherwise just learned about as an assignment. Simply the act of sharing his knowledge made him feel like an expert and care about a remote subject. He followed up by considering how other people's edits to his information made him feel part of a community, even though the other editor was anonymous and remote...

Paxson created a new entry on Eagle Peak, a mountain near his hometown in Alaska. He discovered that unlike Aaron's entry, nobody seems invested in this topic, as he's the only editor who has contributed. But he did learn a lesson about copyright, as he uploaded his own photo of the mountain, which was immediately tagged for lacking the proper copyright - he needed to give it a public domain, GPL, or Creative Commons license to fit with Wikipedia policy. Although we'll be reading about copyright issues later in the semester, this hands-on experience with the practicalities of the system are far more pedagogically striking.

...Scott had a less productive experience - he created an entry for the Middlebury College hockey team, which was "speedy deleted" for not justifying its notability. Scott & I sat down and together rebuilt the entry, following the template for other college sports teams with me teaching him some of the language & protocols for wiki editing, an experience which certainly increased his fluency and strengthened his awareness of how Wikipedia functions as a self-regulating process.

Wikipedia empowers students to take seriously what they have learned in other classes, to see their own research as having potential value in a larger enterprise, and to take greater responsibility over the accuracy of what they have produced. Much as young people become more critical consumers of media when they have engaged in production activities, young people ask better questions about the nature of scholarship and research when they contribute to Wikipedia.

Educators ask the wrong question when they wonder whether Wikipedia is accurate, because this implies a conception of Wikipedia as a finished product rather than a work in progress. Wikipedians urge a more skeptical attitude:

"Wikipedia's radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example, it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is certainly more subject to subtle vandalism than a typical reference work."

The key word here is "at any given moment." The community has taken on responsibility to protect the integrity and accuracy of its contents; they have developed procedures which allow them to rapidly spot and respond to errors, and the information they provide may be more up-to-date than that found in printed encyclopedia which in school libraries might sit around for decades. As historian Roy Rosenzweig explains,

"Like journalism, Wikipedia offers a first draft of history, but unlike journalism's draft, that history is subject to continuous revision. Wikipedia's ease of revision not only makes it more up-to-date than a traditional encyclopedia, it also gives it (like the web itself) a self-healing quality since defects that are criticised can be quickly remedied and alternative perspectives can be instantly added."

Yet, the accuracy of an entry has to be judged "at any given moment." Some entries, which receive heavy traffic, also receive more regular attention than others which might represent tide pools that lay stagnant for extended periods of time. Someone using the Wikipedia needs to assess the state of a current entry. The good news is that Wikipedia provides a series of tools that help us to trace and monitor the process by which an entry is taking shape.

We can see this process in action if we visit the entry on the Shimabara Revolution which caused such controversy at Middlebury. At the top of the site are two warning tags. The first tells us that "This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject" and if we follow a link there, we find ourselves in a Talk section where participants weigh in about the contents of the entry, including discussing extensively the criticisms raised by the Middlebury history faculty. This section tells us the entry is being reviewed by the WikiProject Japan, which is seeking to improve the quality of entries on Japanese history and culture and by the Military History WikiProject, which gives the entry a B for its overall quality. The section includes a list of details under dispute and tasks which still need to be completed.

Going back to the top level of the page, we see a second and even more troubling flag: "This article does not cite any references or sources" and a link to a page which lays out standards of verifiability:

"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed."

If one reads the history pages of most Wikipedia entries, one can see vigorous debates about what counts as reliable evidence. Many of these pages offer compelling case studies that teachers could use to teach the logic through which historians, or other scholarly communities, interprete, evaluate, and contextualize the information they gather.

Wikipedia taps the power of networked culture by providing hyperlinks where-ever possible; this make it very easy for readers to return to the original source and weigh its evidence for themselves. Wikipedian Kevin Driscoll has proposed a game, much like the popular "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," where students challenge each other to see who can find the quickest pathway between two seemingly unrelated concepts. So, for example, we might ask whether one could trace the connection between William Shakespeare and the Apollo Space Program in five or fewer links: We could go from William Shakespeare to his play, The Tempest (move one), from The Tempest to the science fiction film, Forbidden Planet, which was losely based on Shakespeare's plot (move two); from Forbidden Planet to the larger category of Science Fiction Cinema (move three); from Science Fiction Cinema to La Voyage Dans La Moon, one of the earliest science fiction films (move four); and from La Voyage Dans La Moon to the Apollo Moon Mission (Move five). This trajectory takes us between high and low culture, across the divides between science and the humanities, across several periods of human history. and across three national borders.

In doing so, students follow their curiosity, tap their knowledge, and draw connections between topics that might not seem intuitively linked. As Joseph Wang, one of the people we interviewed at the Wikimania conference, explained,

"You have to just, every now and then just step back and say, "What do I think is fun? What do I want to learn?" As you learn more you realize how much there is in the world that you don't understand. And that's really fun. And the thing that I find fascinating about Wikipedia is that there is all this cool stuff that I didn't know I didn't know."

Just as young people coming of age in a hunting based culture learn by playing with bows and arrows, young people coming of age in an information society learn by playing with information. This playful relationship to learning and knowledge is one of the things that motivates the community's participation, though the Wikipedians are quick to stress that they also take on very hard tasks, such as proofreading and fact checking pages.

The practices and tools that sustain Wikipedia are designed to insure the highest degree of transparency -- the most controversial entries come with the maximum numbers of warnings. Yet, realistically, many young people are going to the site in search of quick data and may lack the critical vocabulary necessary to use its contents meaningfully. So, at the most basic level, a media literacy practice around Wikipedia needs to focus attention on the basic affordances of the site, so that students are encouraged to move beyond the top level and see what's going on underneath the hood.

Researchers have shown that the current generation of young learners often exploits digital tools to copy and paste information, sometimes getting confused about where any fact came from, or blurring the lines between their own insights and those from secondary sources. Preliminary work from the researchers at a MacArthur funded project at the University of Southern California suggests that differences in access to digital technologies further impact young people's research practices. Those children who have the most extensive access to networked computers are most likely to look critically upon the kinds of information that they draw from Wikipedia: they have the time to experience knowledge production as a collaborative process. For those young people whose only access is through schools and public libraries, however, they need to get in quick, get the information they need, and make way for the next user. These time constraints encourage them to see the web as a depository of information and often discourages them from taking time to closely examine where that information comes from or under what circumstances it was produced. This is only one of the many consequences of what we are calling the participation gap.

The participation gap is shaped by uneven access to technologies but also by unequal access to formative experiences and thus unequal opportunities to acquire the social skills and cultural competencies we are calling the new media literacies. Participation in these online communities constitutes a new hidden curriculum which shapes how young people perform in school and impacts the kinds of opportunities they will enjoy in the future.

TO BE CONTINUED

Want to Work for Comparative Media Studies?

I know that a fair number of Media Literacy teachers and facilitators read this blog. So I wanted to flag for your attention a new position opening up in our programing working as the Project Manager for Project nml. Official Job Title: Project Manager

Position Title: Comparative Media Studies/ New Media Literacies Project Manager

Payroll Category: Sponsored Research Staff/Administrative

Normal Work Week: 40

Starting Date: August 1, 2007

End Date: June 30, 2009

Salary: 50K- 60K annually full time plus competitive benefits package

Supervision Received: Henry Jenkins, CMS director and Sarah Wolozin, Program Manager

Supervision Excercised: New Media Literacies staff and students

Project: The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. This four-year project - through collaborations with MacArthur's "Digital Kids" research project at UC/Berkeley and a community of educators, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, academics and media professionals - will establish how to define new media education, how to implement it, and how to sustain it once the project is completed.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities (Essential Functions): Serve as primary contact and coordinator for the New Media Literacies Project based at MIT Comparative Media Studies, directed by Henry Jenkins (MIT), and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

Specific role will be tailored for qualified candidates, but minimum duties include:

-- Implement the vision of the Principal Investigator during Phase II of the research project, overseeing current activities, maintaining current collaborations, and forging new partnerships to facilitate upcoming project initiatives;

-- Ensure the dissemination of the project's key ideas and findings through publications, conference presentations, online communities, parent resources, and teacher training programs, and 1-2 NML conferences per year;

-- Oversee the development and management of project-related communications, including a new website and other media production in a variety of forms (i.e., written, audio, video, PowerPoint, etc.);

-- Guide the research process, ensuring a high level of team coordination to facilitate the process of refining pedagogical models and the continued production of multimedia curricular materials;

-- Oversee the processes of prototyping and testing project's curriculum materials;

--Develop advisory board and serve as primary contact; send out regular communications; ensure participation in project; organize annual or bi-annual meetings with board;

--Together with Comparative Media Studies Program Manager manage all administration for project including but not limited to overseeing and managing budget; resolving legal, contractual, copyright and IP issues; generating necessary reporting for funder, CMS program, and MIT; managing and monitoring all documentation and reporting for the program, including coordination of reports with the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects and the Office of Foundation Relations; ensuring project is in compliance with CMS program and MIT policy; handling personnel issues including hiring, training, and terminations.

-- Keep abreast of developments in media theory, educational design, entertainment, popular and youth cultures, and consumer electronics and bring such knowledge to bear on the development of teaching modules;

-- Communicate with corporate, government, educational, and academic leaders who traverse appropriate K-12 and undergraduate market spaces;

-- Coordinate regular communications and formal updates for the MacArthur Foundation and other stakeholders;

-- Present research findings at conferences and in publications.

Qualifications/Technical Skills: Experience in managing media research projects, developing learning environments, implementing educational innovations in media- and/or technology-rich classroom settings, and producing digital and multi-media projects, conducting quantitative and qualitative research, as well as possessing an understanding of the application of a wide variety of media in learning, especially to develop multiple literacies across media. Ability to communicate with a wide variety of contributors and audiences, including both university instructors, educators, designers, artists, comparative media specialists, and current and future sponsors AND young adults, teens, tweens, and children, is critical. Secondary school and/or college teaching experience, strong research skills and a commitment to publication agenda in education or media studies expected; experience in commercial media and/or product design and development preferred. Proven ability to bridge multiple research disciplines and apply theory to effective practice a must. Minimum of Master's Degree in education, media studies, instructional technologies, or related fields; Doctoral candidates with ABD status are strongly encouraged to apply.

Send inquiries to Sarah Wolozin, swolozin@mit.edu.

We will also be looking later this summer for:

Post-Docs to work with the GAMBIT Lab (for games research) and for the Knight Center for Future Civic Media.

A Research Manager for the Knight Center.

An Outreach Coordinator for Project nml.

If any of these sound like they might be a good fit for you, send e-mail to swolozin@mit.edu.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Four, Part Two):Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova

Gender and Cult Texts

[KP] Nina suggests that even when men and women (or would that be fanboys and fangirls) watch the same show, they may focus on different aspects. So I will speak of the shows I know... When I watched Firefly I vaguely wondered what slash pairing Mal/Simon would make, but honestly, I stopped looking for clues pretty early into the show and kept enjoying the adventures and witty banter just like the next guy. I certainly want more of this content, but I can't really bring myself to look into fandom (apart from mildly tapping into it), because I really am pretty satisfied with the source. Moreover, I would rather re-watch the series in a company of friends laughing at jokes we know are there than read a steaming fanfic featuring one of the likely pairings. Does it make me a fanboy of Firefly?

Because I definitely display more stereotypically fangirlish behavior in my reaction to Heroes (even before I finished watching it I already started seeking out lj-based communities, fan sites with fannish content and so on.) My Harry Potter experience started with me being a 'fanboy', went through my reluctance to even admit I was one of the 'fangirls', and ended up with my engaging more with 'fangirl' practices.

[WB] I like Firefly and Serenity too... someone can tell me if that is a "boy" or a "girl" text, and whether having a man-crush on Nathan Fillion makes me some kind of subversive!

[KP] Well, Firefly (and Serenity) is a Sci-Fi western and adventure story, so as a source text is very male-oriented (I am only saying this because it is supposed that boys like guns and adventures, while girls like romance and amassing Barbie merchandise). However, the hints of romance (mostly unresolved) and very engaging male characters portrayed by exceptionally cute actors make it very easy prey for female fans, stereotypically speaking.

[WB] Let's not fall into the trap (as you suggest, it's stereotypical) of thinking that the only women who like Firefly and Serenity are "fans", and more specifically, fan-slashers. What about the women who watch the show but don't have any interest in or knowledge of slash? I think we should resist any assumption (again, I think it is becoming a stereotype in fan-academia) that women's only entry into cult texts, or cult texts that are generically male-coded (Western, Science Fiction) is through trying to pair up the main male characters.

[KP] Actually, I didn't say a word in my previous passage about any male/male pairings or writing slash back into the story.

[WB] Good point - looks like it was me who fell into that trap! I automatically jumped from "female-fans-fancying-cute-actors" to "slash"... my bad. Maybe it says something about how accustomed we are to talking about this visible tip of the fan iceberg - that we only really tend to study the active, creative fans like slashers, not the millions of men and women who just sit there admiring cute actors, maybe discussing it with their friends, but not recording any of it in a concrete form: the watercooler fans, not the Livejournal ones. The advantage of online fandom, for scholars, is that conversation about cult texts becomes so easy to quote, analyse and discuss; ephemeral talk becomes solid text. But there are, again, millions of conversations going on in workplaces and homes about cult texts that never attain that more permanent status, and never enter our radar - because if they don't take place on the internet, they rarely cross that line between the personal and the public.

That's one of the striking things about sites like Livejournal for me - the way it places personal thoughts and conversation into a semi-public, semi-permanent arena - and the accessibility of blogs and discussion boards is obviously a gift for fan-scholars. But obviously, if we rely on those easily-accessible forms of fan discourse, we're also overlooking all the more elusive discussion that goes on every day in the living room or the staff canteen, and perhaps we risk taking the part as representative of the whole. Again, let's bear in mind that there are a lot of people, male and female, like myself - who enjoyed Serenity and Firefly but don't create anything about it or engage in any communities about it. A lot of people who value a specific cultural text and for whom that text is an important part of their lives don't engage in easily-recognisable, visible, traditional fan behaviour.

Stereotypes vs. Prototypes

[KP] I definitely agree that taking the part as representative of the whole is one of the risks we take when we engage in studying fandom - it is so much more interesting to report on what is creative! Besides, for many years it has been a huge part of our agenda as fan academics to change the societal view of fans as of good-for-nothing infantile obsessive misfits, and in our noble... quest against pathologizing we became very eager in bringing out what's creative and playing down what's mundane and 'goes without saying'.

Yet it is so difficult for me to remember about those fans who don't create anything or engage in any communities when I write/talk/think about fandom and being fannish! This made me think about Rosch's prototype theory and its possible applications to this particular problem. If asked, I'd say that creativity and community engagement are central to what I have in mind when I think about the concept of 'fan', and when I encounter a fan who is passionate about their source text, but doesn't do anything or does very little about their passion, I have trouble calling them 'fan', and would go for 'admirer' instead. If we think back to Rosch's classic example: as 'robin' is closer to prototypical notion of 'bird' and 'ostrich' is further from it, a person who is involved in what you call 'easily-recognisable, visible, traditional fan behavior' is closer to my prototype of 'fan' than a person who does not display this type of behavior.

[WB] What's the distinction between prototypical and stereotypical, then? I might not be everyone's prototypical Star Wars fan because I don't live in my mother's basement, wear a Stormtrooper costume at weekends and speak fluent Huttese to my geeky friends (I can recite all of Greedo's dialogue, but that's it). Maybe I don't fit easily recognizable, visible, traditional fan behaviour.

But if we just concentrated on those people who fit the type of "fan" - and where does this type come from? Who constructed it? - we might just end up studying an unrepresentative group at the margins of a broad range of behaviour, much of which is less recognizable, less immediately visible, less striking, perhaps less exciting. But maybe our duty is not just to report on exciting, quirky, sexy fandom.

[KP] In reply to your question about distinction between stereotypical and prototypical: using stereotypes will not lead us anywhere; stereotype here is a pre-conceived notion of something, it comes 'as a package', and is either ignored or acknowledged. Prototype, however, shows where one's priorities are and allows to see how a phenomenon is constructed. To use your example, a statement 'a Star Wars fan is somebody who lives in their mother's basement, wears Stormtrooper's costume at weekends and speaks fluent Huttese' is a stereotype. Prototype is an analyzed stereotype: you can single out specific features (a. living in the parents' basement; b.wearing Stormtrooper's costume and c.speaking Huttese) and account for their relative importance in establishing whether and HOW a given sample 'fits' the prototype.

And here comes the interesting part: while stereotypes are normally shared, the construction of prototypes ('points of reference', if you wish) is less... collective. Even in this discussion, I am leaning to consider those who are 'creative' to be fans more readily that those who are what you call 'water coolers', while you keep reminding about 'those others', which means that in my prototype of 'fan' I place the notion of creativity higher than the notion of fascination with source text, while both notions are present in the stereotype we share.

Now, my understanding of fans and being fannish was shaped by lurking in Harry Potter fandom and by reading academic accounts of fannish activity. I wonder if a definite lean towards studying creativity of fans in major writings on fandom is partly accountable for the fact that many would agree - yes, 'real' fans are creative in their responses to the source text. It seems as if fannish creativity comes as a given, a default assumption that one has to struggle against when one accounts a fan who does not fit this prototype? And now that you have pointed out several times that creativity is not, in fact, a sine qua non condition, it would be interesting to see if this notion of 'creative' fan is only shared by women fans/fan scholars. For me, a non-creative fan is more of an 'ostrich' than a 'robin', but am I the only one?

Or is my assumption is informed by the fact that I hang around 'other girls' in my corner of fandom?

[WB] Where does the evidence come from about what boys and girls, (using these terms with gritted teeth), fans and scholars of different genders, are supposedly into?

[KP] Again, what are they into? So far the discussion in Henry's blog is very mild and not gender-charged at all. The way it was framed, however, one would expect sparks fly. They didn't - well, not about the gender issue. I guess that proves there are more misfits around, and certainly the categories - as many other expectations - are flawed and represent extreme cases of overgeneralization. I'd love to see them abandoned altogether, but that is probably just me and Will?

The Infantilization of Fan Discourse

[WB] The discussion so far has been mild and reasonable, but some of the comments on the Round 2 pairing have riled me with their ready assumptions about gendered behaviour - there seems to be a lot of "boys do this, girls do that." To pick out an individual post:

if you read gender communication theorists you know that men like to stick to the rules; women are far more situational. This is true in childhood play as well. Boys play on teams; they're into competition and hierarchy. Girls are far more likely to 'free play' and create cooperatively with their Barbie dolls and such...as in the childhood playground, male fandom is far more likely to play by the rules and not try to color outside the lines.

I mistrust this kind of absolute laying down of rules about what girls, boys, and by extension men and women "do" and "are". The comparison of grown men and women to kids in a playground also seems unhelpful - it seems part of this infantilisation of fan behaviour that leads us to Team Pink and Team Blue, and the labeling of academics as boys and girls.

[KP] As somebody with a background in cognitive linguistics I can't help but wonder how this infantilization came to be. I don't think it only applies to fans/ fan scholars - it certainly does in this case, but what if it is a manifestation of a more general ADULTS ARE CHILDREN conceptual metaphor (men and gadgets would often be described in terms of 'boys playing with toys'; adult women would often collectively refer to themselves as 'girls'; people who don't follow the pre-established and agreed upon pattern are usually described as 'not playing by the rules'; plus the examples you gave above). If we successfully establish that the metaphor is in place and working - that is, shaping the way we verbalize our experiences - the fact that grown men and women are compared to kids and academics are labeled 'boys' and 'girls' is not that surprising.

I honestly do think that infantilization of fans and Team Blue/TeamPink are two unrelated phenomena, the former being a trace of popular derogatory image of fans as social misfits stuck in their pre-teens and teens, while the latter is the verbalization of one of the conceptual metaphors that govern our perception of the world around us (other conceptual metaphors would be, for instance, TIME IS A COMMODITY, PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS, LIFE IS A GAME etc.).

The real problem in the passage that you quoted above, as I see it, is not the infantilization of adults, but the pre-conceived assumption about who does what. This assumption is so firmly in place that nobody even questions its credibility, but all evidence backing it up is more or less anecdotal. Even though we do have some statistics, we tend to forget, which corner of fandom those statistical findings apply to: I daresay that if one and the same quantitative study had been carried out on two platforms - Harry Potter Lexicon forums and a Livejournal-based Harry/Draco community - the results wouldn't be similar. And I wouldn't say that to collectively build a site like HP Lexicon is less creative (or one has to be less of a fan) than to write smut and post it on Livejournal. Speaking of statistics, here's a curious quote from Science Fiction Audiences (Tulloch and Jenkins, 1995): "One survey, cited on a television documentary about the programme's anniversary, showed that 53 per cent of the American public classified themselves as 'Star Trek fans'". How many of them were 'water coolers' and how many of them were 'creative'? How many of them were women? How many of them were men?..

The Primacy of Gender?

[WB] This stark division of the world into people who do one set of things because of their gender, and people who do another because of their opposite gender, made me wonder why we're focusing so much on this single aspect of identity as a shaping force in both fandom and in academic approaches to fandom. Are our interests in fandom (as fans, as academics, as fan-academics) really molded primarily by our gender? More so than our class, our education, our ethnicity and nation?

The standard objection that Nina offers in response is the one that "the emphasis on 'everyone's different' is one that's been used to counter any type of movement, and the focus on exceptions does the same." But I thought we hadn't agreed that those exceptions are definitely exceptional... I've not been convinced that men who are into creative use of the cult text are in some sort of minority. And why does it imply a position of privilege to be cautious of generalisations about "men do this, women do this"?

Nina brings up the history of early media fandom to show extreme gender imbalance and asks " Can you honestly say that the movement that shifted Sci-Fi zines into narrative explorations wasn't women driven? Likewise, can you really say that men are not more likely to do parodies?" And I can't say one way or the other, because I haven't enough evidence to judge... how do I know whether men are more likely to do parodies? How do you know, how does anyone know? Why should we want to generalise without sufficient proof? I haven't done sufficient research into male parody writing, and haven't read any research on it. Maybe I'm just under-informed, but I'd want to see quite a bit of evidence before I accepted a general rule about a whole gender. And I'm not even saying we should address race here, just that it's worth pointing out there are a lot of other factors what might define fan identity.

[KP] I do agree with Nina that the questions of class/education/ethnicity are mostly important in terms of access to fandom. Once a person is 'in', it seems that practices they engage mostly divide along the gender axis. From this point of view, language and culture would play more of a role in defining the practices one engages in (for instance, there seems to be more hostility and somewhat wary attitude towards slash among women in Russian fandom, for example, although there is a fair number of slashers there; men do write fan fiction, which is not only parody; for historical reason live action and on-line role playing games are central to almost any fandom...).

So far, most of the studies have been carried out on the basis of English-language fandom, I'd love to see what new perspectives the study of national fandoms would bring. I am currently working on my own piece about Russian fandom, which will be posted here in this blog, and it's a journey of discovery in itself - for all similarities (well, fandom as a concept is pretty much borrowed as is), there are striking differences in the way fandom is constructed and works. True, a lot of studies have been carried out on Japanese material, but it's more like the other end of the scale compared to English-speaking fandom. I'm more interested in not-so-subtle differences between seemingly similar phenomena. But I really don't think ethnicity plays any more of a role in construction of fannish behavior than, say, race within a given national fandom. Gender, however, is more of a global factor.

As is taste and preference, apparently: it is really interesting (and that's the other thing I noticed in my study of Russian fandom) how, for all cultural differences, we seem to like same books and shows. Harry Potter has been increasingly popular since 2000, but now Lost has taken Russian fandom by storm, and even Heroes has its own community of fans around several fan-sites (the show has not yet been aired/translated, so the sites also run their own translation projects).

Holding Out for Heroes

[WB] I would certainly like to move on to discuss Lost and Heroes, which Nina implied in her blog were "male" shows (or the focus of male fan-scholars) - this surprised me so I'd like to think about if this is true, and why, and what female fan-scholars are looking at in 2006-7 instead of two of the best TV shows of the decade.

[KP] I'd love to hear why Heroes is a male show, actually, since it is less stereotypically male-oriented than, say, Firefly, in my opinion, but I might be looking at wrong indicators (genre, the possibilities of romance etc). I personally find the show extremely engaging for a variety of reasons. The whole postmodernity of comicbook! Hiro's arc - his name, his having a side-kick, even the fact that when they speak Japanese the translation is not subtitles, but captions (which is really unusual - subtitles can jump, too, but it's normally in the lower part of the screen, in this case the lines appear right next to Hiro's and Ando's heads!).

I like the appreciation of geek culture in this, and the fact that the villain is a geek himself. He also has a purpose, which is a pleasant development and the fact that he sort of tried to step back and not blow up innocent people was really refreshing as far as villains and their behavioral stereotypes are concerned. The characters are clever and multi-dimensional and Claire is so much more engaging to me than Buffy! I could go on and on and on... But I think, in the end of the day, it's the clever play with stereotypes, homage to the geekdom and believable character, as well as the irony and very tongue-in-cheek construction of slogans ("Save the cheerleader, save the world?" Honestly...) that make me fall for this one head over heels.

Will, you said you thought it was one of the best texts in the last two years, what did you find attractive? Same things? Are we, to use Nina's turn of phrase, watching the show the same way?

[WB] I mostly connect with Claire Bennet, the cheerleader. As a lifelong reader of superhero comics, I like the play with those conventions and the often quite striking visualization of standard tropes like flight, phasing, regeneration and time travel. But I think Claire has provided the heart and in some ways the narrative backbone of the show - as the youngest main character, she's gone on the most dramatic emotional journey, and I think Hayden Panettiere's performance has convincingly sold some incredibly powerful, painful moments along that journey. I don't think I would dig the show nearly so much without her - she has provided the main point of identification for me.

Here's a bit of auto-ethnography for you by the way - look how careful I am to avoid saying Claire/Panettiere is an attractive woman, and to suggest that her attractiveness forms any part of my viewing pleasure. (Matt Hills illustrates this dilemma with admirable frankness in his own auto-ethnography, during Fan Cultures - he delays for about ten pages before blushingly admitting he watched X-Files partly because of Gillian Anderson). For a male fan or scholar to explain his fandom of a cult text in terms of "Claire Bennet is hot!" (even jokingly) would conjure up all kinds of negative connotations and sad stereotypes of a guy in a dark room with a screen full of cheerleader pics and a floor scattered with Kleenex. But it's not unusual for a female fan or female fan-scholar to add, perhaps lightheartedly, "and it doesn't hurt that the main characters are totally cute guys!" or admit that she writes slash because she's turned on by the idea of those cute guys getting it on. I wonder how it would sound if I said I wrote stories about Claire and her hot cheerleader friends romping in the locker room. I don't think it would be celebrated as an example of resistant fan creativity.

Anyway, I'm not complaining "girls do it, so why can't we guys talk about how we get off on fit girls" - I'm just examining my own self-censorship here.

[KP] I find it interesting and somewhat ironic that among the protagonists of the show (Hiro and Claire) each of us would name the one of the opposite gender as the one character we connect with most for reasons that might only marginally be related to our own gender/sexual preference. Claire Bennet is certainly hot, but it is not like she's the only hot girl in the show, so, as you write, it is mostly Claire's character and story, as well as the very convincing performance by Panettiere that come first in your assessment of the reasons behind your fondness.

Likewise, I don't connect with Hiro because I find him physically attractive (although Masi Oka is definitely cute) - there are plenty of attractive males in this show - but it's the geekiness, cluenessness and at the same time phenomenal strength of character that fascinate me. He certainly matures emotionally as the show unfolds, maybe not quite as dramatically as Claire (on the other hand, there is Future!Hiro to be taken into account), but visibly and convincingly. I identify with him a lot on different levels: being a fan, a geek, valuing friendship over everything else; even the fact that he's a true foreigner in America (as opposed to Mohinder, for example) and at the same time 'a citizen of the world' hits very close to where I'm standing.

As to your autoethnography here.... I wonder why you avoided admitting that you find Claire Bennet hot, among other things, while you have so readily admitted to having a male-crush on Nathan Fillion in our previous discussion about Firefly. Is the latter is admission different because it's somehow framed as subversive, while the former just brings up mainstream pornography ('Claire and her hot cheerleader friends romping in the locker room')?

[WB] Yes... you're right, and that's an interesting point. It was unconscious, but that was the reason, I'm sure. Saying I have a crush on Nathan Fillion frames me within the acceptable, even admirable fan-lust discourses of female Livejournal communities; saying Claire Bennet is hot would place me within a different stereotype of sexist, probably pathetic and lonely male fandom - or perhaps more broadly it would chime with men's magazine discourse, the sort of magazine that would run a soft-porn pin-up section on Hayden Panettiere with carefully-chosen quotations from her interview like "I often kiss my girlfriends" or "Some nights it's just too warm to wear pajamas" splashed across the pics.

And you're also right, her being pretty wouldn't be enough, at all, for me to be a "fan" (loosely speaking... I don't do anything active about it) of her character. Niki/Jessica is more conventionally glamorous, but she doesn't grab me in the same way, in terms of personality and performance.

[KP] On a different note - do you think the fact that Claire spends a fair amount of time running around in her cheerleader outfit is a nod to the similarity of her cheerleader uniform to a superhero uniform or an attempt to play around with the notion of schoolgirl fetish, given that the show has such a strong 'Japanese' connection? Or both? Or neither?

[WB] It hadn't crossed my mind, but the idea of cheerleader outfit as superhero uniform is a very clever one - it's actually not dissimilar to Supergirl's. And let's not always conflate being a fan with creativity. By that token, I'm not a fan of Heroes at all. I don't produce vids or slash about it, I don't roleplay it, I don't even imagine sexual pairings from its subtext, let alone write them down. I discuss it online when it's on, and I've written an academic chapter about it because that's part of my job. But I'm not participating in any of these more obvious and exciting fan behaviours - I haven't created a vid that shows the Petrelli brothers are secretly in love, I've just posted some comments on it every week. I don't want to assume that someone is only a "fan" if they fit these quite narrow and I think pretty minority categories of creating some kind of fiction between the gaps.

To be honest, I don't see how imagining the Petrelli brothers as an incestuous gay couple enriches the text. I've read theories that the two actors are deliberately having fun with the scenes where they hug and stare sincerely at each other, so I can accept that there are cues for that reading - but if it was explicit in the script that these brothers want to jump each other's bones, I'd say that was a pretty unlikely and implausible character trait, so I feel the same about it being read in there as a subtext. For the record, I don't feel the same resistance to "Qui/Obi" slash, because I feel that's more plausible within the story-world: we know Jedi are trained from an early age at an academy, that they form same-sex partnerships and work very closely together under strict discipline, and it doesn't seem unlikely that a padawan could develop an intimate relationship with his Master. Moreover, and I think this is a crucial point, The Phantom Menace is a pretty weak and unsatisfying story, so slash readings add something more subtle and interesting to flesh out that flimsy framework. Heroes, on the other hand, is a complex and to my mind, satisfying story per se - it doesn't need brothers fucking each other to make it better.

[KP] See, many would argue that Nathan/Peter is exactly the thing that this story needs to be perfect...

[WB] I guess I don't understand that notion of a perfect story. I wouldn't understand someone who thought that Claire must be sleeping with her brother, Lyle, to make the story complete, either. I expect there are some people out there who think the story would be perfect if Mohinder Suresh was secretly having sex with the little girl, Molly Walker, but I don't know if we'd celebrate them.

[KP] The gaps to fill in, I would say, are designed by fans who are doing the job, and whose choice of 'a gap' is informed by a number of factors: their education (Can they see all allusions? Can they discard the notion of authorial intent?); their fannish experience (Are they members of any fandom? What fandom? What do they normally do? Are they slashers?); their literary preferences (Do they prefer angsty stories, for example? Would they, then, find angst lacking in a situation where it is apparently not supposed to occur?); their sexual preference; their gender; their real life experiences, etc. - everything is potentially important.

Besides, while filling in the gaps, imagining the going-ons behind the scene and writing things back into original narrative are long-lived and time-honored fannish traditions, I do not think that, fundamentally, those are only the flaws or the original stories that we somehow need to correct by creating suggestive vids or writing fan fiction - large part of what we do comes from the fact that the story is so complex and fascinating, and its characters are ready-made for us to play with them!

[WB] To return to an earlier point, I wonder if anyone's currently studying that silent majority of fans who don't go "against the grain" of cult texts like Heroes - asking what pleasures people get from just following the story as the producers intended, without filling in the gaps? It would be harder to study these people, because they don't make themselves as visible; and they're maybe not doing anything that's as easy or fun to write about as slash communities, but I'd guess they constitute most of Heroes' viewers.

But hey, I'm a man and we're not risk-takers, apparently - maybe I should have had that schooled into me at kindergarten.

[KP] Here I'd argue that the question of 'what producers have intended' is the tricky one, especially with Heroes, where problems begin at the stage of finding the 'real producer'. If the actors who portray the Petrelli brothers insert some subtext, can we say that it is 'intended'? Are they the producers, because they are not only part of the production team, but they also create some meaning of their own and insert that into the story as opposed to simply acting out what the script says? And does it matter, in the end of the day? I would also like to see the study of that 'silent majority', and it is especially interesting if they all would share 'the one true intended meaning' that, as you imply, exists out there for us to decipher.

[WB] I take your point that if the actors are playing with that subtext, then yes, it's part of an intended meaning on the part of the "producers" in a broader sense.

[KP] I am not so sure about gaps, though. As Henry puts it, fan creation comes from the mix of frustration and fascination, and certainly frustration is not only fed by gaps in already existing canon, it is to at least similar extent fed by the fact that the canon is in progress. Where else could we attribute the apocalyptic anxieties that ripple through Harry Potter fandom now?

Of course, there is a question of what you are fannish about - about being in a community of fans whatever the source text or about discussing a particular source text in a conveniently existing community of fans? Certainly there are fans of slash as a genre that will be worried about pairing dynamics in the new show, and certainly there are fans - male or female! - who would read fan fiction in one fandom and won't even care about it in the other, where they would be content with collecting action figures and box sets.

Perhaps we could close with this comment from Wikipedia's discussion pages:

"This "fanboy" and "fangirl" nonsense... I don't even know anybody over the age of 17 who uses these words, let alone anyone who would consider them appropriate discussion topics in an encyclopaedia.