How We Make Media Theory at MIT...

In getting ready to teach our graduate prosem on Media Theory and Methods, I have been rereading some passages from Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. This term, I am trying something different with the class, beginning with an extended examination of the role of theory and media production in the history of MIT as a way of helping our entering CMS students think about the place of our program within this institutional history. Turner's book is an ideal introduction to this topic in part because he has so much to say specifically about MIT but also because he speaks to the roles of both formal institutions and informal networks in shaping the production and dispersion of media theory. Turner's book is a study of the ways what he calls "network forums" have shaped our current interpretation of digital technologies. In particular, he is interested in how Stewart Brand, his primary subject, "began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks." Turner continues, "

Drawing on the systems rhetoric of cybernetics and on models of entrepreneurship borrowed from both the research and the counter-cultural worlds, Brand established a series of meetings, publications, and digital networks within which members of multiple communities could meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community. These forums in turn generated new social networks, new cultural categories, and new turns of phrase."

Turner is interested in documenting the various "contact zones" where different subcultures of researchers were brought together and the kinds of "border languages" that were created to enable their ideas to flow from one discipline to another. Turner focuses less on Brand as a person than on the various social networks within which he participated -- The Whole Earth Catalog, the Well, and Wired, chief among them.

The book opens with some insightful analysis of what happened when MIT Professor and administrator Vannevar Bush convinced FDR to fund the National Defense Research Committee during World War II: this brought about a different set of relationships between corporate, government, and academic research. According to Turner, Bush, Norbert Wiener, and others of his generation created a context for multidisciplinary research at MIT. Writing about the "RadLab", Turner explains, "

It brought together scientists and mathematicians from MIT and elsewhere, engineers and designers from industry, and many different military and government planners. Among these various professionals, and particularly among the engineers and designers, entrepreneurship and collaboration were the norm, and independence of mind was strongly encouraged. Formerly specialized scientists were urged to become generalists in their research, able not only to theorize but also to design and build new technologies. At the same time, scientists and engineers had to become entrepreneurs, assembling networks of technologists, funders, and administrators to see their projects through. Neither scientists nor administrators could stay walled off from one another in their offices and laboratories; throughout the Rad Lab, and even after hours, in the restaurants and living rooms of Cambridge, the pressures to produce new technologies to fight the war drove formerly specialized scientists and engineers to cross professional boundaries, to routinely mix work with pleasure, and to form new, interdisciplinary networks within which to work and live."

Studying Turner's book has given me some core insights into the institution where I have worked and thrived for the past sixteen plus years. One of the first things I observed when I came here was the difference between the ways that MIT students engaged with theory from the ways it is often discussed in the Big Ten institutes where I did my graduate work. In a liberal arts classroom, students tend to circle a theory like a pack of raptors and rip it to shreds in the course of a discussion, leaving only the tattered bits on the table, or they choose sides, some embracing, others critiquing the theory, and butt heads together like charging rams, to see which one can withstand the pressure. At MIT, the tendency is to tinker, to take the theory apart, reduce it to component elements, and then reassemble it again in a better form. It is a brainstorming and problem solving culture: a theory is only valuable if it allows us to do something we want to do and the test of a theory is its applications in the real world.

The Comparative Media Studies program's emphasis on "applied humanities" reflects these habits of mind: we are interested in figuring out what the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences might have to contribute to helping our society adjust to a profound and prolonged period of media change and our goals are to embrace and promote the emergence of a more participatory culture. To achieve these goals, we have tried to create a "lab culture" for the humanities at MIT. In the MIT tradition, we have created centers and labs which emphasize experimentation and research, organized conferences which bring together researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds, and participate in larger national networks and projects which bridge between different spheres of activity. Perhaps most of all, we place an emphasis on the public communication of our ideas so that they can make a difference in the world and in the process, we try to strip our language of specialized terms or concepts that might impede its ability to circulate within these larger social networks. I have struggled a lot through the years with the question of what it means to be a humanist at MIT. Every so often, I get a glimpse of how well, in fact, our program fits within the MIT culture and how much I have absorbed of the institutional values and practices of this place.

Turner's book has also helped me to better understand MacArthur's current initiative on Youth and Digital Learning. The Foundation speaks openly about trying to construct a new field focused on understanding how young people incorporate new media technologies into their everyday lives, giving rise to new forms of civic engagement, cultural participation, and informal learning. Our Project nml is simply one node in this much larger network of researchers, drawn from universities and centers around the country, built up from people working in very different disciplines. Collectively, this network is doing field work and ethnography on young people's existing practices, developing curricular materials to support new media literacies, rethinking the place of the library within an information culture, forming after school programs and experimental schools, designing and distributing computer and video games designed to foster computational and design skills, editing and publishing books to guide parents and policy makers, creating and maintaining a blog to insure the circulation of these ideas to the larger public, and much more. The Foundation has done an extraordinary job in enabling intellectually meaningful connections between these various projects, bringing various mixes of researchers together for in person meetings and telephone conferences, creating shared projects that build upon our individual endeavors, insuring that we each have stakes in the success of the initiative as a whole. And they have done a good job of publicizing their efforts so that they have started to capture the public imagination. Increasingly, as I travel around the country, I am asked about what MacArthur is trying to do and my role in the larger process. Above all, MacArthur has instilled in us a sense that what we are doing can make a difference in the world.

Over the next few weeks, my students and I will be taking a look at: the development of cybernetic theory, the experimentation with strobe photography and its impact on our understanding of photography as a medium, the role of MIT as a center for video art and cinema verite documentary, several generations of thinking about the political impact of news and information, and several major traditions for thinking about the value of new media for education and self discovery. My hope is that these case studies will not only introduce our students to some core debates in media theory but also give them insights into how these theories originated, the institutional contexts within which they circulated, the discursive practices that shaped how they got picked up by the outside world, and the particular relationship which MIT has developed between theory and practice.

Part of the process of putting this class together has been to reconnect with researchers from these various traditions who are still actively part of the MIT community. For the most part, my students will be getting first hand reports on how these theories emerged at MIT and the contexts which shaped them. I hope to share some of what we learn through the blog in the weeks to come.

MIT is a particularly rich site for exploring the evolution of media theory because of the ways that social and cultural theories take shape here through interplay with technologists and designers, scientists and engineers, industry leaders and public policy makers, rather than in a self-contained academic discipline. I am going to be interested in exploring the kinds of "network forums," "contact zones," and "border languages" which support and sustain the production of theory here at MIT. From there, I hope to maintain at least some focus on the institutional contexts within which theory originated -- from Eisenstein's blurring of film theory and practice through to the Frankfort and Birmingham Schools and to contemporary digital theory (including the work of modern media makers/theorists, such as Scott McCloud or a growing number of folks in games studies.) I'd be curious to hear how other academics are getting students to focus on their own institutions and their historical evolution.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fourteen, Part Two): Francesca Coppa and Robert Kozinets

Techspressive Tools

Francesca Coppa: The two other gendered concerns I have are about technology and affect: technology in that it seems to me that there's a cliché of "men are techie" and women are not, but media fandom in general and vidding in particular go against that: fannish women have always been particularly drawn from the sciences, and vidding was pioneered by women who (by definition) knew how to program a VCR. So the history of vidding is important for exploding some of those stereotypes. However, these technical, filmmaking women didn't make ironic, distanced parodies; they tended to make emotionally invested music videos, and that's an affective choice with problematically gendered legal implications. Mocking male distance is explicitly protected by the Constitution, where female identification/emotional investment is not as explicitly protected, although it is certainly transformative. Even in these debates on HJ's journal, we see a kind of gentle mocking of slash, or trying to come up with "wild" examples, (say, Geoffrey Long's "a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader"); my own experience in fandom actually tells me not to prejudge such a story: the writer might have a reason for writing that. The story might be great: imagine how it might comment on gender and race.

Robert Kozinets: This idea reminds me again of recent developments in my own field, which draws a lot of inspiration from cultural theory and cultural theorists. Regarding technology, I've just completed an article on the ideologies that guide technology consumption. It's a deep tracking of the historical discourses that inform current narratives in the mass media and in consumer's own speech acts (and their practices/performances with technology). Some of the historical forms are quite familiar, such as the Technological Utopian ideology that associates technology use with progress, or the ideology that associate technology consumption with efficiency, productivity, and economic gains. But I also find a more hidden ideology, one that I think has come to the fore more recently. I call that one the "Techspressive" discourse, and it is about using technology in ways that are playful and self-expressive. Thinking back to when this ideology was really breaking into mass consciousness, in the 1990s, there were a number of female artists and authors who were pushing the boundaries of new digital technologies in very interesting ways, and others who were theorizing these developments. I'm thinking of the top of my head of Laurie Anderson, Pat Cadigan, Donna Haraway, and Kathryn Hayles, but there are many other examples. As groups that have had to function in inventive and underground ways, women have been at the forefront of appropriating new technologies and deploying them in new ways. I think that the positioning of vidding in this wider historical trend is right on target. No question about that.

Francesca Coppa: Oh, I love that word: techspressive! Yes, I think that's right; and in fact, you know, I wonder if women's tendency to adopt these technologies early is at all connected to the fact that women have always had a more mediated relationship to public space than men: we were not historically allowed to have an "authentic" or fully "expressive" relationship to public space. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that women were ignored in the first wave of subculture studies because they weren't visible on the streets the way teddy boys, mods, or rockers were; they were home in their rooms listening to Beatles records on the turntable and spinning fantasies to each other on the telephone. I wrote my first fanfiction longhand and sent it out via snail mail. Now we have irc and AIM and jabber and Skype; we have mailing lists and Livejournal; we make elaborate fannish banners and css design schemes for our webpages; we've got wikis and searchable fanfiction archives and iMeem pages for our vids. But we're not technological or anything.

The Fan Boy Reconsidered

Robert Kozinets: No, of course not. Some of my favorite women are cyborgs. I'll let you guess the details..;-). The other idea I wanted to raise has to do with maleness. My colleagues Doug Holt and Craig Thompson recently published an interesting article on the ideology of male consumption. Their findings were compelling to me. They found that contemporary American males had to negotiate between two idealized types of masculinity. The first was the solid-but-kinda-boring "breadwinner" model, the guys who is a good provider, solid friend, good husband, and so on. But in order to be attractive and interesting, men also felt a need to tack into a "rebel" model, who was a risk-taker, a hero, an achiever. Doug and Craig called the synthetic model, where men moved between both models of masculinity without ever settling too far into one, a "man-of-action hero model." Studying fan culture as I do, I'm not sure exactly where fannish expression fits into such a model. Men today work under constraints that are historically new, constraints and expectations that their dads didn't have (I certainly don't remember any pressure on my dad to moisturize and exfoliate). Being emotionally invested in texts and characters (particularly male characters) can be genuinely problematic for male fans. I've written a bit about the stigmatic side of fannish consumption before. So what have we got now? A social world where traditional maleness is somewhat stigmatized, where softy sensitive maleness is certainly stigmatized, and where fannish investments are stigmatized. What's a poor fanboy to do?

Francesca Coppa: My first thought when I noticed the rise of fanboy culture was, "oh, you guys are getting alienated from the means of production, too?"

Robert Kozinets: Oh yeah.

Francesca Coppa: When I teach mass culture, I like to use Richard Ohmann's definition, part of which of which is "produced at a distance by strangers." And while we have unparalleled closeness to TPTB, I think that at the same time, the gulf between producers and consumers has never been wider, and that there's a real underlying hostility to the idea of consumers becoming producers, and thinking like producers.

Robert Kozinets: I see that in action all the time. Despite all the talk about Web2.0, there is genuine misunderstanding, real fear, and as you say, genuine hostility to these ideas of suddenly "active" consumers.

Francesca Coppa: Because the American economy is dependent on consumption, and the mass media seems willing to actually exert force in order to get us to keep consuming at whatever rate they deem appropriate: I mean, I have twice in the last week heard the word "stealing" used to describe a failure to look at ads: once, vis a vis Tivo, and once, vis a vis "adblocker" software. And behind that word, stealing, is the criminalization of the act of keeping our minds ad-free, and behind that criminalization is force. In some economic sense, are we all feminized now?

Robert Kozinets: Bingo. Why are you peasants sleeping when you could be drinking Red Bull, watching TV, and shopping? Get to work!

Francesca Coppa: Absolutely, but to paraphrase Orwell, maybe some of us are more feminized than others. :-) But I do think we're all of us suffering from a culture that has professionalized, commercialized, and turned spectatorial all the kinds of fun we used to make for ourselves: not just storytelling (written and theatrical) and painting, but sports, singing, and even poker.

Robert Kozinets: Now you're starting to sound like a Consumer Culture Theorist. Seriously, there's a whole literature on this coming from the Frankfurt School and descending in crooked lineal lines into consumer behavior theories. My work on Burning Man and among consumer activists chronicles how people feel that their current culture isolates them and tries to render them passive. Movements like culture jamming, doofing and other post-raves, and the rise of major TAZ-like gatherings like the Burning Man project going on this week and the Rainbow Family gatherings all share in this ideological opposition to capitalist culture commercializing our stories and myths, and a sense that they need to be "brought home" again to the people.

Wikimedia and Archontic Literature

Francesca Coppa: I just finished reading your "Inno-tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia," [in the new Consumer Tribes book] and I really love it; I think this is going to be a really, really useful piece for explaining fannish issues to big media. I especially like your concept of "Wikimedia" (media content that has gone open source and begun spawning new content as a kind of ever-expanding collaborative text), which is similar to Derridean "archontic" literature (I myself use "supplement" to describe the same concept vis a vis theatre in my essay "

"Media Fanfiction as Theatrical Performance"). I think that it's important to emphasize the connection between Wikimedia and other forms of archontic culture; theatre in particular has been a useful model for me to think about what you've called brand "invigoration strategies" and what I'd call a theatrical production *g*. In fact, you nearly quote Alan Sinfield's essay on Shakespeare and cultural materialism in Cultural Politics-Queer Reading; Sinfield says that Shakespeare is relevant to precisely the degree to which he's interfered with by directors; leave Shakespeare alone and he dies, and Shakespeare is arguably the most successful brand in history.

Robert Kozinets: What a great, and classical, example. Absolutely. For me, the Bible, the Talmud, and exegesis in general have always been important working models, and the way Shakespeare's texts are sacralized in our culture is another powerful example. It seems like whenever people invest themselves in text and continue working with it, developing it, making it current and specific and situating it, then we have strong texts, meaningful texts. But somehow this never does seem to sink in at the level of the textual producer. It's funny, because it's the same in religion. Don't tamper with the text. We'll control the text. We'll control the interpretation. And then, there it is again at the level of brand management. The exact same tension. We'll control the brand meanings. Don't you tamper with them. But without the "tampering" the meaning fades out and dies. Damn those The Powers That Be (and you know who you are!)

Francesca Coppa: Vis a vis the gender argument I'm making, I would say that fandom has produced strategies that have allowed women to consume otherwise terrible (and sexist) mass media stories; we have done TPTB's work and made this stuff interesting to ourselves (to TPTB's financial advantage; I promise you, I would never have bought Stargate Atlantis action figures otherwise.) Let me give you links to two recent vids by Luminosity, one of our brightest vidding stars: one is a Supernatural vid called Women's Work (made in collaboration with Sisabet); the other is called Vogue and is a vid made about Frank Miller's 300. I don't think you'll have any trouble seeing these two vids as critiques of the source material. In the first, Luminosity reminds us that, to enjoy Supernatural (and its charismatic and sexy male leads) each week, we have to ignore the plot's dependence on suffering or murdered women; in the second, Luminosity punctures the violence of 300 by defiantly aestheticizing both the battlefield and the men on it. She conflates the battlefield and the dance floor, subjecting the men to a female and queer gaze and setting Madonna up as this world's reigning pagan goddess. Luminosity's epigraph for this gender bait and switch? "Bite me, Frank Miller." Together, you might think of these vids as: "This is how mass media looks to us without fandom" and "This is your television on fandom."

Robert Kozinets: This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing all of this, and for the conversation. As a member of multiple minorities and multiple tribes, expression and representation are all-important to me as well. They matter a lot, and I hope they matter to all thinking people.

Francesca Coppa: Thank you, Robert; like so many fannish activities, this has been both productive and a pleasure.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fourteen, Part One): Francesca Coppa and Robert Kozinets

Introductions Robert Kozinets: I'm not a cultural studies scholar, or at least not one who works in the field of cultural studies. My field is Marketing, so I work in business schools, but my tools and theories do come mainly from anthropology and cultural studies. I came to fan studies early in my academic career, during my thesis dissertation, when I decided that media fans, Star Trek fans in particular, would be an interesting thesis topic for a marketing dissertation. I've been working in fan communities ever since, and finding increasingly that the boundaries between fan communities and brand communities, or product communities are blurred and indistinct. So, for example, I published an article a little while ago in the Journal of Marketing where I studied Star Wars fans alongside "fans" of cars like the Volkwagen Beetle. In related work, I looked at coffee connoisseurs and breakfast cereal aficionados and I found that they engaged in very fannish kinds of behaviors, and acted collectively on the internet in communities that were very reminiscent of fandoms. So for about ten years I've been busy blurring the distinctions between media fans and other types of loyal consumers. A big part of the orientation for that is that we live in a highly mediated society. So you don't really have many things that are "just" a freestanding product or service without their mediated representational components. Starbucks is a superbrand, not merely a cup of coffee. Lucky Charms is a mythological creation, not simply a box of sugary wheat bits and colored marshmallows.

Francesca Coppa: I'm Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where I teach dramatic literature and performance studies. I've written articles on fandom for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and the Women's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. More recently, I have been writing and presenting on live action media vidding. But I come to fandom studies primarily as a fan; I started writing about it because I didn't like how other people were doing it. Given my druthers, I'd rather be in fandom than writing about fandom.

Affect and Gender

Robert Kozinets: I hear what you're saying about fandom, and also was originally attracted to the field and the research by the participative element. In fact, one of my big gripes about ethnography in general in my field (marketing and "consumer behavior") has been the affective distance that business school researchers have had from their topics. People would write about extremely interesting topics like advertising, the media, addictive consumption or ethnic consumption, but so often they would write from such distance that their own emotional investments were completely invisible. As I later learned, a good part of the reason for this was the academic journal review process, that tended to excise all introspection from ethnography in my field. Fortunately, we had some pioneers in our field that broke through those barriers, people like Beth Hirschman, Morris Holbrook, Stephen Gould, and of course my poetic friend John Sherry.

Francesca Coppa: I would argue that erasure you're talking about is gendered and actually worse both for women fans and for women critics. What many women want from narrative is often framed as embarrassing or shameful: we're told that we shouldn't value what we value in stories (high emotions, deep friendships and strong relationships, expressions of sexuality, as well as the intricate plotting and big ideas of SFF) and that our critiques of mainstream culture therefore aren't valid. And worse yet, some people would argue that our critiques aren't explicitly protected; not the way parody or other more distanced forms of criticism are protected. A fanfiction story or a fanvid may not be read as an obvious critique of its source the way an essay or a parodic film does, but it is. Many female fans critique the mainstream media for its lack of nuance and emotional depth, and we create stories and vids that rectify that; we add feelings to the text, we add personal attachments and sustained relationships; we add sex, tears and put in what I would say are appropriate emotional responses to the kinds of stories we like. You get to cry when your planet blows up. You might fall in love with the person you've been fighting aliens with.

Robert Kozinets: Well, it's an interesting argument. But speaking as a male academic who likes to write about my entire lived experience, and is very interested in representational issues in scholarly activities, I have to say that I think this bias cuts both ways. Male academics and female academics in my field have been taken to task for expressing an introspective, emotional perspective. In fact, in one of the most famous incidents in my field, a male academic, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote a classic and I think brilliant introduction to introspection as a methodology. His illustration was all about how he, as a consumer, uses his consumption in a way that moves energy around. Now, Stephen is a spiritual guy and he practices tantric methods that are a bit spicy and that probably don't represent the mainstream. But I thought his piece was right on target, and certainly it had lots in common with Larry Grossberg's ideas of mood modulation and mattering maps. Shortly after that publication had supposedly opened the gates to a flood of "non-scientific" introspective pieces in the economics-psychology dominated scientific field of marketing, two female scholars, Melanie Wallendorf and Merrie Brucks, stepped up with a very detailed and precise refutation of Stephen's methodology. They showed how idiosyncratic, unrepresentative, and unscientific that method could be, especially in the hands of literate folk. In effect, females in our field shut down the male voice (and I'd argue male and female both, as Morris Holbrook was also doing some similar stuff and so was Beth Hirschman) that was bringing in a far more emotional, evocative, resonant, sexualized voice into our little corner of academia. Now, maybe you and I are comparing apples and oranges with these discussions of academic versus fannish writing. But I think the point that women suffer more for presenting their feelings is stretching it. I think female and male representational characteristics (if I can call them that without valorizing one over the other) show up in the writing of both males and females, and that they are suppressed, quashed and acted upon by both males and females.

Francesca Coppa: Well, it depends; I mean, I'm not really surprised that it was men who were able to step out in public with this new and exciting emotive methodology, in the same way that I think that it's not a surprise that Henry Jenkins is currently the dominant voice in fan studies. It's not that they're not brilliant and talented men--they are!--but it's also safer for them to risk bringing an emotive voice into the public arena without being dismissed or marginalized. Similarly, I'm not surprised that two female economists took a policing role there; they may well have had something to prove in this arena.

But there is some truth to gender clichés. There's a great story about the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark; Lucas and Spielberg were watching the rough cut, which ended, as you remember, with Indiana Jones meeting with the government people and the ark being squirreled away into a warehouse. Well, Marcia Lucas--George Lucas's first wife, and also a film editor who won the Oscar for editing Star Wars, noticed that Marion was nowhere to be seen; the last we'd seen her, she was standing around with a bunch of melted Nazis. Marcia Lucas argued that there was no emotional closure for the film, and so at the last minute, Lucas and Spielberg shot an additional scene where Jones comes out of his meeting and Marion is there waiting for him, and they go off arm in arm. Put it this way: most genre television and film isn't lucky enough to have a Marcia Lucas. Something else worth noting: she and Lucas were divorced shortly thereafter, and he really hasn't made a decent film since.

Robert Kozinets: Again, I like the example, but I'm confused about the takeaway. Are there no talented, sensitive, male screenwriters who could have handled that scene as well? I've known lots of sensitive, expressive males, and lots of insensitive, emotionally stunted females. I'm not sure gender assignment is a sure bet for the way people are going to act--or write.

Francesca Coppa: Sure, absolutely; in fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Star Trek fandom is the broad female identification with the emotionally-constricted Spock (partly, I would argue, as an expression of how it feels to be a cerebral, often scientific and/or technically minded woman; which is to say, an "abnormal" woman, at least historically.) And of course there are talented, sensitive male screenwriters. But where are the blockbuster female directors?

I mean, I agree with your larger point: that people are complex and don't act narrowly according to gender stereotypes. Nowhere is that truer than in science fiction media fandom, which is full of proud female geeks. But there are ways in which what can be expressed (and be successful and respected) in the marketplace (either of culture or of ideas) is structured by the context of gender.

I gave a paper at MIT5 that seemed to be a bit of a flashpoint for this debate: it was on the history of fannish vidding as it derived from 1975, and I wrote it at least partly in response to seeing Paul Marino give a presentation at the Berkman Center's "Signal To Noise" conference in 2006. Marino showed a Sims music video ("Let's Get It Started" by the Black Eyed Peas) and discussed it as a music video with no reference to the longer, female filmmaking tradition of fannish music vidding (in which female video editors recut extant footage to music to make arguments and tell stories.) Instead, Marino said, "people have been doing this since 1996," and yes, I understand he meant "machinima,"--or, at least, I think he did--but it really bothered me that that this kind of visual creativity was being spoken about as if it were the recent invention of men, rather then the long standing practice of women. Women have always had a harder time getting into the film industry as creators, and so it makes sense that this kind of filmic editing, mashing-up and sampling--which is arduous and was historically done using home equipment like VCRs--would be a female practice, just like blacks engage in sampling partly as an compensation for other kinds of creative resource scarcities. (Abigail Derecho made a more detailed version of this argument in her conversation on this blog three weeks ago, here.) I'm not claiming that women are predisposed to vid because of biological gender; I'm claiming that historically, structurally, women were more likely to act as bricoleurs, to cobble together what they want to see.

Poetics and Power

Robert Kozinets: I have to admit that I was a bit surprised about the gender balance upon entering fandom and starting to read about fandom. Like a lot of people, I had assumed that Star Trek fans were mainly a bunch of keener, somewhat brainy and socially disconsolate young guys. But when I entered the fandom scene by joining a fan club, it had a female Captain and much of the command crew was female. It's kind of a funny story, but my key informant was an American civil servant who was very active in the fandom scene, writing and filking. This person had an androgynous name, and all through our correspondence I assumed that "he" was a male. It turned out that she was female, and she was good enough to laugh about my mistake and to comment on it as a function of the nature of email communication. But I went back and missed a number of subtle hints that, in retrospect I think I should have picked up. It attuned me to my own biases, but I can see how they would be all around with male academics. Yet, again, I think what we are talking about is minority status more than gender. Your drawing on African-American sampling as an example proves that point. Jewish creativity would be another case in point.

Francesca Coppa: Well, but the gender thing makes sense: if, as Henry rightly pointed out, being a fan is at least partly about being a critic, who'd want to be criticizing SFF? Women, certainly. The fact that male critics haven't properly seen this (Henry notwithstanding) really has to do with the failure of men to be bilingual; as so many of the commentators here have noted, it's the "girls read books written for boys, but boys don't read 'girl' books" thing. And you know what, I get that, that's what power is: less powerful people learn the dominant language. But it means that male academics miss things if they aren't paying attention, and worse yet: the danger is that it won't even matter if they miss it, because their version will become the norm: that's what power is, too. Or else, there's the danger that they'll see you but mistake you, not understand the significance of what you're doing, or the art you're making: dismiss it, belittle it. A lot of female fans avoid attention because they're sure it will be the wrong kind of attention: the kind that describes fanvids as (true story) "your little movies," or thinks your slash story is perverse or hilarious while completely failing to understand the context in which it's working, the intellectual moves it's making. However, there are some pluses: for instance, the fact that men have not historically been interested in fan fiction and fan vidding has meant that an exclusively female tradition has been allowed to develop and take root: fan fiction and fan vidding are like the Seven Sisters of the fan world. I personally find women's media fandom profoundly moving; it's one of the few places where I let down my cultural defenses, because the art is made for me, as if I ruled the world. It's like what television and film might look like if Mary Pickford and other women filmmakers had continued to dominate the industry.

Robert Kozinets: Back to my field for a second. There are big debates that have gone on for twenty years, originally raging in open, and now continued more behind closed doors, about the legitimacy of cultural methods and modes of interpretation to study and understand consumers and markets. Most of those battles have already been won intellectually, and yet institutionally we who practice "Consumer Culture Theory" find that our students have far fewer jobs to choose from than our colleagues who use Greek letters in their equations do, and our tenure standards are completely different from our economics-driven colleagues, and that entire schools have locked us out. We are the minorities in our field, and behind our backs (and even to our faces at time) we are dismissed as atheoretical or irrelevant, and belittled as "merely journalism." That's power at work. We're supposed to know their theories, they don't have to know our theories. They critique us using terms and concepts from their paradigm, but don't see how our critiques make sense when applied to them. This is exactly the same tale being told, except that instead of male and female fans, it's quantitative and qualitative research scholars.

Does the Long Tail Include Women?

Francesca Coppa: Agreed; it's about any two groups with power; gender is not the only category, it's just a large one. It's also what makes me suspicious of your field, Marketing. I can't help but feel that any sensible marketer has to market to the thickest part of the hypothetical Venn diagram: if girls will watch boy TV, and boys will watch boy TV, then clearly: boy TV is what you should make. I've heard the various arguments about niche marketing, the long tail, etc, but I'm not convinced, because who will make those niche works? Us; they'll have to come out of the community, I assume, and so what this really comes down to is us selling our works to each other while big media takes a cut, yes? So for instance, the FanLib debacle. Thousands of women write stories and give them to each other for free, and I can practically hear the marketers salivating: all those eyeballs focused on something other than ads! I worry that the new marketing to fandom is essentially designed to put a toll on the artistic roads we've spent years making: and, to continue the metaphor, those roads were carved on the desire lines of all our footsteps, collectively wearing through the grass. No one made those roads for us; the big shiny highways didn't go where we wanted, didn't take our route. But now the roads all seem to be converging.

Robert Kozinets: I don't see anything except perhaps technologies converging in any big way. I see fragmentation. There are no big audiences anymore, Harry Potter excepted. I see marketers at work segmenting into smaller and smaller chunks. I see Divergence Culture. I see marketers thinking for a change about "Aggregation" instead of segmentation. The media audience is becoming smaller and smaller. And I also see fans taking control like never before. Not only are they creating bigger and better stories and sharing them, but some of them want to charge, want to work with the big media corporations, and want to take a cut. Many don't. And a lot of the debate and ferment is about rights. Who owns what, how can it get properly used. Tolls on roads make sense if the roads are kept up well and public services that benefit the community come out of them (regardless of whose footsteps they are built upon). Tolls for the sake of tolls don't make sense, and people will find alternative routes.

Francesca Coppa: Sure, but there may be (male) majorities even within that segmentation. My large (and gendered) concern is that this rising new media culture is going to function in the 21st century like the "rise of the novel" did in the 18th--in other words, that the scribbling/vidding women will be erased now that Richardson and Fielding (the fanboy as mogul) are on the horizon and fandom is becoming a serious cultural practice, national economic engine, and academic discipline. Women became so alienated from the novel--which had been a lowbrow female artform--that Virginia Woolf had trouble finding a "female sentence" 150 years later; it seems to me that we, as scholars, have a responsibility not to go through that cycle again: let's not carelessly erase and/or overwrite the women and rediscover them in twenty years. Let's just write scholarship that takes time to remember the foremothers and originators, and that recognizes the accomplishments of current female fan writers and artists.

Robert Kozinets: And maybe some of the males, too. Males who are straight and gay, black and Asian, rich and poor, Islamic and Jewish, and all other varieties of maleness and femaleness that deserve voices. But overall I agree and this is a very interesting observation. I wonder if the social and particularly economic conditions have changed enough so that history won't repeat itself. Business is depending increasingly upon marketing, and marketing is basing itself on, as I mentioned above, segmentation. Segmentation is supposed to be about finding distinct groups of consumers, understanding their needs, and then fashioning products and services that will appeal directly to them. So businesses presumably would be interested in keeping the female "market" happy. In addition, and I think even more importantly, women fans (and all fans) have more of a voice now than they did in the 18th century, because they have access not only to the means of production, but to the means of distribution. Yet as your earlier example points out, we do seem to have an amazingly short historical memory, and also we tend to give credit to the person who last stated an idea at the expense of the person who first developed that idea. I wonder if this is some sort of cultural blindspot that North Americans have, and I wonder if our European and Asian colleagues would find the same sort of ahistorical perspectives in fan cultures on their home turf. But, yes, keeping an eye on past developments and reminding people about our tendency to repeat the past does stand as a very worthwhile academic pursuit. That should apply to males as well as females.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation...

Several weeks ago, I played hooky from writing this blog to attend an Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society. At the time, I promised to share some of my experiences with you but have been so focused on starting the term that I am just now getting back to you. Here's how the Aspen Institute described their goals for the event:

The purpose of the Forum is to develop recommendations for leaders in media, government, and other societal institutions to promote positive social and democratic values through the various communications media without undue governmental regulation. The Forum will explore how the new technological and behavioral environments are changing the way that media -- old and new -- will serve customers (advertisers/subscribers), users (readers/listeners/viewers/contributors), communities, and the broader social good. After an introductory plenary session describing the drivers and impact of the new media, the Forum will consist of three distinct roundtable tracks, exploring the ways that media may be used to promote an informed citizenry, civic participation, enhancement of community life, and consideration of intellectual property rights and interests.

The Forum brought together government leaders (including U.S. Representatives, current and former members of the Federal Communications Commission), the chief executives of major media companies (old and new), leading academics from a number of different disciplines, lawyers and policy makers, and heads of foundations and non-profit organizations with strong stakes in shaping the future of our media environment. The Aspen Institute events are legendary for creating a social and intellectual climate where people from very different perspectives can exchange views and arrive at meaningful compromises that move forward public policy on a wide array of topics. It was fascinating to watch this process work -- not only through formal events (including plenary conversations with heavy hitters like Michael Eisner, Arriane Huffington, Madeleine Albright, and Arthur Sulzberger, round table exchanges among clusters of participants, and more focused working groups designed to brainstorm and make policy recommendations) and informal exchanges (over breakfast, in the line for lunch, or at the cocktail parties and receptions in the evening.) Charles M. Firestone, the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society programs, was an adept moderator, making sure that every position got aired, cutting off conflict, and pushing us towards practical and pragmatic solutions.

One can get a sense of the caliber of the conversations by checking out the streaming webcast versions of some of the key events. While the videos don't preserve the work process, they do include some of the plenary exchanges which were a highlight of the event. (I am told that videos of the roundtables are forthcoming.)

Sparks flew during the opening session which featured Eisner, Huffington, music industry defender Jon Diamond, and advertising industry leader Lynda Resnick, for a passionate exchange about the current state of the media landscape. Taken as a whole, the group offered us some glimpses into the conflicted and sometimes self-contradictory thinking which is shaping old media's response to the emergence of a more participatory culture. Here, as throughout the sessions, disagreements about how to handle intellectual property in the digital age shaped more or less every other potential point of contact between old and new media companies.

Another memorable exchange, also available via webcast, paired current FCC chairman Kevin Martin with Vivianne Reding, his counterpart on the European Union's Commission on the Information Society and Media. Here, we were given textbook illustrations of the difference between how media policy operates under commercial and public service broadcasting models, as well as hints at the very different cultural and political traditions shaping media policy in Europe and the United States.

A third session on the Future of the Newspaper featured Sulzberger (New York Times), Caroline Litttle (Washington Post), Jake Oliver (Afro), Dean Singleton (MediaNews Group), Craig Newmark (craigslist), and Scott Moore (Yahoo!).

I was delighted to see new media literacies emerge as a central theme at the conference from the very opening session. An excerpt from our white paper was circulated to attendees as part of the packet they received in advance of the meeting and seemed to have heightened participant's awareness of the topic. The idea of young people's relationship to emerging media was posed by opening remarks from Jeff Cole (USC Annenberg School for Communication), who outlined a series of shifts in the ways younger Americans got their entertainment and information. By the end of the first roundtable, the need for robust and widespread media literacy education (for adults as well as for youth) had become part of the group's consensus.

This shared investment in media literacy provided me a context for raising what I saw as important issues about the ways that current ambiguities in copyright law are having a chilling effect upon our efforts to develop and circulate materials for media literacy education. It was clear that almost no one at the event had considered the connection between these two issues before.

Here's how I explained it: I am both a Professor of Literature and a Professor of Media Studies. As a Professor of Literature, I have a pretty good sense of what claims I can make on Fair Use in my work. In writing a printed work about a literary text, I understand roughly how much of a given work I can quote for the purposes of critical commentary and in what contexts; I also know when I need to seek additional permissions and where I can go to get those permissions; for the most part, a system is in place that allows me to pay an appropriate and reasonable rate for my use of those materials.

None of this applies to my work as a media scholar if what I want to do is directly quote from a media text in my own media work for the purposes of critical commentary. There is a pretty well established set of principles and agreements which allow me to show clips in class to my own students and even to break encryption if necessary in order to duplicate and archive those clips. But there is no such protection in place if I wish to circulate materials I have produced amongst other media educators.

Renee Hobbes, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are doing research for the MacArthur Foundation, trying to understand teacher's attitudes towards copyright and how this impacts media literacy education. So far, they are finding enormous fear and much uncertainty regarding many standard pedagogical practices which involve reproducing and sharing media content. Their long term goal is to develop principles of fair use which would provide greater protection to educators, but the effectiveness of these principles rests in part on getting them accepted within the media industry itself. If you want to learn more about this work, you can listen to a podcast of a plenary session we hosted at last spring's Media in Transition conference.

For the most part, Hollywood has been so aggressive at defending its trademark and copyright control over their content (especially in the context of current battles over Napster and YouTube) that university attorneys typically tell us that we run a risk of legal action if we directly excerpt any segments of commercial media content for distribution in any form or in any context. Surely, these attorneys are being conservative and the courts would no doubt recognize at least some limited notion of fair use defending our use of these materials. But this fear of legal action is creating a chilling effect on the development of instructional resources for media literacy.

If educators wanted, however, to get studio permission for our use of these materials, the history has been equally problematic. There is no established clearing house for identifying and contacting rights holders. The studios often do not respond to our queries and when they do, they set arbitrarily high prices. In one recent case, a faculty member was quoted a price of a thousand dollars a minute for the use of Hollywood content for an educational project -- a price which would have quickly bankrupted the initiative. Some organizations are producing media literacy documentaries which include clips from mainstream media, but they have historically felt they were taking major risks in doing so and this has in turn impacted how widely they publicize their efforts.

Thanks to the Aspen Institute, my story was heard by some of the key policy makers and leaders of the entertainment industry. My hope is that this issue will be part of the policy recommendations released by the Institute in the aftermath of our session and that we can use this as a rallying point in brokering a meeting between the Hollywood establishment and key media literacy educators (a possibility raised by several of the industry participants at the event). None of us are ready to declare victory yet but the particular climate of Aspen, which brings key decision makers together in the same space to talk about vexing issues of cultural policy, has made it possible for us to make some real progress on this issue.

One final aside about Aspen: As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.

Digital Media and Learning Competition Announced

I've written here often about the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative, which has funded our Project nml. The Foundation has made a 50 million dollar commitment over the next five years to help foster a field devoted to understanding "the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life" through their use of new and emerging media technologies. So far, the Foundation has tended to hand select researchers and community leaders to participate in the initiative, but earlier this month, they announced an open competition designed to identify innovative projects which might make a difference in this space. What follows are some excerpts from the press release announcing this competition:

"An open competition is an excellent way to identify and hopefully inspire new ideas about learning in an increasingly digital world," MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton said. "We do not yet know how much people are changing because of digital media, but we hope that this competition will help support the most innovative thinking about learning, the formation of ethical judgments, peer mentoring, creativity, and civic participation, all of which are increasingly conducted online."

Awards will be given in two categories:

* Innovation Awards will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. These innovations might range from a teacher add-on for MySpace that allows for safe assigning of a class group discussion, to a platform co-developed by teachers and students to facilitate digital literacy and peer-mentoring between college students and high-school drop-outs earning their GED degrees, to a digital learning festival for the leaders of a worldwide youth environmental campaign.

* Knowledge Networking Awards will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. For example, a team of teacher bloggers who already reach hundreds of thousands of readers may now seek to provide multimedia coverage and translation of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins' recent white paper on media literacy.

The open competition will be administered by a network of educators and digital innovators called "HASTAC" (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). HASTAC was founded and is primarily operated at two university centers, the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. HASTAC has a network reaching more than 80 institutions globally. The choice of HASTAC, one of a new breed of "virtual institutions," reflects MacArthur's goals in promoting next-generation learning.

"We are already teaching a generation of students who do not remember a time before they were online," said Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC. "Their social life and informal learning are interconnected. They don't just consume media, they customize it. These students bring fascinating new skills to our classrooms, but they also bring an urgent need for critical thinking about the digital world they have inherited and are shaping."

As part of their prize, awardees will receive special consultation support on everything from technology development to management training. Winners will be invited to showcase their work at a conference that will include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, educators and policy makers seeking the best ideas about digital learning. Applications are due Oct. 15, 2007, and prizewinners will be announced in January. Detailed information on the competition is available online at www.dmlcompetition.net.

"With the digital media and learning initiative, the MacArthur Foundation is playing a leading role in reshaping both institutional and informal learning practices," said David Theo Goldberg, HASTAC co-founder and director of the University of California's Humanities Research Institute. "Traditional learning practices are being supplemented and supplanted by new digital media, which both enable and extend their reach through virtual institutions like HASTAC. This is a natural partnership."

I know many of my readers are doing interested work in this space. I'd like to personally encourage you to pull together a proposal for this competition. Many of us have been frustrated by the climate of fear which so often clouds public policy as it relates to young people and new technologies. MacArthur is offering us another model -- one which is governed by reason and research rather than sparked by fear and ignorance, one which puts theory into practice to redesign public institutions and practices which touch the lives of children and youth.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Thirteen, Part Two):Anne Kustritz and Derek Johnson

Fans and Consumerism DJ: Part of the project central to fan studies of rehabilitating the popular and academic image of fandom has often been an attempt to show how inherently different it is from those practices that comply with the economics and politics of consumer culture. To cast fans against consumer culture, we've gotten used to talking about them as producers. The texts that are often most important in fan studies are not the texts consumed by fans, but instead those produced by fans themselves and shared within their communities. Of course, these are important texts and I fully support bringing attention to them. However, it seems to me that we are often celebrating fans for being productive, rather than consumptive, and that doesn't always sit well with me--particularly in terms of gender. If consumption is gendered as feminine (though I don't think we should always make this assumption), it seems that we might be celebrating female fans for engaging with the media in more masculine ways.

Personally, I'm much more inclined to position fandom in relationship to consumption and consumer culture, not in opposition to them. Not to disparage productive fan activities--I have dealt with these too in my work--but I resist the assumption that productive activities are always "better" and preferable to consumptive ones. Sure, I'll "question consumption" as the bumper sticker asks, but as a part of that interrogation I'm not going to jump to the implied conclusion that avid consumption of the products provided by corporate culture is always bad.

So I find myself much more aligned with Sara Gwenllian-Jones, who calls for us to consider fandom not in terms of productive communities, but in terms of its relationship to consumer culture and the culture industries. The consumer practices of fandom, she writes, make it less the industry's nemesis, and more "its adoring offspring." To a latter-day Adorno, this would evidence fans as compliant dupes feeding a capitalist system. And honestly, this is an important point: I don't know that we could seriously support the claim that fandom has not been a boon to the industry. But without calling fans cultural dupes, I think that it is advantageous for us to recognize and acknowledge fan participation within the consumer culture offered by the industry, and not just as an alternative culture of its own. Regardless of their own productive activities, fans' relationship in and to the industry is one of outside consumption. Without a doubt this line between production and consumption has been blurred in many ways--and I'd totally cop to criticisms that I've once or twice artificially increased that line's resolution in my work to make the following point. Even when invited to participate in the industry's productive activities, fans remain subordinated as consumers due to their unequal economic and cultural power. So I guess I'm not saying consumption is necessarily "good" (i.e. empowering/resistant) either, only that it's an important dimension to fandom we should simultaneously explore alongside its communal and productive sides.

AK: As in my intent to define "fans" broadly, but study them narrowly, I agree that there is plenty of room within the umbrella of fan studies to look at both "productive" and "consumptive" fan practices, or "creative" and "as is" fans, as I've defined them in my own work. I place value in either sort of study; however I'd like to discuss whether one sees the fan activities themselves as valuable as a separate issue.

There's been some talk about the place of the resistance/incorporation model already in previous weeks of this debate, but I'd like to return to it for a moment. I'm interested in critiquing this sense that productive/creative/community type fan practices inherently deserve greater value because they "resist," insofar as I'd argue that "resistance" means little without specificity. However, I think that this is fundamentally a question of how academic work intersects with the political and social questions of our lives, because so long as I perceive the world as largely dominated by inequalities, I will also continue to value resistance to (or better yet, transformation of) the systems which reinforce those inequalities.

In practice, to me this entails thinking about fan fiction on several levels, each of which may align differently to different axes of power. Fan fiction resists capital at the level of production by evading professional systems of publication and retaining space for amateur, non-profit storytelling. At the level of content the picture becomes more complex, as fan fiction represents a plethora of ideological positions on any given question from gender roles, to militarism, to eugenics. However, on the whole, that very ideological incoherency also counters or resists the culture industry's ability to constrain the ideological content of modern storytelling. Depending on one's relationship to Marxism and the public sphere, these resistances could be valuable, or not. In addition to capital, I find slash valuable as a resistance to heteronormativity, which says nothing about slash's stance vis-à-vis other axes of power. Yet the mere existence of a genre or mode of writing dedicated to making visible the socially invisible (not just homosexuality, but bisexuality, transpersons, and a variety of ways to reorder the family unit and it's relationship to the state which might broadly be called queer) strikes me as a useful step in working toward social recognition of sexual variation.

I'd also like to tease consumption and consumerism apart, as a sort of side-door into the questions that you've raised here. Although they're intimately intertwined, I'd like to separate the consumption of narratives, ideas, and images from the question of spending money, because I'm concerned about a potential conflation between interest and devotion on an intellectual level and purchasing decisions. I'm not at all arguing for advertising's impotence, but I think it's imperative that we separate fans' role as consumers of narratives and as consumers of products.

I attended an unfortunate academic talk a couple years ago which purported to study the popularity of characters based upon the sales of their merchandise. While I don't deny that purchasing decisions have meaning and that it's important to study the activities of fans who primarily define their practices through consumerism, I'm disturbed by attempts to quantify love in dollars. Poor fans love things too, as do fans who prefer to avoid investing money in fan activities. Keeping in mind the significant secondary market for media products as well as the effects of sharing and copying even before the digital age, if consuming fans could be called dupes of the media industry (not that I would label them as such), they are not homogenously so in purely economic terms.

DJ: I'm not sure I see that argument as a critique of the idea of fan fiction as inherently more resistant and valuable than less "productive" practices (seems more like an endorsement), but you make a convincing argument about the value of fan/slash fiction as a practice outside of capital and heteronormativity. I'm certainly not prepared to make the same case about the kinds of fan practices in which I'm more interested: my concern for media franchising draws me to engagements that tend to be more capital-friendly--at least on the surface. The systems of narratives mixed with games, toys, and other branded products offered by the industry are a far cry from derivative but independent texts and genres produced by audiences for their own collective consumption. If I understand you correctly, it's not the consumption of the narratives offered by Smallville the television series that has value for you, it's the collective consumption of the slash fiction produced by fans in response to the series. In my work with franchise systems, however, it's much more difficult to separate the role of consumers of narrative from that of consumers of products. These franchise systems are designed by capital to transform narrative consumption into sales.

To some, this will further evidence the greater value of fan practices that entirely resist capital. But I'm not entirely convinced. Sure, action figure collectors might be complicit with capital in their amassment of the industry's products, but that capital-friendly product consumption could yet lead to your narratives of non-normativity (I can't count how many times the X-Men, Star Trek, and Star Wars toys in my office have been posed in non-heteronormative ways by my playful officemates!). You are right, of course, that certain exclusions accompany these capital-friendly and capital-necessitating practices, and in that respect I'd certainly refuse to celebrate them. But I'm interested in the fact that despite the power of capital, there are yet openings in its consumption systems for the non-normativity you seek. Not necessarily equal to or in excess of those offered by fan fic (I certainly couldn't say), but the potential nonetheless for some kind of non-normativity unexpected and unwanted by capital. Capital does, as you say, have the ability to constrain ideological content, but it doesn't have the power to fix it completely. I don't know that consumption means taking an overdetermined text "as is."

Further, I think that the question of value could be approached in a couple different ways. Is what makes a fan practice valuable from a socio-cultural standpoint the same as what makes it valuable to us as academics? You make a good point about the visibility accorded non-normative practices by the discussion of it in fan studies, but should fan studies only be concerned with studying the "good" fans? Collectors may be less valuable to a feminist set of research questions concerned with non-hetero communities, for example, but more valuable to more industrial (but perhaps equally feminist) questions about marketing and culture. Depending on our research questions, different fans might have different value to us.

But what really concerns me about the idea of either of us deciding what is valuable about fandom is our status as "acafans." Despite our de-privileged status as fans in our off hours, we simultaneously enjoy heightened privilege as academics to speak with power about what kind of culture has value. If you're writing about the kind of fan practices that you engage in, and I'm writing about the kinds of practices I know, and we're both presenting them as "valuable," I worry that what we're doing is self-aggrandizing. Should we, as scholars who are also fans, be in a position to celebrate ourselves? To look at our own cultural tastes and practices and say that they are somehow superior to those of the less enlightened? Perhaps this will sound far too traditional, but I wonder how objective we can be in measuring the value of fandom when objectivity means considering the possibility that our own practices are not really too relevant.

AK: Perhaps I wasn't clear, but my purpose was precisely to deconstruct the "resistance" monolith so that in any given case one can speak of a particular activity as resistant vis-à-vis one vector of power, but perhaps not another. Your action figure example was precisely what I had in mind as an activity which does not resist capital, but could potentially be enacted as a resistance to heteronormativity (and thus potentially resistant to the culture industry's ability to control the ideological meaning of their products). Thus, defining action figure collecting as inherently "resistant" (or not), makes little sense to me without further specifying "Resistant to what?" and "Enacted in what manner, under what circumstances?" I'm interested in transforming and multiplying the basis upon which we ask about resistance (and value), rather than abandoning those questions altogether. This is a move toward an intersectional politics, as my frustration with celebrations of a given activity's "resistance" or "complicity" results from underlying assumptions that power functions only, or most importantly, along one axis of domination.

While I allow that franchises and industry invest in multiplatforming to transform narrative devotion into sales, I'd have to say that isn't my goal as a citizen, fan, or a consumer of narratives, nor is it my primary interest as an academic. Although I find studies which examine the industry's efforts to use narrative affection to create sales vital in understanding the modern media environment, from which none of us can completely "escape" or "opt out" as it increasingly saturates everyday life, I'm much more excited by the ways that people creatively evade and challenge systems of capitalist consumerism. Thus, I place value in the studies, but from the perspective of a funky post-structuralist Marxist, not in the aspects of those activities which increase the culture industry's ability set ideological agendas, or to subordinate more cultural and social space to market imperatives. Non-profit fan activities like fan fiction and vidding certainly cannot exist in a separate realm untainted by capital, as they depend upon mass mediated source narratives. Yet, I find their insistence upon free exchange important and hopeful in an era increasingly dominated by for-profit products fulfilling desires that communal fan-produced forums used to fill.

My study of Smallville as a locus of shared counter-cultural world making focused on the commonality that viewers construct by watching the program "against the grain." Without looking at fan fiction, I analyze such activities as productive of forms of identity and community, as in the experiences of generations of gay men who began to articulate their closeted identity through superheroes' secret identities. Thus, my division between "as is" and "creative" fans had less to do with dividing those who consume narratives from those who produce fan products, and more to do with different ways of being in relationship with canon, i.e. viewing canon as mutable on the one hand and viewing it as a closed system on the other.

With regard to academics' ability to champion their own tastes, I find that I'm not concerned so long as one provides ample explanation for the origins and purpose of assigning value. My tastes, fan practices, theoretical investments, and political orientation all converge in slash, therefore I've attempted to explain to what ends (i.e. toward what desirable imagined world) I find slash useful, personally, culturally, and academically.

Fan Academics and the Future of Fan Studies

AK: Overall, our conversation seems to suggest a shared interest in constructing the boundaries of fan studies broadly, but designing and generalizing individual studies narrowly. I'd suggest that imagining the future of fan studies as a collaborative effort between scholars of many subjects potentially offsets some concerns around the possibility of an emerging gender divide in the field, whereby only one type of fan practice could become symbolically central over time, ghettoizing the study of other sub-communities. I think progress on this level will require us to be very deliberate about building a fan studies canon through broad citation. This series of conversations offers visibility to a number of different approaches, and suggests an imperative to contextualize "our fans" within a wide conglomeration of disparate fan practices, none of which deserves reification as uniquely paradigmatic.

As fan studies progresses, I'd also like to see fan academics (and academic fans) push the complexity of the acafan construct. Partly, I'd be interested to see a more thorough engagement with the anthropological literature on native ethnography and identity, as many fan studies scholars come to anthropology as a second, third, or fourth discipline and afford it relatively little prominence in their work.

In addition, while interesting work has been done by examining academic and fan identity as the confluence or opposition of reason and emotion, there remains quite a bit of work to be done in unpacking both terms. Defining and understanding our own fan investments mirror the very work of the field, but I'd also be interested in seeing our academic identities treated with greater transparency. What are our theoretical and disciplinary investments? As mentioned by previous discussants, academic and fan investments develop through a similarly hybrid process of intellectual and emotional affinity, so in some ways analysis of disciplinary and theoretical affiliation finds a natural home in fan studies.

However, as we come to understand how our tastes in fan objects shape our studies of fans, a parallel process of understanding how disciplinary and theoretical beliefs shape our ability to think about fans also suggests itself. Particularly arguments about "resistance" and "value" in fandom elucidate a pattern whereby theorists invest fan studies with their individual arguments about the world. I'm not proposing that such a process is in any way avoidable or even undesirable, merely that acknowledging this process could allow us to begin unbundling the object of our disagreements when we disagree about fans; have we really come into conflict about the sociological or cultural reality of fan activities, or should we understand fan activities as merely one battle ground upon which we restage arguments about capital, gender, sexuality, pedagogy, identity, and citizenship, among other key debates?

DJ: I couldn't agree more with your overall conclusion. In some respects, I think that the controversy that inspired our ongoing discussion this summer has been in part trepidation about the prospect of the more multivalent fan studies we're proposing: a concern that amid new approaches to thinking about fandom, existing concerns and political coalitions--especially as they pertain to gender--will be lost, eclipsed by a new, masculinist dominant paradigm. But I don't know that there has to be any dominant paradigm, and I think that this conversation has intervened in that disagreeable possibility by establishing a greater network of communication between a number of scholarly voices all interested in fans for different political, cultural, and economic reasons. If anything, the range of opinions shared in this conversation evidences to me the difficulty with which any one approach to thinking about fans could now truly monopolize the field.

Moving forward, the challenge facing the kind of fan studies we're advocating seems to be maintaining broad citation as the field expands. If we push for specificity in dealing with all these different types of fans and fan practices, how do we simultaneously maintain a general connection to one another? If we're interested in entirely different models of fandom, what is the shared interest and point of commonality upon which we can build scholarly dialogues with one another? For example, I'll admit that I'm guilty as charged (early on in these debates) of infrequently attending conference panels where fans are examined from more productive, communal, celebratory, and/or extra-industrial paradigms. While I recognize the concern that these panels, particularly when comprised of female researchers, have been systematically marginalized (especially when scheduled against better attended "male" fan panels), the issue of my infrequent attendance has generally been one of perceived relevance. Given the differences in how we approach fans, I've often elected to instead attend panels that don't relate to fans per se, but speak to the formal, industrial, or historical contexts in which I'm trying to place "my fans."

Having more consciously interrogated this choice through our discussion, I'm now less likely to repeat it. So the challenge that I see is not to engage in the naive project of pursuing a unified theory of fandom, but to invest in the construction of a shared intellectual framework where the relevance between such disparate perspectives as ours can be made much more evident. It hasn't always been clear to me why I should engage in conversations with scholars who study entirely different kinds of fans for entirely different reasons (besides the utility of comparison), and if studies of your fans and of my fans are to cohere as something called "fan studies," it's that why we really have to articulate.

I think that you offer a very promising beginning to this question in asking "why/how do we as humans love things" as a central question throughout different kinds of fandom, but one additional thing I'd like to see us do in continuing to explore acafan identity is to try to specifically interrogate our own love as scholars in the process. At times I feel that fan scholars and scholar fans, while not always celebratory of fan cultures, are loathe to engage with the less savory elements of it. We love things as acafans--be they the media texts that our fandom leads us to study, or the fans themselves that we examine--but we need to make sure those amorous feelings can manifest as "tough love" when appropriate. We need to be tough--critical--not just of the fans and texts we study, but of ourselves, because as acafans, it is often our own tastes and practices that we are examining.

Lightning Round!

But enough longwinded theorizing! As a bonus, we've each exchanged two topics or questions of a more fannish nature and limited our responses to one sentence (creative punctuation allowed).

What has been your most formative fan experience?

DJ: I think that would be not a single event, but the realization later on as an adult that I was always involved in some fan "phase" even as I grew up: my early He-Man phase gave way to a Garfield phase in fourth grade, which gave way to a Darkwing Duck phase in middle school, which gave way to the still-not-over Star Trek phase in eighth grade.

AK: While I experienced a powerful sense of recognition and potential upon finding fan fiction, participating in on-line fannish spaces while living abroad provided my most intense awareness of emotional commitment in being a fan and of the radical promise of global cybercommunity.

Describe one fannish and one academic "character" about whom you're currently excited.

DJ: I'd say I'm currently most excited about Colonel Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica not just because I'm anxious to explore the implications of him being revealed a Cylon, but also because I know that regardless he'll still be a one-eyed bad ass; academically, I'd say Edward Castronova, who manages to talk about the formal aspects of designed video game spaces while simultaneously discussing their functions in politics, economics, and governance.

AK: I derive incredible energy from what one reviewer called Lauren Berlant's "superheroic" ability to swoop across intersectional categories of analysis with ease, while I'm currently fannishly involved in a project to rethink the role of characters of color in fan fiction by re-presenting Mani of Brotherhood of the Wolf.

What are you favorite and least favorite representations of fandom in the media?

AK: This is complex (ack, only one sentence!) because audience has an enormous effect, as when I watched Trekkies 2 at a con and felt such a surge of fannish affection but playing it for my class of freshmen bombed, but I'll say that I'm annoyed with programs which use villains to portray "bad fan" stereotypes, while I enjoy seeing little signs of fanishness pop up in unexpected places, against type, in the lives of complex characters.

DJ: Speaking of villains: my favorite would be the Evil Trio from Buffy (despite vilifying fans, they always made me laugh) and my least favorite would be the dorm R.A. Moe from Veronica Mars (did the Galactica fan who taught Veronica to say "frak" so adorably have to be a rapist-conspirator?).

What would you do if you weren't an "acafan"?

AK: I completed a B.A. in psychology (joint with cultural studies) which was supposed to lead to a career in clinical or criminal psychology, but at this point after completing a Ph.D. in American Culture with an emphasis in cultural anthropology I would probably end up doing American ethnography with activists, people on probation, migrant workers, or other border-crossers/border-dwellers - and then there's always the prospect of the Great American Novel kicking around somewhere inside all of us.

DJ: I'd be a script doctor: I'm not as good at coming up with my own stories as coming up with ideas for how to fix other people's stories.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Thirteen, Part One):Anne Kustritz and Derek Johnson

Biographies in Brief AK: I've recently completed my PhD in the American Culture program of the University of Michigan. Combining ten years of cybermediated and embodied ethnography with a variety of cultural studies theory, my dissertation discusses micro and macro socio-political and identitarian implications of slash fan fiction's construction of a multiple narrative space which sustains the co-presence of numerous possible "good lives." This work builds on articles in the Journal of American Culture, also on slash fan fiction, and Refractory, on queer subtext and citizenship in Smallville. I'm particularly interested in the representational politics of sex in professional and fan produced works, as well as relationships between modern storytelling, public culture, and social systems.

As a fan I've always been firmly grounded in the arts and letters crowd, comprised primarily of fan fiction, vidding, and meta-commentary, to the point that I consider myself a fan of fan authors and artists moreso than a fan of any given professionally published source. Although my academic work specializes in slash and queer readings, I also have a forthcoming piece on heterosexual fan fiction in Harry Potter fandom and participate broadly in numerous fandoms and literary aesthetics. While I discuss my fan activities in my dissertation, I maintain separate on-line personas for my academic and fannish pursuits; in this series of discussions most of my limited participation has taken place on Livejournal in my personal/fan persona.

DJ: As a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my dissertation combines formal analyses, political economy, fan studies, and media historiography to explore the organization of intellectual properties across platforms and over time as media franchises. What I'm most interested in is how the logic of franchising came to be used by industries and by audiences to organize media production and consumption, and how that use shaped cultural forms and practices. As a scholar, I don't necessarily place myself within fan studies proper; I certainly draw from and contribute to its discussions, but since the research questions I explore don't always pertain to fans, I see myself as operating in other fields as well. This has certainly been a gradual development in my work--when I first began grad school I was much more interested in the study of fans for their own sake--but now I tend to ask questions about fans insofar as they are related to industries and texts, not as objects of study or a field in their own right (I'm not saying they can't be or shouldn't be; I'm just explaining my orientation towards fans in trying to understand the media franchise).

My status as a fan is also much more reflective of the experiences of Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson--a fan by some people's definition, but not by others. My tastes and affection for properties like Battlestar Galactica, X-Men, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc grant me fan/geek status in the eyes of some, but according to some definitions of fandom centered on community and creative production circulating in this discussion, I would not so much count as a fan. Aside from one major exception (I co-founded a Star Trek mod for Starcraft back in the late 90s), I don't participate in organized fandom. Some might say that if I'm a fan, my lack of socialization makes me a "feral" fan--though I don't like the patronizing implication that I'm somehow in need of civilization by fan community.

Defining Fandom

DJ: That said, I'm not sure I have a better definition of fan practice available to clear up the confusion of my fan/not-fan status. This point, of course, has come up several times before in this ongoing discussion series, but it's one that I think deserves revisiting. I'm neither satisfied by the idea that fandom has to involve community and creativity (which contradicts my identification as a fan) nor the idea that fandom can be placed within a natural continuum of engagements with media texts ranging from casual to avid consumption (ignoring the forces that shape what "causal" and "avid" mean) nor the idea everyone is in some way a fan (denying the social meanings articulated to the difference of being a "fan").

Ultimately, my problem with our varying attempts to define fandom is an historical one. While I've been skeptical of the idea of fandom as an oppressed minority with a social alterity on the same level as the racially, gendered, or sexually de-privileged, an analogy to race seems rather useful here: whiteness has always existed, but at different points in time it has been defined in varying ways. Fandom, similarly, is a historically-contingent category. Fifteen years ago, for example, a look at the shelves in my living room would have at least strongly implied my status as a fan--who else but a fanatic would have an entire television series collected on video? Today, however, my practices as a media consumer probably don't come off as bizarre and different. The growth of the television-on-DVD market, for example, has increasingly made a place for episode collections on the shelf of the average consumer who may just find it more economical or convenient to have them at their fingertips. While I don't mean to suggest a technological determinism, I think it takes a little more nowadays for someone's consumption practices to raise eyebrows--is slash fiction even as "out there" as it used to be?

In the end, the best definition that I can provide of fandom is that set of tastes and engagements with culture that is at any one point in time articulated to and pathologized as extreme or excessive consumption. Again, though I hesitate to grant fandom the status of oppressed minority (how often are fans the victims of violent hate crimes?), there remains in fandom at least the suggestion of social non-normativity or extremity. In lieu of defining fandom according to a certain set of practices, I'm suggesting that we look at the way fandom has been variably defined by social discourse in different historical moments and cultural contexts.

So in my teaching I've recently introduced ideas about interpretation, discussion, community formation and audience activism, and the production of new texts in response to popular culture before making even the smallest use of the term "fan." That way, my students are introduced to a range of possible engagements with the media, and we can interrogate the ways in which some of those practices are labeled as different or abnormal through the fan category. This helps the students to stop and think about what fandom is--rather than just assume we're wasting a day talking about weirdos--because it points out to them the ways in which their own tastes and practices could just as easily be categorized as "out there", depending on where that line is drawn.

AK: After the latest in an endless series of sensationalistic articles about so-called "slash porn," yes, I'd say that slash is still pretty "out there." However, I do take your point that definitions of fans must take historical and cultural context into account.

Yet my concern with the way academics define fans has less to do with separating fans from a "mundane" audience and more with the implied identitarian, behavioral, and psychological coherency that the term suggests. This discussion series has nicely highlighted a range of topics within fan studies, which I think implies a certain imperative to ensure that when one speaks of "fans" that the argument which follows could robustly apply to the full range of people and practices that the term purports to represent. Repeatedly I've found myself reading works in the academic and journalistic press only to realize that when the author explains that fans do, say, buy, or consume in one or another way, he or she simply isn't talking about "my fans" at all

I think that your definition of fandom as extreme or excessive consumption offers an analytic lens for thinking about how society constructs and regulates (classed) taste cultures, but doesn't offer a useful rubric for articulating individuals' self-identification, normative fan practices, or those beyond the language of media or consumption. Rather, instead of attempting to enclose a master-category within which all fan activities fall, I'm more interested in clearly differentiating and limiting individual studies without allowing any one level of analysis to dominate the whole (for example, your definition would be much closer to my concept of "media fandom" than of "fans" writ large). While it makes sense to talk about the way that society constructs a notion of "the fan" as an out-group, I think it makes considerably less sense to study "fans" at a general level as, apart from a shared negotiation with shared cultural intuitions like the fan stereotype, individual micro-level studies of particular fan communities or practices often bear little relevance to each other and generalize poorly (i.e. knowing how fans in a crowded concert act doesn't necessarily offer much insight into the way that on-line creative groups or individual collectors function).

I'm suggesting that while determining how dominant discourses define "fans" is possible within a given space and time, the sociological definition of "fans" is unanswerable in the abstract because there exist a multiplicity of localized answers whose specifics vary immensely. Even studying only slash fan fiction, I struggled to represent dialectics between the fluctuating denotation of the term slash and the enormously variable experiences, passions, and identifications at play for each individual involved.

DJ: We both agree, then, that the scholarly enterprise of studying fans should strive for contextualization and multiplicity, rather some unifying theory of fandom. We have to account not only for the way in which ideas, ideologies, and values attached to the idea of fandom change historically, but also the multiplicity of practices and identifications contained within that single, over-determined category. I really like that you've responded to my call for greater contextualization with a call for even more, because I too, when reading academic works that engage with the idea of fandom, often feel that the subjects being discussed are not "my fans" either. Recognizing the differences between fans is often difficult because the term "fan" so frequently denotes difference already (from the "mundane" audience, as you put it). Fans are so distinguished from general audiences (and increasingly, from non-fans and anti-fans) that it becomes easy to forget the diversity of practices contained within fandom. So I'd like to see the field of fan studies expand a bit to engage more with the kinds of fan practices we don't hear about as much.

However, while I agree that my discursive definition of fandom is limited (indeed, still generalizing about a wide range of phenomena), I'm not sure that the social construction of fandom as a category isn't still somewhat useful in trying to understand individuals' practices and identifications as fans, since those processes don't occur outside of social discourse. Identifying and calling one's self a fan constitutes a negotiation of that cultural category. The category may be a social construct, but it does have real impact.

Your arguments about recognizing different kinds of fans and fan practices raises another important point in this regard: while fans tend to be socially marked as extreme and outside the norm, the significance attached to that difference can vary depending on exactly all the assorted types of fans you bring up. Some of my colleagues, for example, are huge indie rock fans, and claim solidarity with me and my television/video game/comic book fandom. They see parallels in the sense that people overhearing us talk about our different interests on the street might similarly raise eyebrows, but to me, our non-normative practices and taste cultures have very different social and cultural meanings. We're all outliers relative to social norms, but knowledge of music will grant them access to a different set of cultural capital than my understanding of the differences between a Mark II Viper and a Mark VII. And if I were to build models of the Mark VII, that would be an even different story!

AK: I didn't intend to imply that talking about normative constructions of "fans" as a social category lacks relevance, rather that negotiation with that term will happen at a personal rather than a macro level, and for me the process of negotiation, and thus the field, includes rejection by people who wouldn't self-identify as fans or be interpolated by the social category - people for whom we culturally reserve other names, like "connoisseur," aficionado," or indeed "scholar," seem to me equally relevant to fan studies as an academic unit as do more socially recognizable media fans.

Part of my interest, which I haven't yet explored in my scholarship, lies in thinking about incredibly normative patterns of behavior as fannish, and thinking of normative fan behaviors, and indeed part of convergence seems to involve normalizing and mainstreaming fan activities. However, in addition to a notion of "excess," I think fan studies offers a way into working through devotion and identity construction (particularly in relation to narratives) themselves. At the heart of fan studies are eternal human questions: Why do we love things? How do we define ourselves and find a place for ourselves within the on-going story of human imagination and society? I recognize that at a certain point opening "fan studies" to broader and broader topics of inquiry threatens to dilute the label beyond recognition, but using fan studies to think across eras, subjects, and disciplines offers considerable promise for interdisciplinary scholarship and a robust place for fan studies within the academy.

Fans and Public Sphere Theory

AK: Both of us, perhaps uniquely, seek to utilize public sphere theory in analyzing fan communities and practices. However, we do so from rather different perspectives and to different ends.

My interest in the public sphere builds largely upon feminist and queer critiques of Habermas by theorists like Nancy Fraser, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner. In my work I'm interested as much in the ways that the law and other institutions define "publicness" as I am in considering how people come to act as "a public." As I'm particularly invested in understanding representations of sex, Berlant and Warner's work on sex in public has been useful as a starting point for thinking about the process by which individual body parts, bodily acts, and desires may each become public through a number of different strategies, and through contact with a number of different institutions. Overall, I'm interested in how identities, thoughts, and concepts become publicly intelligible, knowable, and imaginable.

With regard to fan communities, my article on Smallville deals with the creation of a counterpublic based upon shared, subtextual interpretive lenses. In a prelude to my current work, the article dealt with writers' and producers' official attempts to structure fan investment into a kind of glorified, normative homophobia, while fans who invest instead in queer readings have the opportunity to construct a shared, counter-cultural identity.

My dissertation examines slash fan fiction communities as a spatial practice which secures a territory in which people may enact unpredictable encounters with the otherwise publicly unknowable and unspeakable. The publicness of slash fan fiction communities serves as a key consideration in my understanding of the socio-political implications of their ability to speak sex, bodies, and unique conjunctions between inter-personal investments and citizenship.

DJ: Like you, I'd consider myself as someone who launches from a rejection of Habermas--particularly, his insistence on publicity and public discourse existing in the realm of the rational and non-affective. Instead of endorsing Habermas' claims that commercial culture brought an end to the public sphere, I'm interested in the ways that media culture may have introduced competing models of publicness. I'd say my theoretical touchstones come much more from the work of people like Joke Hermes, who directly challenge Habermasian notions about what should count as political. I'm particularly inspired by Hermes' model of cultural citizenship, wherein our roles as citizens with rational political and economic interests are tied to our cultural lives as media spectators structured by the more irrational pull of affect. In addition to considering politics by mediated, affective means, I take to heart Couldry's recognition of the validity of "outs," wherein people disengage from politics because its processes do not serve them. Thus, I don't want to reduce media consumption to publicness and politics when it may often be an alternative to those social forces.

While I reject Habermas' conclusions, I think you'd be right to say I haven't given up all of his concerns. What really interests me with fandom in regards to the public sphere is the idea of debate and institutional oversight over the (political) realms in which fans have affective, pleasurable interest. So one thing I've explored is the way in which fans of a television program like 24, for example, develop interests as cultural citizens not just in real life national policy, but also post-national interests in the production of the series and in the alternate reality of the world being constructed by the series. Fans act as cultural citizens in the real world, the industrial sphere, and the fictional world. In consuming the series, fans critique the power exerted by real-life American institutions at the same time that they debate the institutional authority of both the producers who bring them the show and of story world characters and institutions like Jack Bauer and CTU. Should America torture terrorists? Should the producers ameliorate their representations of Muslim Americans? Is David Palmer weak on national security? Fans debate all these points, acting as publics in surveillance of institutional authority along a multiplicity of oscillating but interrelated cultural realms in which they are passionately interested. Again, very Habermasian concerns, but I pursue them in an arena of playful consumer culture (to the point of taking up citizenship concerns in a fictional narrative world) that stands in opposition to Habermasian ideals of public rationality (but perhaps not entirely incompatible with his more forgotten notion of the literary public sphere).

AK: I'd be interested to know how you conceptualize some media consumption as a way to opt out of politics. Although I'm dedicated to using public sphere theory to talk about fan communities, it strikes me that reifying artificial separations between politics and the everyday or privileging "formal" politics may be a potential danger of such analyses. While I realize that many academics place Foucault and Habermas in opposition, I employ them in tandem, so that I'm just as interested in repressive and ideological or micro and macro forms of politics (perhaps we emphasize different ends of this continuum). Therefore, I don't recognize any ability to "opt out" of politics, merely ways of moving between different forms or styles of politics. Warner and the feminist movement exemplify this strain of public sphere theory by enacting rival forms of publicness, and attempting to theorize the politics of privacy.

Within the fan communities I've studied I found that although some enthusiastically discuss slash as political, many deem "overtly political" fan fiction poor storytelling, or assume that their intention to enjoy fan activities without an overt political motive makes the community apolitical. However, in my work I've repeatedly argued that regardless of individual intentions, politics operate by implication in all human actions and interactions. The decision to believe one has "opted out" is itself a political decision on a "formal" level, whereby the refusal to vote or participate in caucuses or the like allows fewer people to control the political process, but on a cultural level as well as public and private expressions of detachment from "formal politics" affect the way that other people feel and think about political processes. In slash I've discussed the presence of the community in public as political because it offers passersby tools for thinking about sexuality and ways of relating, which may then be applied to both the macro-political realm of lobbying for legal change and the micro-political realm of everyday discussions and self-presentation.

DJ: Articulating media culture like fandom to the public sphere suggests to me the very opposite of a reification of the boundaries between the realms of formal politics and of the everyday. In any of its various forms, fandom is anything but formal politics (and especially not the kind Habermas prescribes). And while I agree that the decision to opt out of formal politics is itself a political one, I wouldn't assume that such a choice always leads to or constitutes an ongoing practice of alternative politics and/or publicness. Does disengagement with one style of politics and one type of public automatically compel engagement with another? I don't dispute your claim that all human activities and interactions are shaped by the political, but I'm not willing to assume that media fandom is an activity that is always publicly political. The choice to opt out can be a choice to explore politics by other everyday means via engagement with an alternative public, but it can also be an exit from participation in any kind of public (formal or otherwise). I could opt out of politics and choose to self-present and discuss other concerns in a fan public, but I could also choose to opt out and spend all my time watching TV alone without participation in a public. While I want to recognize the isolated modes of fandom generally ignored by fan studies, I don't believe the political dimensions of that solitude are the same as in more collectively public forms where fans actually interact. The difference between public engagement and disengagement, for me, is a difference between political practice and practices shaped by politics.

So while I myself do tend to act as a more isolated fan, what excites me about studying fans in more public forms is the potential for direct--but definitely not formal--political engagement. The potential for alternative public politics in fandom is so great, I think, because of the immense interest that fans hold within particular cultural objects. This is interest not just in the sense of curiosity and excitement, but more importantly in the political-economic sense of investment and ownership. This claim that fans can have over a particular cultural arena--a claim that can be contested by institutional authorities or other competing fan interests--can make it a site of overt political struggle between different factions and interest groups. Perhaps this concern for struggle over and between public interests in some fan interactions is closer in character to formal politics than the more diffused, dispersed, ubiquitous human politics you speak of, but the stakes of the debate are often well outside the bounds of what formal politics would find relevant or permissible. So I'm fascinated by the way in which issues of affect, fantasy, and play can become sites of direct political contention within fan publics in ways they cannot in formal politics.

The Getting of Wisdom or Orientation MIT Style

Sorry that the blog is getting very little of my attention this week. Yesterday is one of a small handful of days I have missed posting since I launched this blog sixteen months ago. But I have been very much in the business of orienting new students this week. This process takes over my life both at home (I am a housemaster in Senior House, an MIT dorm where we have no frosh and their parents arriving this week) and at the office (I am co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program). On the home front, Senior House welcomes new students by dropping thousands of bouncy balls from the roof of our building while "Go Ask Alice" blares from the sound system and strobe lights flash in their faces. It can be a vaguely out of body experience but it captures the unexpected quality of life in this dorm. I put a fair amount of time this weekend getting to know some of the new students and more importantly trying to calm down their anxious parents. One of the neighboring dorm has a pair of cutting shears at their front desk where students check in with the note, "use these to cut the cord." I know how painful it was for us to drive away and leave our son in a strange city for the first time, so I have great sympathy for such parents, but we also stress in our dorm that we as housemasters are not a second set of parents, that students are responsible for making their own decisions, and that most of the policies in the house originate from the community of student residents and are not imposed top down by administrators. One of our primary jobs is to try to insure that students have the space to make their own decisions, including make their own mistakes, within what has historically been a highly libertarian dorm culture.

Today, the new CMS graduate students arrive for a two day orientation process, designed to introduce them to both the academic and research side of the program. Today's focus is on the academic side. Each of our students is asked to use a medium or media of their choice to prepare a brief introduction of themselves to their fellow classmates. We very much want their first experience in the program to be one which bridges between theory and practices and encourages them to reflect on both the nature of identity (how to express who they are to someone who doesn't know them) and the nature of medium (how to creatively deploy the affordances of media to express some aspect of themselves). Students come with a wide array of different skills and experiences with media. Past presentations have included comic books, story boards, animated films, remix videos, chalk talks, costumed performances, power point presentations, sound mashups, and everything in between.

Another highlight of today's events will be our book discussion. Each year, we choose a recent book in the field of media studies (or a sampler of recent articles) which we ask all of the students to read over the summer. The books are selected because they embody key themes or topics which shape our instructional and research efforts for the coming year. The books become a shared reference point for our community -- in the weeks leading up to the student's arrival and in the weeks that follow.

This year, we selected Charles R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media. If you read my work earlier this summer on retrofuturism and Dean Motter, you will know that I have already found this book to be a useful intellectual resource myself. As a program which deals so often in the space of New Media, we felt this book set the right tone for our students. The new focus on Residual Media gives us a more layered and dynamic picture of the process of media change, helping us to focus on the ways that the emergence of new media impacts the entire ecology of existing media technologies and practices. When one medium becomes new, it typically means that another medium becomes... well, old. The writers in this collection draw on a range of different theoretical models for thinking about the concept of residual media and for offering models for understanding the process of media in transition (including McLuhan, Williams, Innis, Benjamin, and others). We like the broadly comparative approach the contributors take -- many of them discussing the range of media in place at a particular historical juncture -- as well as the mix of very different media discussed across the different contributions. The Comparative Media Studies emphasizes an approach which thinks across media, across historical periods, across disciplines, and across national borders, and we see Acland and his contributors to be very much exploring this same space.

In case you are interested, previous year's books have included Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation: Understanding New Media, Hamid Nafficy's Home, Exile, Homeland, Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins's Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, Marie-Laurie Ryan's Narrative Across Media:The Languages of Storytelling, and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Each of these books makes a valuable contribution to the development of comparative perspectives in media studies. Taken as a whole, this list would represent a pretty good starter set of readings in our field.

Tomorrow, we will take our students on a tour of the various CMS research initiatives, before settling down for extended meetings within the research teams.

Orientation isn't all hard work, though: our students will also enjoy a retro evening at a local 50s themed bowling ally tonight and tomorrow we are getting a tour of Boston's newly finished Institute for Contemporary Art. I have to race off now to actually attend these sessions but I hope you've enjoyed this window into our orientation process. (It's the only thing I have on my mind this week in any case so I couldn't think of anything else to write about).

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part Two): Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills

And Matt's Half-dozen Questions: 1. To what extent are other cultural differences as significant as gender when thinking about the forces that act on fandom and fan studies? Should we be debating class identities and fandom here, for example?

CD: It seems clear to me that the significance of gender as a factor in fan experiences, fan identities, fan practices and fan communities depends a great deal on what we're discussing. For example, gender is crucial to a HPslash fan's experiences, identities, practices and communities in a way that's not necessarily true for a YouTube/MySpace-member who's a fan of The Decemberists. I'm not saying gender is ever irrelevant or even unimportant, but there are clearly degrees of importance. Or intensities, if you like. I think when we talk about "fandom" without acknowledging those differences we do it a disservice. Moreover, identity categories are far from the only factors that affect fandom. Taste, education and various types of literacy, for example, might be more important terms for thinking about what intensities matter to being part of some fandoms or fan communities than gender or class (and no I don't think taste, education and literacy can be reduced to class any more than to gender).

So I'm for being careful about what sort of fan practice we're talking about before we set up gender as the/a prime structuring principle. But even when gender is obviously crucial I still worry about being too structuralist about it. Let's say I belong to a particular HPslash-centric fan subcommunity - what and how gender matters to me, to what I produce, to that subcommunity, to its place in that fandom and relation to other fandoms is still a slippery and changeable thing. Gender will always be important, but not always in the same way, even just for me. Moreover, gender won't be important as something produced in "the world" and then responded to by me, my subcommunity, my fandom, but will be something we are helping to produce in not at all homogenous ways. If someone called me to account for exactly why I think gender is such an interesting way to approach fan communities it would be for the shifting slippery ways gender is produced by fan communities - sometimes as the grounds for their existence in the first place but in many other ways too. I could use the word dialectic here, as long as I get to mess with what it means.

When it comes to "fan studies" I think the question of how gender matters is very different and I think it's a serious mistake to confuse the two. Of course gender is a factor in all academic hierarchies, but I don't think the gendering of the academic hierarchy within fan studies is noticeably different than in most other areas of cultural/media studies. There are areas of "fan studies" where being a woman or being invested in gender as a conceptual tool are an advantage, and areas where they are not. I'm inclined to think it matters most as a methodological issue. Just trying to imagine how different my experience would be as a researcher if I presented myself as a man in any fandom I've studied is a little mind-boggling, not because of any enormous difference in how my work would be received - though I don't doubt there would be some difference, most of which would also come down to questions of method - but because of how I would be interacting with those fans. The fandoms I've studied have been dominated by women and intensely aware of and reflective on that dominance, so my being and presenting myself as a woman is a crucial element of how my research proceeds.

I think certain tendencies for women studying fan cultures may be becoming entrenched as primarily of interest to women and primarily about women, but I don't actually think those were shaped by the state of academic life per se but by the way the existing scholarship on fandoms/fans has been circulated. It seems almost a default now that working with fanfiction is to work in a particular type of "women's studies" that has always been perceived as academic work primarily done by women, and always positioned as slightly marginal because overly invested in its own identity politics. It's interesting to see the old debates about "women's studies" being played out in fan studies along lines that aren't all that radically different to how they used to be played out in "literary studies". I think that debate can still be interesting, but if we let the line between that discussion and the one about how gender matters to fans become too blurred then I think we lose the value of both.

MH: I agree that it remains important to think carefully and to an extent separately about the gendering in/of specific fandoms and the gendering in/of 'fan studies', insofar as this exists (since, as you point out, some of the work being done about fandom may often occur within or in relation to different academic subcommunities). And I feel that it would be (is?) a very real problem if certain types of work are becoming identified as primarily about, or primarily of interest to, women. Fanfic, whether it is slash or not, is something that has historically been of interest to those studying types of media fandom. My sense from lecturing and teaching on the subject is that actually, despite some mainstreaming of fan practices, the activity of creating fanfic - and most especially slash - is still viewed as somehow 'odd' or disreputable by both right-leaning and left-leaning students. It remains, in cultural common-sense or the cultural imaginary, something that students typically view with disdain, even those who are active fans in a variety of other ways. And this devaluing of fanfic is partly linked to gender lines - to the disparaging of feminised cultural sites and spaces - but it is also linked to what might be termed reactionary views on intellectual property, and to possibly even more ingrained concepts of 'originality' and 'authenticity' (as well as reactionary views of sexuality in some instances). To assume that any and all of these issues are primarily of interest only to women seems peculiar in the extreme. These are surely feminist-inflected (though not only that) concerns for any version of cultural studies and theory that remains interested in issues of cultural power - and for me, even if this is a 'game of greys' - I really liked your phrase to encapsulate that - then it's still a serious game, and it's still important to try to ascertain the different shades of grey involved.

I also agree that the importance of gender can't just be taken for granted, or assumed in advance, and hence that this remains an empirical question for fandoms and practitioners of fan studies. I guess my question was really trying to put a whole set of other cultural differences on the agenda, because one of my feelings about this debate has been, and still is, that where academic communities are potentially divided by a form of cultural difference (i.e. gender) then that difference can tend to become highly visible. Hence this whole 'boy'/'girl' thing. But at the same time, where other cultural differences may not be as prevalent as lines of division or tension within academia (I'd hazard the guess - and this is purely speculation - that the vast majority of those writing 'fan studies' are broadly "middle-class") then this academic sameness produces analytical silence. Why aren't we all up in arms about issues linked to class? That's really my question. Is it because we live in classless societies? Is it hell. And I'm still reading texts on fandom which mutter about a lack of work on ethnicity and fandom too - why? Relative cultural sameness in the academy producing yet more silence? Probably. Getting worked up about one specific axis of cultural difference - and I am absolutely not denying the importance of thinking about gendered differences - may nevertheless be an indirect and unintended outcome of the cultural identities at stake for those taking part in the debate. May be Henry and others will organise blog debates on 'fandom and class' or 'fandom and ethnicity' next time out, who knows. My sense is that along with the variant intensities (nice word!) of gender, we still need to dwell with equal time, energy, and intellect on other axes of difference and cultural identity.

2. Is the term 'fan' now more or less useful than it once was? Should we be studying specific types of self-identified 'fan communities', or groups of dedicated, passionate media users and consumers who may not even deploy the term 'fan' within their self understandings?

CD: Well I think "fan" still does mean, or at least it should still mean, "groups of dedicated, passionate media users and consumers". I don't know why the internal deployment of the label "fan" needs to be a criteria for understanding someone or some group or some site as "fans" in scholarly terms. If I try to think of reasons for jettisoning it I only come up with ones that reinforce some hierarchy of cultural activities whereby fan is popularly understood as undiscriminating and uninteresting.

There certainly are important distinctions to be made between fans who assemble in only loosely organised ways - occasionally exchanging value judgements over the latest bootlegged The Decemberists audiofile in the background of P2P sharing, for example - and those that participate in much more structured forms of assembly and identify themselves as forming a community. But I see no reason why the term fan isn't useful for the former: why it isn't still a term which identifies a history of relevant scholarship; why it doesn't work analytically to emphasise the significant difference of media use/consumption that is dedicated and passionate.

Clearly at least one of my questions is also trying to get to this issue. I think it does matter when people want to avoid calling such passionate and dedicated users/consumers/communities "fans". I want to know what's at stake in that disavowal for them.

MH: With this question, I was trying to get at the extent to which the cultural life and career of the term 'fan' may be ever more fragmentary at present. And it certainly appears to be a discourse which is structurally absent in some cultural arenas, and used with great variance across others. Plus numbers of scholars seem to have concluded that the term is highly problematic and thus requires careful contextualisation as a 'shifter' or a performative. It does also worry me that the term may be used to reinforce, within analysis, pro-fan cultural hierarchies - i.e. some types of dedicated and socially-organised communities are somehow more 'deserving' of the label "fan", whereas other, more loosely-organised 'consumers' may not be 'proper' fans, or may not be analysed as such. So with that in mind, I agree with you that the term may be useful across many different types of fan experience - and would add that, for me, not all of them would necessarily be communal or even group-oriented.

I also wonder if there is a industry question lurking here as well, given the sense that 'fans' - and not just fan communities - have increasingly become a target market for, say, TV producers, who have been carefully checking the buzz surrounding shows even before their launch, as well as monitoring the interpretations and responses of specific fan groups. 'Fandom' has become a cultural identity that is now self-reflexively engaged with by producers just as much as scholars. And this engagement (I'm tempted to say 'co-option') has also, I think, contributed to specific images and representations of fandom, whether it has been within the Star Trek franchise, or Buffy, or Doctor Who. Types of fandom remain 'good' and 'bad' objects for producers, meaning that specific forms of informational economy (and info-war) are being generated in the spaces between producers - duty-bound to protect the commercial value of 'their' product - and fans who frequently want 'spoilers' and behind-the-scenes information which could actually reduce or threaten (in the short-term) the commercial value of a programme 'brand'.

Fans may be specifically targeted, but they are also at one and the same time conceptualised by some producers as a specific type of threat to wider-scale commercial viability. These power struggles aren't so much about poaching (how the finished article of the show is 'read'), as about the temporality of information flows (who knows what and when about forthcoming series or episodes). So to the degree that media fandom has become something intently monitored by specific producers, it has also, in turn, become increasingly about the intense and almost real-time monitoring of production processes - the uncovering of information, the use of Agents' websites to uncover casting news, or writers' blogs to glean clues, or more generalised rumour-mongering. All of this can be the activity of a type of communal fandom, but it can also be fandom which focuses on sometimes-oppositional textual agency rather than textual poaching: on doing things with 'the text' (finding out about it in advance/speculating/learning minuscule details about its production), rather than reading it oppositionally. In fact, the final text may even be relatively and counter-intuitively unimportant: I've encountered Doctor Who fans who were greatly enthused by watching filming on the streets of Cardiff, and gleaning information about forthcoming episodes, but who then were far less interested in and about 'the text' by the time of its transmission. The fan 'excitement' or engagement surrounded the production process, and a sense of getting unusual access to the 'media world' (c.f. Nick Couldry's work in this area). So these might be other ways in which fandom is fragmenting and conceptually multiplying or moving in interesting directions which we can't always anticipate merely by thinking about community per se or somehow less-dedicated consumers.

Perhaps the crucial thing emerging here, for me, is that if the term 'fan' is still useful, it is now often useful in relation to a wider or longer-scale temporality of media production than previously. 'Fans' don't just arrive after a text/product is commercially 'out there'; they can pre-date, in a variety of complex ways, the official 'existence' of a text, and can inhabit a range of critical-oppositional and anticipatory-unfolding temporalities of 'fandom', even to the extent of not seeming to behave "like a fan" upon actual or eventual broadcast. Tulloch and Alvarado wrote about one of my beloved programmes as an "unfolding text" back in 1983 - "unfolding fandoms", with different hermeneutic and temporal horizons, now seem to have caught up with those sorts of production processes.

3. Why am I currently writing about Russell T Davies in a book about Doctor Who? Should I not be exploring a wider range of fandoms rather than writing as a scholar-fan who combines these hybrid identities, but only in line with specific taste cultures and gendered fan histories?

CD: As a general rule people don't ask specialists in other fields to shake off their taste cultures and gendered histories and field-specific knowledge and move on to, say, the Marquis de Sade rather than Jane Austen or the life cycle of fairy penguins rather than that of emperor penguins.

As long as your work is aware of that cultural and historical placement - and as long as you're not endlessly saying the same thing - then I don't see why changing to other objects where you will necessarily have less knowledge of the field is automatically a good thing. I think feeling compelled to move on to other examples is of a piece with other forms of accepting that fan studies are not valuable precisely because they give too much attention to things that lack some perceived innate value.

In fan studies, on the side of the supposed object and on the side of the tools and interlocutors we choose, we're just as subject to fashion as every other scholarly area of inquiry. It's fair to say that media and cultural studies--especially when it deals with popular culture--is perhaps more subject to fashion than other fields because fashion is part of its field. So there's also a certain need, I think, for there to be people in fan studies willing to take on longer projects, slower projects, and recurring projects.

MH: Yes, here lies the problem and the possibility of fashion-led scholarship. Just as temporalities of fandom may have shifted partly as a result of new media developments, so too have the temporalities of academia, certainly in my 'home' territory of the UK, shifted in response to practices of governmentality. Above all, the Research Assessment Exercise has led to a requirement to publish in a timely manner, but I'd say that academic publishers are also much more market-savvy than previously, and are happier to publish on 'hit' shows and 'buzzy' texts of the moments when they can see a fashion-led market, and a quick publishing hit which may not then be sustained. What is the life cycle of the typical academic book now, for example?

So the benefits of 'slow academia', like 'slow food', may need extolling. The US system seems to allow for this once tenure has been achieved, though the cost and pressure for younger scholars seems to almost entirely offset the gains that can be made once tenure has been acquired. And along with 'slow' academia would come, of course, not just "recurring" projects but more longitudinal projects on media fandom/communities/texts and so on.

My own current work on Doctor Who is partly a product of all these sorts of institutional and publishing forces and contexts. I may have lived all my life as a fan of the series, but I'm still required to actually, physically write the book in a space of eighteen months or so, so it can't really be 'slow academia'. And I've read of Russell T. Davies being described as the new 'poster-boy' for fan studies, so I'm certainly writing in a 'fashionable' area - a slightly strange experience for a Doctor Who scholar-fan, it has to be said! All of these things do bother me. Not that I lie awake at night often, but I do ponder (with a disorienting element of distaste stemming from my cult fan habitus, I suspect) the strangeness of being/becoming part of a TV SF academic 'bandwagon to the stars'.

And I do feel that by being part of this 'fashion' I may be contributing to the canonisation of some texts and some producers over others, hence failing to be more adequately inclusive. It's not the case that I therefore won't write about my own fan objects at all, but instead, I would very much argue for the value of moving on to other objects as well where I would have less investment. I don't see this as being an acceptance "that fan studies are not valuable" per se - merely that my studying one object over and above others, because it happens to be fashionable and to fit with my white-middle-class-Southern-England cultural identity, may be part of a problem. Or that this may be limited and limiting for fan studies, at the very least, if such work participates in a wider pattern of canon-formation. So I think we're probably in disagreement on the specifics of this, but hopefully you can see from this answer (and from my earlier answers to your questions) what I'm getting at here.

4. Do I actually think of myself as a 'fanboy'? If not, is my lack of attention to my gender part of a problem in fandom and/or fan studies?

CD: I'm not a fangirl. Calling myself a "fangirl" isn't just paying attention to gender it's a certain quite specific identity claim. It means different things in different contexts but in the areas of fan studies where I work to call yourself a fangirl is to identify a particular fan identity linked to quite particular practices. I don't do enough of the fangirl things in any fan community to lay claim to the term. So, not thinking of yourself as a fanboy is not the same as not paying attention to gender. In fact, calling people who work in fan studies fanboys/girls strikes me as insensitively claiming a kind of subcultural credibility that's not in the term and should have been long left behind by the scholarly practices of fan studies.

However, let's say you don't pay attention to the way gender impacts on your status as a fan. Well, while gender isn't the only thing to talk about in relation to fans and fandoms etc I would think that never thinking about it would be a shortcoming, simply because you will never have paid attention to one of the key elements of one's cultural life that might impact on the kinds of practices, identities etc you choose, prefer or do not specialise in. So I think in every cultural studies project one has to raise the question of how and where and in what ways gender matters - it's just that the answer to that does not always bring gender to the foreground of any project.

As I understand it, part of the inspiration for this series was the opinion of some women scholars in fan studies that the "does gender matter" question was not being asked carefully enough by the most visible figures in the field of fan studies and, in general, by many men working in the area of fan studies. I'm prepared to offer a qualified maybe on that, but that doesn't mean that I think it would be productive to incorporate a "gender" subheading in every project or publication.

MH: I agree that any such mechanistic approach would hardly be helpful. By asking this question, I was trying to suggest that gender, as it is experienced and discursively re-circulated, can be a fairly fluid and complex matter. So even if I do not claim the identity of a 'fanboy' (which in any case feels as if it is slightly more a part of US-centric media fandom discourses than my experiences of UK fandom, but don't hold me to that!) my fan practices may still be highly gendered in certain ways, as well as being articulated with my sexuality and so on. Not thinking of myself as a 'fanboy' may be less a dematerialisation of gender, and more a way of engaging with specific discourses of gender. As a geeky male scholar who has more than his share of obsessive tendencies (they're vocational, honest), I can hardly claim to adequately align myself with hegemonic masculinity. But at the same time, I do feel at some distance from the discourses of the 'fanboy'; this is a partial resistance to what has historically been a relatively feminised stereotype of non-hegemonic masculinity. Between the non-existent stereotype and the unattainable hegemony lies all that shiftiness of a problematic engagement with ideologically-loaded gender identities. And even while I am intellectually aware of the issues surrounding hegemonic masculinity, there's still a fraction of me that wishes I could attain its impossibilities. But then perhaps that's the most perniciously hegemonic part of gendered identities: that they always seem to be about aspiration, and about striving to be something unhelpfully other.

Not identifying as gendered in particular ways is a way of doing gender. But surely it is not necessarily a 'reactionary' way, though it may be. Or, again, it may be part of a 'game of greys' of the kind that I characteristically seem to want to see everywhere. So I'd be in favour of more self-reflexive analysis of gender in fan studies which is also counterfactual analysis, i.e. that we should seek to ponder the ways in which we don't 'do' gender, and the ways in which we perhaps seek to disavow certain gender identities in relation to our fandoms and our scholarly selves, in order to better illuminate gendered practices. For instance, it seems striking to me that there is a marked cultural identity for the 'fanboy' - i.e. there is something transgressive or at least culturally visible about this as a mode of not-quite-hegemonic but perhaps recuperative 'knowing' masculinity - yet there is not quite a comparable 'scholarboy'. Given that historically and culturally images of 'the academic' have been gendered as masculine, why are there not discourses of scholarboys and scholargirls as there are fanboys and fangirls? Because gender has been interrogated more routinely or successfully within fandom than within academia? Or because 'fanboy' and 'fangirl' are infantilising discourses linked to popular culture, and academia's gendered terms are far less boyish and girlish?

Above all, would I be a 'scholarboy' if such a cultural category existed? Or would I be a 'fanman' instead of a 'fanboy'? Language can very quickly be made counterfactually and neologistically strange, of course, but in these strangenesses I think we can see our own cultural 'reality' for the specific construction that it is.

5. What's the most exciting work I've read recently in 'fan studies', and why?

CD: Actually the best piece of fan studies I've read lately was a meta post by LJ user "executrix". Of course, like all such posts what was great about it was not her post in itself but her post plus the communal conversation it spawned. However, as I'm sure you mean scholarly publishing, I'm far less clear about that. I tend to approach scholarly publishing in fan studies alert to things I don't agree with as much as things I do, so I can't think of the last time since NASA/Trek I put down a piece of fan studies and thought, "Wow, that was exciting". That isn't because Penley's stuff is just better than everyone else but because it was the first piece of "fan studies" I ever read.

Now, when I'm excited about fan studies in that scholarly sense it's usually because I read something not fan studies and come away thinking about its usefulness for fan studies - one from last year would be Chris Hilliard's book To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. I left that book thinking that democracy, literacy and community bound together made a fascinating framework for thinking about some of the historical specificity of fandom as a big concept covering a whole lot fields.

I could talk about what I think is still most influential in fan studies, and for good reason, but in the spirit of "recently" I'll try something else. I can see by your replies to my questions that you're very keen on Alan McKee's piece in NYU's Fandom volume from this year, so let me respond by choosing the piece that I found most interesting in that text and I hope that will do as an answer to this question. I was really interested in Derek Johnson's piece on "Fan-tagonism" because it was a step away from the continuing emphasis on consensus in fan studies of fan communities/spaces. While it's still framing fans in terms of producer-consumer relationships I was convinced that that frame was necessary to do the work it was doing and I appreciated careful attention both to a particular fandom with a particular history that's internally crucial. The fandoms I've worked in are defined by spaces for assembly, by webs of voices and interest, and by internal discourses on the fandom or fan community itself as much as on the canon of the source text. Entering Buffy fandom means entering the history of Buffy fans, which is no more consensual or utopic than any other.

MH: I love your answer, because it brings home to me very precisely and very acutely that I did mean scholarly publishing. I'm aware of meta - somebody once forwarded me a meta discussion of Fan Cultures, which was far more insightfully engaged with it as a text than some published academic work I've read. There did seem to be some anti-academic sentiments expressed too, mind you - along the lines of "why do academics use twenty words when they could use two" - which didn't entirely fill me with unalloyed hope and joy, but such is life.

I also have a PhD student at the moment who's very interested in writing about meta, so no doubt I shall learn more about it through that creative process. But despite having read some very good challenges to the academic/non-academic division from a range of writers, I must confess that I tend to read and cite published academia rather than meta. Nor am I part of any self-consciously meta fan group, though I do participate in some fan communities that discuss academic work, and concepts of fandom, without this being dubbed meta.

I'd actually like to read more meta stuff, but I honestly don't feel as if I have the time. I hardly have enough time to read the academic work that I'd like to, along with the sorts of novels that I'm appreciating these days (I've got the new William Gibson, Spook Country, awaiting my attention, and I'm reading David Peace's stunning noirish crime fiction too at the moment, which puts me faintly in mind of the famous BBC TV serial Our Friends in the North, only with even more police corruption, and additional bleakness).

As for my own answer to my own question (rather than an apology for the question's assumptions) - I wanted to get at the emotions and the passions that run through our scholarship in fan studies as much as through our fandoms. Hence my hope that work in the field may be quite literally "exciting" for both of us. I shall certainly take a look at the Hilliard text you mention, and I agree that sometimes an occasional 'eureka' moment can be had while reading outside fan studies and hence finding something that can shed new light on a specific object of study.

I've read some very energising things 'in' fan studies recently such as book proposals for textbooks explicitly on 'fan studies' and manuscripts dealing with TV, new media and participatory audiences (both by female scholars) - so I have a sense of things in the pipeline from other writers that I'm looking out for (anticipatory academia?). And in terms of published material, I asked Derek Johnson to contribute to an issue of New Review of Film and TV Studies I was co-guest-editing with Glen Creeber, and I was very impressed with what he came up with - a really careful, critical reading of the newfound proximity between producers and fans, and how fandom is still very much disciplined and managed by producers in particular ways. That kind of work is important, I'd say, as it doesn't lose sight of the dimensions of cultural power operating on fandom that were absolutely there and theorised in the work of John Fiske and then in Henry's Textual Poachers. Obviously, there's also Liesbet Van Zoonen's work that I've referred to in answer to one of your questions, and the collection that Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson edited, which I liked a lot because there's a sense in which it is both about media fandom 'now' (i.e. my undergrad and postgrad students can quite closely relate to it), but yet also covers the history and development of media fandom in a way that surprisingly hadn't really been analysed as directly before. And, yes, I always find myself appreciating the work of the likes of Alan McKee and Will Brooker (Will's been doing great work putting what I termed 'cult geography' a while ago properly on the map of fan studies, and Alan's stuff is pretty much always inspiring to me). Also having recently read Fandom, I found Henry's Afterword to be the most provocative of contributions, as it just makes me want to say "yes, but what about the dimensions of cultural power shaping those particular discourses, and non-discourses, of fandom?" Henry's work has a lengthy history of provoking me - the best work of all isn't that about which you can immediately say 'that's right, I agree' or 'that's just plain wrong', but is instead that which stays with you for a long time as you struggle to articulate why it feels incomplete, or why it rubs you up the wrong way, or how and why it's messed up your own favoured theories, or how it's said something you wanted to say but hadn't managed to before. So, in the end, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I tend to appreciate scholarship in fan studies that genuinely provokes me. Abercrombie and Longhurst's Audiences had that effect on me when I first read it, too.

On the whole, collections like Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Fandom (2007) surely indicate a very healthy state of affairs for 'fan studies'. And whether or not I get to be involved in it, I'm looking forward to someone publishing the first book explicitly and specifically on 'Anti-fandom' after Jon Gray's great work in that area.

6. What, for me, is the most exciting thing I've become a 'fan' of recently, and why?

CD: I was stuck on a plane recently with a selection of movies that I'd either seen and not loved or couldn't stand more than fifteen minutes of and I watched an episode of the most recent Doctor Who series. And I really enjoyed it. It echoed with several elements of the Doctor Who series I watched as a child in really interesting ways and I could predict so many ways in which fans must be responding to the new series and see so many interesting questions to ask about it, and about fans of it, in relation to previous series. I can imagine watching the whole series, and I can imagine going back to watch the series (plural) in order, because the history of that seems kind of fascinating.

None of that makes me a fan of it though. Usually, to become a fan of something I have to stumble over it and kind of fall in love. That's true for popular culture, for more generally valued cultural forms, and for intellectual/scholarly work. I think my latest fan crush was probably The Colbert Report, and I'd count that because I've repeatedly tried to convince other people to give it a try. That apostolic mode is definitely one thing that signals being a fan for me. But then I can think of any amount of academic texts or writers that I'm more apostolic about than Stephen Colbert. I can't think of the last time I taught a course which didn't have its getting people past the superficial image of Foucault and seeing why it's really great moment. Also, sometimes my fandom is not at all apostolic - we definitely do different sorts of things with different types of fandom. I'm also an immense fan of The Decemberists right now, but it's all about the music and me - I don't think I've ever tried to convince anyone else to listen but I certainly use it to do music obsession as well as any fifteen-year old bedroom culture cliché.

Fandom is, for me, always a social network. I got to The Colbert Report via The Daily Show, but I got there because I had friends who were huge fans and I was excited to be able to watch it "live" with them while I was living in the States the year The Colbert Report began. And I got to The Decemberists via my son, who got there via some online friends and knew I would love them.

Recently I was teaching a course in which a student said to me that they didn't think "fan" had to have anything to do with a "community" and I think it does. It's just that community doesn't mean only one thing and the relationships between fan and community can be formed in many different ways. I don't go anywhere to be with other fans of The Decemberists, but my circulation of information about work by them is still intensely social and overlaps via things like "Detect Music Now" options with communities which are formed around being a fan. I don't know that one can actually be a lone fan.

When I was thirteen I was an enormous David Bowie fan. I didn't have posters on my wall - I wasn't allowed. I never saw him live - there was never a chance. There were no other Bowie fans in my school. The records were not what made me a fan. It was weekend television and struggling every night to find a radio station in a far away city that might play Bowie. It was social. I was aware of the place of other Bowie fans in my experience of Bowie fandom. The fact that they were out there not only mattered but mediated my experience of it. I think being a "fan" requires not only the mass distribution of culture but also the mass distribution of knowledge of others' consumption. It's not the fact of records that allowed for Adorno's hated Caruso fans, but the fact of records in a network of information about other people's consumption of Caruso.

MH: I know these last few questions of mine have moved away from directly being 'about' gender, but I wanted to try to get access to our fan experiences (whether of fan studies or the media outside scholarly publishing) and then see if gendered issues and debates were thrown up via that entry point.

Your answer here contains yet another beautiful turn of phrase (one for me to add to my 'game of greys') - 'mass distribution of knowledge of others' consumption'. I like that. Yes, more than 'mass media' or the 'culture industry', there's always the matter of what other people are doing with it all, and whether we want to join in.

One of my recent fan objects resonates very strongly with that notion, as I think my initial entry point was a kind of mediation of others' fandom (and not even a mediation that I can validate or corroborate). Basically, I read a piece of journalism - I very much enjoy reading decent cultural journalism, of the 'Sunday broadsheet supplements' variety - which suggested that a specific BBC TV series called simply Bodies had spawned immensely vocal fans, and that audiences who loved this particular show really, really loved it. It wasn't a programme that I had ever watched, nor had it really been a resounding industry success, nor did it belong to a genre that I'd ever had much interest in (medical/hospital drama). Furthermore, its creator and writer, Jed Mercurio, had previously been responsible for a piece of television science fiction largely felt in certain UK fan circles to be one of the worst efforts in recent decades, Invasion: Earth. (My memory of it was that it was pretty ropey, minus one episode which I think was largely told in flashback black-and-white, and which I remember as standing-out).

Despite these misgivings, I resolved to give Bodies a try on DVD, having enjoyed a large number of BBC serials of late such as Funland, Conviction, Sinchronicity and others. My decision to start watching it, and to invest time in it, was based almost solely on this one piece of cultural journalism saying that the series had immensely devoted fans. Not even really properly "mass distribution of knowledge" of others' consumption activities, then, just an inkling of an intrigue thanks to a suggestive newspaper filler-piece.

Bodies scares me. Its near-hypnotic incidental music becomes a rhythmic and repetitive, integral part of its massively uneasy pleasures; its writing is both deeply idealistic and terrifyingly cynical; all its characters seem fully realised and convincing, and Keith Allen will never, ever play a role as perfectly Allen-esque as this one. It does the whole 'life and death stakes' thing that hospital drama tends to do, but without ever flinching and looking away from the darkness that is shown to be at the heart of the UK's National Health System, with its government-led targets and its management statistics, and its patients who are sometimes, for some, the least important part of the whole process.

Bodies is more meaningfully 'political' than most Politics Programmes which feature guest politicians having cosy or ritually-interrogative chats with 'star' presenters just as much a part of the establishment as they are.

Bodies is the most intense piece of television I have watched for years. I felt churned up by watching it. The suspense that it generates is astounding, and really puts a fair bit of TV 'thriller' programming to shame. There aren't ticking clocks or crack military units or explosives or sleeper cells or tough-guy gangsters. There's just couples trying to have children, and people trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Out of this comes black comedy and blacker tragedy. There aren't quite clear heroes and villains - so tick the box for moral grey areas one last time - but more than that, there are some huge dramatic reversals that really make emotional sense rather than being obviously 'plotted'.

Something else I've started to enjoy is Heroes. But my enjoyment of this is intertextually coloured by having watched Bodies. Heroes does feel 'plotted' - terrific twists and cliffhangers arrive bang on schedule, but there seems to be a deep sense of cynicism embedded in its bag of tricks. It feels like a fantasy drama of reassurance, beginning with an iconic 'falling man' apparently plummeting to his death from a tall building, and who believes he is special, and who turns out to be special. This time, this falling man lives.

Despite being self-reflexive about its 'everyone wants to be special' superhero plotlines, Heroes still seemingly manages to offer this narrative pleasure to a potentially regressive extent. And it courts an international TV market by setting part of its narrative strands in Japan and India, while still being US-centred (cheerleaders weren't a major part of my cultural life growing up in the UK). Its thriller components feel contrived and, much as I hate to write it, even faintly juvenile when watched through the half-light of Bodies. May be it's just that I've never been a huge fan of superhero narratives and characters, though I very much enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. But nobody is 'special' in Bodies; people just want to safely get in and out of hospital, and they want their children to be delivered safely. Nobody has special powers; staff simply try to do the work they are trained to do. And one Doctor who endangers patients through apparent incompetence is neither obviously misguided nor villainous; he too is trying to help, and trying to do his job. People die. Routinely. Their deaths are simply part of the performance statistics of the hospital. Nobody can regenerate.

When I thought long and hard about the opening episode of Heroes, I realised that I wanted it to be a drama where characters believed, in infantile terms, that they were 'special', only to be proven wrong. I wanted it to be a drama which didn't reassure its audience, and where superhero powers might not arrive, as expected, for our identificatory figures. Where nobody could guarantee their elevated status or narrative safety. I wanted a thriller that thrilled me by refusing to play by obvious set rules. Perhaps perversely, I actually wanted a version of Heroes where pretty Peter Petrelli died in episode one as a result of plunging to his doom. That would have been dramatic, scary, risk-taking TV. But may be I've got Bodies for that sort of thing. Either that, or I've been reading too much David Peace, and it's seriously disrupted my thought processes.

But still I'm watching Heroes avidly, and piling through the episodes, and I could very well be described as a 'fan', and I've read online fan discussions, and, oh, just the other day I thought idly to myself "may be I'll buy that SFX magazine special so I can read the episode guides and see which are the fan favourites." But I feel as if I'm a culturally-compliant fan, going along for the ride slightly against myself, watching because it's the sort of cultish genre show I "ought" to love, and because I know friends and family and colleagues will be watching. Part of me doesn't want to criticise the show, wants to validate it as a lovely bit of sophisticated pop culture, and yet another part of me really does think that it's deeply ideologically problematic and quite transparently a textual-formal outcome of the political economy of the TV marketplace.

But these tastes, and this wrestling with my own previous patterns of taste and my history as a media fan-consumer, are they gendered? I'm not at all sure that they are, though Bodies is very grisly, bloody stuff, and does perhaps partly appeal to me via my culturally 'masculinised' horror-fan-identity. May be my tastes in TV drama are in transition, away from 'cult' and genre material and towards more conventional 'social realist' and 'quality' tastes? Put like that, the change seems a rather tedious cliché: have I just been busy unwittingly internalising the taste formations of the canon-builders of TV Studies these past few years? I'm not sure, as I would still want to champion many versions and instances of cult TV over more obviously canonical TV, and I'm certainly still in love with Doctor Who. But recent UK efforts at self-conscious 'cult' status such as Cape Wrath (Meadowlands elsewhere, I think) have also left me cold. Weeks and weeks of 'eccentric' drama ending with a nonsensical conclusion, and featuring characters whose 'motivation' was telegraphed so baldly it was as if they'd been auto-generated in 'Screenwriting 101'.

I can think of one TV series I've recently enjoyed which did strike me as forcefully gendered, almost as if it had been designed by (a rather reactionary) gender committee: The Unit. I watched this because of its David Mamet pedigree, having enjoyed many of his plays and films, and counting myself as a Mamet fan, despite his work's sometimes hysterical maschismo. I would not usually bother with a militaristic TV drama, I have to say up front. Like Bodies, I ventured outside my genre comfort zones, this time to follow an acclaimed playwright rather than because I'd read about fan audiences. And though I enjoyed The Unit, especially an occasional episode written and directed by Mamet which became an almost formal exercise in suspense and misdirection, the show as a whole seemed by-the-numbers schizoid, as if purposefully designed to have 'masculine' plotlines with army blokes shooting stuff and blowing stuff up, running alongside 'feminine' storylines in which The Wives back on the military base occupied themselves having affairs or blowing the family's savings on bad investments. And it spent its series one finale ranting about how rubbish the French are, which you just couldn't and wouldn't get away with now in UK TV, but which seemed entirely acceptable in this apparently neo-con drama powered by little else beside gender stereotypes and national pride.

May be I just don't want to love texts like Cape Wrath that have been too obviously designed for me to love them, which would fit with the cultural identity of the wary (and 'masculinised') cult fan. And perhaps I'm also not quite part of the right national market or age-based demographic for Heroes, my ambivalent fandom of which could be less about gender, and a little more about my academic interests in cultural politics. What exactly are the academically 'progressive' and more celebratory readings of Heroes? And I'm certainly not about to uncritically applaud the straight-up gendered binaries of The Unit, which seems to have avoided being reactionary 'blokes' TV by being simultaneously reactionary in its depiction of both tough-guy 'masculine' and stepford-army-wife 'feminine' story strands. If equality means screwing over representations of men and women, then this programme format gets uncannily close to it. Having said all this, thinking about the media texts that I personally love right now, as well as those that I'm ambivalently fannish about, still seems like a useful way into debates over cultural tastes and identities.

There's no real conclusion here, of course. How could there be? But I would like to say how much I've enjoyed thinking and writing about all of this, and responding both to your questions and your elegant formulations. Cheers.

No, I can't imagine a conclusion either. But thank you. I've really enjoyed this and in reading and responding to your answers I've found some interesting new questions and inflections of old ones. Thanks very much to Henry too for setting up this series - it's a very generous use of the speaking position he's worked so hard on.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One): Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills

I think the format of these exchanges calls for us both to introduce ourselves to the blog's readers. So, we are Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, paired up for the purposes of this debate by Henry's magical 'fan studies and gender' discussion-partnering machine. Here's a bit more information about each of us, and how we came to be interested in fan studies: CD: I'm currently Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I first became interested in fan cultures while writing my first book, Girls (Columbia UP, 2002), which discussed scholarly and popular images of girls as fans and fans as girls. Since then I've written essays on fanfiction for Helleksen & Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Jane Glaubman's forthcoming collection on the Harry Potter fandom. While my forthcoming Modernist Cultural Studies (University Press of Florida, 2008) is more interested in the practices and ideas that made fan cultures possible than in fans themselves, Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online - which I'm co-writing with Melissa Gregg at the University of Queensland - uses online fan practices as a key example for thinking about online culture today.

MH: I'm currently a Reader in Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and my first published book was Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002). This was based on my 1999 doctorate from Sussex University, which in turn came about in part because I'd been a fan of various media texts, especially Doctor Who, since the age of about three.

Most things I've done since the PhD have had some relationship to fandom and fan studies, especially my books The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum 2005) and How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold 2005). I'm working on a number of books at present, and the next to be delivered will be Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century (Tauris, 2008).

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So, having set out that very brief bit of context, we've decided to offer 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' by virtue of each of us posing six questions that we wanted to ask of fandom and/or fan studies at this moment in time. These questions were deliberately designed to be as open as possible, and to spark discussion. They don't always refer directly to issues of gender, though they frequently give rise to reflections on that theme. Having each set six questions, we then let the other respond to them before taking the opportunity, in turn, to enter into a dialogue on the thoughts and arguments that had been thrown up. It would be fair to say that each of us has some hesitancy about being fully 'committed' in print, and for all posterity, to what we say here, and each of us wrote this material and responded to it under time pressures. But no doubt these things will have been true for almost all participants in this series, so in the final analysis, we can hardly claim any special indulgences or allowances.

Catherine's Six Questions:

1. What is at stake in the way that fan studies either directly or by default returns to assessing degrees of resistance (or, by inference, conformity)? The words for this may change, such as talking about fan creativity rather than resistance per se, but there continues to be a fan studies investment in laying claim to something that amounts to social value in hierarchical oppositional terms where the opposite of creative/resistant/whatever seems taken for granted. Are we still thinking Culture Industry, or is it something else?

MH: My sense is that this has started to shift a bit, as both my own Fan Cultures and Cornel Sandvoss's Fans have critiqued the 'resistance' paradigm, and of course Abercrombie and Longhurst were doing that long before either of us, in Audiences. And as Henry likes to point out from time to time, he was hardly without ambivalence in relation to what's been termed the 'Incorporation/Resistance Paradigm'. I think that this mode of thinking is very ingrained though, as it has formed a key part of cultural studies' sense of its own distinctive project and identity, the fact that it (and supposedly it alone) was able to read for 'resistance', or assess the cultural politics of primary texts and audiences' responsive, tertiary texts. Christine Scodari, for example, has strongly argued that fan studies should still very much be about this assessment and valorization of specific fan practices, viewing my position in Fan Cultures as an abdication of cultural studies' and fan studies' 'proper' responsibilities, I think. It is as if challenging the IRP is sometimes assumed to mean throwing out the baby, bathwater, and probably the whole bath with them.

But I continue to think that we need to find ways out of the "Culture Industry = Badness; Some 'resistant' fan activities = Goodness" binary. Because it does still seem to occasionally be about finding strangely clear lines of division - what I'd call a 'moral dualism' - as if post-structuralism never ever happened. Alan McKee's work has charted one useful pathway, to my way of thinking, by refusing to treat 'the Culture Industry' as that evil, old monolith, and instead starting from the idea that industry producers can have cultural politics and cultural theories too. And that these aren't just markers of 'academic' cultural distinction and identity versus 'the Industry'.

In any case, changes within 'the Culture Industry' itself, moving in the direction of convergence and digital interactivity, mean that some of our views of 'resistance' really need further updating and revision. Will Brooker wrote about this some time ago in a piece in IJCS reflecting on Dawson's Creek fans, whose online fan activities could sometimes be interpreted as being almost 'programmed', pre-structured or directly facilitated by 'the Industry'. But even if this means that some fan activities blur together 'resistant' and 'conformist' elements, I suppose there's still a reinscription of that binary "proper resistance" versus "co-opted resistance" lurking somewhere. It is such a tough pattern of thought to shift.

May be thinking about 'the Culture Industry' and thinking about fan 'resistance' (or not) shouldn't be so closely articulated. Uncoupling or de-articulating them might open a few more interesting pathways of scholarly thought: do some groups of fans 'resist' some of the normative identities linked to 'what it means to be a fan', for instance, within their own communities? Some fan communities may be de-Politicized, and others may not be, such that 'resistance' might be directed at targets other than 'the Culture Industry'. There may even be forms of fan 'resistance' to the 'textual poaching' of academics - with not all of this resistance to multiple Others being clearly progressive or reactionary. The real problem with articulating 'resistance' and 'Culture Industry' paradigms, for me, is that we end up with not only very one-dimensional and thin depictions of cultural heroes and villains, but also that we end up with equally one-dimensional representations of cultural power, rather than perceiving 'resistance' as happening internally, within both 'the Industry' and 'fan communities', and even 'in' the academy in a variety of ways. I tried to develop this sort of decentred Certeauian and multiple approach in an article for Social Semiotics in 2005, in fact, in a meta-theoretical sort of vein.

CD: Yes it's true that many people have now paid attention to the problems involved in assessing fan activities and identities in terms of resistance, and yet I feel as if resistance has been mostly displaced by less political synonyms for the same opposition. I guess that means that I agree there's something ingrained and thus very hard to shift about such a pattern of thought. Cultural studies does have a longstanding attachment to seeing something other than "the mass" in "the popular". But as it gets taken up in the terrain of fan studies (and cultural studies work on fans is pretty much as old as cultural studies itself) I feel as if "resistance" has remained such an attractive distraction from paying attention to the diversity of what goes on amongst fans that I'm constantly tripping over new forms of it.

Yes, I think the answer is to have something other than an oppositional understanding whereby we just reverse which side of the binary is good and which is bad, but I don't just want to play a game of greys either, where such an opposition is reinforced but there's good and bad to be found on either side. Nor do I want to reinforce that opposition by showing how the (still separated) sides speak to one another. Instead, I would like to pay attention to the ways in which fans don't need to have a project or even a focused antagonism or call to arms in order to do something interesting. In which their relation to cultural forms is not perceived through an opposition between producers and consumers/users. That obviously misrepresents a range of important things, but in order to try and shake off the ingrained response I feel it's a worthwhile experiment.

I like many of your questions here, therefore, it's just that I don't see them being asked very often except as an aside to more expected discussions of resistance. So in my experiment I'd like to do away with any and all talk of resistance or subversion when thinking about fans - just to see what happens. Nina Busse and I once had an exchange about fandom being "not_subversive" that even resulted in a community with that name, but it was mainly a place marker for academic conversation rather than a fan community. Since then I've tried just abandoning the resistance/conformity questions when talking about HP fanfiction communities and was a little surprised to find that fan audiences seem to understand and appreciate that a lot more than academic ones. Some fan communities have an investment in being "subversive", but even when they do they're marking that out as something that differs from most fans. I'm not saying fans are "conformist", or more conformist. I'm saying the question is not at all to the point at this time.

2. Can "fandoms" be thought of as dependent on particular artefacts in the way we usually talk about them? Is it enough to talk of "subcommunities" within a fandom to cover the diversity of attachment and practice? There's not a Harry Potter fandom - there is a web of Harry Potter fan communities, and it's a very distorted web as well - frayed at the edges and tangled up with different "fandoms" entirely. I don't mean there's no common ground at all - there's JKR's "canon" - but it's not consistently important or utilised.

MH: This 'subcommunities' point is vital, I'd say, because it draws attention to the fact that talk of singular fan 'communities' is itself a bit of an academic fiction. There may be fan interpretive communities, but again, we're very much dealing with a multi-dimensional (sub)cultural field cut across by varieties of fan identities and practices. And what counts as 'canon' can even be contested more-or-less strongly in some media fandoms. So what we seem to need is a vocabulary that acknowledges fan 'community' as meaningful, up to a point, but which doesn't foreclose the massive variation in fan practices happening under that sort of banner. Bacon-Smith wrote about fan "circles" in Enterprising Women, of course, with these "circles" sometimes being more-or-less loosely interconnected, and that's one of the values of ethnography - that it can illuminate these processes of (sub)cultural affiliation and dispersion in more adequate detail. And Bacon-Smith's work also illustrates that this isn't an issue tied to the growth of online fandoms - it was already there in the pre-Internet days. Perhaps some of the later work in fan studies has been too quick to use 'community' as a starting point for scholarship without interrogating the limits and blindspots associated with the very concept, or without trying to think it through more rigorously, or even without paying due attention to the specifics of Bacon-Smith's work. I'm still finding and reading new books on fandom which seem to start and end with positive assertions of fan 'community' support, and to be honest it frustrates me more than a little.

Certainly fandoms can be 'tangled' up with and between an intertextual range of objects; fans may follow the different work of certain showrunners, writers, or performers. So to even nominate a fandom as "belonging" to one show or individual can sometimes be problematic. Or fandoms may be co-incident, but of intertextually unrelated artefacts. This was one of the reasons why I tried to carry out a very small-scale autoethnography in Fan Cultures, and I know that some readers have been critical of that (in its execution, I think, rather than in principle). I wanted to try to start teasing out the complexities of how our various fandoms may intersect (or not), and how fandoms could work in concert to realise a cultural identity, or not. For instance, some fandoms may be linked to discourses of gender for the individual fan concerned, whilst others may be disarticulated from gender identity - and this is an empirical question for me, not one we can decide in advance. I've read outstanding autoethnographies written by some of my female students, where they analyse how specific fandoms enable their femininity to be realised in 'resistance' to cultural norms, whilst other fandoms are culturally-conventionally 'feminised', and others seem not to meaningfully intersect with gender discourses, in their cultural experience, perhaps primarily linking to discourses of national identity and Welshness instead. All of which means putting 'resistance' into a more fleshed-out context, as well as reflecting on the subject's 'repertoire' or 'cultural portfolio' of assorted fandoms.

We have a situation, to my way of thinking, where fan studies shows a potential tendency to reify fan 'community' as well as reifying and unhelpfully abstracting singular 'fandoms'. This may be a matter of convenience; question: "what are you studying?" - answer: "oh, Harry Potter fans", but it is still a foundational problem. We need to be much more precise about the parameters of our research sometimes, studying specific forums or fan groups, or normative and non-normative fan identities, or fandoms which intertextually (or historically) emerge out of, or morph into, others. I thought about this a little bit in a piece for American Behavioral Scientist in 2005, where I wrote about "cyclical" fandom - that some fans might sequentially move through different fan 'objects', nevertheless displaying patterns of taste and distinction in their multiple, diachronic fandoms. Just as we could ethnographically (or autoethnographically) analyse various synchronic fandoms, it may also be worthwhile to diachronically analyse peoples' self-reflexive 'projects of fan-self' (to creatively mangle a bit of Giddens). I make another small start on this in my second book The Pleasures of Horror, where rather than thinking about horror fan 'communities' per se, I try to link discourses of fandom to people's biographical senses of self.

All of this makes me think of another of Henry's longstanding complaints -if he doesn't mind me using that word - about the reception of Textual Poachers. Just as the book was reduced to being a totemic representative of the 'IRP' when it was actually more complex, so too was it frequently viewed as being 'about Star Trek fans', when it was actually about fans of intertextual networks of TV shows (what we'd probably now call 'cult TV' fans). So may be this 'reading for singular fan communities' is actually more of a problem in the interpretive reception and promulgation of fan studies than an issue 'in' fan studies itself (though I'm not very keen on the boundary line I seem to be rhetorically creating here). It is a matter of how readers get a handle on the subject - with many academics, who may not be specialists in the subject of media fandom, using the notion of fandom common-sensically to mean 'fans of X'. It's a short-hand, a map of the territory, which occasionally seems in danger of becoming the territory in-and-of itself. It's a tendency which empirical and theoretical approaches to media fandom themselves need to 'resist' (another kind of contextualised 'resistance'), I would argue. We need to insist on the fragmentary nature of fan 'communities', divided by their axes of (sub)cultural power, and on the usefulness of not reifying fandoms as 'singular', instead working to try to see them much more "in the round", as it were.

So I'm completely sympathetic to this question, really. Does it mean that 'fans' are 'not dependent' on particular artefacts? Perhaps. Perhaps media fandom has enough of a cultural history by this point in time, that it would make sense to view some 'fans' less in terms of their objects of fandom, and more so in terms of their fan-cultural competencies, which are the skills of doing 'being a fan', and which can be transferred across texts. Again, it strikes me that the concepts of a longer-term 'fan career' or 'fan socialisation' may be of value (with all the disclaimers and qualifications one would want to bring to those terms). Garry Crawford's work on sports fans has developed an intriguing model that media fan studies could benefit from applying, in my opinion (I make some use of it in my third book, How To Do Things With Cultural Theory). Rather than fandom being 'about' specific fan objects, it could then be viewed as a way of using, or relating to, objects. But that's already there in the literature in fan studies, to a very strong extent, I suppose.

CD: Two sentences in I wanted to interject and say *no, not subcultural*, but I'm glad I had to wait and let you make your point. (I'm pleasantly surprised to find that's a real plus about this format.) I do want to talk about subcommunities, but not as if they are subcultural. I'd love to find some other prefix like nested (but less derivative) or intersecting (but less two dimensional). As it is, subcommunities seems most recognisable for now. I do like the word community, both because it begins with the twin recognitions of shared space and shared interests and because there's a long history of debating what communities are and how they work that I think fan studies still has a lot to learn from. But I entirely agree "fan community" is in no way a synonym for "fandom" and that's its value even if it comes with a lot of baggage.

You're right too about the shortcomings of thinking about fan studies as dealing with specific fandoms rather than fans/fandoms in general, but that's a very slippery set of problems. On the one hand a fandom is not, in fact, a fandom; on the other, erasing the crucial differences between fandoms that give rise to both variation and change in fan practices is not something fan studies can afford. Hence, I think we're stuck with sub- until we find some less misleading term for the network of communities and other modes of assembly that attach to an apparently singular object.

I think your "some fans" that are "cyclical" fans in fact comprises an extremely substantial set of "fans". I can't think of a single field in which fans don't do that in very significant numbers--not even football fans and certainly not academic fans. With media fans I think that's actually the overwhelmingly dominant norm.

3. Why does fan fiction seem to be such a dividing line in fan studies - as if to do "fan studies" with fan fiction means something quite different than to do fan studies that, for example, talk to TV audiences about their investments and interpretations of a show? It does seem to me that some of the conversations on Henry's blog have marked that distinction out and, in turn, gendered it.

MH: I agree that this seems to have become one of the structuring binaries in the debate. I find it slightly strange, to be honest, and I'm not at all convinced that it is as powerfully gendered as some seem to think. Now, it could be fairly said that in my work I've not looked at fanfic. Does that mean that my work is unequivocally gendered as 'masculinist'? Or as not being about 'fan communities' (with all the misgivings I have about the easy use of that term)?

On the contrary, I'd say that the whole notion of doing an autoethnography is strongly indebted to broadly feminist perspectives, while my critique of 'fan community' work has revolved around wanting to analyse fan communities as Bourdieuian hierarchies and overlapping/decentred social structures - it hasn't been based on any straightforward "individual" fan versus "fan community" binary. I certainly do argue that we should theorise 'fans' who wouldn't tend to be part of socially-organised fandom (fan 'communities', as they've been called), but for me this has never been an either/or.

In fact, I saw it very much as a corrective to the prior tendencies of fan studies, which at the point when I wrote Fan Cultures (and did the doctoral work it was based on) were very much not managing to theorise 'lone fans', or fans operating outside of what I would still argue tends to be a more narrow - or specific - strata of fandom where the practice of writing fanfic is a central activity. For me, again, this was not an either/or; it was, in intention, a more inclusive model of fandom - not accepting that the 'real' fans or the 'resistant' fans or the 'creative' fans were necessarily always to be found in more visible, subcultural spaces (though some might be there; yet again, an empirical question). But I never argued that work shouldn't be done on these types of fans - I simply didn't do it myself because many others appeared to be doing it, and doing it very well. There was no need for me to address the same set of concerns and topics in my own work - to duplicate labour, if you like - when instead of that, I could seek to argue for an expansion of the range of empirical and theoretical approaches to media fandom. Expansion and co-existence. Not an either/or!

So, although I've not directly written about fanfic (though I have written some, badly, many years ago now, for a Doctor Who Appreciation Society fanzine), it continues to be something that I teach on, am interested in, and appreciate reading others' work on. It isn't something I feel obliged or compelled to write about, because other fan activities interest me - activities which when I wrote Fan Cultures hardly seemed to exist in the literature, such as fans' use of cult(ural) geography, and practices of fan tourism. I think that to argue (or even to imply) that everyone should be studying 'X' or 'Y' in fan studies is a bit of a problem. It's probably a version of what I termed the 'fallacy of internality' in Fan Cultures - the notion that each individual scholar's work has to 'say everything', whereas it's really more important that scholarship as a whole covers the widest possible range of relevant material, so that we can read Sandvoss on neutrosemy, or Bacon-Smith on fan circles, or Jenkins on convergence, or Driscoll on fanfic; we don't all need to be saying everything (or even, necessarily, defining 'fandom' in the same way; or arguing that fandom is 'really' about community or individuality).

So the argument that there's a gendering of work on fanfic, or that 'lone' fans versus 'community' fans translates into a gendered binary, for me that seems a bit muddled. Henry Jenkins and Will Brooker have done major work on forms of fanfic, along with Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith. My own work is absolutely about fan community, and the uses and limits of that concept, even though I have chosen not to write about fanfic to date - because I wanted to widen the fan debate. But even if that narrative is overly selective, it still strikes me that to perceive these as gendered lines of division may be to take the contingent a little too quickly for a structured/structuring social fact. Numerically-speaking, more female scholars may write about fanfic (though even certain kinds of fanfic have been over-represented in the field), and some (some, not all) fanfic-centred communities may be gendered as feminine. We can take all of that as read, if you like. I can't see that it follows from this that the presence or absence of work on 'community' or 'fanfic' in any scholar's work is solely or determinatively gendered as feminine/masculine. This seems to be a monolithic reading - at best, a kind of structuralist-feminist conclusion, perhaps - which disallows the actual complexities of gender linked to a range of writers' work in fan studies. One problem with structuralist readings of all kinds is surely how they fix meaning in relation to key ideological binaries, then not considering how these binaries may be more-or-less fluid, deconstructed, or even internally incoherent within each of the terms in a binary.

So if I wouldn't want to take a strongly structuralist view of the supposed gendering of fan studies, I think a more post-structuralist view of the same may be useful. There are certainly discourses of masculinity appropriated in and by my academic self (which is only one cultural fraction of my self-identity). What I choose to write about - the fan objects I reflect on - are partly linked to cultural discourses of masculinity (which may not always be "hegemonic" masculinity, but may be in some contexts and in some ways). Writers in fan studies, I feel, almost invariably perform their gender in certain ways whilst ostensibly analysing specific fandoms or aspects of fan activity. But the little poststructuralist voice that speaks to me wants to say, "yes, but that doesn't produce monolithically gendered arguments, does it?" So, I can be interested in fanfic, and I might have written it atrociously, even while I haven't academically analysed it, for reasons that, as a cultural agent, I would argue were not discursively articulated with my performance of gender, but were instead about appropriating academic-communal discourses of 'originality' of topic or argument. (I wouldn't view this as strongly gendered, but I'm well aware this could be debated further).

Taking a poststructuralist stance on gender in/of fan studies, I think it is absolutely important for writers to seek to be self-reflexive, and to carefully consider why they are writing about what they are, and in the way that they are. It was this set of poststructuralist concerns that led me to attempt to write about fandoms I was not a participant in, as I felt that otherwise I was in danger of reproducing, within my academic work, aspects of my pre-academic cultural identity - my gendering, but also my classed identity. I was contributing to a 'canonisation' of certain fan tastes over others, and hence was implicitly helping to silence a range of fan voices rather than working to include a greater range and diversity of fandom within the multiple projects of fan studies.

So, as well as writing more about Doctor Who fans (because again, this wasn't an either/or; a virtue or a vice), I consciously decided to write pieces about Dawson's Creek fans (for the BFI collection Teen TV) and fans of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire (for the OUP book ITV Cultures), as well as then contributing a self-reflexive piece about academics' fan tastes to the 2007 NYU book Fandom. For me, the question isn't whether or not I'm writing about fanfic or 'community' per se; it's a question of which fandoms I'm writing about, and which precise fan activities within those fandoms, and why, and how, and ultimately whether or not that leads to a reproduction of one, narrow view of what it means to be a fan. And some of my work has done that, I would say; some of my work has definitely reproduced gendered norms and tastes within contemporary culture. Not only or necessarily or inevitably in relation to gendered fan-consumer tastes, but also in relation to levels of cultural capital. I just can't see this as something that's structurally a given, or happening behind the backs of the cultural agents who contribute to fan studies; it's something that can be reflected on, addressed, and which can also tend to be far more complex than simply being read off from specific presences/absences in somebody's work.

The question that I've increasingly been asking of my own work is this: does it broaden what we can theorise in relation to 'fandom'? This could mean trying to think about 'cyclical fandom' or multiple fandoms, or the divisions within fan communities, or fandom and autobiographical senses of self, or 'theory fandom' rather than fandom linked only to popular culture, or fandoms which have been under-explored in the literature, or types of fan who have been under-represented, or types of fan activity which have been less frequently investigated. Fan Cultures wanted to resist 'decisionist' narratives of resistant/complicit, good/bad in favour of suspending those moral dualisms. Given that the complete suspension of any and all moral dualisms whatsoever is probably a sense-making impossibility, and that therefore any such call or claim could only ever become self-contradictory (Scodari pointed his out quite neatly in her review of the book), I'd say that an inclusive ethic has become slightly more my concern as time's gone by: to strive to include views, versions, aspects, and empirical activities of fandom that have otherwise been excluded (sometimes by myself) in favour of the discursive and cultural reproductions of academia and its specific tastes/paradigms/schools. And I would also recognise, in line with my earlier work, that this cannot be singularly achieved; hence I would auto-critique some of my own work, and would fully expect others to find it limited in specific ways, or 'disappointing' to the extent that I don't evade the limitations of my own performative cultural identities.

CD: I'm entirely in favour - I'm sure I don't even need to say it by now - with paying attention to the specific fan practices that interest you. And so of course studying Doctor Who doesn't mean studying Doctor Who fan fiction. But I suppose it does leave a couple of questions unanswered.

First, where does one have to make a reference to the breadth of fan practices that make up a fandom? Can one write about Doctor Who without ever considering how significant fan fiction communities have been or are now within that field? At what point and in what way does that limitation on one's fandom "sample" need to be acknowledged? Fan fiction is more important to some fandoms than others, thinking in terms of numbers, in terms of perceived fan culture, and in terms of media visibility. I suspect this problem of acknowledging the limitations of one's slice of fandom is quite easily addressed.

But second, as fan communities often construct hierarchies within which fan fiction (sub)communities are sidelined and denigrated as the most fannish (in the sense of obsessive attachment and derivative deployment) of fans, where does not-doing-fan fiction turn into a similar sort of hierarchy? I ask that question already hearing an answer to it, in a way, because fan fiction is in the present tense so central to some parts of fan studies that it seems weird to picture it as marginal. And yet, when I pick up collections like Fandom I feel there's an obligatory fan fiction inclusion strategy at work, with the generality of fan studies doing something else less... what else if not less marginal?

Overall, no, you don't and no one should have to work on fan fiction, but perhaps it's useful to have this place to step back and ask what place does fan fiction have now in the schema of things published in fan studies. It's both foundational and yet somehow positioned as limited and specialised. For now I'm going to settle for saying that's... interesting.

4. Does it matter if one is invested in the fandom of the fans one studies? It's one of those recurring tropes of fan studies that the writer/critic stakes out their terrain in terms of attachment. This doesn't happen anything like as commonly in, for example, literary studies. Maybe it's obvious that this is about the role of ethnomethodology and ethnography in fan studies, but even where there are no human subjects to be "ethical" towards it seems to happen and so it strikes me as maybe more interesting than it looks. When people who study "fans" want to distance themselves from "fan studies" I think they're also making a statement relevant to this.

MH: I think my previous answer starts to hint at my emerging ambivalence about this question of investment or attachment. When I finished my PhD, and shortly thereafter, I was very much of the view that being a scholar-fan (a fan of what one is studying, or of the type one is studying) was a benefit rather than any kind of hindrance. This was undoubtedly partly the influence of Textual Poachers on me, but probably also the influence of dialogues and debates with the likes of Will Brooker's work. And I certainly have no interest or desire to retreat into what strikes me as a resolutely reactionary position (so, yes, here's another moral dualism that I cling to) - by which I mean the whole "scholar-fans can't be properly objective or distanced or critical" argument, which I continue to strongly think is simply arrant, modernist nonsense. Alex Doty dismantled that best, for me, in Flaming Classics, a book that lives up to its name. So, yes, I think it does matter, and very much, that writers are invested in the fandom of the fans they study.

However, I also increasingly think that this isn't enough in and of itself. Not if it leads to specific investments and attachments being overly reproduced in scholarship, where these tend to be attachments linked to specific taste cultures and levels of cultural capital. S. Elizabeth Bird critiqued this definitively, really, in her recent book on audiences for Routledge - pointing out that 'cult' and 'edgy' TV was getting lots of academic attention (and we could elaborate on this to suggest that fans of these sorts of shows also get more academic attention... plus they just-so-happen to share levels of cultural capital with many of the scholar-fans producing this work). By contrast, middlebrow TV or resolutely 'mainstream' TV, or shows targeting older audiences, weren't and aren't getting anywhere near as much academic attention, failing to be lit by the spotlight of scholarly buzz. So there are real limits to this process, I feel, and that's what my chapter in Fandom ended up being all about.

If we don't retreat from declarations of attachment - and I don't think that ethnomethodologically or ethically scholar-fans should; really, more should be made of this in pieces of work where it is relevant - then how do we avoid the pitfalls of cultural reproduction and canonisation? How do we avoid the problem of there being a journal of Buffy studies (cool, teen, hip, cult US TV), but not a journal of Heartbeat studies? (uncool, older, rural, mainstream, Sunday evening British TV). How do we avoid, as a scholarly community, producing a patchy and very skewed account of TV or the media which is perhaps linked less to our genderings and linked much more to our levels of cultural capital, as well as to generational identities?

I've already alluded to my own partial and non-solution: that it may be worthwhile for scholar-fans to deliberately seek to work on fandoms and shows that they are not invested in, while nevertheless bringing their knowledge of fandom and their expertise to the table. A variant version of this would be for academia to seek to recruit a wider range of participants and voices working on a wider range of scholar-fan tastes, but I'm verging on wishful thinking or idealism there, so I'll stick with a smaller-scale attempt at shifting the situation in this instance.

Of course, some writers on fandom may want to distance themselves from 'fan studies' altogether, as you say. If this means not reading up on the relevant literature, then that strikes me as somewhat foolhardy. If it means approaching fandom from a different disciplinary perspective, or through variant philosophies, then surely this can only work to challenge and strengthen fan studies. I had this sort of feeling while reading Steve Bailey's recent book on fandom. Though it was published in the same year as Cornel Sandvoss's Fans, it couldn't have been more different in terms of its intertextual affiliations (I've just recently reviewed the two side-by-side for the journal Popular Communication). Sandvoss's work is strongly linked to media sociology, and draws on fan studies as an historical area of media/cultural studies; by contrast, Bailey seems to be writing at one remove from the 'canon' of fan studies. Though for me this created a danger of 'reinventing the wheel', it also allowed Bailey's work to speak back to fan studies, if you like, and to start from unusual first principles. Types of 'rogue' knowledge can be very valuable and useful, once more acting as a kind of corrective to taken-for-granted or ossified assumptions/subject matters. Of course, not all rogue knowledges do this; some just spectacularly miss the point, otherwise there wouldn't be any value in building up one's awareness and knowledge of an academic field in the first place!

CD: I very much agree that the attachment to attachment in fan studies has resulted in quite overt negotiations of cultural capital through the fan texts one writes on. It's Buffy one year, Harry Potter the next; cult and edgy for some fan studies circles, "reclaiming" the massively popular for others.

I think where we might disagree is actually at the level of method. I've pretty much arrived at the point where I feel as if what's needed in fan studies is the kind of long slow careful ethnography that has become quite difficult to do in anthropological studies of lived communities as separate cultures. I want this now partly in order to see the importance of differences in attachment amongst fans - why for some fans a fan community is a way of life and for others it's some version of a bulletin board that one checks after a particularly good or bad episode. I'm aware that my position on this now has a great deal to do with the fact that I work exclusively with online fan communities and that it's a position I hold with reference to online culture as a whole and thus fan communities as a piece of that.

So while I can accept the value of rogue knowledges and, at the same time, feel the limitations of scholars who try to reinvent the wheel of fan studies, those questions feel less important to me than avoiding the drive-through mode of fan studies. Perhaps ironically, this does not mean I want more reflection on the position of the ethnographer in relation to fan communities. In fact, I want a lot less of that in order to avoid the self-referentiality that seems to pervade and dominate the field. I feel as if it is possible to do the necessary in terms of ethical clarification without turning one's ethnographic self into the coolest insider on the block.

5. Fan studies blur really easily into media studies and now new media studies. I know there is work that looks at fandom of "classic authors" etc but I do wonder if the difficulty of talking about my Foucault "fandom" as a fandom is not only about the presumed relationship to mass-produced popular culture that's set into the idea of "fan" now but also about the way fan studies is so often about studying the means of articulating fandom rather than its content. Academics both don't much want to look at academic attachments that way and would find themselves with an odd, if perhaps illuminating, focus if they tried. Maybe there's not a question there. Here's one - could academic reflection on its own institutionalised scholarly practices of research and citation perhaps learn a lot more than it has yet from fan studies. Something about community hubs and tiers, about canon (and fanon), about flaming and wanks... I could go on. Maybe it still isn't a question.

MH: Whether it is a question or not, it's certainly an area that needs more analysis and thought. Alan McKee has written playfully and productively about theory fans in Fandom, and I've written on the subject in How To Do Things With Cultural Theory, which I don't think has filtered into fan studies debates very much yet (and this is just one of the problems with there being an emerging 'canon' of fan studies books as well as canonical fandoms - when I look at some bibliographies underpinning articles on fandom, say, I'm rather struck by the impression that Fan Cultures has ended up in there because the writer thought their bibliography ought to be all "present and correct", and not because they've actually engaged with it in any meaningful sense. Similarly, I do wonder whether scholarly resources which might help particular arguments are neglected because they don't have an obvious 'fan' or 'fandom' in the title... this may also be partly to do with keyword-database-searching as a research strategy, and increased time pressures and an apparent rise in instrumental rationality... but now I suppose I'm sounding like a specifically gendered 'grumpy old man', so may be I'll shut up).

But basically, I absolutely agree with you, and have pretty much published along these lines. In Chapter Seven of HTDTWCT, as part of a section 'Exploring Theory Culture', I argue that work from fan studies can play a significant part in enabling us to theorise and think about academics' theory fandoms. I suggest that the reluctance to use this body of work in this way has been partly related to academia's need - and especially media studies' need - to culturally position itself as something Other to 'mere' fandom, and hence to legitimate itself as properly 'intellectual' and 'critical'. Of course, this cultural 'resistance' (again!) to discourses of fandom is also very much linked to the fact that 'fandom' is assumed to belong to the realm of pop culture, whereas academia is allegedly the application and understanding of 'Theory', itself thought of as an Other to popular culture. So the exnomination of 'theory fandom', I end up arguing, is one strategy aimed at authorising scholarly knowledge as being 'above' its objects of study. There are multiple Otherings and exclusions which this is based on, and these can be contested and deconstructed, which is what I set out to do. In essence, I take a poststructuralist position in relation to the binary of Theory/fandom, asking what happens if we no longer recognise this as an either/or. This involves extending and revisiting my autoethnography from Fan Cultures so that as well as self-reflexively analysing my pop-cultural investments in Doctor Who, say, I analyse my theory-cultural investments in the psychoanalysis of Donald Woods Winnicott (or, from DW to DWW). Alan McKee was quite right to criticise my first attempt at autoethnography for these particular silences and exclusions.

By recognising that 'theory fandom' may be a meaningful term, it is also possible to utilise further insights from poststructuralist feminism, arguing that forms of affect and embodiment have been written out of 'modernist' academia, and that even some versions of fan studies which have sought to challenge this (my own earlier work included) have nevertheless recuperated specific binaries of knowledge/affect underpinning academic 'authority'.

Another extension of fan studies work into unusual and productive areas, and one which aims to challenge the popular culture/high culture binary, is Liesbet Van Zoonen's Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. There's no obvious 'fans' or 'fandom' in this title either, but it really should be essential reading for anyone thinking about the cultural limits to discourses of fandom (which are also forms of cultural power, of course). Van Zoonen asks whether and how 'fandom' can be used as a concept to think about processes and practices of democracy. Can one be a 'Politics fan' as well as a 'theory fan', in other words. It is startling stuff; brilliant scholarship and innovative thought which pushes the reader to think differently about fandom, to broaden its range and scope, and to challenge its cultural definitions and discursive restrictions. I'm very nearly inspired to 'book envy' by it.

CD: I've read Alan's piece in Fandom, and yours. I think there certainly is a tendency for the newest work in fan studies to be less considered and less cited, but within cultural studies I'm sure we can see this as an unavoidable disciplinary phase. My students find you more readably relevant than fan studies that's fifteen years old and so I'm sure the canonical reference points are in transition.

Having said as much I hope it will not be too ungenerous to say that my difficulty with both yours and Alan's pieces in Fandom is the sense of a clear distinction between "academic" and "fan" that is not in the least undermined by talking about conflicts or negotiations between those two roles.

Let's take "meta" as an example, by which I'd want to refer to the broad range of ways in which fans self-consciously analyse their objects and their fan communities and circulate that as analysis. Paying attention to how those skills are learned academically, how academics working as fans can not only produce meta but then turn around and produce the same analysis as academic scholarship, and how debate generated by meta mirrors or even challenges academic debate, I think it's unhelpful to place academics as doing things (including thinking things) that fans do not. As one small example, I couldn't recall how many references to Foucault have been given to me by fans - sometimes with page numbered quotations, sometimes just as a general sense of things.

But yes absolutely with regard to everything else you're saying here. I think fandom has a lot to show academics about how they operate without really wanting to think about it too much - and I liked both your and Alan's pieces in Fandom for just that reason.

6. I'm rambling now, so a shorter attempt at # 6. Fan communities and the way they work are the most interesting part of fan studies to me when I think about fandoms academically. But if we attempt to study fans ethnographically, as communities, do we necessarily throw the objects they are fans of into the background, and does that matter? I guess this is question 2 asked in reverse.

MH: Hmmm, well, I think I've done more than my share of rambling in response to your excellent and thought-provoking questions. But I guess there is a possibility of work on community per se putting 'the text' (with all the provisos we need around that) into the background. Having said that, I'm not personally convinced that it happens much; writers examining fan communities tend to find that the values, meanings and 'poachings' made from fan texts inevitably seep into the performative fan identities constituting that community, whether it's Star Wars fans appropriating notions of rebellion, or Sopranos fans setting themselves up as the communal 'counsellor' or tough-guy. So the text/community opposition may be a weaker analytical division than first appearances would suggest.

I'm not sure that studying communities is "the most interesting part of fan studies" for personally me, though. I recognise that a lot of scholars are doing it well, and developing the theoretical depth of fan studies via community case-study work - I'm thinking here in particular of Rhiannon Bury's (2005) book and its excellent use of both 'heterotopia' (something a PhD student of mine is investigating at the moment in relation to online REM fans) and John Hartley's work on the audience as 'invisible fiction'. Academia can be a slow road sometimes, and I'm not sure Bury's work has fully found the wider readership it deserves, as of yet.

The notion of fan 'community' is philosophically and empirically intriguing to me, but I still don't feel that it goes anywhere near encompassing the diversity of types of fan experience. And bearing in mind Garry Crawford's timely warnings about the possibility of certain types of fan activity being implicitly (or otherwise) constructed as 'authentic' fandom - as 'real' fandom versus other implicitly inferior modes - for myself, I'd still rather explore other types of fandom which may be more 'mainstream', less subcultural, perhaps less spectacularly visible, and possibly gendered differently to some (not all) of the sometimes feminised spaces of socially-organised fandom. If, as Bury's study argues (2005:205), "there is no such entity as a fan" (and I argued the very same thing in the opening pages of Fan Cultures), then surely it falls to us to study the entire performative array of how and where discourses of fandom are both mobilised and exnominated? (And where this could far outstrip any sense of primarily studying fan communities, though fan community would be one cultural site where discourses of fandom would be intently performed and debated, and so would absolutely require careful study as part of what I view as a much wider project).

Actually, upon reflection, I think the most interesting part of fan studies for me at the moment is thinking about cultural sites and spaces where fandom could be used more widely as a discourse, but remains typically counterfactual - Politics (Van Zoonen), Theory (Hills; McKee; your questions here), and even social networking or Web 2.0 (see Henry's Afterword to the Fandom book, which for me just ends up posing the question of why fandom isn't being used as a discourse by certain cyber-gurus).

Where fandom supposedly 'isn't' is just as crucial a question of culture and power as studying where it self-evidently 'is.'

CD: Well, I actually don't have a lot to offer but agreement here. I don't think it happens much either, and I think the opposite is far more of a problem. Perhaps I was wanting to flag it as something to watch - a possible flaw in what I'm doing now. Because it would be ridiculous if, for example, Doctor Who turned into nothing more than a label for a space in which Doctor Who fans interacted. Looking at that sentence now perhaps it's not entirely ridiculous at all, but it certainly would miss the influence of the source text on fan practices.

I am most interested in communities when I think about fans, but I'm starting to suspect in the course of our exchange that what I mean by "community" is not necessarily what you do. I'm fascinated by the way in which fandom is experienced as a part of daily life, as an everyday layer of one's life with its own temporalities and modes of entanglement with everything else. Not as a bounded community, then, but as a set of mutable ideas and varying practices that are taken up by some as "community" and not by others. I want to explore the ways in which fandom is a terrain, a currency and a language for intimate knowledges of other people that comprise the experience of fandom.

Even for people who do no more than log onto discussion forums after a TV episode there's an everydayness to it and a specific place that the practice and the connections with others formed by it have in the fan's life. So I don't mean community in the sense of being a card-carrying Elvis fan club member, but community in the sense of a located community of interest to which people can have very different degrees of attachment. For me, because I otherwise work in communities no one doubts are communities (like country towns), I'm interested in how the patterns of investment and modes of belonging to fan communities are actually quite similar. In particular, of course, I'm interested in how the sense of community experienced through fandom might be shaped by the particularity of online platforms, but I don't think my questions are irrelevant to other kinds of fan culture.

The New Mr. Spock?

I am being forced to relive the 1960s as journalists seek ways to describe my work. Last year, Howard Rhinegold dubbed me "the 21st century McLuhan," a comment my publishers felt compelled to put on the front cover of Convergence Culture. And I've been hit again and again ever since with questions about my relationship to McLuhan. Short answer: McLuhan and I differ in our conceptual starting points. McLuhan starts from the communications technology to explain its potential impact on society (his famous "the medium is the message") where-as I tend to start from the culture and focus on how social agents redefine technologies through their uses. McLuhan was important to me, however, in so far as he paved the way for comparative perspectives on media (moving us beyond medium specific debates which had limited the discussion in my opinion) and in that regard, he ranks alongside Harold Innis and Ithiel DeSola Pool in terms of being a founding figure in Comparative Media Studies.

McLuhan also provides me with a role model: he was someone who was willing to talk with media corporations and policy makers alike in his efforts to shape his culture; he was deeply invested in the concept of media literacy; he was a public intellectual who saw the value of engaging with the news media and with the public in an attempt to make his ideas more widely accessible; he was the head of a center which brought together intellectuals across many different disciplines; and he was someone who constantly experimented with new media platforms, including newsletters, records, video, and photographi collages, in his effort to spread his ideas more widely. These are all goals I try to embrace in my own work, though so far, I haven't been interviewed in Playboy, been the subject of jokes of Laugh-In, or made a cameo appearance in a Woody Allen movie. :-)

This past week, the analogy shifted with Stephanie Olsen from ZDNet News calling me "The Internet's New Dr. Spock." I was initially bemused by the comparison, especially since most of what I had said during the interview about Spock had ended up on the cutting room floor. But I was even more amused by the fact that several people out there responding to the interview have confused Dr. Benjamin Spock, the leading child advice writer of the 20th century, with Mr. Spock, the Vulcan first officer on board the Enterprise on the classic Star Trek series. Talk about generational differences in perspective!

Here are some comments from the Talk Back section following the article:

....Doctor Spock?

I thought it was Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy??

***********************************************************************

Aye, Aye Scotty!

Reader post by: Commander_Spock

Story: The Internet's new Dr. Spock?

Prepare To Beam Us Up For This Debate!

On Board Enterprise Warp.

Commander_Spock

Of course humans are not the only ones to make such confusions. The ad words that cropped up spontaneously on one site which mirrored the article pointed consumers towards a range of Star Trek related products, including, no joke, rubber Spock ears.

Leonard Nemoy struggled his whole career with people who confused Dr. and Mr. Spock, a confusion which normally resulted in an arch of his eyebrow. As it happens, I have written extensively both about Mr. Spock, through my work on Star Trek fans, and about Dr. Spock, through an essay I published in the Children's Culture Reader.

For the purposes of identification as this discussion continues, this is a photograph of Mr. Spock from Star Trek:

And this is a photograph of Dr. Spock, the child rearing expert and anti-war protester:

As it happens, there is a NEW Mr. Spock, as Entertainment Weekly reported a few weeks ago: Zachary Quinto, the actor who plays Sylar on Heroes, was recently cast to play the young Mr. Spock in the next Star Trek film which is being produced by J. J. Abrams.

I have been having fun imagining what readers thought Stephanie Olsen meant when she compared me to Mr. Spock: Is it some kind of comment about my logical mind, my (hardly) stoic attitudes, my commitment to "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," the fact that every seven years I go into Pon Farr, my lust for Jim Kirk, or some other aspect of the television character's personality which escapes me. Of course, I always fancy my job as going where no humanist has gone before, so there may be some resemblence to THAT Spock after all! :-)

It occurs to me reading such comments that it would be useful to spend a moment explaining who Dr. Spock was for a generation which may have grown up without his sage guidance or seems to have no clue who he was.

Wikipedia provides a pretty good summary of Benjamin Spock's life and work:

Benjamin McLane Spock (May 2, 1903 - March 15, 1998) was an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its revolutionary message to mothers was that "you know more than you think you do." Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals, whereas the previous conventional wisdom had been that child rearing should focus on building discipline, and that, e.g., babies should not be "spoiled" by picking them up when they cried.

I wrote an extensive discussion of Spock's work for my book, The Children's Culture Reader, and that essay is reproduced on line for anyone who'd like to read it. Essentially, this article argues that Spock was one of a generation of post-war children's advocates who began to reassess the power relations between adults and children and who also helped the society come to grips with Freud's discoveries about infantile sexuality. I argue in the essay that this post-war parenting advice prefigures and predates later discussions of adult sexuality in important ways:

The recognition of children's sexuality as a positive, rather than as a negative, force led to a close examination of how parents should respond to and facilitate children's erotic awakenings. Children, so often, in our culture become the bearers of our own utopian fantasies for a better world. In this case, the world which was being envisioned was a world without erotic inhibitions, a world which was open to sexual pleasure and free from guilt and negative self-images.

By looking closely at children, their bodies and their desires, permissiveness developed an ideology about sexuality which helped to prepare the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. First, sex was rendered "wholesome," natural, biologically necessary, and in the process, old superstitions and moral prohibitions were pushed aside. Second, sex was stripped of its ties to procreation, with the child's masturbatory exploration of its own body and its pursuit of pleasure assuming positive values in and of themselves. Third, healthy sensuality extended to the entire body and not simply the genitals. The child's polymorphous eroticism was to be retained in adult life as a new and more vivid form of sexual experience. Fourth, pleasure was seen as beneficial, necessary, and the body was depicted as knowing its own needs. The body doesn't lie; if it feels good, it can't be bad. Fifth, all aspects of life, especially learning and creativity, assumed an erotic dimension, as practices of re-direction and sublimation transformed sexual energies into other kinds of activities, and the desire to explore the world was understood as primarily sensual in origins. We know through our senses, and as a result, we should awaken our senses to the broadest possible range of experiences. Sexual frustration and perversion were seen as resulting from boredom and understimulation. Sixth, sexual openness within the domestic sphere was viewed as positive, including some "healthy" interplay between parents and children, yet sex was, by its design, a private act, which should be performed behind closed doors and held in check by public expectations. Morally charged concepts, such as "sin" or "guilt," were gradually displaced by socially-directed concepts, such as "privacy" and "propriety." Most of these conceptions of eroticism would become core tenants of the self-help books or liberation literature of the sexual revolution; they would become the common wisdom of a generation which sought to expand the place of recreational sex within American life and to prolong the period of childhood sexual experimentation into a richer, fuller erotic life as adults.

So, what does this have to do with my work on youth and digital media? Not a lot. I am a media scholar, not a pediatrician or child pyschologist. But for the baby boom generation, Spock functions as short hand for all advice literature for parents. In practice, Spock himself was deeply distrustful of mass media even though he himself used the media very effectively to get his advice out to parents. Subsequent children's advice writers have tended to say very little about media or reduce their advice to parents to what I call the "just say no to Nintendo" position. That is, good parenting comes through restricting access to media: keep it out of the children's bedrooms; limit the number of hours.

I would argue, however, that parents have a constructive role to play in actively shaping young people's relations to media, helping them learn skills which will allow them to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape and develop a healthy, ethical, creative, and intellectually engaged pattern of media use. As I wrote in Technology Review several years ago, media literacy begins at home and parents have an active role to play in insuring that children acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed to become full participants in the emerging media culture.

It is not even clear that there could be a Spock of the Internet Age. Spock's books emerged within the context of a consensus culture; they were being read at a period of mass migration in which the dominance of the extended family was breaking down as children moved away from their hometowns as they started their own families and thus needed a different form of advice than their parents had required. Spock's books were read by almost everyone in the society where-as today's market for advice literature is increasingly fragmented, responding to a multicultural society with many different definitions of what a family is and what values should shape the interactions between parents and children.

But if we look at what Spock said in his books, we might construct some core principles of what advice to parents would look like:

1. Spock felt that parents should remain calm and trust common sense to get them through most problems. In the case of the Internet, parents would do better to try to find analogies between what occurs online and other more traditional forms of activities. So, in what ways is hanging out in MySpace like the teen haunts of previous generations? In what ways is joining a guild in a multiplayer game like signing up for sports? In what ways is Live Journal like writing for the school newspaper? And so forth. These analogies would only get us so far but starting from an idea of radical difference may cause parents to freak out about every aspect of their teen's online lives rather than focusing on real points of conflict or weighing risks and benefits of certain activities.

2. Spock worked hard to insure popular access to the latest thinking of academic experts. We've already argued that he was a popularizer of Freud and psychoanalysis; he also helped to bridge between cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead and the American public. He wanted to insure that parenting was governed by reason and reliable information rather than having parents strike out blindly. He wanted parents to see their jobs in a larger social and cultural context and that's something which could help contemporary parents find the right solutions for their own families.

3. Spock taught parents to respect their children and see them as citizens within a democratic society rather than subjects of a totalitarian regime. Permissive child rearing doctrines then and now got a bad reputation because people imagined children as becoming tyrants and parents as reluctant to set limits. But Spock, in fact, shifted back and forth over time in his advice trying to counter both the authoritarian impulses of parenting in the immediate post-war period and the excesses of totally permissive parenting which came in its wake. Respecting children, listening to their point of view, but also providing leadership and governance within the family was at the heart of the social ballance he advocated. And that ballance is totally off at the moment where the internet is concerned. Some parents remain ignorant and indifferent of what their children are doing online, while others employ all kinds of surveillance tools to snoop on their kids. The key is, as I said in the interview, to watch their backs and not snoop over their shoulders. Parents need to engage children and youth in a process of reflecting on their own ethical choices and educating them about the risks they face as they move into this unfamiliar space. And that means adopting an informed perspective on the online world rather than acting in ignorance or fear. Spock's advice literature helped another generation learn what it needed to know in order to confront the social transitions of the post-war society. A new Spock would need to give them the information they require to manage the cultural, economic, and technological transitions of our own era.

To borrow a line from Leonard Nimoy, I am not Spock. I suspect there never will be another Dr. Spock given the fragmentation of our culture. But we can all learn things from Spock's legacy which would help parents deal with some of the challenges they face right now.

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part Two)

What kinds of skills and knowledge are young people acquiring through their involvement with the production of youth radio? Response from Ayesha Walker, Online Project Associate. If you want to check out some of Walker's work for Youth Radio, try "Bathing Ape", Marketplace

and "From Blacksburg to Bay Area."

I unconfidently discovered radio my sophomore year of high school at El Cerrito's KECG station. I was determined to break through my introverted shell and find comfort behind

the microphone. Somehow in my senior year I was elected Director of Communications,

hosting my very own radio crew, playing my voice through every speaker in El Cerrito

high school. By the time my senior year came around, I fatefully stumbled across Youth

Radio. I studied all of the features and fell in love with web, photography and journalism.

As the new generation of technology users, today's young people are trained here at

Youth Radio in exactly what we need and want: proficiency through technologically

advanced equipment in media production. Therefore we advance in the skills that already

belong to us.

We learn to magnify our personality with confidence, creatively generating authentic

work through the components that YR offers:

News and commentaries: young people write stories for local and national radio,

iTunes, and our own website

Music: young people learn to produce their own music through industry standard

computer software and also program music shows featuring a range of artists and styles

for terrestrial and web radio

Web: young people learn to produce and design youthradio.org

Video: young people learn to create videos for outlets ranging from PBS to

Current TV to YouTube

After learning what we want, we learn what to do with the skills we've acquired through the program. We either move up or move out. Young people evolve into an essential part of staff, guiding other young people in the right direction. Or we find work outside Youth Radio, sometimes even outside converged media, using the professional skills gained here.

Youth Radio has helped shape the minds and personalities of many young people around the Bay Area, making the road to success much more visible.

Throughout my time here at Youth Radio, I've worked on a mob of commentaries. But there's one in particular I'm most proud of is called "Hood Sweet Hood." It hasn't aired on an outlet yet, but I'm proud of it because I feel I had the chance to clarify a few things that take place in the hood that most people outside of the ghetto wouldn't understand.

At Youth Radio, I've learned to swallow my people-fearing ways and express myself. I've learned to write creatively to a broad audience. By helping to maintain and produce youthradio.org, I've learned to take professional quality photographs, to network, and most importantly, to have fun. I've learned to think more deeply about my actions, whether it's buying from large corporations or just plain recycling. I've learned to speak properly on air. I've learned interviewing tactics--not from a book, even though I love books with all my mind, but from experience, which is the best teacher a student could ever have. Youth Radio has allowed me to sit in and help plan its future and my own.

And more on this question from Reina Gonzales, Youth Radio graduate and Associate

Producer. To sample Gonzales's work, see "Military Deserters in Canada."

I've been with Youth Radio since I was fifteen years old in a variety of roles. As a

student, I can say that the biggest impact Youth Radio had on me was that it gave me a

sense of direction. I learned what opportunities were out there for me and was then able

to decide what would bring me the most fulfillment.

As a peer teacher, I was surprised by how supportive and non- judgmental the students

were. In our weekly radio shows, I often saw the students struggle with writing or

on-air nerves, but in working together, they showed a sense of trust and mutual respect.

This was an experience completely opposite to the hostile environment I encountered in

high school.

As a youth reporter, I learned that writing ability on its own isn't enough to produce

media that matters. I had to develop a more holistic approach to the stories I worked

on--thinking about all the possible ways I could tell them and always trying to consider

different points of view.

As a radio and video producer, I've seen students learn to adapt to the always-changing

media landscape by using new technologies and producing their stories across formats.

They also think about new ways to market themselves and their work using social

networks--all of which suggests they're becoming just as good if not better than their

adult media professional counterparts.

What relationship does your group have with other youth radio producers around the world?

Response from Senior Producer Rebecca Martin and Producer Brett Myers, Youth Radio's National Network/Curating Youth Voices Initiative. To see some of the work of the Curating Youth Voices Initiative, see "Leaving the Mountains," NPR

Youth Radio has grown into a hub for local, national and international converged media

production. We carry out this work through collaborations and partnerships with youth

correspondents, youth media groups, and youth organizations across the country and

around the globe. In addition to our bureaus in DC, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, we have an

extensive network of youth media partners whom we work with to co-produce content for

national and international audiences on a regular basis.

The bureaus and youth media partners in the U.S. are part of a unified editorial

structure at Youth Radio designed to represent diverse youth experiences and respond to

national news and issues in a comprehensive way that reflects the American landscape.

This structure also insures that our content meets the highest journalistic standards.

Our extensive youth correspondent network links individual young people across the

country and around the globe with adult professional editors and producers, and youth

peer editors at our headquarters in Oakland, California, who work with them remotely to

bring their stories to national and international audiences on the radio and the web.

Over the years, we've worked with young reporters and commentators in Afghanistan,

South Africa, Palestine, Israel, Mexico, Cuba, France and India.

We actively participate in conferences that bring together youth media producers (and

founded the Youth in Radio conference with the National Federation of Community

Broadcasters); regularly host international journalists; and do our best to provide

technical assistance and advice to newcomers in the youth media field. One initiative

that formalizes the latter effort is Teach Youth Radio, a free, online curriculum

resource we offer in monthly installments designed to encourage educators inside and

outside classrooms to integrate youth media content and methods into their work.

When we met in Saint Louis, we had an interesting exchange about the value of individual

authorship as opposed to collective intelligence. I wondered if you might be willing to

share your perspective on this topic here.

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

I was actually inspired to write a bit about this topic after we met at the 2007

National Media Education Conference in St. Louis. In your media literacy white paper,

you describe collective intelligence as a property of joint projects where "everyone

knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole."

This notion of collective intelligence resonates for me in lots of ways. My own personal

youth media practice and research have always centered on learning environments that

leverage collaborative thinking and making, and I often find myself trying to expose,

understand, and promote all the joint work that takes place behind all meaningful

productions, even those designated as "single author" works. Something I especially

love about the concept of collective intelligence is the way it embraces our fundamental

incompleteness outside the social contexts we make and re-make everyday.

That said, I'm wondering if there are ways that collective intelligence just might

sometimes work against youth producers...I find that some of the most important work we

do at Youth Radio, even within our hyper-collaborative production method, is to secure

individual on air credit for the organization and our youth reporters and artists. We

take those radio "back announces" (when the host credits the contributor you just

heard) extremely seriously. Sometimes young people can't afford to be anonymous

contributors, no matter how intelligent their collectives happen to be, if they are to

convert their media productions into concrete new opportunities in higher education

and/or living wage work.

When I raised this line of questioning with you in St. Louis, you offered a provocative

response that has stuck with me. You said it reminded you of the observation that

scholars started proclaiming the "death of the author" at the very moment when women

and people of color started getting traction in academic departments and publishing.

So I guess I hesitate to declare the death of the individual youth media maker at the very moment when young people need concrete, specific, and traceable acknowledgement of their work's value, not as a loosey-goosey self-esteem builder, but because that kind of recognition is sometimes necessary for them to leverage their work to transform the conditions of their lives.

Having said all this, I do realize that to some extent I'm conflating collective

authorship with collective intelligence. Collective intelligence isn't so much about

joint production as it is about shared knowledge, not so much about who deserves credit

for the outcome, but how various minds/bodies/imaginations inform and derive

"smarts" from the process. When I reflect on my own creative methods as both a

writer and producer, I can see how "intelligence" can be displaced from the people

in the room to the project underway, from separate minds to shared spaces that take

shape throughout the time it takes to complete a given piece of work. If that's true,

it makes me wonder what happens to that collective and perhaps temporary or contingent

intelligence once the group disbands or the project ends?

Which brings me to one final point. Our conversation in St. Louis also got

me thinking about how it can sometimes feel like projects never end anymore, as a result

of digital culture and its permanent, searchable, ongoing conversation, as dana boyd and

others have described. If youth media producers drop out of that conversation after

they've finished and broadcast/posted a final version of the story, they surrender the

right to keep shaping how the piece is received, interpreted, and re-purposed by other

producers. When Youth Radio stories air nationally, we often hear directly from

listeners, usually with admiration, but not always. Some especially controversial

stories from our recent archive include: when Brandon McFarland wrote about being

whooped as a child; when Cassandra Gonzalez described the first time her baby's

incarcerated father met his newborn daughter; when Clare Robbins talked about an

anti-racist group she joined for white people only. Stories like these get other people

talking, and our challenge as a media literacy organization and production company is to

teach young people that from now on, their work doesn't stop when they produce the

story; they need also to produce the conversation that (hopefully) continues in the

story's wake.

For further information, contact elisabeth soep

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part One)

When I spoke at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis earlier this summer, I was approached by Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep and Ayesha Walker. Soep is the Research Director and Senior Producer f and Walker is an Online Project Associate for an organization called Youth Radio, which defines its mission as: "to promote young people's intellectual, creative and professional growth through training and access to media and to produce the highest quality original media for local and national outlets." As it happens, Soep is a regular reader of this blog and as it happens, because I like to listen to NPR and PRI podcasts when I walk every day, I had heard several of the segments her team had produced. We immediately fell into an intense conversation about authorship in an age of collective intelligence and participatory culture and about what these shifts in the notion of participation and collaboration mean in the context of a program which is trying to "authorize" young people (that is, empower them to become authors.) That conversation convinced me that Soep and her gang had something to teach all of us about youth media production, the nature of radio as a medium, and the shifting construction of authorship in a digital age. And so I immediately asked her if I could do an interview with her and with the people who she is working with for my blog.

This is, in that sense, an unusual interview. Most of my interviews are with specific individuals; this is one of the few times we have done a collaborative interview. The answers which follow come from both youth and adult participants in the Youth Radio program. Such a process is the most appropriate way to capture what Soep calls "collegial pedagogy" -- which depends on shifting the power relations between children and adults. (She says more about this concept below so I don't want to pre-empt her comments.)

I have written here before about my reservations about the "digital natives/digital immigrants" terminology which has gained such circulation in recent years. When I first heard the terms, I thought they were powerful and I have since seen that power many times. They immediately give people a tool to think about something they are experiencing -- some kind of generational shift in the ways that young people and adults relate to these emerging technologies. But it is a power we should use selectively since these terms also distort many aspects of the phenomenon that they seek to describe. There are at least three major distortions involved:

1. The terms are ahistorical. They give rise to the myth that this is the FIRST generation where kids have known more about technology than their parents. I hear this claim again and again from people who should know better and it is simply not true. There have been a series of generation gaps surrounding technology across the past century or more and these gaps have had real impacts on the historical development of communications media. We can learn more about the present moment by looking to the past and using language which cuts us off from that larger history is profoundly unhelpful in understanding our present moment.

2. It collapses all young people into a so-called digital generation. David Buckingham, the British researcher, was the first to really help me understand the risks involved here. We could argue, as I did in Technology Review several years ago, after attending one of Buckingham's conferences, that there are two competing myths -- the Columbine Generation (which we hear much less often now, thankfully, which sees young people as at risk because of their "unique" access to technology) and the Digital Generation (which celebrates the positive transformations being brought about by young people's access to technology). We give up the myth of a Digital Generation at our own risk since it is the most powerful way to counter the Columbine Generation myth. But we also need to recognize the ways that it erases class boundaries in young people's access to and ability to participate in the new media landscape. The Digital Natives metaphor doesn't acknowledge either the digital divide (in young people's access to the technologies) or the participation gap (in young people's access to the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully and meaningfully participate in the emerging digital culture.)

3. It ignores the degree that what's really powerful about most of the new forms of participatory culture of fans, bloggers, and gamers is that such affinity spaces allow young people and adults to interact with each other in new terms. These affinity spaces (to use James Paul Gee's term) bring together youth and adults who don't have fixed and hierarchical relationships (students/teachers, children/parents) on the basis of their shared interests. There are all kinds of anxieties about such relationships in the modern era (since any contact between youth and adults who are not members of their families bring with it a fear of child predators) but there is also something very constructive about many of these normal relations between children and adults. Even traditional forms of contact between adults and youth, such as Sunday school outings or Boy Scouts gatherings, have been tainted both by the fear and the reality of child molestation. And in any case, many of the older ways that youth and adults interacted outside of school and family -- whether through churches or youth organizations -- are facing declines in participation. Moreover, most of the traditional youth organizations were modeled on the same hierarchical relations that shape formal education. In an internet world, where people can meet first without such clear identity markers, young people and adults may at least sometimes interact without age being a major factor. In almost every case, the new participatory cultures are ones which have been built by youth and adults working together. We need to spend more time examining how and where such relationships occur and articulating their value. One of the things which interest me about Youth Radio is that they are pulling such interactions into a public service organization in very conscious ways and that's at the heart of what they are calling "collegial pedagogy." And like many related youth media projects, they involve youth speaking directly to adult and youth audiences about things that matter to them, encouraging us to take seriously young people's perspectives on the world.

The interview which follows not only explains but embodies those relationships. I would also encourage you to check out some of the links to the group's productions which are sprinkled throughout this interview: it will give you a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when we take seriously young people's perspectives on the world and help them get access to the means of cultural production and distribution.

How would you define the mission of Youth Radio? What are you trying to accomplish?

Response from Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer. You can learn more about Soep's perspective by checking out Lissa's blog.

Youth Radio is a youth development organization and independent media production company founded by Ellin O'Leary in 1992. Headquartered in Oakland, CA, we've got satellite bureaus and youth correspondents working across the U.S. and around the world producing and curating award-winning converged media content. Youth Radio stories and shows reach massive audiences through outlets including National Public Radio (with its 27 million weekly listeners), iTunes, Radio Bilingue, YouTube, and MySpace. Youth Radio promotes young people's intellectual, creative, and professional growth and citizenship and transforms the public discourse through media production.

Students come to Youth Radio primarily from the nations strapped, heavily tracked, re-segregating public schools. Most are low-income, digitally marginalized youths and young people of color. Our approach links deadline driven, production-based media education with programs that support personal and community health, engage active citizenship, and pave pathways to college and living wage jobs in the media and beyond.

Over the past several years, Youth Radio's teen reporters have examined the status of free speech in U.S. classrooms in an era of shrinking civil liberties. Our Reflections on Return series has documented the experiences of young troops coming home from the Iraq war. A Cape Town college student grappled with her father's participation as a police officer in the former apartheid state. One young man documented his experience of deportation, having been released from prison to a country he hadn't set foot in since he was two years old. A son reflected on his mother's struggle, and his own, with her AIDS diagnosis. Teens described the horror of running into their moms on MySpace.

Young people produce culture everyday. Through stories such as these, they put cultural production to work for themselves, their communities, and their audiences across our connected, divided world.

What roles do youth play in your production process? What roles do adults play?

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

The answer depends on where young people are in the program. Within the first week of starting an introductory class, students go on the air for a live public affairs radio

show, which goes out via broadcast and online. In this phase of their Youth Radio

experience, they learn mainly from peers how to produce commentaries, news,

roundtables, public service announcements, original beats, music segments, blogs, and

videos. Recent program graduates--most teenagers themselves and some younger than their

own students--serve as the lead instructors, editors, and co-producers. Peer teachers

make the transition from students to educators with scaffolding from adults through

weekly professional development workshops on topics ranging from how to operate a flash

recorder, to how to navigate the uncertain ethics of today's digital culture.

After the 10-week introductory course work, young people move through another 10 weeks

of more advanced training in specialized areas (e.g., engineering, journalism, music

production, etc.) and eventually into paid internships in every department across the

organization. Here's where they start to collaborate in a different way with adults.

Take, for example, our professional newsroom. Young people facilitate weekly editorial

meetings where they pitch stories to peers and adult producers. Youth reporters then

work closely with adult media professionals on every stage of developing the story:

finding an angle, identifying characters and scenes, developing interview questions,

gathering "tape" (a term we still use all the time inside our fully digital studios)

and then devising an outline, composing a script, mixing the story, and delivering to an

outlet.

I call our newsroom methodology "collegial pedagogy" (Vivian Chavez and I have

written about this in a Harvard Ed Review article and we've got a chapter devoted to

it in our forthcoming book, Drop That Knowledge, with UC Press).

Collegial pedagogy is a deeply interdependent dynamic that's markedly different from most classroom scenarios. In collegial pedagogy, young people and adults co-create original work

neither could pull off alone, and over which neither stands as final judge, because the

work goes out to an audience no one--young or old--can fully predict or control. The

adult producer could not create the story without young people to identify topics worth

exploring, to host and record peer-to-peer conversations, and to experiment with novel

modes of expression and ways of using words, scene, and sound. At the same time, young

people could not create the story without adults to provide access to resources,

equipment, high- profile outlets, and institutional recognition, and to share the skills

and habits developed through years of experience as media professionals. Young people

offer a key substantive contribution that the adults cannot provide -- a certain kind

of access, understanding, experience, or analysis directly relevant to the project at

hand. They contribute insights and challenging perspectives to a mainstream media that

too often ignores the experience and intelligence of youth. And yet adults do not only

oversee or facilitate the learning experience surrounding a given media production

experiment; they actually join in the production process itself.

It can be tricky to work as an adult inside collegial pedagogy, tempting as it often is

to get so swept up in a project that you start to take over. It's a problem youth

media producer Debra Koffler from the Conscious Youth Media Crew has cleverly termed "adulteration" - a risk that seems inherent in creative collaborations where young

people and adults feel mutual passion, investment, and vulnerability. That's why

there's one policy that is absolutely non-negotiable at Youth Radio: young people

always have final editorial say over everything they create. The ultimate goal of

collegial pedagogy, after all, is for young people to develop the technical, creative,

and intellectual capacities they need to step away from adults. In our newsroom, they

increasingly work independently to create high quality products, while maturing into

journalists prepared to partner, from the other side of the pedagogical dynamic, with

students following in their footsteps.

What do you see as the continued value of broadcast radio as a medium in an era of blogs

and podcasts?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

The teenagers and young adults currently enrolled and working in our organization are bridging this gap between broadcast and digital outlets. They're key consumers and producers of converged media products, finding new music through social networking sites and seeing their online radio programs downloaded as podcasts hundreds of times a week. But there are still technological barriers to online radio and podcasts becoming their own listening formats of choice.

Even though they are increasingly using their cell phones and iPods for music downloads, they often have limited access to computers on which to stream online radio. And even when they do have home computers, that access engenders a very individual - even lonely - listening experience. Broadcast radio, on the other hand, creates a listenership community. Even a high school student graduating in the class of 2008, coming of age alongside MySpace and Sirius, will have made most of the new music discoveries of his or her lifetime during drive time terrestrial radio broadcasts. I'd be surprised if the power of this nostalgia didn't echo into the next generation of listeners.

Even though radio's "golden era" (which can plausibly refer to any period before the FCC's 1996 deregulation of the industry) offered far more musical diversity, it has something in common with the post-consolidation period. A favorite radio jock is crown prince or princess of the morning, determining the proverbial water cooler conversation: Are you going to the Art and Soul Festival Chuy mentioned? They're going to have a blood donation booth. Did you hear that crank call to the bakery? That interview with Mary J. Blige - I didn't know she was in town this weekend!

I also think that despite the surge of interest and influence in user-generated content and the move-away from top-down journalism, there's still a strong desire for traditional media producers' authority of experience and delivery. "I can't live without my radio!"

I noticed that you are making your broadcast content available via iTunes. How did that

come about and how successful do you think this approach has been at broadening who

listens to youth radio?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

As digital media/online radio and podcasts began to draw increasing audiences a few years back, Youth Radio approached Apple's iTunes as a potential outlet for our radio stories. We ended up with both a weekly podcast on iTunes and a 24-hour radio stream, found under iTunes "Public," "Urban," and "Eclectic" categories.

In addition to being another opportunity for our students to refine the improvisational live hosting and interviewing skills they learn in our classes, the radio stream has been an important free space for creative stories and uncensored music that might be difficult to place on our terrestrial broadcast outlets, given time constraints and FCC regulations.

Youth Radio has produced a variety of talk-format programs for weekly and monthly broadcast on San Francisco Bay Area commercial and public radio. However, most of that programming was dominated by public affairs content - roundtable discussions and interview segments responding to news events or exploring various aspects of youth culture. The iTunes stream presented an opportunity to run 24 hours of music-driven content. This programming is akin to the live radio format that draws many young people to Youth Radio in the first place. The fact that the stream is online and carried by a significant media company vastly expands the potential audience, with listeners in various national and international locations, represented as pushpins on the world map in our iTunes studio. And like our relationship with NPR, the recognition and marketing potential of the Apple brand provides valuable leverage as we seek new digital media outlets.

The iTunes stream also has great potential as a place for experimentation as audiences' appetites shift. For example, as YouTube came to prominence, one of our students shot and posted cell phone footage of the Oakland A's mascot hyphy dancing (an energetic hip hop genre originating in the Bay Area) and the clip has been viewed more than 400,000 times to date. We were inspired to start experimenting with this less highly produced aesthetic in our audio work, launching a content stream called "Youth Radio Raw." iTunes was the natural, (and frankly, only) place to debut this material.

There's been a general trend suggesting that contemporary youth are less likely than previous generations to seek out information from traditional news channels. What insights do you have about why young people might be turned off by news?

Response from Pendarvis "Dru" Harshaw, Youth Radio Reporter and Commentator For a sample of Dru's broadcasts, see "N-Bomb", NPRand "The Turf/The Village"

Readily available news. Everyone reports. How do you decide? The information age has reached the point where news is constantly flashing in our faces, from news tickers on

the sides of skyscrapers in major cities, to news flashes on your hand held communication tool that you use as a cell phone.

News is everywhere. So how credible is every source?

Many would say that laziness is the reason that my generation doesn't re the news. But

I say searching for credibility is where my generation's laziness comes into play. Instead of researching the origin of stories and the hard facts, we would rather take what is given as fact, or not take anything.

We have an urge to know about the news that directly relates to us. When I read the newspaper, I read about the sports team I like and the city side section to see if anyone I know died. I get on the internet and check my email and MySpace, and if something on Yahoo's web page catches my attention, it's because it directly relates to me...In turn, credibility has been substituted for relativity. That's why we do not read YOUR news, we read our news.

The difference between Youth Radio and MySpace or a YouTube or any new site which allows

a person to produce themselves is ... media literacy. Youth Radio does what MySpace

would hate us to do: Teach us why sites like MySpace work--the advertisements, the

conglomerates, and how all of this relates to them getting our money. Instead of

blindly posting our videos and pictures on a website owned by a round table of old

farts, Youth Radio teaches us the process of broadcasting, the mechanics of production,

and the influence of media --not from the mouth of an old fart, but from the mouths of

young people who have also gone through this program, young people who are literate in the power of media, and the power we have in producing the media.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part Two): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Articulating Attachment NB: I think people are often better able to articulate what stories mean to them in terms of the text itself: which characters they identify with (or don't), what they think about plot turns, etc. With music, it's very hard to find words to explain one's connection outside of the role songs played in that moment of one's autobiography. I have loved music more than stories most of my life but I can explain narrative conventions with some degree of competence and can't even begin to describe things like the common rhythmic or chord structures in the music that moves me.

AP: This is an interesting point, and I would readily admit that if someone were to ask me why I enjoy A. R. Rahman's music or why a certain playback singer's voice moves me, I would have nothing much to say. And as I quickly realized when I began speaking with fans of A. R. Rahman, this question doesn't move the conversation much. What would get me and other Rahman fans talking is this: tell me about your conversations and experiences interacting with other Rahman fans online. Attachment, in other words, was defined in terms of belonging in a community.

It is very important to recognize that this relates to taste hierarchies and the ambivalent status of film music in Indian public culture. The question of high culture vs. low culture fandom that Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson brought up is very relevant here. Given that music directors and playback singers are often trained in classical music and the fact that film songs draw on classical music, fan discussions do revolve around this. In the Rahman fan community, there are fans who are well-versed in the technical (or "formal"?) dimensions of music and go to great lengths to explain them to other fans. Needless to say, this expertise becomes a form of value and these fans quickly become leaders within the community.

In fact, film music's middlebrow status allows elite youth to claim a fan identity and belong in a fan community partly because it is not associated with lower class, lower caste, and "political" fan communities that form around film stars in south India.

NB: That's interesting, I don't see much of this in the music fandoms I spend time in. In fact, I think it's pretty unusual to see any fans talking about the formal elements that make songs sound as they do. When I read Daniel Levitin's (author of This Is Your Brain on Music) claim that the appeal of pop music is in the timbre, I had no idea what "timbre" meant, and I'd bet that most pop music fans don't. Musicians can have those conversations, but fans that aren't musicians rarely can, and I think this is very different from narrative where fans can not just articulate narrative conventions, but are often using them to write their own fan fictions. There is no music fandom equivalent of fan fiction except fan fiction about musicians, but that's a total form shift.

But I think it makes perfect sense to extend a fandom approach to "high" culture, and to look at how 'high culture' sorts of discussion permeate 'low culture' fandoms. On my blog, for instance, I've written about wine fandom and how that doesn't normally get considered "fandom" but that people who are into wine act just like people who are into a TV show or movie -- they hold gatherings, they read supplementary materials, they go on pilgrimages to wineries, they wear winery t-shirts and baseball caps, they try to connect with others who are into the same things (there are now at least 3 online wine-based social networking sites). I knew so many people who made pilgrimages to see Wagner's Ring Trilogy performed in its entirety on consecutive nights by the Chicago Opera.

Communities of Sound

NB: Another way in which the text at stake raises very different questions with music is how the social relationships formed around music differ from those formed around narratives. I love your point above that attachment is "defined in terms of belonging in a community." Music has ties to location in ways stories don't -- as you know! Where narratives have the fan conventions that bring the hardcores together, music has live performance that is integral to its very being and gets everyone from the hardcores to the curious together in place. This is again a huge contrast to, say, the fan con which is only going to get the hardcores together in space. How does music's connection to place affect the fandom that forms around it?

AP: I'm really glad you raised the issue of place.

As I said earlier, fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because film stars in south India have been successful at mobilizing fans along linguistic and regional lines.

Given that the Rahman fan community is first and foremost a community realized online, and that fans bring diverse stakes and affiliations to bear on their participation, mobilization along axes of caste or language is, at a basic level, rendered structurally impossible. For example, fans based in Malaysia, for whom participation in the Rahman fan community is part of a larger process of claiming a Tamil ethnic identity, share little in common with second-generation Indian-Americans for whom dancing to a remixed Rahman song at a club speaks to a very different set of concerns. Focusing our attention on the realm of film music thus allows us to challenge the romanticization of fan culture as subaltern politics. The realm of film music fandom forces us to acknowledge other ways of being a fan and modes of belonging in fan communities.

Of course, this does pose problems. For instance, members of the Rahman fan community appear unconcerned with questions of class and caste that have been central to fan-based political mobilizations. In the very first interview I conducted, the moderator of the group made it clear that the Rahman fan community shared nothing in common with "rowdy" fan associations and went on to remark: "we're online, not on the streets!"

NB: I think one has to really stretch the definition of "politics" to argue it's an important component of the fandoms in which I spend time, but place is core. One of the topics I've been intrigued by is the role of online fans and fan communities in taking music out of place. For instance, in the Swedish indie music scene, outside of MySpace (and arguably there to an extent) the work of exporting this cultural product is being taken on by (often unpaid) fans in America, England, France, and other countries. Songs that would never be heard outside of Sweden, and might not even get heard in Sweden, are getting international audiences through mp3 blogs and online webzines devoted to that (and the broader Scandinavian) scene. Online fandom is spreading music well beyond its locations of origin on an unprecedented scale, but their place-based nature remains an important component. In terms of the individualizing function of music fandom, being able to identify with a foreign music scene is great - I could frame myself as a big fan of local music (and I've done so at other points in life), but being a Kansan who strongly self-identifies as a Swedish indie fan has a lot more potential to start conversations and allows me a lot more potential to turn local friends on to bands they'd otherwise never hear. And on the other side of that, having an online community of people who are into bands as obscure as these are in America allows me to continuously find new music and to get in-depth expertise on the bands I fall in love with. Many fans in this particular fandom are far more likely to check out a new band if they are Swedish than not, regardless of where they live themselves.

Relationship Building

AP: Relationship building is definitely an interesting issue. Fans of A. R. Rahman have positioned themselves very clearly as a grassroots marketing team. Some of them have business degrees and work as consultants, a large number work in the IT industry, and they've taken it upon themselves to figure out new ways of distributing Rahman's music, tackling digital piracy and p2p sharing, and so on. Rahman, for his part, has acknowledged these fans' efforts and has begun collaborating with them on a range of projects.

In the Indian mediascape, these new kinds of relationships between fans and producers haven't received much attention. And it would be fair to say that producers are yet to figure out ways to tap into the vast space of participatory culture that has emerged online. Fans are being courted, but only because their serve as information hubs. As I see it, talent competitions on TV are the only site where fans are able to strike up conversations with music directors, playback singers, lyricists, and others in the industry.

NB: I see a lot of norms about sharing in music fan communities, most of which prohibit fan distribution of anything that can be purchased except in the context of mp3 blogs, which often operate with the tacit approval of labels. But as I say, fans are certainly acting as distributors and publicists.

Another element that's interesting here is the huge boom in online sites built to create social relationship amongst music listeners in the name of music discovery. There are new "Music 2.0" sites launching weekly. With music we have sites that are being built from the ground up to track everything people listen to and make personal connections and music recommendations based on that. That ability to track it all and create collective knowledge algorithmically seems to be operating at a whole other level with music. These sites raise so many questions about the roles of shared taste in relationships. Looking at Last.fm, whether or not a person shares musical taste is the core issue in whether or not someone will "friend" someone they don't already know, but how well does that predict whether they'll have anything else to talk about?

Boys and Girls

NB: Meanwhile, aren't we supposed to be representing some sort of gender divide? Or talking about gender?

AP: I should make it clear right away that the stakes here are very different. Given that fandom has been neglected for the most part by academics who have written on media in India, there is, at this point, little concern about who is writing about fandom. Having said that, I would like to point out that paying attention to the domain of music does create an opportunity to talk about gender and participatory culture.

So far, the spotlight has been on fan communities that meet at street corners, at teashops, or outside cinema halls. Participatory culture, then, has been circumscribed as that defined by working-class (often lower caste) male youth in visible, public spaces. Once again, turning our attention to film music presents a way forward. For both commercial and cultural-political reasons, every new medium - radio, state-owned television, satellite television (MTV-India, STAR, etc.) - has drawn on film music and developed innovative programs. These film music-based radio and television programs have had a large fan following, and women's participation in these sites has been very prominent and visible. I would argue that examining these sites of participatory culture is critical for opening up the discussion on gender and fandom surrounding Indian cinema.

NB: Pop music fandom is so blatantly gendered it barely seems worth laying out just how. Short version: girl fans want to sleep with the bands, boys want to be them. (I wrote a longer piece about this here.)

It seems like gender is being taken in a couple of ways in the discussions in this series thus far. First is a question of authority in the academy -- those studying 'female' ways of doing fandom feeling excluded by more 'masculine' scholars. This is something I just don't identify with at all, and I suspect there are several reasons. One is that I align myself with interpersonal and online communication as my primary research foci, and see fandom as an important and neglected context in which to explore them. The study of personal communication and relationships is gendered female to begin with, so perhaps my internet-based approach is considered techie and therefore gendered more masculine than the norm. I do feel some frustration at the failure of fandom research to adequately address the interpersonal relationships I think are at the core of fandom. Perhaps that is inherently gendered since looking at the fan/fan relationship gets us back to the study of personal relationships which, as I said is gendered female. But in terms of academic authority, I've never felt that my focus on fandom or the way I approach fandom has lessened that.

Gender has also been brought into the question of how people engage texts -- to crudely oversimplify the discussion, girls explore nuance and boys create with a more business sensibility? The idea that an interest in the production/economy of fandom is masculine is again something I have trouble identifying with. I see many gender issues in how men and women engage music and with what consequences, but less in how they are conceptualized (though this gets back to the shortage of fandom research in music to begin with -- there's some, just nowhere close to that around TV). Sometimes I wonder if music fandom is itself so very sexist that anything we'd encounter in the academy seems negligible in contrast!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part One): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Who are we? Aswin Punathambekar: I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Dept of Communication Arts (media and cultural studies) and will be joining the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan this fall term. My research and teaching revolve around globalization, culture industries, and public culture in contemporary India and the South Asian diaspora. These interests were shaped very strongly by my own experiences as an immigrant, and my participation in online fan communities began back in 1999 when I arrived in Athens, Georgia for graduate studies. I made the transition from fan to aca-fan in the Comparative Media Studies program and needless to say, was shaped strongly by Henry's work. Over the next few years, I hope to carve out a space for the study of participatory culture within the larger field of scholarship on Bollywood and other domains of south asian media.

Nancy Baym: I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. I started studying fans when I became involved with the newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps in the early 1990s, a project that became my dissertation (I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1994) and which finally ended up as the book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. At KU, I teach courses about personal relationships, the internet, and qualitative methodologies. So far this decade, most of my published work has centered on the topics of online interactions in personal relationships and qualitative methodological issues in internet research (a book co-edited with Annette Markham on this topics is forthcoming from Sage Publications). Recently, though, I've turned my attention

back to online fandom, with my blog called, oddly enough, Online Fandom

(www.onlinefandom.com) and a just-published article about Swedish independent music fans

(http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/baym/index.html). I'm also just finishing up data collection for a study about 'friending' on Last.fm.

AP: I approach fan communities surrounding films and film music as a particularly compelling site for examining relationships among cinema, consumption, and citizenship in contemporary Indian public culture. And the specific group that I've been interested in is one that has cohered around a music director (A. R. Rahman) who composes music for Hindi-language Bollywood films, regional language films (Tamil and Telugu), diasporic films (e.g. Deepa Mehta's trilogy - Fire, Earth, and Water), and international projects like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams. This is an online fan community, and brings together hundreds of Rahman fans from around the world (www.arrahmanfans.com). While a majority of the participants are of Indian origin, a growing number of non-Indian fans have joined this group over the past few years (although they lurk for the most part).

Given the immense popularity of film stars in India and in a number of countries with large diasporic South Asian populations (Fiji, Guyana, U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.), and the large number of online and offline fan communities that have emerged around these stars, the question that comes up right away is: why do I choose to focus on a music director?

Raising this question leads me to a broader one: What new questions can we raise by shifting the focus away from films/TV shows/stars onto the realm of music?

NB: I like that your focus positions you as a bit of an outsider to what seems to be the dominant domain of contemporary fandom research, American and British television fans. I've done plenty of work about American TV fans in my 1990s analyses of soap opera fans on the internet, but have always come at fandom from the outside in that my interests are first and foremost about how people create the social structures that organize them into personal relationships and communities, and how they use the internet in these processes. So I would place myself within internet studies before fandom, and that brings with it some different assumptions and approaches.

Fandom is a fascinating context to look at these things, though, because fans are always at the leading edge of using the internet in creative ways, and because fandom is a site where interpersonal and mass communication merge, which is often one of the internet's defining qualities. Like you, my attention has turned in recent years to music fandom. I've been working on projects about the role of online fans in the export of Swedish independent music and also the nature of "friendship" in the "social music" site Last.fm. With a few exceptions, fan studies has little to say about music fandom and I'm not convinced it's the same beast (or menagerie) as other fandoms, so yeah, what new questions get raised by looking at music?

The Text

NB: One question is simply (or not) the nature of "the text." I find when I read much of current fandom studies, I have trouble making the connection between what they're talking about as 'text' with many of the phenomena that interest me. I wonder how well you think all that theory that's been built up around people engaging narrative fits music fandom? It's particularly interesting in your case since you are looking at music that is tied to a narrative in film.

AP: For more than a decade now, Indian cinema has served as a key site for academics to re-think and rework our understanding of narrative, spectatorship, and participatory culture. I certainly see my work as contributing to this larger body of work (for a good introduction, take a look at the opening essay by Bhrigupati Singh here [http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525.htm]). And you're right in pointing out that film music complicates the boundaries and definitions of a "text."

As is well known, songs have been an integral part of commercial films since the early 1930s when sound was introduced. While songs serve a variety of narrative functions within the film, it is critical to recognize that film songs have a well-defined circuit of production, circulation and consumption that is both tied to yet independent of the films themselves.

Film songs are released 3-4 months before a film hits the theatres, and are tied closely to publicity/marketing strategies. Clips of songs serve as teasers on numerous television channels, songs are played endlessly on FM radio, they are available on music websites such as musicindiaonline.com and raaga.com, and they are also circulated as cell phone ringtones. Songs circulate in the public realm long after the film itself does and song compilations (playback singer, music director, time period, actor/actress, etc.) sell exceedingly well. There are a large number of television programs around film music, and over the past decade, talent shows have become immensely popular (,em>Indian Idol, for e.g.).

The commercial value of film music has also meant that music directors and playback singers have occupied a key role in the industry from the very beginning. Film songs, then, are associated with music directors and playback singers just as much as with actors/actresses lip-synching on the screen (Neepa Majumdar uses the term "aural stardom" to argue that we need to think about ways to conceptualize stardom in the absence of glamour and the "invisibility" of playback singers).

All of these elements shape discussions in a site like the Rahman fan community. The "text," to put it simply, is never limited to a specific film or even to A. R. Rahman. Now, it is not enough to merely point out that the film song as a "text" is very different when compared to a film or a television show, or that the music director or playback singer is a different kind of "star." In the context of this discussion, perhaps the more relevant question is: in what ways do fan practices surrounding film music differ from those that cohere around, say, a film star? And for me, this involves challenging the dominant narrative of fan-politics in the Indian context.

Fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because of its explicitly political nature. In south India, male film stars mobilize their fan base to organize electoral campaigns and run for political office. Fan clubs are, quite often, grassroots political organizations (and almost entirely a male space). Online spaces like the Rahman fan community have been ignored for no reason other than their seemingly non-political nature. Focusing on music, then, opens up an opportunity to develop other stories of fan culture (more on this later in the discussion).

NB: I guess one piece of my answer would be that the three minute pop song as "text" challenges many of the notions ingrained in fandom study. What does it mean to fill in the blanks of a text that tells no story to begin with or - in contrast to film scores - has no connections to stories? There are concepts ("neutrosemy" seems to be an important one), that kind of get there, but I'm not sure that treating meaning making as the core fandom process works as well for music fandom as it does for narrative fandom. It seems that music is in many cases a much more direct emotional experience than narrative.

Again, I find myself shifting away from the dominant focus of fan studies - how do fans engage texts as collectives - and toward what I think are much more central issues in music fandom: how do people use music as a means of constructing their own identities and connecting with others? These are not untouched issues in fan studies, but they seem to get marginalized by what I'd consider a more literary/cultural studies approach that foregrounds what they do and don't do in engaging the text itself.

Certainly some music fans concern themselves with lyrics, but for all the years I've been following music as part of various fandoms, I can probably count on one hand the number of discussions about what the words to a song mean that really went anywhere. In most of the fandoms I follow, lyrical discussion never gets past "and the words are clever" or "the lyrics stink, but the hooks are so good you can overlook it" or "I guess their drummer's suicide really influenced these lyrics." These just aren't rich discussion topics. There's much more discussion of extra-textual issues like recording dates and information, discography construction, concert chronology construction, arranging trades or torrents of concert recordings, and so on. Even when you look at a site that is specifically discussing the songs, such as Pop Songs 07 where every REM song is being blogged, the discussion is mostly about the personal experiences people associated with a song rather than what Michael Stipe meant in those words or what key the song is written in. To an extent, that's meaning making, of course, but it's quite different from what I saw with soap fans.

Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran an excerpt from Comparative Media Studies graduate student Peter Rauch's thesis about ethics, morality, and games. Today, I run a second selection which explores some of the ethical and moral questions raised by the game, Fable. Fable is the brain child of British game designer Peter Molyneux, who ranks as one of the best theorists working in the games industry today. I was lucky enough to be able to sit down for an extensive public conversation with Peter Molyneux at the Education Arcade conference several years ago. Highlights of that conversation recently appeared in the first issue of the new Harvard Interactive Media Review, alongside articles by such game scholars and critics, as Ted Castranova, James Paul Gee, Eric Zimmerman, and Alice J. Robison. It is nothing short of astonishing to listen to Molyneux talk about a game that is still in production. He has a deep respect for the potentials of the medium and an enormous ambition for what he hopes to accomplish in any given project. His conversations are conceptually sophisticated and always full of surprises and challenges which overturn our expectations about what games can and cannot do. Molyneux's descriptions of his games in production are provocations that force other game designers to take stock of what they are doing with their time all day. Unfortunately, his games are often better in theory than in practice. The hard realities of the industrial process and the need to ship product often results in the need to cut features and as a result, by the time Fable shipped, it didn't include many of the things which had generated the most excitement and speculation within the gamer community. I think we can learn a great deal by listening to Molyneux talk about what he wants to do with his games; we may learn as much or more by examining what happens to such a vision when it gets shoved through a studio mode of production.

Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics

by Peter Rauch

A third-person adventure game, Fable occupies a well-worn genre. Its claim to originality developed from its treatment of morality. Like Black & White, Fable received a great deal of press during its long development time, and also like Black & White, it was perceived by many players that the creators' ambitious promises were not realized in the final game design. In practice, Fable is an unremarkable adventure game, and while many actions do have moral consequences, these consequences are predominantly superficial. However, a great potential for moral argument remains inherent in the design.

Fable is a world to be explored, with an ethical framework to be discovered through play. The narrative involves human-like characters that can lie, coerce and kill each other. Some of the actions of these characters are categorized as "good" or "evil" according to the beliefs of the designers, and the player is relatively unrestricted in choosing to perform them. Finally, the player's actions are acknowledged by the rest of the world, however imperfectly, in the sense that NPCs respond to the player's past actions, as well as the avatar's appearance. Fable possesses all the raw materials to create a convincing, semi-realistic world that is intentionally biased toward a specific worldview--to argue the validity of a moral philosophy. That this possibility was not realized, or not sufficiently realized, or not meaningfully realized, does not alter the game's potential. As such, Fable seems an ideal place to start when conceptualizing games that make meaningful arguments about morality.

[...]

The player begins Fable as a (male) child in a small, fantasy-medieval village in the land of Albion. Childhood functions, rather appropriately, as a tutorial, introducing the player to most of the basic play mechanics, as well as the game's moral engine and social system On the day in which the game begins, it is the protagonist's sister's birthday, and he needs money to buy her a gift. His father, eager to cultivate noble habits in the boy, offers the protagonist a coin for every good deed he does. The player is then presented with several conflicts demanding his or her intervention: each allows the player to make right or wrong choices, and the player is explicitly told the morality of his or her choices by a change in the protagonist's "alignment." The player can engage in these conflicts in any order; I have numbered them here only for convenience.

In the first conflict, a little girl tells the protagonist that her teddy bear has been taken. Elsewhere in town, the protagonist finds a little boy being threatened by a bully. The little boy is in possession of the teddy bear in question. The bully, the player learns through dialogue, is the little girl's older brother, and wants the teddy bear so he can destroy it. (How the little boy came to be in possession of the teddy bear in the first place, in such a way that its owner was unaware, is never fully explained.) The bully offers to pay the protagonist one coin to get the teddy bear from the little boy. Here, the player has two initial options: he or she can beat up the bully, or pummel his victim. If the player chooses the former, the bully will begin whining with the first blow, and eventually run away. In this case, the little boy thanks the protagonist and gives him the teddy bear, which can then be returned to the little girl. Both assaulting the bully and returning the bear to its owner are considered "good," and have a positive effect on the avatar's alignment. If the player chooses to assault the little boy instead, the boy will complain about this injustice and give the player the teddy bear in an attempt to stop the violence directed at him. At this point, the player faces another choice: to give the teddy bear to the bully, receiving a coin as reward, or take the teddy bear to the little girl, performing a good deed for which the protagonist's father with also pay him one coin. Attacking the boy is a "bad" action, as is giving the teddy bear to the bully--each gives the player two "evil" alignment points. Returning the bear to its owner is a "good" action, worth two "good" alignment points. Consequently, a player who hits the little boy and then returns the teddy bear to its owner will end up with the good and bad actions cancelling each other out, numerically, although the player can get an additional two "good" points by attacking the bully after the fact. No matter which course of actions the player chooses, the protagonist will end up with one coin.

In the second conflict, a woman complains of her philandering husband, and asks the protagonist to find out where he is and what he's doing. Sure enough, the player finds the man engaged in an amorous embrace with another woman--upon discovery, he offers the protagonist a coin to keep quiet. (The game warns the player that rumors travel fast in the village, and people will know he took the bribe.) If the player takes the bribe, he or she receives two "evil" points and gets the coin, although he or she can balance those points out by breaking his promise to the adulterous husband and telling his wife the truth. From a monetary perspective, this is the ideal solution, since the player gains two coins, one from the husband and one from the protagonist's father for doing a good deed.

In the third conflict, a merchant asks the protagonist to watch his barrels while he runs an errand in town. Some local boys urge the protagonist to break them and see what's inside. Honoring the merchant's wishes gets the player two "good" alignment points and a coin from the protagonist's father, while smashing all the barrels earns the player two "evil" alignment points and a coin from inside one of the barrels. Curiously, if the player can break all the barrels and get back to where the protagonist was supposed to be standing guard before the merchant returns, the merchant will thank him for watching the merchandise, and the player will receive two "good" alignment points and a coin from the protagonist's father, despite having broken his promise. Again, the "neutral" path, i.e. performing both good and evil deeds with no apparent logic connecting them, presents the fastest way to earn money, buy a gift for the protagonist's sister, and advance in the game.

At first glance, it would seem that these examples do not lend themselves to moral subtlety. Even in "real life," morality is taught to children first in broad strokes, and the morality of many fantasy worlds is similarly rendered in black-and-white. It makes perfect sense, from a design perspective, to deal with morality on a very simple level in the tutorial and flesh it out as the game continues. However, the Fable tutorial fails to accomplish even this, because of a poorly thought-out reward system that severely limits players' choice of action and defines morality in terms of discrete actions, regardless of motive or intent. In the conflict involving the teddy bear, no non-violent options exist: the player cannot attempt to reason with the bully or threaten him verbally. While it can be argued that some conflicts can only be solved through the judicious application of violence--Fable is an adventure game, after all, and much of the game is spent killing--few would argue that this is necessarily the case for conflicts involving children, and that beating up the bully is the best moral option available to the player. In addition, the "evil" alignment points given to the player for hitting the little boy can be cancelled out by attacking the bully, even though there is no logical reason to do so. Therefore, in Fable, random, illogical violence for the sake of violence is perceived as morally superior to violence as a means to an immoral end. Similarly, it could be argued that taking the adulterous husband's bribe and then telling his wife anyway is, morally, the worst option, since it could be interpreted to represent an amoral pursuit of profit. Finally, that the player can break the merchant's barrels without him realizing it, and be rewarded for it, simply makes very little sense.

The problems presented here are twofold. First, it seems that Fable's designers put very little effort into deciding why given actions are right or wrong. Actions are decided to be moral or immoral, but few clear principles seem to have been defined to guide these decisions, and those that do are not consistently applied. Second, the game as it currently exists can respond to play actions, but not player intent. The importance of intent in morality is hotly debated of course, and intent is coded into Fable by the designers. However, the player has no role in deciding this intent. Like the protagonists of many adventure games, Fable's hero is presented as a tabula rasa, and the player never hears him speak (dialogue choices are generally presented as a simple "yes" or "no"). A character who cannot speak cannot easily articulate his intent, but this intent does nonetheless exist at a narrative level.

Peter Rauch is a graduate of the Florida Atlantic University Honors College,

holding a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a concentration in American

Studies. He has no major experiences, accomplishments or credentials, but is

nonetheless interested in politics, theology, and all manner of media texts,

from literature to videogames.

Rauch recently completed a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He is currently at work on a number of articles concerning the interplay of videogame texts and culture with philosophy, religion and politics. He lives in Cambridge with his partner Alana and cat Shazzer.

If you enjoyed this excerpt and would like to read more of Rauch's thesis, you can find it at the Comparative Media Studies site. We are in the process of making more of our thesis available online.

Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics (Part One)

Earlier this summer, I shared with my regular readers some selected passages from this year's Comparative Media Studies thesis. Today and tomorrow, I wanted to share another sample of the kind of work being produced by our students. Peter Rauch came to CMS with a strong background in Philosophy; what he wanted from our program was the chance to employ those tools to think deeply about games, trying to explore in what sense it was appropriate to think of games as ethical and moral practices. In this section from his thesis, he walks us through his core framework for thinking about the ethical and moral dimensions of games. Next time, I will share a passage where he deploys this conceptual model to think about the game, Fable. Enjoy! Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics

by Peter Rauch

Many dictionaries consider morals and ethics to be synonymous, but in common usage, at least in American English, the two words can have a variety of subtly different meanings. My definitions are provisional, and while they can be used in general discussion, they are specifically tailored to be applied to the interpretation of videogames.

I define ethics as a discourse concerning what is correct and what is incorrect. What is ethical is dependent on a specific activity, determined entirely by an explicit, constructed system of rules, and cannot be questioned by the participants. I define morals as a discourse concerning what is right and what is wrong. Morality, unlike ethics, is not tied to a specific activity, but can be applied over multiple activities, and possibly all experience. Moral rules enjoy considerably more variance than ethical rules: because they are wider in scope, they are more nuanced, and subject to interpretation.

Ethical frameworks, while they might attempt to model moral behavior--as in the examples of ethical codes for doctors or lawyers--need not have any connection to morality at all. In chess, that players should try to capture their opponents' pieces is an ethical rule, not a moral one. It has no relevance to the world outside chess. This rule is also not subject to interpretation or argument. It is simply, factually, true. A player that makes no effort to capture the opponent's pieces is not playing chess. The same cannot be said of moral rules like "love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus' formulation of the "golden rule," nor can it be said of "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law," Kant's categorical imperative. These rules concern the very act of being human, but one does not cease to be human if he or she rejects or violates them. They are much less specific than the rule concerning the capturing of pieces in chess, and open to many more interpretations.

Morals and ethics exist independently of each other, and while they must each be internally consistent, it is possible for the two to explicitly contradict one another. Law is an ethical system that is constantly revised to prevent such conflicts. Torture, for example, is illegal under international law. Assuming one accepts the existence of international law, the legality of torture is not open to debate. The morality of torture, however, is fundamentally unconnected to its legality. Torture is not less moral now than it was before the Geneva Convention. Conversely, it would not become more moral if the U.N. were to repudiate the Geneva Convention tomorrow.

Any game that has a "win condition" has an ethical framework. This applies to all games, not just videogames. First and foremost, these games are possessed of an overriding ethical imperative: win. If the game has a win condition, a player who does not try to win is not playing the game. As Johann Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, a player who does not try to win faces greater censure from society than a player who cheats in order to win (11). One interpretation of Huizinga's claim is that a player who cheats breaks only those rules concerning the means of play, whereas the player who throws the game violates the goals of play. The goal constitutes what players must do, while the rules offer only clarification on how the goal is to be accomplished--what actions are correct, and what actions are incorrect. A strategy or technique that helps a player win, while not explicitly violating any of the rules, is always ethical, in terms of the game in question. The ethical framework comprises both goal and means, and although the former is more fundamental to the game than the latter, they are both necessary for a game to function. The game's ethics, which determine how it should be played, are inextricably bound in the game's rules, which determine how it can be played.

I use the term "ethical" to denote imperatives that are dependent on the accepting of a role, as in the specific ethics of a given profession, and also in terms of play in general--playing a videogame ethically could be seen as the player's agreement to play the role allotted to her by the designers. Some degree of freedom is present, of course; were such freedom absent, it would not be play. However, just as an actor may be allowed to improvise, but must ultimately play his role to the author's conclusion, the player must play "in character" to play the game. If the player does not accept this role, she is not playing the game, but rather playing a game with a game.

This activity of "metaplay," in which the player designates goals unrelated or contrary to the game's internal ethics, has a wide variety of forms, some showing clear principles of ludus (adding or removing barriers to make the game easier or more difficult), others showing behaviors associated with paidia (exploration for its own sake), and still others being more difficult to determine (making machinima). Metaplay, at least in single-player games (where there are no social expectations of ethical play), is not "cheating" in the sense that the word is used in everyday speech. It simply means that the player in question is not, strictly speaking, playing the game.

In addition to the ethical frameworks inherent in any games, videogames can potentially add an unprecedented level of narrativity. This narrativity is achieved by mapping recognizable symbols onto the rule system. This mapping process allows for the suspension of disbelief necessary to involve the player emotionally in the gameworld.

The interaction of these symbols gives videogames the potential for rich narratives. However, if the narrative is not sufficiently integrated with the rule system, it will appear arbitrary, and fundamentally disconnected from the experience of play. This disconnect between narrative and rule systems is one of the central problems for the potential of videogames as a communicative medium, forcing a distinction between authorial narrative (the story written by the designers) and emergent narrative (the story enacted by the players). Even in the most non-linear games with the greatest potential for emergent narrative, the rule system and choice of symbols are selected by the designers, and as such the players' freedom of interpretation is inherently limited. In videogames, the author might be dead, as was famously suggested by Roland Barthes, but she is still the author, and she must not be confused with the reader. To make the transition from ethical imperatives to moral argument, the designers must fully embrace authorial status.

Narrative alone is not sufficient for morality, of course, since without a connection to the ethics, the gameplay and the narrative will operate independently of one another, as is often the case in games that rely extensively on cut-scenes. Moral imperatives can exist in a game only when the ethics can be interpreted and applied to the world in which the game is played, and this can only be achieved by connecting internal ethics to the external world through narrative. Most, if not all, of the game rules must be connected to recognizable symbols, and those symbols must have referents in reality.

Rules and a win condition are all that is necessary for an ethical framework, because ethics point inward to a specific activity. Conversely, because morality must gesture outward to the world at large, it cannot consist only of abstract symbols. For a game to have a moral framework, it must have an ethical framework, a narrative that can be connected in some way to what we speciously refer to as "real life," and a careful integration of the two. Specifically, the moral argument of the narrative must be connected to the win condition. It might be necessary, in making distinctions between what is right and what is expedient, to develop some new ideas as to what constitutes "winning." This will require a somewhat nuanced perspective on the avatar.

The avatar, in most games, is more than an extension of the player into the gameworld. Rather, the avatar is simultaneously an extension of the player and a different character that is not the player. I refer to this different character as the protagonist. Since the protagonist has only diegetic information, his motivation for interaction in the world must be entirely diegetic. The player, who has access to the game's non-diegetic information, will have additional goals, often involving tasks with no narrative meaning such as scoring points or unlocking content. Narratives, even videogame narratives, have a logic of their own, and even when the narrative fails to emotionally invest the player in the story, it can usually be assumed that the protagonist is quite involved. The narrative, even when viewed by players as epiphenomenal, is the entirety of the protagonist's reality.

[...]

1This term is not synonymous with "metagame," the term Henry Jenkins uses to describe the social context in which games are played ("Effects and Meanings" 214 )

Peter Rauch is a graduate of the Florida Atlantic University Honors College,

holding a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a concentration in American

Studies. He has no major experiences, accomplishments or credentials, but is

nonetheless interested in politics, theology, and all manner of media texts,

from literature to videogames.

Rauch recently completed a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He is currently at work on a number of articles concerning the interplay of videogame texts and culture with philosophy, religion and politics. He lives in Cambridge with his partner Alana and cat Shazzer.

If you enjoyed this excerpt and would like to read more of Rauch's thesis, you can find it at the Comparative Media Studies website. We are in the process of making more of our thesis available online.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Ten, Part Two): Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson

"Bardies and Bachmaniacs" Fans vs. Elitist Bastards

JG: Roberta's chapter in Fandom is in our "high culture fandom" section, and is a polemic calling for more studies of "middlebrow" and "highbrow" fans. This was a section that I really wanted in the book, since I think that fan studies could really get a lot out of studying a broader range of fandoms. So we'll kick off this second part by discussing why we think it's time to go looking for such fandoms.

My first two degrees were in English and Postcolonial Lit, but when I moved into media and cultural studies, I was somewhat shocked to see that the field had apparently negotiated a binding divorce settlement with English Lit. English took the Lit, and media and cultural studies took audience studies, and a court had clearly enforced the lack of visitation rights quite firmly. I wonder though why we can't do more to examine the audiences, and in particular, the fans, of Lit. To run with my divorce analogy, it's as if I've now grown up with media and cultural studies, but would like to know a bit more about my birth father (I'll gender Lit male since high culture is often seen as the more proper and masculine, and popular culture as peripheral and feminine). This springs from no animosity to my mother - I love television - but I don't know why I need to choose between them. Why is it, do you think, Roberta, that the move to popular culture has often by nature enforced a separation from Lit, classical music, opera, and other elements of supposed "high culture"? We've used this conversation to discuss boundaries around fandom, and this one seems to me one of the big barriers, yet one that has limited how we think of fans, and of how popular culture works in general.

RP: Now there's a huge question. You and I have a Polonius-like tendency to ramble on a bit so as Hamlet's dad says (speaking of birth fathers) 'brief let me be.' I think there are two reasons for the divorce between lit crit and its high culture siblings, one ideological and the other structural. As with fan studies, cultural studies started as a polemic, an attack on all things high culture that were seen as complicit with dominant hegemony. Now even to suggest that high culture might be worthy of study is seen as treasonous. This, coupled with the weakening of high culture as the central repository of a culture's identity and knowledge, means that fewer scholars are ever exposed to high culture, but are saturated with the popular. I think today's young scholars simply feel uncomfortable studying high culture because then they'd have to consume it and they don't have either the intertextual frame or the proper register in which to do so. It would mean attending a concert where you weren't supposed to get to your feet, hold a lighter aloft and rock gently to the music.

This is of course a bit of a polemic itself, but you get the point. What really bothers me though, is how short sighted this is. We know full well that you can't study 'blackness' without studying 'whiteness' or 'femininity' without 'masculinity.' You have to interrogate the dominant that structures the subordinate. While high culture is no longer dominant it's still a structuring force in a marketplace that increasingly blurs the lines between high and low culture in terms of production and marketing, or at least that uses the same tactics of marketing with the one as with the other. There are lots of potentially fascinating case studies out there, such as Britain's Classic FM, or classical radio lite as opposed to the more traditional BBC Radio Three (which has itself just gone through another redraft to make it more 'accessible'). I get into cabs where the drivers are listening to Classic FM and always attempt to strike up a conversation about why. Then there's the weirdness of the traditional Last Night of the Proms in which classical music (and some not so classical) gets appropriated in an orgiastic nationalist frenzy. And of course Shakespeare's all over the place, something that the lit crit types are indeed writing about. But I think that many cultural studies scholars, among them the fan studies set, would prefer to cling to their stereotypes of high culture consumers as remote and elite because it makes life easier.

Unitary Fandoms vs. Multi-Fandoms

RP: You ask why you have to chose between the high and the low. Of course you don't and I suspect that many other people don't as well. Most people undoubtedly range across media and cultural forms, intense fans of some and casual consumers of others. I'd like to see fan studies address the issue of multiple or serial consumption, if you will.

JG: Yes, perhaps this lack of discussion of multiple or serial consumption has also helped keep high culture fandoms "under wraps." If I accounted for all of my fandoms, I'd have to get to some Lit, art, classical music, etc. sooner or later, and I suspect many of us would. Heck, somewhere down the road, this may even be a good way to ensure that Lit and so forth still are engaged with by "those young people today." Both in the academy and outside, fandoms often demand corresponding anti-fandoms (I'm glossing Vivi Theodoropoulou here, by the way), as is most evident in sports fandom: you could never really be a fan of both Arsenal and Man U, the Yankees and the Red Sox, etc., right? But why not? Of course, sports teams actually compete, but how about Star Wars fans who are asked to dislike Trek, or Pullman fans who feel the need to establish his "excellence" on the back of J.K. Rowling's "mediocrity"? And this goes for media more generally, since being a fan of television, for instance, is often assumed to require a suspicion of, if not outright anti-fandom of, Literature and other high culture. We're asked to pick our team, so to speak. However, if bridges and continuums between fandoms were established, this may be more possible, less problematic. Hard methodologically, but a worthy goal. (Matt Hills has a neat piece on "cyclical fandom," though, in American Behavioral Scientist, and I'm sure others have done some work on this too?)

And, of course, Girls vs. Boys

JG: To return to gender, there are some fascinating questions to be asked of high cultural fandoms, seeing that high cultural genres like Lit, Art, and classical music have historically been considerably more male-dominated than the still very male-dominated fields of popular culture. So we've seen, for instance, how female fans co-opt or read around romance, soap opera, science fiction, or teen dramas, but how does this happen when the object of fandom is Milton, or Wagner, or Brueghel? And so on.

RP: You're absolutely right about 'team picking', athough Pullman is simply better than Rowling and there's no question to me of Star Trek's superiority to Star Wars. I'm being a bit facetious here, but one of the reasons I dislike Star Wars so much, as well as Bored of the Rings, for that matter, is because I see them as very masculinist. All those endless battles and so few girls! And of course, Pullman's hero is a girl. So my choice of fandoms is gendered. And certainly my reading strategies in some of my other fandoms are gendered. I value the Holmes canon for the friendship between Holmes and Watson and read Patrick O'Brien for the friendship between Aubrey and Maturin, skipping all the technical naval stuff. Really interesting question, then, about gendered reading strategies around Milton, Wagner or Brueghel, maybe even a question that might inspire some within the fan studies community to look at high culture.

Not sure you're right, however, about high culture always being constructed as masculine. In American popular culture, I think high culture is often constructed as other, the realm of the female, the effeminate male, and even the evil foreigner. There are of course certain exceptions, like my beloved Captain Picard whose fondness for high culture makes him the consummate civilized European, but against him there are numerous suave, slightly sexually suspect males who revel in their art collections or listen to classical music. But of course popular culture too has been stigmatized as female. There are real complexities here that need to be explored, not only in terms of the contemporary but of the historical.

To wrap this up (for now), I think the central theme in our discussion has been about boundary blurring - between fans and academics, fans and producers, fans and non-fans, fans of high culture and fans of low culture and, getting back to the inspiration for this whole exercise, boys and girls. Personally I'm always more interested in blurred boundaries than in binary oppositions (despite having staked some claims above to one or the other sides of those boundaries). It would be great if these debates could set a new agenda for fan studies more sensitive to these blurrings.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Ten, Part One): Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson

PART ONE "Why We're Not 'Fans'"

JG: Roberta and I agreed to work together for this "Détente" since we're both in the peculiar position of being considered by many to be "in" fan studies, yet neither of us are really fans. Or, rather, we're not fans in the sense of the word as it is often used within fan studies, and so we thought it might be provocative to discuss why this is, and what sort of fans - if at all - we are. This discussion led to some testing of the boundaries of fan studies, and to discussion of some of its governing binaries.

Fans vs. Non-Fans

JG: To "out" myself, I've never written fanfic, I don't make fanvids or machinimaa, I have only posted on fansites a few times, I haven't been to a convention, I am not a member of any discernible fan group, I've told people that I would wear a proper Boba Fett costume if they got one for me, but otherwise I don't have fan-related clothing (save for a Simpsons tie bought for me by my parents), and I suck at most fan trivia games. As a kid, I played with Star Wars toys a lot, and was definitely a fan of Star Wars and The Muppet Show, but these days I don't conform to a common definition of "fan" within fan studies, since I'm not a member of a fan community per se. I don't have problems with those types of fandom ("some of my best friends are fans"), but that's just not me.

But I do have strong engagements with texts, and these fuel much of my more involved conversations with people, and a fair bit of my daily "thought time." So I want to call myself a fan. But I'm often made aware of a hard perimeter around "community-based" fandom that isn't so keen on letting the likes of me in. The problem is, though, that I don't just "like" Lost, Buffy, The Simpsons, The West Wing, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Michael Ondaatje, and William Shakespeare. I like other texts, like CSI, for instance, or Harry Potter: if they're there and I'm there, I'll bite. If I miss them, I don't mind. But mere affect or terms such as "follower" don't cut it for my fandoms. And some of my own work into audiences is driven by an interest in this big gap that often exists in ethnographic work between "audiences" (often pulled in at random, or the researcher's students) and "fans" in the community-based, "creative" sense that fan studies often dictates. Fan studies at times monopolizes both audience studies (in the media/cultural studies tradition, that is, not the alligator-clips-and-magic-dials sense) and affect, but that leaves a lot of us unrepresented. And we'll get to this in due time, but I'm not convinced that the "us" in that sentence is gendered.

RP: Since you've begun by 'outing' yourself as a non-fan, I should probably do the same. I suspect that on the fandom continuum I'm closer to being a fan than you are, but might not be considered as such by some within fan studies, who insist on community and production as paramount markers of the true fan. My longest standing fandom is Sherlock Holmes, which began when I was in early adolescence, peaked when I lived in New York City and became actively involved in local Sherlockian scion societies, and lapsed when I moved to my first job in Pennsylvania. When I moved to New York to do my doctorate at NYU, I became a member of the national female Sherlockian society, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. I'm still in touch with a core group of Sherlockians whom I count amongst my closest and dearest friends - my life would be immeasurably poorer without them. I was probably then a 'real' fan by any definition: I attended meetings, wore my scion badge and even wrote Sherlockian scholarship and pastiches (fanfic to the rest of you). I've even been published in the premiere Sherlockian publication, the Baker Street Journal, in an article that claimed that Holmes was Jewish. I delighted in the companionship of fellow enthusiasts but even then felt a bit uneasy about some of the over-enthusiasts. For whatever reason, however, I ceased any active affiliation with local groups after leaving New York.

Of course, I'm also by some definitions a Star Trek fan. I've been watching the show since TOS premiered in 1966 and it's been a constant thread in my life both in terms of consumption of texts and of my social life - many of my closest friends share an interest in Trek. One of these close friends is Maire Messenger-Davies with whom I'm now co-authoring my Star Trek book. Maire adamantly resists being called a fan and to some extent I share her reservations because I'm doing research on Trek within an academic context which I see as somewhat different from doing research as a fan (and I know there's a whole long debate there that we don't have time to get into). My resistance to the fan label probably stems from the fact that Trek is both the most high-profile and the most demonized of all fandoms, and it's still difficult in some circles to have academic credibility if you're working on it. I've been teased by numerous colleagues about this research.

In terms of outing, I have to admit that I don't really feel comfortable with the 'aca-fan' designation; it seems a too easy conflation of separate spheres of activity designed to get us off the guilt hook. At any rate, while for awhile I happily attended Sherlockian gatherings, I never went to Trek cons or to any SF cons. But, having started on the Trek book, I did go to an SF con in Cardiff. It was there that I saw for the first time grown-ups dressed in Starfleet uniforms, which made me quite uneasy. The next time I saw grown-ups in these uniforms was when I spent a few days wandering around the Paramount lot doing interviews and had the privilege of spending a night on the set of Star Trek: Nemesis. Didn't have a problem with that (other than discovering that the comm badges just velcro on and that Captain Picard's phaser is plastic), but that's probably because I'm personally more interested in producers than in fans. Having read the previous entries in the debate, that interest in producers seems to be one of the complaints of the 'fan-girl' contingent, who see it as a betrayal. That might be an issue we could take up. If I wanted to be polemical about it, I might say that it's a lot easier to study fans than it is to study producers, and that the focus on fandom has kept the field from really interrogating the processes of production, in the way that Henry and others are now beginning to. Obviously however, these areas aren't mutually exclusive.

Aca-Fans vs. Non-Aca-Fans

RP: Like you, I'd consider myself a fan of lots of things; some sport, some television, and lots of high culture - Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, etc. My most staunchly non-fan friend, William Uricchio, Henry's MIT colleague and staunch non-fan, thinks I'm a real fan. I have a 'fannish' disposition, he says, by which he means that I have a strong and continuing affective relationship to lots of stuff. So here I am betwixt and between - non-fan to fans and fan to non-fans. I don't think that anybody within the fan studies community would want to study me. That's fine because I don't like being studied - that's why I resist the conflation of academic and fan because it gives up the distance that academic implies. Perhaps we should call my part of this dialogue 'confessions of a non-aca-fan'. My position may be offensive to some but it certainly raises issues of the psychology of the individual (as Jeeves would say) which should perhaps be of greater import in fan studies.

This takes us back to where you started, Jonathan, raising definitions of fandom. My above reflections are all quite personal, but between us we can offer two 'auto-ethnographies' which are in some ways very similar and in others quite different -- a useful starting point for our interrogation. For example, you told me on the phone that you've never gotten any stick for researching The Simpsons. Why do think this is the case? What does this reflect about the 'mundane' world's perception of fandom, particularly amongst academics? And why don't you call yourself a Simpsons fan? And if you would call yourself one, how do you handle being a fan and a scholar? Are you an 'aca-fan'?

JG: I'd say, yes I'm a Simpsons fan, and yes I'm an aca-fan ... and as with you, the non-fans out there call me a fan too. And the aca-fan label in particular intrigues me because I'm part of a generation that grew up saturated in media, and while many of media studies' founders didn't watch much television or film [announcement: Roberta is blissfully not one of these people], writing books about things that in effect they didn't know enough about, I think that we need to insist on the acceptability of studying the mediasphere from inside, in part to normalize affective relationships. Someone very close to Neil Postman told me that he secretly loved some television (The Simpsons), and you can see occasional lapses in others' media-hating that are presented guiltily, and I'd like us to be able to move beyond the guilt into honesty.

That said, maybe if I'm not allowed to be a fan, I can't be an aca-fan either?

As for studying The Simpsons, I found it amusing how it was the exception for so many academics. But I'm also somewhat bothered by how it got let off the hook - yes, it's great stuff, but why should it and The Daily Show be the only fandoms to get a pass? (And let me interject that I'm not at all convinced that this is gendered: there are many many female fans of The Simpsons. Lisa is, after all, one of the best female characters in television history). I'm sure its non-serial structure allows many to see its fandom as less stereotypically "lost in the other world," and Simpsons fan groups are quite different in kind from other fan groups, given its non-seriality. Again, I doubt they'd be considered real fans by some in fan studies. But this points again (to me) to the exclusivity of the term "fan": I worry that we in media studies, and certainly society as a whole, aren't getting a full picture of what either fandom is or what it means to engage with television when Trek, Lost, and All My Children fans become metonymic of fandom as a whole. Of course, though, you've studied Star Trek (and Batman), so I'm interested in how you see the aca-fan/fan/non-fan rubric play out from that side of the barbed wire fencing.

RP: I absolutely agree with you about studying media from the inside and share your distaste for the Neil Postmans of this world. There's a whole American tradition of studying media, primarily television, in which you have to hate it to analyse it. That's the basic assumption of the very influential field of cultivation studies in mass comm., spearheaded by the very important, but ultimately unsatisfactory work of George Gerbner. The basic assumption of this approach is that television is bad for you - makes you stupid, makes you fearful. That's why the pioneering work of the first generation of fan studies, by people like Henry, is so important. It made it okay to like media content, and even to champion it. As many have subsequently pointed out, this polemical approach became a bit too celebratory and the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. But we can't gainsay the accomplishments here. Nor can we so easily dismiss the concept of the 'aca-fan' as I am guilty of doing above. But my uneasiness stems from some lingering attachment to the concept of objectivity - is it possible to step far enough away from the object of study to be critical as well as analytical? You mention Batman above. I felt capable of studying this object because, aside from some nostalgia for my misspent youth, I no longer had a strong affective relationship with it. Star Trek is different, since it has been an important part of my identity for so long and I still worry that my book will end up as a paean to the industry.

Fans vs. Producers

RP: Speaking of the industry, I must admit that I have some sympathy for producers who are a bit dismissive of fans as a small segment of the audience. Many of the Star Trek producers I interviewed said that they couldn't cater simply to the fans, but had to think about the larger audience. Those who were fans even said that sometimes, for this reason, their own fandom could get in the way of what they were doing. And this takes us back to your original point about the definition of fandom and what we're actually studying. I again absolutely agree with you that we need to broaden our focus to include something other than hardcore fans as defined by hardcore fan studies. For this reason, my Star Trek book will have a chapter on audiences but not a chapter on fans (and not only because the world hardly needs any more about that particular fandom!).

JG: To me, an exciting development in recent fan and non-fan studies is the interest in fan relations with producers, since it holds the potential to break both the exclusivity of fandom as singular sphere, and the exclusivity of production as singular sphere. Kristina Busse has expressed concern about this shift, worried that the "fanboys" are getting excited about meeting the stars and producers, so to speak, and leaving the "scribbling women" once more in the margins. This certainly is a potential problem. But perhaps we might also see how fandom and production are much more closely wed. For instance, authorship has long been idealized as starkly new and original expression, when in fact it always begins with some form of fandom. If we could see television creators, for instance, as fans, this would wed production and consumption more convincingly. And if we could see how production requires fandom, at multiple levels (I think here of Terry O'Quinn actively posting on The Fuselage until he needed time away to work out his own idea of his character, an obvious sign that the fans were influencing his construction of John Locke), then fandom can't be ignored or shunned as much as it continues to be, both inside the academy and outside.

My own vision for fan studies is that it should invade mainstream media studies, exploding silly myths about production, text, and policy as being divorced from affect. Aswin Punathambekar's chapter in our collection, for instance, makes a great argument that Bollywood studies need to account for fans. Production cultures also need to account for fans, as Derek Kompare's recent work is saying. And so do legalities, as Rebecca Tushnet's work argues. I think some are wary of moving fan studies into the center since they're invested in fan studies being a cool kid's club on the side (and hey, we are the cool kids, right?), and they're (rightfully) concerned about who and what will be left behind, but at least a vanguard needs to be sent, since ultimately this is about more than just fans: it's about media studies as a whole. The field needs a broad, not exclusive fan studies, so let's give it one. To reintroduce gender to the discussion, if fan studies has always been seen as somewhat feminine and feminized, that's all the more reason why we need to establish more of a beachhead in the often painfully masculine and masculinized field of media and communication studies.

RP: You're right that fandom and production are closely wed, just as to some degree fandom and academia are closely wed (after all what are Shakespeare scholars but Bardies?). But closely wed doesn't mean co-extensive. They still remain different fields of cultural production. Moving from one side of the screen to the other necessarily gives the Brannon Braga's and Russell T. Davies's of the world a different perspective. They can't just indulge their fannish impulses but have to think about the larger audiences of non-fans, followers, enthusiasts, what have you. Both these guys had to recharge long-standing franchises and to do so they necessarily had to appeal to the core fan base through references that newbies wouldn't get. But they also had to attract the newbies and they couldn't do this by disappearing up their own metaverses. Braga failed miserably with Enterprise and Davies succeeded magnificently - he's made Dr. Who mandatory tea-time viewing for a whole new generation that previously didn't know Gallifrey from gadfly. Another danger of overly blurring these fields of cultural production is that the producers still ultimately have the power. O'Quinn can decide not to read fan posts precisely because he, together with the writers and the other production personnel, is given the final responsibility for deciding how to characterize/play John Locke.

That's why it's so important to study production, because without producers there would be no fans. But this does raise the issue of the starstruck fanboy, or perhaps fangirl in my case, even though I'd resist the label. I have to admit that for a life-long Star Trek fan wandering around the Paramount lot and seeing people in Starfleet uniforms was simply amazing and that Maire and I did spend a bit of time behaving like giggling teenagers. On the other hand, we had extensively prepared for each of our interviews and when the time came tried to behave like professional academics, if only out of respect for the very professional production personnel whom we were meeting. We also made it clear that, while we liked, even loved Trek, we weren't intending to write an uncritical celebration. So I guess I'm saying that it is indeed possible to be both fan and academic. You can have a hybrid identity that involves shifting between the two but you can't perform both simultaneously. Not sure whether being a boy or a girl makes any difference here.

You say that we need to establish a fan studies beachhead on the masculinised field of media and communications studies, but of course these guys have always studied audiences (cf. Gerbner above). If I can use another spatial metaphor, I think we need to establish a two way bridge between the two fields. Media and communications studies needs to acknowledge the important contributions of fan studies, particularly with regard to affect (and with regard to their own affect toward media texts). But fan studies needs to consider more general audiences. And this brings us back to where we started, seeking a broader definition of fan and fan studies. So over to you!

JG: This seems like a good place to end Part One, actually (though I'd mention quickly that Gerbner wasn't studying fans - he was pathologizing them). In Part Two, we can talk about high culture.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Nine, Part Two): Derek Kompare and Cynthia Walker

Fandom Meets The Powers That Be CW: You make a couple of interesting points, Derek, some of which I've been pondering myself. The first is the need to get away from the idea of a rigid binary. TPTB have never been a single entity. We know there are conflicts between the producers and the various levels of the big corporations that distribute their work. Indeed, that's how all of this began. Roddenberry needed allies against Paramount and enlisted SF fans for support. He wasn't the first producer to make that effort (a similar alliance occurred in MFU) nor certainly the last. You mention Joss Whedon who has "fannish" credentials and attitudes. I'm sure most Buffy fans will remember when, in the wake of Columbine, the WB network delayed the airing of an episode involving a would-be student sniper in the U.S. In response, Whedon famously recommended that Canadian fans "bootleg the puppy."

Other producers (Chris Carter and J. Michael Straczynski and yes, Ron Moore, come to mind) have also represented themselves as underdog producers battling the "suits." Personally, I find these alliances between various creative professionals and the fans (which can be complicated and angst-ridden for all parties involved) quite fascinating and, with the internet, more and more common. I used to feel encouraged by them. Lately, though, I've become more pessimistic.

DK: I'm more ambivalent and skeptical than pessimistic, I suppose. My default position is that TPTB will probably screw things up (to wit, Star Trek), so ambivalence must be an improvement, right? This is a rapidly changing media environment, after all, so there's much here that is legitimately "new," particularly as far as the networks and distributors are concerned. I was encouraged by the deals worked out for Battlestar Galactica and Lost, for example, which essentially protect each series from future exploitation by networks/studios, but still leave doors open for fannish creativity. Still, it's a very open question as to whether that creativity will be constrained under various rules and (God forbid) EULAs, or just left alone.

CW: Marketing is certainly a factor now that TPTB have realized that fandom can be utilized for viral marketing efforts. I don't think fans mind all that much being used to promote their favorite source texts. Heck, we ourselves proudly admit to "pimping." The real issues are power and control. Producers and marketers are accustomed to seeking control over audiences or, at least, being able to predict their behavior. By comparison, fandom must seem very scary in its diversity and unpredictability. Although one can probably argue that there are some similarities between fandom and Hollywood in that they are relatively small, highly networked communities, ultimately, they don't operate in quite the same way.

The incursion of Hollywood into fandom reminds me of the European explorers encountering the indigenous population in the New World for the first time. We're talking about a clash of civilizations here with very different economies and value systems. We might get past the first exchanges of beads for land use, but eventually, inevitably, there are going to be serious tensions as interests conflict.

Linking this to gender, my experience is that, in general, male fans have been much more open ---even welcoming ---to these incursions into Media Fandom than (again, in general) female fans. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I have some theories. Prime among them is that the kinds of activities that guy fans are involved with --- collecting memorabilia, assembling non-fiction information websites --- are more likely to be approved by TPTB than some of the activities, like writing fan fiction, that are dominated by women. Also, at least in my experience, I find my guy fan friends are much more competitive with each other in vying for the attention of TPTB, are more likely to have connections to the professional and/or Hollywood communities, and seem to have a stronger desire to see their passion for the source text legitimized.

For example, because of my dissertation work and my professional ties to Norman Felton (we've both been involved in promoting media literacy), I'm often one of the folks that TBTB will seek out when they're looking for a representative of MFU fandom. There are other fans who fill this role as well, but they are nearly all male. I'm often the lone female voice, which is odd considering that our fandom is mostly run by women fans and is majority female.

Fanboys/Fan Girls Revisited

DK: I think you're right about the broad differences of gender within and between fandoms. Lots of quantitative and qualitative work (including yours) has pretty much borne this out, after all. Still, there will always be exceptions, in almost every fandom. Unfortunately, my experiences (and those of my fan friends) inside and outside fandom have shown how gender is often policed from within. "Fanboys" at comic cons alienate female fans by drooling after scantily clad cosplayers, or mounting loud, pedantic arguments about canon. "Fangirls" at fic cons alienate male fans by talking in code or banning them from slashvid rooms (as one of my female fan friends reported witnessing at MediaWest

back in the 90s).

Here's where, I hope, the emergence of female writers and writer-producers in the industry might help change things. Not in an essentialist sense, but in a sense of maybe projecting a kind of "fangirlness" (or at least not presenting "fanboyness") as a distinct, viable category for broader dissemination. We have a few prominent women writers on key popular and cult shows as it is (e.g., Jane Espenson, Carol Mendelsohn, Marni Noxon, Shonda Rhimes, Amy Sherman-Palladino), but they're very much the minority in Hollywood (and every other TV-producing community in the world, for that matter, unfortunately). I don't think more women producers would necessarily change the fairly fundamental split between men and women over who wants access to TPTB, but it might at least present some other possibilities for engagement, within the source texts and in publicity.

CW: No, I don't either. I don't see evidence that women producers and writers are necessarily more open to engagement with fandom than male producers. Those who are most open to interactions with fans seem to be those who, regardless of gender, have some experience with and/or strong ties to the SF community. This makes sense since the SF community has a long history, dating back to the early 1930s, of pros and fans interacting together and even folks exchanging roles at various times. I understand something similar happens in the Romance community.

But getting back to the fanboy/fangirl dichotomy, I'd like to see us get past this binary as well, although I'm not sure we ever will entirely. Despite the fact that women and guys (in general) favor different fan activities and do appear to have different experiences, I think it's in their (our?) common interest to forge some sort of alliance. In the end, as fans/users/consumers/audiences, we're all in the same boat.

I made this point when the discussions in this forum touched on machinima, which struck me, despite its reliance on images rather than words, as a reworking activity very similar to writing fanfic. At the media conference I attended in New York in May, one of the machinima panelists explained to me how the gaming companies, which are relatively small, are really open to their players altering the games and offer open source code. I then asked him what would happen if the gamers created a message which was critical of the gaming company or which was contrary to what the company would really enjoy or approve. He admitted that this doesn't happen much. But one would expect that, inevitably, a machinima artist will come along who will create a more radical piece that's not something the gaming companies can approve or ignore. What happens then?

The conversation I had that day also made me wonder if male fans seem more content than women fans to 'color within the lines' because most popular culture is created by guys for guys and women have to alter it more severely for their own pleasure. Are women fans more radical in their approach or does it just appear that way?

For example, I notice that machinima features a lot of violence, shooting and blowing up stuff, which frankly, seemed to embarrass the panelists who felt a need to warn the audience about it. It seemed to me the equivalent to how we have to prepare mundane audiences to accept and understand the existence and use of sexuality (both in slash and het) in female-dominated fanfic. Of course, at least in American popular culture, violence is more acceptable than sex and how feature films are rated reflects this.

DK: I think you're absolutely right that particular media forms and genres have a kind of gendered existence not because there's anything intrinsically "male" about blowing stuff up, but because "blowing stuff up" has become a prominent signifier of a culturally promoted masculinity. When the economics of the gaming industry are factored in, as well as the design history of gaming software (i.e., variations on controlling visual space), and the culture of computer science education, it all favors particular codes and possibilities, and marginalizes others.

Still, does this make these men any less "creative"? I'm not sure. I keep thinking of those guys in Trek fandom in the 70s and 80s who would create these elaborate technical blueprints of Trek technology, some of which might never have actually been seen on-screen. Not my cup of tea, but pretty impressive nonetheless, and categorically not all that different from women writing fanfic. Now, once you get into the actual content of the creativity, and its relationships to the source texts and wider culture, then substantial differences emerge. But still, blueprints or fanfic or machinima or vidding are all creative acts inspired by particular sourcetexts and supported by fan communities.

A big question going forward is this: do we (as fans, or acafans) want to crash the gates? Do we want to affect change in the way media is conceived, produced, and distributed? Do we want our cultures and perspectives to be represented in the source texts themselves? Or would we rather keep them to ourselves, build our own communities, and keep them exclusive? Setting aside the issue of fear of the copyright police for a second, do we still want to maintain boundaries between fandom and the mainstream?

As you pointed out earlier, the gates are being crashed anyway, to an extent, by TPTB arriving on the shores of fandom, and producers (benevolently) shouting-out to the fans. Accordingly, as academics and fans, I think we need to keep picking at all of these categories, "men," "women," "fans," and "producers," and learn better to think in other terms as well (most notably class, race, generation, and culture). We can learn an awful lot from the histories of these categories and interactions (as our scholarly work has shown), but we should also attend carefully to their flux at this moment, and look for opportunities, such as the FanLib debate, or these great discussions, to build new identities and relationships and/or defend old ones.

CW: You said: "But still, blueprints or fanfic or machinima or vidding are all creative acts inspired by particular source texts and supported by fan communities." Yes, they are, and personally, I'd like to see folks stop privileging one over the other. Like you, a lot of my academic interest and work is in media studies and also in the related areas of media literacy and media ecology. I'm a big fan of Marshall McLuhan.

And one thing we understand in media studies is that each medium has its virtues and limitations. Film is different from television, and television is different from radio --- but not necessarily better. We choose a medium depending upon the message and the intended audience. One of the first exercises I assign my students is to talk about the class to three different audiences in three different ways. They can write a letter, send an email, text a message, make a phone call, have a face-to-face conversation, whatever --- and then report back. They are always amazed at how the choice of medium shapes, influences, enhances or limits the message. Some media, they discover, are more effective with some audiences than others.

I think it's the same with the creative activities of fandom. I don't think we can privilege creating machinima over fanfiction or the reverse. Posting episode guides, creating technical blueprints, putting together a fanvid or writing a story all have their place and contribute to the commonly shared culture of a fandom. Instead of dismissing activities which we don't understand or in which we don't participate, I'd like to see more cross-community and cross gender communication. After attending that machinima panel, I, myself, wanted to explore, if only as a viewer, that particular medium. I wanted to hear more from the machinima fans.

I'd like to see more guy fans pursue fanfiction, if not as writers at least as readers. And while slash may make some guys uncomfortable, well, those sexy figures based on comic book characters (remember the recent controversy over the depiction of Mary Jane washing Spidey's outfit?) make some of the women uncomfortable as well. Maybe, as academics, we can be bold enough to sit on panels together and explore what makes us uncomfortable, gender-wise, as well as what commonalities we share in our fan activities. I think more dialogue ---more open but respectful dialogue --- is a goal to pursue.

As far as your next bundle of questions --- ie: Do we want to affect change in the way media is conceived, produced, and distributed?... Or would we rather keep them to ourselves, build our own communities, and keep them exclusive? etc. ---those are tough questions and the answer may be different for each individual fan. Is it possible for fandom to do both? As far as maintaining boundaries, can we somehow interact but still keep a distance? (And am I being too greedy in wanting my cake and eating it too?)

Moving Forward

DK: I agree that dialogue in many varieties is necessary, and here I'd hope that people following this discussion would lead the way in doing this (fans, academics, and acafans). If men are uncertain about slash, maybe gen fic is a place to at least start. If women aren't so sure about Halo, maybe try the Final Fantasy series. The next time you assemble a panel for a conference, try to find a different perspective. Discomfort is part of the process, and can be interesting in itself.

I think greater visibility is important as well, even if it is a double-edged sword. I honestly had no idea that LiveJournal was a vibrant hive of fan activity until the MIT 5 conference in April, and I don't think it would have come on my radar without people like Kristina Busse pulling me in. If we're invited to something, or are at least made aware of it within our usual haunts (online or otherwise), then we're much more likely to check it out. That's how fandom works, after all!

As Matt Hills wrote, fans are fans of being fans, and migrate between passions and mediums. We all have interests that overlap with what we might consider our "primary" fan identities, but which stoke our passions in different ways. I don't mean moving from Stargate Atlantis to Smallville or from Amazing Spider-Man to Ultimate Spider-Man, but to gardening, or reggaeton, or college basketball, or whatever. Perhaps we could open up as we migrate, and connect these areas, rather than treat them as islands of engagement.

As for connecting fans and producers, that's going to be a trickier process, but one that's already happening in many different ways. Ideally, producers should be free to "walk the walk" of fandom, and not just declare themselves to be fans (Ron Moore's ecstatic and immediate blog post reaction to the Sopranos finale-his first blog post about anything, in months--was a rare instance of this). Realistically, though contracts and network lawyers will keep them on a leash, and carefully monitor any kind of potential or actual IP exchanges between fans and producers. There are some situations that shouldn't happen (producers really don't want to hear your episode pitch in a convention hallway), but there are others that should happen more often (gabbing at the hotel bar about how much you both love a completely different show that the producer never worked on). The latter, thankfully, goes on every year at the Gallifrey con in LA, and it sounds like it works that way in U.N.C.L.E fandom as well, from your description.

At our end, as fans and acafans, we'll just need to continue to monitor these interactions, critiquing as necessary, but also recognizing possible positive developments. I suppose my ideal situation would be that each "side," fans and producers, could still continue doing their own things without interruption or aggravation (neither side should be beholden to the other), but could still find some spaces for collaboration or at least sharing their texts and viewpoints.

CW: Well said. To sum up, I'd just like to reiterate four quick points we've sort of made already. One is, that in any one of these discussions and/or debates, the "sides" are not a simple dichotomy but multiple and complex, often between and among collective parties. The second is that these parties are composed of real people. For example, both TPTB and Fandom (with a capital F) are made up of individuals with varying perspectives and maybe that's where dialogues and relationships might begin ---between and among individuals who then network with others. Third, that perhaps we aca-fen might provide a bridge to further understanding and cultural negotiation, as critics do between professional artists and their audiences. And finally, this is a good moment in time to develop and advance the dialogue and to support initiatives like Net Neutrality, because the boundaries are becoming more permeable and the shape of the Internet environment is still in flux. Change will come whether we're ready for them or not. It's better to be ready.

Thanks for the conversation, Derek. I enjoyed it.

DK: Those four points are an excellent plan moving forward, and they can all happen now. I'd also emphasize your last point, about the future of the Internet. We (as in all of us) have common interests in maintaining and expanding the openness of this resource, so we need to monitor possible changes carefully, and be prepared to mobilize with others in order to preserve and improve it.

It's been a pleasure, Cynthia, and I look forward to continuing this discussion here and elsewhere.