Welcome to Idea Lab

Today, PBS and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced te launch of MediaShift Idea Lab Blog, a group blog featuring 36 wide-ranging innovators reinventing community news for the digital age. Each Idea Lab blogger won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The writers will use the Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the online community.

Here are some samples from the first round of posts on the blog:

From MTV's Ian V. Rowe:

More than any time in human history, young people have more tools at their avail to consume - and create - information on the issues that are most relevant to them. So to figure out exactly what MTV's approach would be to truly engage young people aged 18-30 during this Presidential election cycle in this new, Wild West era of self-publishing and self-organization, we first had to listen to what young people themselves said they wanted.

The results were simultaneously disheartening and hopeful, in the way only young people can express themselves about their future. The MTV/CBS News/New York Times Poll revealed that younger Americans have a bleak view about their own future and the direction the country is heading: 70 percent said the country was on the wrong track, while 48 percent said they feared that their generation would be worse off than their parents'. But the survey also found that this generation knows their power: 77 percent said they thought their votes would have a great bearing on who became the next president.

By any measure, the poll suggests that young Americans are anything but apathetic about the Presidential election. Fifty-eight percent said they were paying attention to the campaign. By contrast, at this point in the 2004 presidential campaign, only 35 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they were paying a lot or some attention to the campaign. And these projected 2008 numbers followed actual record youth voter turnout: In 2006, 10 million 18-29 year-olds voted than in 2002 midterms (2 MM+ increase - largest youth turnout in at least 20 years in congressional elections.)

So clearly young people are ready to participate because they know how important the stakes are. Elections are no longer an abstract concept. Whatever their position on the decisions of the current Administration over the last seven years, it has become crystal clear to young people that who is elected as President matters and has consequences.

From Dori J. Maynard (Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education):

First, the Jena 6 story lived on the Internet. Bloggers, many of them black, members of list serves such as the National Association of Black Journalists and members of social networks like Facebook, used the Internet to spread the story before it took off with mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR.

The fact that the "afro-sphere" has largely received credit for driving this story is important to keep in mind when we think about what is going on in cyberspace.

At a time when "the digital divide" is still code for "people-of-color-don't-have-access-or-know-

how-to-use-the-Internet," Jena 6 reminds us of the fallacy of that premise. African Americans used the web and alerted the world to what was going on in a small town and in a largely overlooked state.

True, there are still some significant hurdles for entry into a fully wired world. However, they are largely socio-economic. I once asked someone how many white homes in Appalachia have Internet access. Turned out not a lot. The digital divide is real. It's class, not race, that makes the difference.

The Jena 6 story also reminds us that while the Web may be a place where anyone with access and an idea can voice his or her opinion, it does not mean that every opinion gets the same amount of attention. Think of how quickly word spread about "Memo Gate" and how long it took the outside world to pay attention to Jena 6.

From Jay Rosen (New York University):

Not knowing what the model is, we go on. We go on with newspapers. We go on with Internet journalism, and the practice of reporting what happened. We go on with the ordeal of verification. We go on with the eyewitness account, and with the essential task of getting and talking about the news.

Reasons for my uncertainty about the newspaper in the combination we know it now were well stated recently by Doc Searls of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, who also writes about the Internet and keeps his own blog.

For metropolitian newspapers, whose problems I know best, it's not just the forced march to the Web and the decline in revenues from the printed product. It's not only that free content seems to be the standard online.

"The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work," Searls writes, "and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding -- or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it."

So (class) why does Searls say that the advertising model may be broken too? Isn't there advertising to be won on the Web? There is, and it is coming on. But underneath that something else is going on. "Harder to see..."

While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I'm not saying advertising isn't effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we've long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

The inefficencies that created modern advertising are themselves under pressure from the Internet. That is what Searls argues, and I think we need to consider it. "The holy grail for advertisers isn't advertising at all," he writes, "because it's not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it's the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It's also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers -- on customers' terms and not just on vendors' alone."

Searls thinks sellers and buyers can increasingly get into information alignment without advertising and its miserable kill ratios in the battle to break through the noise and reach the few who are actually in the market.

From Gail Robinson (Gothan Gazette):

The staff of Gotham Gazette is counting down to the day later this fall when our first online game goes up on our site. It's been an interesting process getting us this far.

First, of course, we needed a concept. In some respects, this was the easy part as brainstorming sessions over the summer produced literally dozens of ideas. We'd like to do them all -- and we will do some of them in the next two years -- but we decided to do the first one on garbage. What to do with tons and tons of garbage has long been a thorny issue in New York City, one that never seems quite resolved. It's something New Yorkers care a lot about and it provides policy options that can be clearly presented in a game format.

Our game will have two parts. In the first, players will be residents deciding how to sort their trash.Should it all just go in the garbage can (or, since this is New York, into a big black plastic bag). Or should some be recycled. Maybe you're willing to put your empty water bottle aside for recycling, but what about an apple core? And can you do anything with a soiled diaper?

Once the player sorts his/her trash, they move to the next portion and play policymaker. What would you do with the city's garbage. Send it to a city landfill,ship it acorss state lines, convert it to energy? And what about the recyclables?

At the end of the game, players will learn how much money they have spent, how much room they have taken up in a landfill and other costs. And they will send us their plans so we can convey their ideas to City Hall.

Now we just have to make this idea a reality -- a process we are in the thick of now. More on that in another posting.

These represent only four of the many voices represented on this new blog. Civic media and citizen journalism takes many different forms and the community of researchers which the Knight Foundation is assembling are tackling the issue of civic engagement from many different angles. What they have in common is a belief that we can deploy the affordances of new media in ways that strengthen bonds within geographically local communities.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part Two): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Mastery and Expertise DS: There are so many overlaps between film and game fandom Lori, which I sense both domains are subject to some of the same conceptualizations. In my own experience, it was the depth of the fandom that brought new knowledge to bear in the pre-internet days. I remember, in particular in games culture, how anecdote and fuzzily understood Japanese names would circulate among our group, as a form of ill defined knowledge, which nonetheless enabled us to evidence our commitment to the medium. At a time when US and European game adaptations would feature designers and developers in the end credits using arcade-style acronyms, such as 'Maki1000', I remember the particular case of Yuzo Koshiro, the musician behind the Streets of Rage Series (Burning Knuckle in Japan), and other Sega games throughout the early-to-mid nineties. Koshiro was distinct in that his name was featured on the attract screen of the arcade machines for the Streets of Rage games. Knowing the name of a particular person within a Japanese games production, and being able to associate it explicitly with good practice (the music was particularly good!) meant that, certainly within my own limited childhood experience, there was a palpable sense of connoisseurship and expertise that emerged from what today I objectify as fandom. The 'scars' of Americanization were no longer naturalized into the mediascape we had become accustomed to. Our commitment to complexity, with its associated passion for knowledge concerning origins, authenticities, modes of production, was profound, and manifested in ways exactly reminiscent of what you describe in the language play in women's HK film fandom.

There was a discernable sense of a 'private contract', much like what Anderson calls 'communities of the imaginary', at the point these unknown authors acquired names and faces. I felt a powerful sense of authority that came from the absolute ignorance of my parents, whose views of Japan and Asia still chimed with wartime anecdote and tragedy. We felt like a collective of codebreakers, learning languages, both Japanese and those of semiotic media literacies, in the course of resolving the burning questions that arose from games as subculture. I think that the contemporary relationship to authorship in videogames is still inflected by the revelations of the nineties.

As a teenager, the gender and transnational dimension emerged in the ambiguity surrounding Japanese names to provincial British kids like us. Is it a boy's name or a girl's? From that ambiguity rolled out other questions (certainly compounded by my own questions surrounding sexuality), as a young aspiring artist; for instance, do girls make/like these violent beat-'em-up games? And likewise, are there boys out there designing characters with the sexual charge and ambiguity like Prince Ali in the Sega roleplay game Beyond Oasis, imagining new paradigms of male beauty and power which stepped outside the hyper-masculine fantasies of the British and American teen culture I had been exposed to until that time?

LHM: What you write reminds me of what my partner says about his own mid/late '80s anime fandom. He's Japanese-American, and says that he had a particular (and peculiar!) credibility among American anime fans at the time because he 'looked' the part of a Japanese person AND had some cultural knowledge to impart as well. This emphasis on cultural specificity (in contrast to, say, authenticity) seems to be a contrary impulse to what Iwabuchi describes as "odorless" transnational popular culture; fans' knowledge of the originating culture may be incomplete and even wholly 'inauthentic', but - particularly within the fandom itself - it still holds considerable cultural capital.

This seems especially the case with Anglo-American interest in yaoi fan fiction; slash writers have moved into yaoi fiction and make a distinction between the two (one that I don't wholly understand, but which seems to be based at least in part on yaoi's emphasis on 'beautiful boys'), but this is as far as their appropriation of the Japanese practice goes. For many such writers, the term 'yaoi' seems to have taken on a life of its own, independent of its Japanese origins. We might ask if the same is true within other Asian (eg: Korean) yaoi-style works, given the very different role played by Japan, as a nation, within those contexts.

Indeed, this is one problem with the monolithic characterization of transnational media fandom that you describe above: if our conversations are confined to comparisons of "Western" and, in this case, "Japanese" media and fans (with each being described in terms of the other), we are left not only with a limited understanding of how media circulates and is used by such fans, but also with narrowly defined points of origin and destination.

Soft Power and Shallow Consumption

DS: I want to return to the specifics of the transnational relation in my fandom in academic terms, but first describe an anecdote from my teaching that certainly supports my ideas. At Newport we run Japanese lessons as part of our community-learning program, and every year a large cohort of undergraduate games design and animation students sign up, passionate about anime, games and Japanese popular culture in general. As an evening class, it doesn't compete with their core study, and the class is almost always three quarters constituted by my students, with the remainder members of the general public interested in learning a new language. After a number of sessions, the numbers start to drop off radically, most after the first. We are left with a committed core that will go on to finish the complimentary program (it is interesting to note that those who generally remain are young women). While there are numerous explanations, including their study workload, and the first year undergraduate experience in particular, I have often thought about the particular relationship between fan knowledge and fandom generally, which in many cases brought them to undergraduate studies in these areas, and the acquisition of orthodox knowledge (such as learning the language) in these areas.

It reminds me of suggestions Koichi Iwabuchi was making in the mid nineties about transnational multiculturalism, in the particular case of relations between 'Japan' - and its constructed 'Japaneseness' - and the 'West'. He frames the discussion in terms of Self and Other, and discusses the construction of Japaneseness both by the orientalizing rhetorics of the West, and Japan's self-orientalizing position in relation to its perceived 'others', in particular America and its Asian neighbours. He writes that the West from Japan's view had been '...discursively created in a quite systematic way...' and that most importantly, '...what had mattered was the ideas of the West that the Japanese had created for the purposes of self-definition. The real West was irrelevant.' Much of what I see in the contemporary fandom for Japanese games, film and anime chimes with Iwabuchi's suggestion, albeit from the inverse position. The pattern of their consumption and the scope of their connoisseurship have much more to do with their own identity politics than with any substantive enquiry into another culture. The new mobility and accessibility of Japanese popular culture provides new imaginary negotiations with archetypes of gender, class and power which are highly attractive to contemporary young people, insofar as they act as a means to configure selfhood, and as a source of information from which cultural capital can be drawn and parlayed between sympathetic peers. I think that sometimes this solipsism is written out of the account of transnational media fandom, the idea that something so global can have such domestic drivers.

LHM: I have to say, I'm very intrigued by the fact that the majority of remaining students in your language curriculum are women. When I was a Japanese language teacher back in the late 80s, the bulk of our students were men, drawn to Japanese language study by tall tales of all the money to be made in Japan's then-booming economy. The parallels between this shift from Japanese business to cultural attractiveness, and from male to female students, seems worthy of study in its own right!

I both agree and disagree with last point above; or, rather, I think it's something that's less an "either/or" than "both/and" situation. I agree with you that while we've moved away from early work on Western anime fans, in which they are characterized as almost wholly divorced from any awareness of, or interest in, Japan, we have yet to fully integrate our understandings of what the specific "domestic drivers" of transnational media fandom might be in the conversation. Are there aspects of specific transnational media that resonate with specific fandom practices in the target country (slash and yaoi again come to mind here)? Particularly in the case of such apparently different countries as, for example, Japan and the United States, the question of what exactly it is about anime texts (and its modes of production and distribution) that is so attractive to transnational fans is one that had yet to be fully interrogated.

Yet the word "substantive" is a sticking point for me, insofar as it seems to ask fans to justify their interest in non-native popular culture - something that we simply don't ask of fans of domestic media. Failing this, critics such as Iwabuchi tend to dismiss what transformative work the fandom might perform, and yet my own experience and that of the women I've interviewed suggests that, for at least some fans, this work does in fact occur. This would probably be your "committed core" of language students; they may not represent the mainstream of anime fans (and not all of them may even be fans), but that even a few take a very personal interest and parlay it into something that exceeds their fandom suggests that, at the very least, the question of what constitutes "substantive" interest in the cultures of other nations needs to be revisited.

DS: I think you are right in the sense those who go the distance are transformed by their engagement with the subject, though the degree to which this relates to their capacity as fans or as learners is a conversation in itself. To come back to your point about the play of language, in the Q&A session at a conference a few years ago I heard Western anime and game fandom being described as an 'infinitely shallow pool', in which fans circulated information about the latest series of gameworld which incredible rapidity and energy, but that any single encounter with that media was not defined with particular depth. The anecdote of kids torrenting hours and hours of Naruto, Inuyasha and the like, but never getting round to watch it, constructed this contemporary archetype of the cable-internet-fuelled frenzied collector. While I don't find this sort of illustration particularly illuminating, writers like Thomas Lamarre have observed that contemporary otaku spectatorship can be understood as a process of 'scanning' a series, or vinyl figure, or manga, for affirmative traces of textual tropes, which chime with established genre and representation conceits, understood by the fan community. Extending from this, fans knowledge of the Japanese language follow its yoked association with signification important to the currency of fandom. And so, to return to that first Japanese lesson filled with my students, they will certainly know the word for cat, neko, since feline-eared characters are a mainstay in the manga/anime/cosplay world. The language of anime is the currency, not Japanese per se. Language and world are intimately bound in this fandom; is the labour intensive investment in learning conversational Japanese measured against its use within the fan community, when the rhetoric of fandom legitimates and even celebrates what to orthodox eyes is 'partial knowledge', but which, in the case of fan subculture, constitutes a world of signs all of its own.

So, in contrast to the picture you posed of conversations across borders, I think transnational fandom in animation and games is not so much the cosmopolitan conversation it might have been portrayed as previously. I think that the majority of young people in this country who actively hunt out Japanese manga/anime/games/film do so with a view to pursuing a passion (albeit an increasingly mainstream one) that provides them with a means to re-imagine themselves outside of the relative confines of their domestic experience. I am trying to speak from the perhaps mythic position of a 'general fan', and I think such a thing exists, since commercial culture is now configured so absolutely to provide consumers with a means to invest in an experience of fandom as much as a text in itself. The organization of comic book, music and media stores are optimized to create the sensibility of the collector, and with manga imports, invariably the pricing and sale pitching compound this effect. Rarefied media are no longer the golden chalice they once were, where transnational media relations were evidenced in import/export flows. Transnational dimensions to contemporary media are found in its production of meaning through narrative and representational cues, which assume unforeseen levels of literacy in a wide variety of territories, along with the serialization and multimedia distribution of franchised intellectual properties. In this space, fan endeavour is characterized by a systemic filtering of proliferating media around a core text. Finding the good stuff assumes that you know the bad when you see it, and implicit to this assumption, is that almost any franchise will not exist as a single series, film or manga, but will spawn unforeseen ancillary media texts claiming to extend its scope.

The face of popular culture is merging into one, with transnational flows moving with a frightening intensity. When I was a teen Japanese popular culture was monolithic and exotic, now kids have Korean Chinese and their own homegrown media, which has followed the Japanese mould. But still, most interesting to me are the generic realities of Japanese culture that are coded as gendered. Shojo and Shonen, girls and boys genres, and beyond that Seinen, Bishonen, Yaoi. The specification of genres featuring action stories for boys, or stories of beautiful boys for girls in Japan, or for British queer teenagers who revel in the Bowie-like anti-heroes, I think the enduring influence on fandom that has come from transnationalism has been the complication of archetypal gender roles. While the people I speak to consider themselves fans, they choose to operate in shallower waters than the first generation of fans that aimed for the stars, and they nonetheless return to the enduring influence, through games/manga/anime of these new subjectivities, and for instance the subversive power of explicitly queered male heroism. Its amazing to me how the image of young men nowadays, through bands like Fallout Boy/AFI/Lost Prophets, draw on the image culture of imported anime from the eighties and nineties. Not quite dandyism, since a certain sobriety is key, the hair and the attention to detail is suffused with anime influences, and the gender play most explicitly betrays this heritage. Through Japanese performers like Gackt whose influence can be traced in the contemporary 'scenester' and 'emo' aesthetics, the softening of male aesthetics is perhaps the most enduring evidence of how fandom went mainstream here in the UK.

Wrapping Up

LHM: Given the really nascent state of writing on gendered (and gendering in) media fandom in the transnational context, I feel like we've only been able to begin to think through some of the issues at work here. We seem to be performing a dance around issues of in/authenticity, transcultural and transsexual masquerade, and carnivalesque language play that I'd love to see picked up and discussed more in the comments. Thanks for a rigorous and thought-provoking discussion, David.

DS: Yeah, writing late in the gender and fandom series has meant so much ground has been covered, I have found myself drawing a lot on my own experiences. I think that the potential for a further discussion on issues of authenticity in fandom is huge, since it plays such a decisive role in the structure and hierarchy of communities. As you say, it would be good to take it further in the comments. It's been great fun Lori.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part One): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Introduction LHM: I'm Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, and my academically sanctioned biography states that I'm a PhD candidate at Indiana University, working on a dissertation that examines Japanese female fans of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Normally, I would not include the information that I just now plopped my daughter in front of an episode of Dora the Explorer in order to buy some time to write, but that information - as well as the fact that I'm presently seven months pregnant - turns out to be relevant to the ways in which I'm thinking about female fandom in my dissertation, as well as the ways I'm thinking about academia in my own life. In essence, I'm interested in unruly fans (and unruly academics).

My own fan experiences, like those of the women about whom I'm writing, are very much a product of personal transnationalism. I spent my formative years living in Hong Kong; there, I was a fan of Hollywood blockbusters and took every opportunity to fill Chinese embroidered scrapbooks with movie stills culled from the Japanese movie magazines Screen and Roadshow. Later, I paradoxically 'discovered' the unique pleasures of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, and, as a fan, I've invested my fair share of hard-earned cash in star and movie memorabilia, quaked with excitement upon realizing that the Hong Kong restaurant I happened to visit was the backdrop of a favorite scene in Peter Chan's He's a Woman, She's a Man, and shaken Leslie Cheung's hand at a concert in Osaka. This is all by way of saying that fandom, for me, has been - first and foremost - a very personal and highly affective experience. As with many of the female fans I've talked with over the years, it stems from passion - for a narrative, for a genre, for a star. The fans with whom I identify are messy - to borrow from Martti Lahti and Melanie Nash, we're "those girls": the ones who exceed predetermined parameters of fan/star interaction, who allow our lives and our fandom to commingle to an unseemly degree.

DS: My name is David Surman, and I am founding Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the University of Wales, Newport. Fandom brought me to university, where I studied animation, with a view to working in the games industry. I was chaperoned through childhood by a Sega Mega Drive, and as a teenager I was consumed by an expanded passion for Japanese animation, games and popular culture; I guess I would qualify as one of the first wave of UK game otaku. I was caught up in the cloud of excitement around anime and manga generated by Jonathan Clements and Helen MacCarthy in magazines like Manga Max and Manga Mania, at a time when British and American animation was a dust bowl. Even though retailers sold the limited number of titles available at mercenary prices, over the years I acquired numerous videos with my meager allowance. I came to them knowing something of the controversy but nothing of the pedigree in anime.

My own media mixing put Kaneda and Tetsuo headlong along the same highway as the Gunstar Heroes and Joe Musashi on horseback. Videogames, manga and anime became the counterpoint to boredom at school, and university provided me with an opportunity to deepen those interests in an almost-legitimate way. No sooner had I got there, my interests began to broaden, through a patchwork exposure to film studies and classic film and animation. I found a passion for European experimental and North American limited animation, and these in turn deepened my appreciation of anime. My masters and PhD work followed the path set during the degree; I have sought to bring film studies methods to bear on transnational videogame and animation cultures. I guess, in this process, I have been examining my own fandom. I don't think that my experience is in many ways idiosyncratic; it always amazes me how many of my students share biographical details, motivations, dreams and desires, having spent their childhood committed to the same mediums as me.

In several recent essays I have vainly vindicated my own abstruse feelings about games fandom. My film studies prejudices come to the fore in the essays on Fable in the Animated Worlds anthology, and on StreetFighter in Videogame/Player/Text. Until relatively recently game studies have tended to focus on matching the sociology of play to the dynamics of gameplay. Along with a few other guilty parties, some of whom have contributed to this gender and fandom series, I am interested in the relationship between game aesthetics and fandom, though I suspect aesthetics is sometimes too weighty a term. Game art, images, advertisements and merchandise fascinate me, in particular when they betray particular cultural and generic assumptions about gender and games.

The 'Messiness' of Transnational Fan Culture

Whenever I think, "what am I doing?," I remind myself of what I consider one of the great fan studies texts, Barthes' The Language of Fashion. His summary exclamation, 'The most seemingly utilitarian of objects - food, clothes, shelter - and especially those based on language such as literature (whether good or bad literature), press stories, advertising etc., invite semiological analysis.'

I have tended to work with an emphasis on close analysis within the systems of games representation. Like Barthes I guess, the sum of my interests in games, animation and fandom pass through another lens, sexuality, which shapes my thinking, and my consumption of images and play experiences. I think I qualify as one of your messy fans, Lori. In my recent work I have become interested in female transnational/transmedia character archetypes (phew!), as loci for fan investment, authorial refinement, and cultural commentary.

LHM: Actually, I'm intrigued by your parenthetical "phew!" there at the end of your self-introduction, since it really is a mouthful but, at the same time, something that's part and parcel of contemporary globalized (or transnational or transcultural), gendered fandom. Since we've both written on media fandoms in a transnational context, I think this is something we might be able to talk to in addition to issues of gender. In my own work, I've found that the sheer amount of exposition necessary to bring a more general audience up to speed in terms of the specific culture(s) I'm talking about often acts as a barrier to discussing those cultures in terms of broader issues of fandom. In an English-speaking Western conference setting, for example, comparatively little background information is needed for speakers and audience members alike to engage in fairly high-level theoretical discussions of, say, Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings fandom. But in the case of characters like Kaneda and Tetsuo (who I was pleased - and mortified, but only because it dates me - to recognize), theoretical discussion often seems to take a back seat to exposition. My feeling is that, as a result, such discussion tends to get ghettoized or relegated to 'specialties' within academic discourse on fan cultures.

DS: Specialties indeed; your description of the challenge facing new territories of media research chimes exactly with my experience over the past 5 years or so, as games in particular have entered the mainstream as a object worthy of intense scrutiny. The stellar growth of the games and animation research fields has not been matched by moderate methodology, and there is still a substantial problem regarding the sensitivity with which scholars and critics figure transnational relations, and even the principle of national identity, in their research questions.

For me, one of the crucial issues in fan critique is the discrepancy between the needs of industry, journalistic, academic and general fan opinion, in relation to the expression their views on subjects, for instance national identity, and oriental/occidental constructions. I recently commented on this issue on the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) listserv. Distinctions between East and West require sensitive disentangling in academic thought, and such demands aren't generally expected of those in other domains.

I think it is absolutely crucial in this sort of comparative discussion that the category of the 'West' is not positioned as a coherent singularity, where narrative/generic/ideological operations can be thought relative to opposing and equally pejorative notions of 'Japan', which is somehow taken out of its Asia-Pacific context. The conceit of 'Japan' juxtaposed against a singular 'West' depends on outmoded assumptions about the dynamic topography of transnational media relations. It seems essential to figure into aca-fan thinking the internal complexities within Western media culture, and to further measure those against a similarly nuanced discussion of Asia-Pacific media culture, within which Japan is placed. The uncomplicated singular construction of 'Japan' as a media producer recurs time and again in animation and game scholarship, and it's not useful, especially when justified in relation to an equally mythic West. Woeful industry, journo and fan conceptualizations of East and West should be left for them to ruminate. A discussion of transnational media relations needs to proceed from a more nuanced set of assumptions, am I right? You wouldn't get away with it in any other field...

LHM: It's the challenge of articulating heretofore discrete fields of inquiry - area studies, in particular - with disciplines that have only just begun to confront your "dynamic topography of transnational media relations." These days, it's become more difficult to talk about fandoms within the American television mediascape without at least a passing knowledge of shows such as Torchwood or Naruto (or even Are You Being Served? - and I'd love to see a paper that really delved into the apparently bottomless popularity of that dinosaur in the U.S.!), yet because of those persisting notions of national coherence that you describe above, we seem to have a hard time breaking out of a framework that emphasizes cross-cultural exchange at the broadest national (or regional) level. At the risk of appearing sycophantic, given the forum for this conversation, I would mention that recent work by Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins emphasizing "semiotic solidarity" and "pop cosmopolitanism," respectively, offers a means of making sense of transnational fan networks that takes us outside traditional notions of the individual and the nation.

Of course, once gender enters the conversation, we're confronted with an even more complex nexus of identity construction. These days, we're relatively comfortable talking about 'otaku' in the context of transnational fan cultures centering on anime, but it's generally a foregone conclusion that, in the Japanese case, 'otaku' are men and, thus, comfortably "Japanese." When the discursive construct "Japanese woman" is introduced to the conversation - along with centuries' worth of baggage about her ostensible subservience and cultural/political disenfranchisement - discussion about what role Japanese female fans might play in furthering our understanding of how fan cultures work across national borders gets shelved in favor of trying to understand the women themselves. Scholars such as Brian Larkin have written exceptional work introducing non-Western media fans to discussions of how transnational media are consumed across borders, but these fans are almost exclusively male; the conversation about non-Western women and media consumption seems to be stalled in debates about resistance and subversion - debates that the mainstream of fandom studies has called into question. And given the contested value of any kind of "cosmopolitanism" in fostering mutual empathy among media consumers within a framework that privileges resistance and, in particular, cultural authenticity, it becomes all the more difficult to break out of old models of national identity in attempting to make sense of globalized patterns of media consumption on the part of non-Western female fans.

Performing the National

DS: I remember reading Volker Grassmuck's early work on otaku culture, and being amazed when his first interviewee was a female game otaku. I think problems associated with women's fandom emerge from a complex historical construction of women's work, play, recreation and entertainment. Early games culture was profoundly male dominated, with only a few women of exceptional resilience able to stand the grunts and smells of the old arcades! I guess a comparative analysis of women's recreation between different cultural spaces would no doubt shed new light on how we conceive the operations of fandom. Like Lawrence Grossberg suggested, I think we need to bring it these sorts of issues closer to home if we are to see rich new avenues opening up. William Gibson has drawn some interesting parallels between British and Japanese culture, mutually juxtaposed against American culture, he writes that '...the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures.' Gibson has certainly contributed to the conceited picture of 'Japan' through his science fiction novels, but his statements in the Guardian are useful for illustrating the point that comparative analysis is best researched in discussions taking place closer to home than antiquated notions of East and West.

Making the effort to proceed from complicated beginnings might mean that, in the long run, we say much more sustainable and durable things about the subject in question, in this case gender and fandom. Work like Andrew Higson's early essay 'The Concept of National Cinema' in Screen from 1989 give a really sound explanation of why we can't permit brutish and uncomplicated discourse on the scale of transnational relations. A few lines are pretty useful:

'To claim a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings. The process of identification is thus invariably a hegemonising, mythologising process, involved both in the production and assignation of a particular set of meanings, and an attempt to prevent the potential proliferation of other meanings.'

My question would be, to what extend does English-speaking fan film/animation/game criticism need a represented Japanese mode of production to perform a particular set of codes (and by extension narrative and ideological functions), against which it can define itself within a particular set of its own traditions? In increasingly globalised and mutually intelligible film/animation/games production cultures, where different production traditions rub shoulders in elective spaces such as the Tokyo Game Show or cable television channels, are such national/occidental/oriental discourses evoked out of 'fear of cultural contamination', as Iwabuchi would suggest?

Does the need for a coherent Western fan tradition (see responses to Dr Who, LOTR) arise from the new transparency of transnational games culture? Is that need for coherence the driver rather than the cause? In this case, do differing national fan subjectivities exist as a textuality of sorts in themselves, which compete within commodified fan culture as a form of generic reconciliation (the fight for shelf space in retail comic book stores for instance).

LHM: This last question is very intriguing, and it gets me thinking about the ways in which fans perform both their own, as well as target, national identities within the context of, for lack of a better term, non-native fandoms. For example, one female writer of Torchwood and Doctor Who fanfiction who I know from my own X-Files fanfiction writing days assumes what might be described as a stereotypically British personae when talking about these particular shows on LiveJournal: exclamations of "La!" and observations that "I'm so knackered" seem to express a kind of delight in - rather than fear of - cultural difference. The beauty of one of her exclamations - "He's lovely!" - is especially nice insofar as it refers to a Japanese anime character; this isn't the rigid Anglophilia of the PBS crowd but, rather, a messy and decidedly incoherent revelery in transnational fandom.

Equally, this kind of playfulness is at work in the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong cinema, again manifesting itself in language. In this case, similarities between written Japanese and Chinese, which have typically been used to demonstrate discrete cultural affinities (often in the aid of arguments for the cultural "Asianization" of East Asia), become a site of excessive intra-fandom communication. For example, stars are referred to not only by their Anglicized stage names (ie: Jacky Cheung), but also by their Chinese given names (Cheung Hok-yau) and - most notably - Japanized versions of their Chinese names (Cho Gakuyu), which, in spoken Japanese, are intelligible only to other Japanese fans of Chinese stars. Japanese fans of East Asian popular culture have been used to illustrate Japan's rediscovered Asian belonging on the part of political and cultural elites, but such arguments are grounded in the maintenance of coherent borders between Japan and its East Asian neighbors. In contrast, this kind of play exceeds conventional understandings of linguistic and cultural coherence, and it emerges not from a perceived need to communicate across borders, but from the sheer pleasure and intimacy it fosters between both fellow fans and those fans and the stars they admire.

Given that this kind of transcultural play is especially evident in recent role-playing fanfiction (eg: Milliways bar on LiveJournal - http://community.livejournal.com/milliways_bar/), I wonder if this sort of thing is at work in transnational gaming culture, as well?

Spacewars and Beyond: How the Tech Model Railroad Club Changed the World

"Games lubricate the body and the mind." --Benjamin Franklin

I spoke a few weeks ago at the opening of From Spacewars to MMORPGS, an exhibit on the history of video games which was organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. What follows are some of the notes we pulled together on the history of video games in Boston. I should note that this takes a very MIT-centric view of the Boston games scene and someone from another university might foreground different moments or groups in telling the story. Giving the talk in this context was nerve wracking because there were so many people in the audience who had helped to shape the evolution of games in Boston and there is no way to reference every significant player in the history here.

In the beginning, as the title of the exhibit suggests, there was SpaceWar!, one of the first interactive computer games, built in the early 1960s by the Tech Model Railroad Club, which was at the time housed in MIT's building 20. Building 20 is a legendary space here at MIT: built during World War II as temporary housing for the Rad Lab, the group which helped develop and perfect radar technology, it survived well into my time at MIT in the 1990s. It was on the site of the new Strata Center (Frank Gehry) and housed a number of key media research initiatives through the years. The Tech Model Railroad Club consisted of people who liked to tinker with technology and they were housed at the heart of the military-industrial complex. A 1959 Dictionary of TMRC language shows them using words like "foo," "Kludge," and "hack" which very much describes their relationship to technology. The club developed a highly complex railroad system with hundreds of relays and had started to turn their attention to recreational computing, playing around with the PDP-1 computer in the MIT AI Lab during off hours. Space Wars was developed by three friends, J.M. Graetz, Steve "Slug" Russell, Wayne Wiitanen, who became known as the "Hingham Institute," because they lived together on Hingham Street in Cambridge and consumed pulpy science fiction stories and Japanese monster movies. They later said they built the game for three reasons:

• show off the limits of a computer's resources

• be interesting. each run is different.

• invite audience participation.

It seems significant that the first computer game was already a mod of the existing computer hardware if not of existing software. It was built by people interested in simulating real world environments -- and in that sense, we might draw a line from the model railroad to more recent simulation games, from Railroad Tycoon to SimCity. And it was built outside of a commercial context -- for the sheer pleasure of play. Spacewars later shipped with the PDP-1 computer so that DEC representatives could use it as a final test of the computing power at an install site. From there forward, computer games have been on the cutting edge of computing. I've argued that computer games are to the PC what NASA was to the mainframe computer -- a shared vision involving the work of hundreds of researchers trying to push forward the capacity of the equipment. The modern computer would not have its current graphics capacity, processing power, and reaction speed, nor would the PC have penetrated into the domestic market as quickly as it has, without games to constantly raise higher expectations about what computers might do.

MIT intervenes into the history of computer games a second time in the late 1970s with the launch of Infocom, a company founded by MIT staff and students, led by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Albert Vezza, and Joel Berez. Infocom is closely associated with the rise of interactive fiction and text-based adventure games, building on the foundations set by Zork, which had been created by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1977. Infocom exploited the Zork interpretor which could understand complete phrases (e.g. "look at the apple") versus the canned commands (e.g. "look") of earlier IF games. When Zork was released commercially in 1980 for TRS-80, it sold more than 1 million copies. Infocom helped to broaden the potential market for games by selling their titles through bookstores as well as computer stores. These games, which valued storytelling over graphics, retain a strong cult following down to the present day.

A third period in the history of games in Boston centers around Looking Glass Studios, a company created in the early 1990s after the merger of Lerner Research and Blue Sky Productions. Looking Glass moved to Cambridge in 1994 and recruited heavily from MIT, absorbing Intermetrics in 1997, a NASA software developer founded by veterans of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Lab). Looking Glass originally worked on flight simulators and driving games, moving on to other fields soon after. Until their closure in 2000, they were responsible for games that were beloved cult hits with both game fans and many game developers and for originating many design and technical innovations that would have long-lasting effects on video game development. Many of those associated with Looking Glass, Paul Neurath, Ned Lerner, Warren Spector, Ken Levine,Doug Church, Marc LeBlanc, Sean Barrett, have developed a reputation for pushing forward the art of game design and for being leading thinkers and theorists within the games industry. Marc LeBlanc has talked about the group's "MIT-style ambition" to push forward the art of interactive storytelling, including developing and refining the First-Person interface and creating the genre of stealth games (Thief and its sequels). Today, they are perhaps most famous for System Shock 1 and 2, which took the first person shooter genre to greater complexity, interweaving story and game play in a particularly sophisticated manner. The recent success of Bioshock, created by Irrational Games, a company founded by former Looking Glass employee Ken Levine, has been described as a spiritual sequel to the Systems Shock titles. After the company split apart, the employees went to many studios across the nation including Ion Storm, Harmonix, Irrational, Bethesda Softworks, Mad Doc, Junction Point [Warren Spector's newest venture, recently acquired by Disney) and Electronic Arts (Doug Church at EALA). Former Looking Glass employees have also contributed heavily to Independent Games movement, helping to found the Indie Game Jam and establishing numerous companies under various publishing methods.

Boston today is characterized by a broad array of cutting edge games companies, including:

the previously mentioned Irrational, which was recently purchased by 2K, the owners of Rockstar, and recently renamed

Mad Doc Software, creators of Empire Earth 2 and Star Trek: Legacy, a company highly regarded for complexity and good AI.

*Turbine Inc, publisher of a number of successful Multiplayer ventures, including Asheron's Call 1 and 2, and more recently, Dungeons and Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online.

But if we want to tell the story through an MIT lens, we'd want to focus on Harmonix, creators of the highly successful Guitar Hero games (which I can tell you are faves where-ever MIT grad or undergrad students gather.) Harmonix was founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy who met while at the Media Lab at MIT. The company was built on the premise that the experience of performing music could become accessible to those who would otherwise have trouble learning a traditional instrument. At the time of the founding, Japanese music games were taking off, such as Parappa the Rapper and Dance Dance Revolution. They began to produce titles such as Frequency and Amplitudethat allowed users to create music in the games using the console controller.

In 2005, Harmonix released Guitar Hero. The game featured similar gameplay elements to FreQuency and Amplitude, in which the goal is for the player to hit color-coded buttons to the rhythm of passing button sequences. However, Guitar Hero utilized a five-button, guitar-shaped controller, designed uniquely for the game and became a huge success, both critically and commercially. MTV Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom, became the owner of Harmonix in September 2006. Harmonix has been closely involved with Boston's independent music scene.

Well, that brings us up to the present, but we'd like to think that MIT has something to contribute to the future of games as well. Take for example our new GAMBIT lab, launched this summer, as a collaboration between Comparative Media Studies and Computer Science and the AI Lab inside MIT and nine colleges, universities, and polytechnics in Singapore, funded by the Singapore Media Development Authority and the National Research Foundation. Last summer, teams of students from both MIT and Singapore worked together to do cutting edge research that would be hard to complete within product-driven processes at most games companies, translating their innovative ideas into playable if short duration games, which are now being shown at games festivals in the United States and Singapore. We hope that GAMBIT will be an incubator space for new game titles which will generate interest within the games industry and among games players. The challenge we pose to these students is to constantly stretch the limits of what games can do as a medium of expression, to try things which might fail but which also might yield spectacular results.

To help inspire these students, we have etched the image of the original Space Wars games into glass at the entrance to our laboratory space, reminding all who pass through our doors of the role which MIT has played in shaping the development of recreational computing. If you want to get a taste of the atmosphere in GAMBIT this summer, check out this short documentary created by Neil Grigsby, one of the CMS graduate students who helped lead the rapid prototype and iterative design process this past summer.

You might also like to check out this visualization of the historic evolution of the Boston games Industry (Code by Darius Kazemi, data by Kent Quirk and the Boston Postmortem).

Thanks to Philip Tan, Matt Weise, Michael Danziger, Joshua Diaz, Kevin Driscoll, and Jason Rockwell for their help in pulling together this information.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part Two)

Some critics of the idea of participatory culture have argued that only a small percentage of people want to generate or share content with other people. Even advocates such as Bradley Horowitz have argued for a pyramid of participation in which a small group at top become creators while others help to circulate and critique what they create. Should we then accept that the new participatory culture is only modestly more democratic than what has come before? What do you see as the implications of these inequalities in participation? What does your research suggests about the steps which need to take place before someone begins to participate in these expressive cultures?

Absolutely, these issues are vitally important. If participatory culture is a site of cultural citizenship, but the most active participants are already a privileged elite, then we have a problem ­ a problem for democracy. You refer to this as the participation gap instead of the digital divide and reframing the problem this way is an incredibly important intervention. The unevenness of participation is not a consequence of lack of access to the hardware and software and internet connections, but a consequence of uneven motivations and literacies.

The digital storytelling movement is an explicit attempt to intervene in these issues creating situations where ordinary people can work with more experienced media producers to create considered works based on their own life narratives. Just a note for readers who may not have come across the Digital Storytelling movement before: the form of Digital Storytelling I talk about in my work is a specific tradition based around the production of digital stories in intensive collaborative workshops. The outcome is a short autobiographical narrative recorded as a voiceover, combined with photographic images (often sourced from the participants own photo albums) and edited into a short movie. For examples, have a look at the Centre for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org), the BBC¹s Capture Wales digital storytelling project (http://bbc.co.uk/capturewales) and one of our projects

here at QUT, the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project (http://www.kgurbanvillage.com.au/sharing/digital/index.shtm).

In comparison to Web 2.0 platforms for amateur creativity like YouTube or Flickr which rely on autonomous participation and peer learning rather than top-down training, digital storytelling works to broaden participation by connecting everyday vernacular experiences and practices (like oral storytelling) with professional expertise and institutional support. Common to all branches of this tradition is an ethic of participation: one of the core aims is to provide people who are not necessarily expert users with an opportunity to produce an aesthetically coherent and interesting broadcast quality work that communicates effectively with a wider, public audience.

But digital storytelling is mainly focused at the production end -- the creation of artefacts, albeit in an intensely social workshop setting. Much of what is so interesting in new media contexts does happen on the web, though, and those who are able to participate most effectively in those spaces are highly skilled in new and emerging literacies. In particular, I talk about network literacy -- understanding that participation in blogging, or vlogging, or in the Flickr community, or whatever, is not just about creating something great and broadcasting it ­ it's also about being part of social networks. In fact, the social and cultural value that is generated by these online creative communities is very much a product of both social networking and creative practice, in a convergent relationship. It¹s not just great content, and it¹s not just connectedness, and it's not just findability and relevance, it¹s all of those things. That's what Flickr's interestingness algorithm, as a way of re-presenting the most valuable images on the network, is all about. So the point is that ongoing, engaged participation in creative communities is just as vital for effective participation as the creative competencies and aesthetic literacies particular to your chosen artform, whether that's photography, music, vlogging, or whatever. And at the same time, those who want to learn more about photographic techniques, say, couldn¹t do better than to actively participate in a social network that¹s organised around photography, like Flickr.

There has been a growing body of criticism focused on the discourse of web 2.0 and its concept of user-generated content from the perspective of creative labor theory. Flickr has been seen as emblematic of this new creative economy. How does the corporate construction of user-generated content differ from or resemble your concept of vernacular creativity?

Let me say to begin with that I don't like the term user-generated content very much at all. First we're masses and now we're generators? Users isn't great either, but it's hard to think of a better term for the relationship it describes. I tried to use vernacular creativity as much as possible because it focuses on the practices of users in relation to their own lives; not as the sources of content in relation to online enterprises.

But to move on, I'm not really an expert in labour theory, but the debate around user-led content creation in relation to labour is really interesting because of how much it says about the unexamined assumptions of the left, more than anything else. I have to say here that some of the most interesting discussions of new labour theory in relation to network culture have been happening on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list lately (https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002698.html), and my colleague Melissa Gregg (http://homecookedtheory.com) is one of many

people doing very interesting work on affective labour in relation to new media technologies. I'm not talking about discussions that occur at that level, but the knee-jerk responses that frame almost any participation in commercial online spaces as just free labour. That kind of statement reveals how much of our thinking is still structured around the competing dynamics of oppression and resistance, not to mention industrial models of the economy, and doesn't allow for the idea that we may be seeing the emergence of newly configured, dynamic and volatile economic and power relations between the media ÂŒindustry and ordinary consumer-citizens, which may afford new forms of agency and opportunities for human flourishing as much as they do new forms of labour.

Of course, mainstream technophilic commentators like Wired and so on are

just as guilty ­ the hype around the idea of crowdsourcing as a source of free or cheap labour was not only pretty insulting to the agency of users, but pretty unimaginative, I thought. I think too much focus on the idea of free labour might obscure some of the most interesting and challenging problems around user-generated content. For example, considering that there

is no alternative at scale, at least right now, to the big commercial social network services and platforms, like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and so on; what about the challenge of getting the interests of the service or platform provider and their user community to align in a way that maximises the public good they produce as side effects? Is it possible to show that this care for social and cultural value is essential for the commercial success of the platform provider as much as it is for the interests of the community? And where do commercial imperatives create barriers to the public good? Flickr is really interesting in this respect because they have very

open feedback channels between the user community and the company ­ for better or worse! The moments where that cosy, we're all in this together relationship between service provider and user community appears to break down is the moment where any hidden problems in the relationship come to the surface (think of Flickr's recent issues around localisation and censorship, for example), and at least in theory they can be explicitly discussed and even transformed for the better. Or not!

You describe your stance as one of critical optimism. What did you learn in your research which left you more optimistic? What did your research show that forced you to become more critical of the prevailing rhetoric about a DIY revolution?

When I was first planning the research project that eventually became my PhD, back in 2003, a lot of the hype about amateur creativity seemed to be saying that ordinary people were overthrowing the expertise of the media industries and creative professionals within them ­ and for some people that was seen as a great thing, a revolution; for others, it has been seen as a very dangerous thing. And by the way, it seems little has changed, if Andrew Keen's impact on public discourse is anything to go by.

I didn¹t like that overblown revolutionary and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, because it seemed to be making a grave and ahistorical mistake--we always, always have to be very careful about what is actually 'new' about 'new media'. And I was just intuitively convinced there was something more subtle and interesting going on. I also wanted to get away from that amateur-professional dichotomy and think about the actual practices and social uses of user-led content creation, in their own terms, without serving a polemical agenda.

The main thing I wanted to explore and understand was the extent to which both lower barriers to production, especially because of cheaper and more available technologies like digital cameras, in tandem with networked mediation, especially online, might be amplifying those ordinary, everyday creative practices so that they might contribute to a more democratic cultural public sphere. I guess I was optimistic in that I went looking for evidence that might support that hope, and not defeat it.

But this is happening very imperfectly, of course, and it¹s not yet clear whether the mass popularisation of participatory media platforms will improve matters or not. The encounters that occur in the most populous, democratic media platforms, like YouTube, are not always a pretty sight. Just as much as YouTube supports the self-representation of minorities or the popularisation of evolutionary science, for example, it also supports hate¹ speech and religious fundamentalism. It isn¹t clear yet how the cultural normalisation of spaces like YouTube will turn out.

I found that the spaces that were most rich in examples of vernacular creativity were at the same time constrained in certain ways, and each context was shaped towards forms of participation that served the interests of the service providers as much as they serve the interests of the participants. So in Flickr, the most active, intensive forms of participation seem to be taken up mainly by already-literate bloggers, gamers, and internet junkies. In the digital storytelling movement, there is a certain kind of polite authenticity that is valued, and the workshops are incredibly resource-intensive, so that they aren't open to the ongoing, everyday participation that something like blogging is. There are always constraints and compromises, no matter how open a platform appears to be. So, I suppose, that's the 'critical' part.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part One)

I recently had the privilege of being an outside examiner on a dissertation produced by Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate in the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology on the topic of "vernacular creativity." I've long considered QUT's Creative Industries program to be a sibling of our own efforts in the Convergence Culture Consortium. Indeed, Joshua Green, who currently heads the C3 research team, is a post-doc who came to us from QUT. And we've seen a steady stream of visitors through the years (John Hartley, Alan McKee, John Banks, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess, among others) from down under. Burgess is now collaborating with Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and others on the C3 team on research centering on YouTube. I was quite taken by what Burgess had to say about "vernacular creativity" and its relationship with participatory culture, media literacy, and civic engagement. She talks about these concepts in the following interview:

Your dissertation focused on what you call vernacular creativity. Can you give us a sense of what this concept means for you?

I used the concept to talk about everyday creative practices like storytelling, family photographing, scrapbooking, journaling and so on that pre-exist the digital age and yet are co-evolving with digital technologies and networks in really interesting ways. So the documentation of everyday life and the public sharing of that documentation, as in sharing photos on Flickr, or autobiographical blogging; these are forms of vernacular creativity, remediated in digital contexts. These are also cultural practices that perhaps we don't normally think of as creative, because we've become so used to thinking of creativity as a special property of genius-like individuals, rather than as a general human -- some would say -- evolutionary process. I found the term really useful for focusing on the fact that there is much about the current explosion of amateur content creation online that has a long history, that isn¹t particularly revolutionary, and that relates to specific local contexts and identities. Vernacular creativity is ordinary.

But ordinary doesn't mean generic or boring, not necessarily anyway. Each example of vernacular creativity is also a representation of a specific life, a specific time, a specific place. Because of this specificity, the ordinariness of vernacular creativity doesn't necessarily equate to uninterestingness. The practices and artefacts of vernacular creativity are of course very rich and meaningful in relation to the social contexts in which they're created, communicated, and disseminated: think of your own family photo album, and then a complete stranger's family photo album from the 1960s that you stumble across in the back of a junk shop in a different country, for example. Both ordinary at the point of origin, both full of meanings and stories, but in different ways. The point is, culture doesn¹t have to be sublime or spectacular to be useful or significant or interesting to someone, somewhere. But what I find most interesting about vernacular creativity in the context of the new media generally and the Internet particularly is the potential to scale that immediate social context add up to social connectivity, and conversation, to individualistic self-expression. The two major case studies I explored in the thesis - the Flickr photosharing network, and the Digital Storytelling movement -- each demonstrate how that might work out in practice, but in very different ways.

How might a focus on participation and creativity, rather than resistance, change the agenda for cultural studies?

The focus on cultural participation as a positive thing is entirely compatible with a long tradition in cultural studies that was concerned with empowerment and social inclusion through self-representation and education. I think this is an agenda that has always been there, but perhaps was overshadowed by an alternative relationship to power - resistance, even as resistance was located in the everyday. The important thing for me is that a focus on participation shifts the questions that we need to ask about the cultural politics of media slightly sideways from being only about power, exploitation and resistance to questions of voice, cultural inclusion, and so on and those questions seem to me to offer more hope for pragmatic interventions.

Symbolic creativity and agency in relation to media, particularly, has a long history in cultural studies. Henry, you would know better than anyone that fans were very important for earlier investigations into participatory media because they showed how creativity and agency were possible even within the media landscape of the broadcast era. At that stage, fans weren't really understood as ordinary citizens, but rather as pretty extraordinary, intensively engaged media consumers. But at least the creative practices of fans demonstrated that there might be empowering uses of popular culture, and that audiences for broadcast culture were not -- or at least not all -- passive. And I also don¹t need to tell you or many of your readers that creative fan practices in new media contexts has often led the way for more mainstream forms of participation.

I thought it was time to consider the extent to which people who may have a much less intense relationship with mass media and popular culture than fans, might also be participating in culture through their own creative efforts.

What links do you draw between empowering people to create and share what they create with others online and the development of conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement?

Most of the time, when we hear terms like citizenship and civic engagement, we think of participation in the processes of formal politics ­ democratic deliberation, elections, and so on. These forms of participation are thought of as separate from everyday life, consumption, popular culture, and pleasure. But I think some of the most interesting forms of civic engagement occur where the everyday and popular collide with the political -- look how much there is going on in the Obama Girl video, for example. So as a way of getting at those ideas, the term I use most of the time is cultural citizenship, which is a way of talking about the ways in which cultural participation and citizenship might be the same thing, in certain circumstances.

So one of the core concepts I work with in the thesis is this idea of cultural citizenship¹. It¹s used in several different ways by different theorists, but what I mean by it is that culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging. Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it¹s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship ­ in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense. This idea -- that networked individualism in participatory media might actually be good for society in some way -- really seems counter-intuitive to those who have been convinced by people like Robert Putnam, who argues that the increased privatization and commodification of social life weakens the social fabric, e.g. of neighbourhoods.

One of the things my research emphasised in relation to Flickr was that cultural citizenship was not only constituted online, but through the articulation of the online social network with everyday, local experience. A lot of my research focused on the Brisbanites group within Flickr, and there¹s a good illustration of this from an apparently insignificant event that occurred there. At one stage last year, an Italian user known on the network as Pizzodesevo, who had lived in various cities around Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, started posting scans of old slides taken in the 50s to the group. Other group members showed interest in the photographs by leaving comments that ranged from expressing appreciation to offering technical advice about scanning, to discussion of the locations of the photographs and how much they had changed in the past 46 years. What was really interesting to me was that the connections made between users as part of this discussion resulted in one Brisbane-based member of the Brisbanite groups spontaneously creating a kind of game around the images: he began going out specifically to capture images of the same locations as in the old slides, and uploading them to his own Flickr photostream. Pizzodesevo then combined some of these new images side by side with the old ones in a series of double images. The simple act of combining them revealed some of the dramatic changes to the Brisbane cityscape that have occurred over the past few decades. This led in turn to more discussion about the ways in which the city has changed, blended with nostalgia for a past that many of the discussants had never experienced themselves. So there on a microscopic level you have vernacular creativity, remediation, social networking, and civic engagement threaded back and forth and adding up to something much more than just sharing photos.

Joke Hermes refers to the texts and practices of popular culture as providing some of the "wool from which the social tapestry is knit." I think of each of these apparently insignificant moments of participation in online social networks and creative communities as being very much like that "where they start to knit together," you see how the everyday individual practices of vernacular creativity could add up to something beyond the individual level. It's in making those forms of personal expression available as part of public culture -- however small the public turns out to be -- that the digital remediation of vernacular creativity starts to look like it has real potential for propagating cosmopolitan forms of cultural citizenship, albeit at a modest scale.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

CMS and Home Inc. Host Media Literacy Event

2007 Media Literacy Conference October 27th, 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture

HOME, Inc., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies, partner on a one-day conference on Media Literacy. The event is scheduled for October 27th and will take place at the MIT Campus: Building E51. It has been two years since we had our wonderful conference, Media Literacy, Building Critical Thinking Skills In Our Media Age at MIT.

Since fall of 2005 so many things have changed. The cell phone has cameras and people are sharing videos over the Internet on YouTube and MySpace. Music and video games are omnipresent, and virtual worlds on the Internet, such as Second Life are being co-opted by large business and educators, who are discovering whole new avenues for teaching, learning and commerce.

The conference theme "Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture" will showcase the innovative work of classroom teachers, highlighting new pedagogical practices that support school reform and after school enrichment. We will explore after school learning through new platforms and technologies such as Second Life, and examine the research that is shaping the field.

Educational decision makers, curriculum developers, after-school program coordinators, superintendents, instructors and community leaders are all welcome to attend and participate in relevant panel discussions and breakout sessions. The conference will include two plenary sessions and eight breakout sessions covering topics relating to "in-school" and "after school" media literacy program development. Teachers from the Boston Public School's U.S. Department of Education funded media literacy and health projects will be highlighted with video presentations, sample curricula, professional development strategies and more. Discussion on best practices in Media Literacy curriculum, integration of replicable programs into K-12 or after school settings, along with a workshop on developing technology grant proposals, will provide helpful insight that will enable attendees to take the next steps toward school reform.

A keynote address will be given by Henry Jenkins, who is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006).

Other scheduled speakers include:

Rafi Santo and Global Kids, "Virtual Worlds, Real Skills"

Renee Hobbs, Temple University, "Meeting The Challenge of Teaching and Learning With Media in Schools"

Anna Van Somerin and Deb Lui, "Moby Dick Remixed: Appropriation As a New Media Literacy"

If you require any additional information on this event please contact us at, 978-395-5068 or by email at medialitconf@homeinc.org

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eighteen, Part Two): Julie Levin Russo and Hector Postigo

Technology and Control HP: One of the things we talked about during our meeting in Providence was how new media technologies, especially the internet, can potentiate changing conditions and relations vis a vis consumers and producers? I've sort of touched on this a bit above with my comments about how the web allows for mass broadcast of previously isolated products. So I think user production and fan contributions and their value (i.e their exploitability) are a function of the medium. Fan fiction for example, has been around for some time and their communities have been able to coalesce and remain together over time thanks to zines and fan cons and other social/communication enterprises. I think that the web adds an element of mass broadcast to fan production such that we are talking about fan products as content; as part of the commoditized information flowing out of the pipe. So I don't think we can any longer ignore the political economy of fandom. One of the interesting points that comes of all this is the question of control. If all this production is entering into some sort of relation with capital how is it controlled? The relations we discussed above are social relations but they happen through a technology so we could ask ourselves to what extent does the technology of the internet shape/is shaped by the productive relationships?

JLR: I'm so glad you asked! Control is a fruitful concept for articulating the economy with technology because, as the story of late capitalism goes, a new configuration of control is now coming to the fore: one which is just as horizontal, localized, and networked as the field of production on which it operates. Rather than enforcing prohibitions, it organizes possibilities and enables free movement within them -- often mobilizing technology to do so. In Protocol, Alex Galloway suggests that today we commonly experience hybrid grids of control, and offers the anatomy of the internet an as example: it combines the top-down architecture of DNS with the distributed architecture of TCP/IP. I often notice an analogous strategy at work in proprietary fan-driven content initiatives, where the confining threat of legal muscle is overlaid on a structured platform for creative license, striking a compromise that (when it's successful) is tolerable to both sides. What's clear is that, at this point, if we're looking out for hierarchical, centralized diagrams of power, we're going to sail right over the terrain of struggle. Web 2.0 is seductive in its user-centric mentality, but in exchange for the convenience and scale of social media we accept (literally, by ticking the box on the TOS) its given parameters, both technological and economic. Recently fandom is beginning to wise up to this dynamic and work towards building an infrastructure that is user designed, owned, and operated.

HP: I like the idea of alternative infrastructures that resist the commercial iterations of things like Web 2.0 driven social enterprises. I wonder to what degree power in this system of sociability/production/distribution is dependent on technological know-how. Will only those that can design infrastructure be able to challenge protocol with a counter-protocol? I would take a lesson from Langdon Winner and say that not all of us have to be technologist but it's in all our best interests to be concerned with the technological structures that consistently arise around us. We walk around in a state of what he calls "technological somnambulism" where before we know it we are moving through systems (social and technological) that were not democratically designed nor designed with the interest of democracy in mind. To what degree is this happening in participatory culture...to what degree has protocol taken shape around us without our input and without consideration to the values that users/fans/etc hold dear?

To get to the question of gender and technology it seems that these are not only pressing questions for participatory culture but also questions about how technologies embody gendered/sexist assumptions of what it means to produce in the digital world. Pointing to the troubling trend, when a technologies or professions become populated by women the economic rewards for the work decrease...the idea may be related to class too as for example when we say that a technology "is so easy to use anybody can do it" what we mean is that it's lost its elite status because not only college educated white men can use it but also everyone else of any class, educational background, and gender. In the logic of supply and demand of course this would dictate that the supply is increased and thus the value is decreased but I don't think this maps out in the area of cultural productions where conversations, reconstructions, and networks create value...in these cases the fact that anybody can do actually adds value but the elitist rhetoric holds it back when viewed from a market perspective.

JLR: Interestingly, this gendered revaluation can also move in the opposite direction: some occupations, such as film editing and computer programming, were initially understood as repetitive, detail-oriented labor that was thus feminized and performed primarily by women, and then later masculinized into elite technical skills. And while one sentence isn't much of a corrective to the white- and US-centric slant of this project, I'd like to note that there's a global dimension of inequality here too, as devalued forms of work are often relegated to the world's as well as the nation's "second-class" citizens.

One cause for optimism in the localized case of media fandom is that it's always been full of geeks -- women with highly-developed expertise in digital technologies -- and thus surfed the first wave of innovation throughout its decades-long history (thanks to Francesca Coppa for reminding us of this). Moreover, fandom is collaborative, so it's not necessary for us to be cultivating a counter-protocol on an individual basis when we collectively have a resevoir of competences to share. In any case, these are all good examples of the myriad ways technology intersects and intertwines with power, gesturing toward the merits of exploring, within our academic work, the particularities of its role in fan practice and fan/industry relations.

Ownership and Desire

HP: From the small clip I saw of your work it looks like you are looking at the content produced by fans and how readings of a text (TV show) inform fan production and how that production does or does not mesh with what we assume are the goals of the industry. In my experience with video games, I have not played close attention to content just its volume (i.e. how much of it there actual is). I would posit that the substance of the content (what it is actually is about) is in the aggregate less of a concern to media companies than the whole productive field. Which is to say that so long as the whole of the content has substance that can help meet the demands of selling that product then the media companies do (or should) live with the content that in substance is not "mainstream" that from a bottom line perspective this content does one of two things for the content owners. #1 Nothing or #2 something profitable. #2 is interesting to me because it says that in some way all content is profitable and this is why. Of all the content that is produced by fans some will be quite good, some may even bring some attention to the original work which then helps the media companies, some will be bad (poor quality which does nothing for the company) some will have readings that the company may object to. If the whole field of fan production is seen as a testing ground, a free market-research domain, then companies can't really loose. If they notice that everyone seems to like a particular reading then that is an intimation that perhaps that reading ought to be explored, packaged, resold. I think this claim runs into trouble when there are critical messages in fan created content such that they critique the media company where it would be believed that the content will actually be bad for the bottom line. This is all well and good for content owners but what about the fans. It seems problematic especially if the critical force of some content rests in part on marginal status.

JLR: In terms of content, I think there are some legitimate concerns among fans about the suppression of work that falls at the more extreme end of the continuum of "non-mainstream" readings. In these exceptional cases, there can be a #3: something perceived as detrimental to the value of the property or service. One recent and very visible example is LiveJournal's mass suspension of journals and communities accused of hosting "pornographic" works about underage Harry Potter characters, supposedly in violation of LJ's TOS. I'd argue that this is an instance where the substance of fan creations threatened the ideological underpinnings of the dominant system, albeit an oblique threat filtered through a series of legal and institutional mediations. The specter of such a crackdown hovers over the rich cosmos of derivative smut, the majority of which is currently situated within commercial social media platforms with official bans on "inappropriate content" (which they can interpret and enforce at will).

I wouldn't claim, though, that fan activities resist commodification simply by virtue of being slashy or critical -- the commercial media are becoming ever-more adept at self-reflexively absorbing such orientations. For the most part I agree with you that the salient conditions are structural and largely independent of the content of fanworks. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm saying that femslash challenges capitalism because it's about lesbians! However, I do think we can view queer fan production as form and not just as content. The widespread notion of "subtext" implies an open, plural, and dehierarchized model of textuality wherein diffuse and collective creative labor isn't easily contained by top-down intention and authority. I realize I'm risking a dubious move here, collapsing embodied queer sexuality into metaphorically queer textuality, but I'm committed to making this metaphor work convincingly in my project. Given the centrality of the mechanics of desire to the economic system, I don't think it's a coincidence that the representation of desire becomes particularly unruly. Considering that the value of media properties inheres in the libidinal labor of their consumers, corporate "ownership" is held in place primarily by the external fiat of intellectual property law. I think this is a foundational contradiction that fandom can productively stress.

HP: I find this last paragraph very interesting. It sounds like you are drawing a parallel between the drive to inspire a desire for a given commodity and the "unruly" representations of desire in fan production. ("Given the centrality of the mechanics of desire to the economic system, I don't think it's a coincidence that the representation of desire becomes particularly unruly"). Equally interesting is the claim that desiring the commodity gives it value (actually the interesting part is the consequences you imply). That this desire (wanting) is labor in itself that justifies a claim of ownership by fan communities (You statement that IP is a fiat that holds owners claims in place leads me to this interpretation...correct me if I'm wrong). I like both of these because they really de-center the rhetoric of IP that has governed western rationale for property ownership: the "mixing of labor" argument put forth by Locke. In your interpretation it is the mixing of desire (ironically constructed by capital to drive consumption) with the raw material of popular culture industry products that legitimizes ownership. You don't outright say this but I think you imply it. Also the first sentence I quoted above suggests that consumption driven by desire leads in some instances to re-writings inspired by desire. The link between the two can further be stretched to articulate with Jenkins' recent arguments for a moral economy of fan production and ownership...if we count desire as a valid "mixing of labor" argument (where labor is now desire) then the moral hold on property (which is in part the foundation of IP at least in political philosophical terms) is shaken. NEATO!

To further think about how your thoughts might de-center other lines of rationalizing about how IP gets legitimized through moral/philosophy rhetoric we might consider the notion that creative works are part of the self. Thus in the European tradition authors' rights tend to be stronger in terms of the control authors have over their IP because in a sense it is extension of the self. It would seem that desire as a vehicle for extending the self into the production of fan re-writings, for example, would create competing claims about self. In other words, authors' claims of moral ownership over a particular piece of IP rooted in arguments of the self conflicts with fans' claims of ownership over a re-writing based on the same arguments. In this sense it would seem that the claims of self from fans would be secondary to the claims of self by original authors. However, the scholarship of legal scholars like James Boyle suggests that in a cultural commons the original author is a myth. This has interesting consequences for any totalizing claims over IP.

JLR: First of all, thank you for this elaboration of my ideas! I'm still in the early stages of trying to articulate this thesis, and it's exciting that you can amplify it in ways that make sense. I'm pretty rusty on Locke and much subsequent political and legal theory, but I think you've captured the contradictions I'm getting at here. I love that you come around to the relation between creativity and selfhood -- of course the IP regime depends on a unified and bounded model of subjectivity wherein "original" artistic production emanates ex nihilo from individual interiority (which, as you mentioned in pt. 1, tends to be inflected as male/white/bourgeois). Working psychoanalytically, I'd go beyond competing selves to argue that any of the selves involved is internally conflicting, fragmented, and intertextual, further compromising the claim of "ownership" over expression.

Nonetheless, intellectual property law is held in place by institutional power (the tangible threat of debilitating lawsuits [Fair Use doctrine has been called "the right to be sued"] and the intensifying alliance between legislative and corporate sectors in extensions of copyright), often very successfully despite this conceptual incoherence (which grows ever more insistent as consumption and production blur together). What I find valuable about analyses of concentrated "moral economies," though, is that they can highlight the equally central role of discourse in this process. Copyright, which undergirds the economics of who can make money from what kinds of artistic labor, can't operate only by force -- its legitimacy requires an ongoing ideological negotiation (this should sound Gramscian). This is one example of how work -- both academic work and fan work -- that engages at the level of discourse is crucial. I hope that this series of "debates" can, at best, be an intervention on that very real terrain.

HP: I agree with your last paragraph. It seems that the discourse has been dominated by rhetoric that dominates IP law and policy. Such things as copyright as incentive, the balance between the public and the authors and the construction of users as pirates all tend to skew how we percieve the limits of use. The problem of course is that these are powerful tropes in US society and so alternative discourse is needed to challenge them. Well I think that wraps it up for me. Thanks go out to Henry for giving us the forum and thank you for engaging in these topics with me. Hopefully we can meet for tea again!

JLR: The communities that we work on and within, modders/hackers and fan producers, have certainly been dynamic channels for alternative economies, discursive and otherwise. So my optimism hasn't been disciplined out of me yet! I'd like to thank you, Henry, and the rest of the participants for this opportunity to ruminate and hold forth on some of the issues I'm passionate about. It's been a pleasure conversing with you, and very fruitful for my own process. Look me up when you're next in town!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eighteen, Part One): Julie Levin Russo and Hector Postigo

Introductions Due to some serendipitous travel plans, we had the opportunity to meet IRL two weeks ago to kick off the conversation below. It was a pleasure to find that we have quite compatible preoccupations and positions when it comes to fandom and convergence -- good matchmaking, Henry! However, in addition to applying our viewpoints to different specific artifacts, we're coming from different disciplinary orientations, which we'll attempt to detail below. One bent we definitely share is a commitment to political economy, so that will be the primary focus of this installment. And BTW, we chose to compose this post in a wiki page, and we wonder what effect that has, if any, on the shape of the discourse.

Julie Levin Russo: I'm a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. My interests span the intersections of technologies of representation, sexuality, and politics, and in grad school I've worked on topics such as media epistemology, cyberporn, and "privacy." My dissertation project, entitled "Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Lesbian Fan Communities," focuses on femslash fandom, taking it as an occasion to explore the larger negotiations and stakes of the struggle between unbridled participation and capitalist reincorporation in today's convergent mediasphere. In terms of my methodological approach, I'm situated squarely in post-structuralist theory and the humanities, and my deliberate and perhaps dubious approach to the gender axis is to tacitly assume that queer female labor can serve as an exemplar of broader transformations in media consumption. The body of my diss consists of three localized analyses of series-specific interpretive communities (Battlestar Galactica, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The L Word), discussing each across three intertwined registers: screen texts (television programs, though acknowledging their increasingly fluid borders), metatexts (ancillary online materials disseminated by TPTB), and fan texts (specifically, lesbian readings and writings). As is the custom in my discipline, I don't presume to offer a comprehensive and/or empirical picture of a field of practice, but rather hope to lay out three frameworks for diagnosing the nexus of convergence and desire: technologies of reproduction, politics of representation, and commodification of identity. My structuring question is: what aspects of fan production contradict or challenge systems of domination (capitalist and otherwise)? You can follow my diss as a WIP at my academic LJ -- I'm tremendously indebted to discourse with LiveJournal's community of acafangirls for any insights therein.

As a fan, I'm a bit of an anomaly in that I participate exclusively in the femslash community, which is a minuscule (some would say marginal) enclave within media fandom at large. I'm a devoted writer and organizer, and while I try to maintain plausible deniability in the professional sphere, my fic is not difficult for interested parties to find. Excepting an avid swath of multifannish d(r)abbling, most of my work has been based in Star Trek: Voyager (beginning on a newsgroup/elist in the late 1990's) and Battlestar Galactica (which has essentially taken over my life since mid-2005) -- perhaps a testament to my utter helplessness before the combo of female leaders and female cyborgs. As the first fandom I've been immersed in almost since its inception, BSG femslash has been a particularly rich and rewarding experience for me, including mentoring and infrastructure-building (not to mention my metafannish vlogging and speaking).

Hector Postigo: I'm an assistant professor of new media studies in the Communication Dept. at the University of Utah. My research focuses on new media and society and I'm currently pursuing two lines of research. The first line is a study of social movements and their use of information communication technologies. Recent research in this area has centered on analyzing the digital rights movement's user-centered fair use campaign and the movement's deployment of hacking as a tactic in its extra-institutional repertoire of action. The second line of research focuses on value production on the internet. I was on of the first researchers to study video game fan communities that make valuable modifications to popular PC games (modders) and to study AOL's volunteer communities. My research on both these groups suggests that a large amount of their "invisible" labor contributes to the value produced in digital networks such as the World Wide Web. I've taught courses on the internet and society, information communication technology, and the new economy. Some of my publications can be found here. These are related to modders and their work on video games and AOL volunteers. I come to fan studies primarily as an observer of the productive processes that are the result of various fan community associations. I'm really excited to meld both my macro approach to a political economy of fan work with Julie's ground level understanding of these communities.

Labor and Value in Late Capitalism

HP: I've been working for some time trying to figure out value of modder productions from an economic perspective. I've started with some admittedly simple questions. From my perspective media corporations are motivated by return on revenue first and foremost so when I first started looking at fan production I asked myself 2 questions. 1. Why would anyone want to spend all of their free time making something for which they will get no money for and 2) why would media companies encourage this? Now I admit these are very simplistic questions. #1 assumes that people do things only for money and it also assumes that money is the only reward and that community, reputation, pleasure, and the gift economy have nothing to do with it. # 2 assumes that that the popular culture industry has only one internal logic "make money" but we know that institutions have all kinds of heterogeneity and that nothing is monolithic... The last thing that all this assumes is a very materialist Marxist perspective. #2 presupposes that at some point the media companies surrender control and that that surrender is calculated and that fans become cogs in some sort of post-industrial "social factory." We know that things are way more complex. Fans are active readers and their communities have internal logics, norms, and practices that are oppositional, conspiratorial, and/or neutral to the workings of popular culture and its industry. Fans are both insiders and outsiders in that respect. Regardless, one unwavering fact remains, at least from my experience in video games, fans like to contribute and video game companies for the most part encourage it.

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JLR: It seems the first thing you've done is debunk your own questions -- I'm with you so far. In order to launch our conversation from some common theoretical ground, I'd like to refer to Tiziana Terranova's work, which we're both very fond of. Her chapter "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy" was first published in Social Text (2000: Vol. 18, No. 2), revised for her book Network Cultures, and also appears in the downloadable volume The Politics of Information (I'm citing from this version). Her definition of the "digital economy" can offer a useful framework for the issues you raise above (and for fan studies at large):

It is about specific forms of production... but is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such... These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion... However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect... Rather than capital 'incorporating' from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always already capitalism. (104)

So first of all, she's proposing that we scrap this binary of money/not-money as the benchmark of capitalism. You could say better than I to what degree the entertainment industry has been able to institutionalize this perspective so far, but certainly new rubrics like "engagement marketing" suggest that it's beginning to move in the direction of consciously valuing and promoting activities that aren't directly monetizable. On one hand, we could read this pessimistically: I think a lot of us, myself included, are seduced by the vision of fandom as a "gift economy" or otherwise alternative system of exchange that resists or at least stands partially outside of capitalism. Terronova argues that this fantasy effaces the centrality of such non-waged labor to the post-industrial economy. There's a danger, as you point out, for this position to reduce to "fans are dupes" -- that is, if we're allowing the industry to expropriate the profits of our work, it must be because we're too naive to realize it. But that's an oversimplification ("Free labor," Terranova writes, "is not necessarily exploited labor" [112]). Both sides (insofar as we can still distinguish fans from TPTB) are interdependent, and both sides are capable of being equally calculating.

And on the other hand, I think there's a more optimistic way to view this interpretation: Terronova indicates that, rather than requiring a practice external to capitalism to constitute opposition (a tall order indeed), there are resistances immanent to the system -- I hope I can clarify this formation below. The key point here is that we're transitioning from a schema where work (waged labor) was considered distinct from leisure to a schema where work (waged or not) and leisure become increasingly coextensive and desire and the rest of the affective spectrum become a central productive force.

I admit to knowing almost nothing about gamers (and other communities of grassroots production outside of media fandom), and we agreed that a comparative study was not the most interesting direction for this dialogue. That said, the unique intensity of the collaboration between modders and game companies is inspiring, but I do think it's telling that this detente occurred within an almost exclusively male zone. The gendering of the permittedness and legitimacy of fan practices has come up many times in this series, and the selective valuation and compensation of affective labor along gender (and other) lines is a dynamic Terranova too acknowledges (as do you in the work you sent along to me). This further complicates the already tangled question you raised in #1 above about why (beyond the reductive "false consciousness" explanation) we (women in particular) continue to participate in this regimen. The more idealistic answer is that it's because the power formation isn't monolithic, and while our work remains complicit in some ways it interrogates and challenges it in others.

HP: I wouldn't say I debunk the questions so much as acknowledge that they are oversimplified approaches to getting at the nature of complex labor relations in this post-industrial world of production. I purposefully cite Terranova's use of the social factory a condition in which cultural production is incorporated into labor relations. Community, friendship, fandom, and their products (intangible and tangible goods that are the outcome of social relations as well as the "sweat of the brow") are commoditized. The question for me when I've looked at Terranova's paper/chapter has always been, "how are "the fruits of the collective imagination...originating within a field that is always already capitalism,''" exactly incorporated? I think that her quote above is grounded in her understanding that "Free labor is not necessarily, exploited labor" (which you cite above). I don't know if these processes were always part of capitalism...honestly I have to think about whether I agree that cultural production is always labor (even if it is not exploited) just because it happens within a capitalist system, ideology, potentiality...I think incorporation is key. It's almost as if everything we do is labor it's just that capitalism hasn't figured out a way to exploit all of it yet. I can see the value of that line of thinking since it helps us draw connections between cultural practices and the furtherance of the capitalist logic but can't we imagine some practice that is not ultimately exploitable? I hope so. In the spirit of drawing some boundaries and pinpointing when a cultural practice becomes exploitable I'll hazard a technological deterministic stance. I'll argue that the internet has created the means for establishing a categorical difference between the way cultural products were (maybe) part of capitalism prior to their ability to be placed on line, to a condition in which they are massively available, massively (re)produced and massively broadcast by a medium that literally creates the structure by which that culture can be exploited. From this perspective it wasn't until distribution of fan content for example, became wide spread that value became practically exploitable (even though the content was always valuable). I think Terranova starts to get at this when she discusses the differences in audience produced content on television versus the user created content on the internet (pg. 94-97 -- I'm using the book).

I also shy away from thinking that we ought to "scrap this binary of money/not-money as the benchmark of capitalism." I've spent long hours trying to discern the process by which all those mods, maps, skins, and other forms of modder generated content for PC video games actually translate into a bottom line. The fact that I don't have a definitive answer partly would validate your point and cause me to think that maybe I should stop thinking along those lines but yet something in me resists. The reason why I think this is because there is a practice on the part of video game companies of encouraging modders. For example, video game companies take risks with their very valuable intellectual property (yes even though it is protected by the all pervasive EULA), and that investment at the very least is perceived to be paying dividends. Perhaps the dividends take the form of hard-core gamer loyalty which ensures future customers for a game, perhaps modder productions prolong the life of the game and ensure fans won't drift away or perhaps by allowing for a creative space that admittedly is very crowded, game companies encourage an "incubator lab" for novel ideas for games. So for example, while number of mods that get "adopted" by the video game company and distributed are few, that small percentage of marketable product is a tolerable return because the company invested a comparatively small amount (an SDK, maybe access to the source code, and so on) to encourage a vibrant development community that takes risks, explores different content and potentially can yield a tested game variant proven to be loved by its community. Given all this I have difficulty believing that game companies are ultimately not dealing in and encouraging a commodity that will ultimately reduce itself to profit. The labor relation is still there it's just inside a host of layers that are unstructured.

JLR: Much of this is very close to how I (or Terranova) would look at it -- "the labor relation is still there it's just inside a host of layers that are unstructured" is a very elegant description of the diffuse nebula of cultural production. But I'd like to note that the entertainment industry is not equal to "capitalism." Capitalism is a set of structural conditions within which both producers and consumers must operate. Though corporations are still motivated in every explicit sense by financial profit, it doesn't necessarily follow that money is the sole operator of the system at large -- and your example bears this out, since most of what modders do falls outside of the company's "tolerable return." So then, as you suggest, once of the crucial ideological processes of capitalism is to make it appear tautologically as if activities that make money are more valuable in legitimate ways than activities that don't. Which is where a whole host of inequalities such as gender enter the picture.

Let me engage your question: "how are 'the fruits of the collective imagination... originating within a field that is always already capitalism,' exactly incorporated?" The first thing I'd point out is that other participants in this series, as well as Terronova herself, have cautioned against modeling the relationship between cultural laborers and the culture industry in terms of "incorporation." Now, I do think there are good reasons to deploy this concept strategically, namely that it highlights the different kinds and degrees of power enjoyed by corporations and fans, and thus offers a clear basis for resisting the troubling trends within this landscape. But another way of looking at it is through the concept of immanence, which is a buzzword in a lot of theorizing about late capitalism (tracing Terranova back through the Italian Autonomists to Deleuze+Guattari). This is a flat rather than stratified model of power and control which suggests that various contradictory positions can be coextensive. So for our example of fan production, the way I'd look at it is not so much that our free labor is "exploited" when it's channelled into the industry's financial economy, but rather that aspects of our free labor are always flowing into the dominant economy while other aspects are always flowing around and in excess of it. So the political project is not so much to protect the autonomy of fan communities from TPTB in a binary sense as to deflect the channelling and increase the excess.

That said, the question of precisely what the mechanism of these flows are is a fair one (the theoretical abstraction is what drives people nuts, right?). I think you're on the money to point to digital technologies as a crucial site for grappling with this issue more concretely. There's a leveling or disintermediation that happens here which aligns with the horizontal model I described: as you point out, the immaterial, instantaneous, non-rivalrous characteristics of digital media make it more practicable than ever before for the industry to mobilize fan labor in literal and direct ways (i.e. "user-generated content"). On the flipside, though, they also make it more practicable than ever before for fans to "exploit" corporate products directly (i.e. now that TV is going digital, a vast repository of it is available to me, freely and illegally, to use and manipulate as I see fit). I'm agreeing with you that technology and convergence make cultural labor more palpable and its value more immediate. In this context, the local variations in code, interface, and framing matter: one could compare how fan media could and does play out on YouTube vs. imeem vs. blip.tv vs. Revver, for example, because each of these instantiates a different set of possibilities and powers (within the given system -- of course, all of them are still ultimately for-profit services).

Finally, you ask, "can't we imagine some practice that is not ultimately exploitable?" I hope we can too, and I've groused about this before. But I've been forced to admit that the call for some "outside" position isn't ultimately so realistic or useful. I'd counter that the most productive positions at this point are hybrid ones that collude in some ways and resist in others -- and luckily a LOT of us find ourselves in this situation. I'd like to map out the PARTS of practices that aren't exploitable, that remain to gum up the cogs of capitalism.

HP: I not sure if I want to abandon the term incorporation even though as you note Terranova and others don't necessarily prefer it (interestingly she uses the term in scare quotes but uses it nonetheless). Maybe my understanding of incorporation is not what others are thinking or maybe there are layers which need to be teased out. I think there is the possibility to draw some boundaries between certain kinds of incorporation so that both a coextensive model and one that give a clear delineation of when/how content becomes effectively part of the labor relation. Ideological incorporation is one way to look at it I think. One can have content that is commoditized yet ideologically is still resistive....but I think the way I'm thinking about is economic incorporation (as in making the cultural production part of some direct/indirect labor relationship...waged or not). So my point is that once means are found to extract profit from a process/product it is incorporated into the relations governed by labor...the logic kicks in...there is no avoiding it really...you produce something...post it on line...I figure a way to squeeze a buck out if it and its part of the system...market alienable...questions of ownership, fair compensation and exploitation all come from this...despite the cautions I wonder whether immanence serves to improve our understanding of the processes that allow/disallow exploitation, incorporation or channeling? To say that "aspects of our free labor are always flowing into the dominant economy while other aspects are always flowing around and in excess of it," sounds theoretically interesting but how does it really work at the moment when it's exploited? If I imagine the field of all that is produced by fans and we feel that most of it is "in excess" or "around" why is that? Is it beyond exploitation? Why? Because of material constraints or content or something else? And I should be clear that when I say exploitation I'm mean a process by which the product becomes market alienable...some one can sell it...I guess for me that is incorporation.

Your point that the very same technologies that facilitate exploitability are also the ones that facilitate participatory culture is right on and I think points to a paradox in the way these technologies are used. On the one hand there is a strong drive to create technologies that lower the barrier to entry into a participatory culture (web 2.0 techs and such) while at the same time there is a drive to develop technologies that prevent or "lock up" the content (such as DRM). In the field of all this technological development, one question I like to ask is: What technologies are users themselves developing to allow for increased participatory culture? It seems that many of the technologies that are immediately associated with increased participatory culture on the Web are developed with market interests in mind. So I like to think of hackers as a great population of user/developers that are both insiders but also outsiders and thus have developed some really useful technology to facilitate participatory culture from the perspective of users not necessarily from the perspective of a market mindset. The anti-DRM technologies like HYMN, JHYMN, QTFairUse and even DeCSS come to mind.

I think your point about the gendered nature of modder and video game company relationship is right on. I think the problem is part of a wider issue in how we talk about what is valuable labor, and who gets to do it and part of a broader class issue as well. The rhetoric of the "professional" for example validates the work of programmers as worthy of a wage but not of amateur programmers (except within less then fairly compensated structures of crowdsourcing for example). When I looked at AOL volunteers I wanted to unpack the ideological baggage associated with the word volunteer and how that constructed the worker in a gendered fashion, disempowering claims for understanding what they were doing as work. I think rewriting texts to challenge and interrogate them is important I'd love to hear more on that from you though. Is the reason that you continue to participate an idealistic project or are there other reasons?

JLR: In the case of media fandom, acafans have pointed out that there's a gendered logic to intellectual property law, which functions to limit which instances of cultural labor can be waged. Notions of "originality" favor forms of production that are practiced disproportionately by men (this has come up elsewhere in the series, if I recall). Traditionally "feminine" labor, often associated with consumption and desire, is classed as "derivative" and thus of lesser worth (financial and otherwise). Now, I'm particularly interested in the centrality of desire to capitalism. Yes, one could trace this back to Marx's commodity fetishism; to put it most simply: you have to desire something to want to consume it. I like to call the work we do to make products meaningful to us libidinal labor (my roomie chimes in to say I'm just renaming cathexis). It becomes increasingly important in post-industrial capitalism because commodities themselves are increasingly immaterial ("brands" rather than widgets). Your point that we need to retain some of the financial specificity of terms like "incorporation" and "labor" is well taken, but I'm still not convinced that even this economic register of the "process by which the product becomes market alienable" is clearly bounded these days -- witness the retooling of the Nielsen rubrics in a rather frantic effort to fix engagement in some monetizable metric, for example.

So as for the impetus behind my own activities as a fan, fic ("rewriting texts to challenge and interrogate them," as you graciously put it) just materializes the labor ALL media consumers do. I realize I'm sidestepping the debates about how to taxonomize the diversity of fan activities, here, but I do believe there's a common ground in the axiomatic "active audience" framework. This is the sense in which my fan work sustains the industry (even though they're not profiting from it directly, even though it may be critical in content), because it elaborates and regenerates the desire that gives their texts economic value. But I am an idealist (don't tell my advisors!) and I also trust that there's more to it than that. This is where the question of what's "excessive" comes in. Desire is never going to be fully contained within the capitalist box, and that remainder stresses the ideologies (legal, economic, heteronormative) that hold the system in place -- though I'm not yet prepared to answer your reasonable query as to how, concretely, this operates. I think a lot of us feel like we can assert our ownership over these bright shiny objects by artistically reworking them, and given the instability of ownership right now that's not necessarily a delusion.

We run into a dilemma, though, when trying to prescribe the concrete (re)configuration of the relationship between fans and industry. Despite the fact that fan production is always integrated with capitalism, I do think that the partial disaffiliation of our communities from corporations and commercialism is valuable (as I said, the industry is not equivalent to capitalism writ large). I'm tempted to dub creative fans hermeneutic hackers, because our textual tinkering seems to fit your definition of "insiders but also outsiders [who] have developed some really useful technology to facilitate participatory culture" ;). At the same time, given the inequalities that circumscribe our unwaged activities, there's a certain class privilege implicit in celebrating non-monetary craft and exchange (I'm not the first to bring this up). Anne Kustritz emphasized that poor fans can and do take part in our "gift" economy, but nonetheless I wouldn't want to imply that it's "wrong" to want to be recognized and compensated in the dominant culture's financial terms for one's labor. What I hope is that these paths aren't mutually exclusive, and both can coexist within the diversifying and intensifying network of fan engagement. The choice between being marginalized and being assimilated wouldn't be a pleasant one.

HP: One thing I'd like to bring up before we wrap up this section is the idea of ownership. I think (related to your point over masculinized nature of IP) is that the very rhetoric of ownership seems to have a logic which privileges one gender over an other. The most obvious case is the differential privileges that historically have existed in the law which permitted men to be property owners over things and people. More subtley is the idea that "man" needs property to become a full human being which is rooted in Locke's arguments for property which can be (a bit simplistically I admit) reduced to "I own therefore I am." Thus by this logic all structure (legal, economic, social) that permits ownership helps fulfill the mandate to be a full human being. This of course is troublesome for gift economies and free things (like love, care-giving, libidinal labor or passionate labor as I've heard it called before etc).

JLR: Word! I'd love to delve further into the ideological underpinnings of humanistic notions like "originality" on which IP law rests, but I think that's beyond the scope of this blog post. So onwards...

Announcing Futures of Entertainment

Many readers attended last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, which brought together leading figures from film, television, games and virtual worlds, advertising, comics, and other media industries for an indepth discussion of some of the trends impacting our contemporary mediascape. If you missed this event,you can check out the podcasts here and read a report on it written by Jesse Walker for Reason online here. Well, we were so excited by the quality of last year's event that we decided to host a second Futures of Entertainment conference with new topics and a new cast of characters. The event is sponsored by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's some of the details:

The logics of convergence culture are quickly becoming ubiquitous within the media world. Audiences are being encouraged to participate in a wider range of sites. Transmedia principles are being adopted by content producers in a broad range of fields. 'Engagement' is being discussed as crucial to measurements of success.

Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications.

Co-hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Futures of Entertainment 2 (FoE2) takes place Friday, Nov. 16, and Saturday, Nov. 17, at the Bartos Theater, in the Wiesner Building at MIT.

This year's conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, audience measurement, cultural labor, fan relations, and mobile platform development.

The conference works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. This is not simply another industry gathering. The goal is not a

pitch or even a pre-prepaired presentation -- just serious conversations about the

future of entertainment.

Speakers featured at FoE2 include:

Mobile Media: Marc Davis, Yahoo!; Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting; Francesco Cara, Nokia

Beyond the launch of shiny new devices, the mobile market has been dominated by data services and re-formatted content. Wifi connections and the expansion of 3G phone networks enable pushing more data to wireless devices faster, yet we still seem to be waiting for the arrival of mobile's "killer app". This panel muses on the future of mobile services as devices for convergence culture. What role can mobile services play in remix culture? What makes successful mobile gaming work? What are the stumbling blocks to making the technological promise of convergence devices match the realities of the market? Is podcasting the first and last genre of content? What is the significance of geotagging and place-awareness?

Metrics and Measurement: Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group; Stacey Lynn Schulman, HI: Human Insight; and Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can "count" engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

Fan Labor: Mark Deuze, Indiana University; Catherine Tosenberger, University of

Florida; Jordan Greenhall, DivX; Elizabeth Osder, Buzznet; Raph Koster, Areae Inc.

There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web. The incentives which work to encourage participation in some spaces are alienating other groups and many are wondering what kinds of revenue sharing should or could exist when companies turn a profit based on the unpaid labor of their consumers. What do we know now about the "architecture of participation" (to borrow Kevin O'Reilly's formulation) that we didn't know a year ago? What have been the classic mistakes which Web 2.0 companies have made in their interactions with their customers? What do we gain by applying a theory of labor to think about the invisible work performed by fans and other consumers within the new media economy?

Advertising and Convergence Culture: Mike Rubenstein, The Barbarian Group; Baba Shetty, Hill/Holliday; Tina Wells, Buzz Marketing Group; Faris Yakob, Naked Communications; Bill Fox, Fidelity Investments

Migratory audiences and declining channel loyalty are seen as two key challenges convergence culture poses to the advertising industry. At the same time, campaigns that respond by capitalizing on the creativity of audiences prompt questions about the continuing role for creatives. This panel looks at the unfolding role for advertisers within convergence culture, looking at questions about the nature of agencies, transmedia planning and the increasing circulation of advertising as entertainment content. Does the agency structure need to be rethought? What are the implications of breaking down the distinction between content and advertising? What are effective ways to collaborate with creative audiences? How is convergence culture changing the value of different advertising sites?

Cult Media: Danny Bilson, transmedia creator; Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner; Jesse

Alexander, Heroes; and Gordon Tichell, Walden Media

Cult properties have become mass entertainment. Marvel's success bringing comic book characters to the big screen and the resurgence of the space opera suggest niche properties may no longer mean marginalized audience appeal. This panel explores the politics, pitfalls, and potentials of exploiting niches and mainstreaming once marginalized properties. How do you stay true to the few but build properties attractive to the many? What role do fans play in developing cult properties for success? Is it profitable to build a franchise on the intense interest of the few and rely on Long Tail economics? Are smaller audiences viable in the short term, or do we need to rethink the length of time for a reasonable return?

Opening Remarks by Henry Jenkins, MIT; Joshua Green, MIT; Jonathan Gray, Fordham

University; Lee Harrington, Miami University; and Jason Mittell, Middlebury College.

With fewer than 200 seats open for the conference, FoE2 emphasizes discussion amongst

panelists and interaction with the audience. Please note: While we were able to provide the conference free last year, there is a registration fee this year designed to help us recover our costs for the event. So please register early due to the limited seating.

Drawing a mixed academic and industry crowd, the conference boasts broad coverage of

the new media and entertainment space, and deep engagement across industry and

disciplinary boundaries.

It provides a unique opportunity to partake in a focussed discussion on the issues

affecting the contemporary media landscape.

The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) is a research consortium at MIT exploring

shifts in the media industries from an audience- centered perspective. Corporate

partners with the Consortium are Fidelity Investments, GSD&M Idea City, MTV Networks,

Turner Broadcasting, and Yahoo! Their Web site is available at http://

www.convergenceculture.org.

The Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT (CMS) is a graduate and undergraduate

interdisciplinary program centered in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social

Sciences. For more information on CMS, their Web site is available here.

The Wiesner Building is located at 20 Ames Street, Building E15, in Cambridge, Mass.

For more information on the conference, contact Sam Ford, Project Manager for the

Convergence Culture Consortium, at samford@mit.edu.

There will be a special pre-conference event on thursday Nov.15, hosted by the MIT Communications Forum. (You do not have to be registered for the conference to attend this session):

nbc's heroes: "appointment tv" to "engagement tv"?

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007

5 - 7 p.m.

Bartos Theater

Abstract

The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesmen are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamers, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this Forum, Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshow, producers from the NBC series Heroes will discuss their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audience.

I hope to see many of my regular readers in Cambridge for these exciting events.

Attention: Prospective CMS graduate students

Tired of just reading about the exciting adventures we have out here in CMS-Land. If you can draw those pictures on the back of matchbooks, you should go to cartooning school. If you can analyze media, you should come to Comparative Media Studies. But seriously -- a high percentage of this year's crop of entering students discovered our program through this blog. So, I figure there must be some folks out there thinking about applying. If you'd like to know more about our program, here's some details about our forthcoming information sessions for prospective students:

The Comparative Media Studies Masters Program In-House information sessions are held periodically throughout the term in room 14N-417 at MIT (unless otherwise noted below). This is an opportunity to sit down with our directors, Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio, and ask any questions that you may have about the masters program here.

Please RSVP if interested in attending. Email Generoso Fierro (generoso AT mit DOT edu) with any questions.

Upcoming On-Site Information Sessions

Tuesday, October 16, 9 am to 3 pm

* introduction to CMS by Henry Jenkins

* attendance at Henry Jenkins' class, CMS.790

* break for lunch

* open house at GAMBIT to talk to Research Assistants for the various Research Projects

Tuesday, November 13, 9 am to 3pm (as above)

Upcoming Online Information Sessions

We also hold on-line information sessions a few times a semester. Visit this page on the day of the scheduled session to log into our webchat.

Tuesday, October 23, 8 to 10 am (Asia)

* chat session with Henry Jenkins and other members of the CMS community

Monday, December 3, 2 to 4pm (Europe)

* chat session with Henry Jenkins and other members of the CMS community

Was Herman Melville a Proto-Fan?

Earlier this year, I proclaimed my ambitions to re-read (perhaps more accurately, read) Moby Dick this summer, having done a rather poor job of tackling this novel as a high school student. I am now a hundred pages from the end. What had inspired my own personal pursuit of the Great White Whale was my involvement through Project nml with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Ricardo has been working to get young people more engaged in Melville's classic story by encouraging them to rewrite it in a more contemporary setting. The result was Moby Dick: Then and Now, a remarkable stage performance which our team (especially Deb Liu) has been documenting. This fall, we will be working to create a teacher's guide for Moby Dick based on the idea of learning through remixing.

In anticipation of work this fall with Wyn Kelly, my colleague from the MIT Literature Section and a leading Melville expert, I returned to the scene of the crime -- reading the novel in the battered Bantam classics edition that I had failed to complete in high school. I must say that reading Moby Dick through the lens of remix culture has taught me a new way to experience this remarkable and idiosyncratic work: rather than cursing the various digressions from the core adventure saga, I have found myself reading them with renewed attention.

Moby Dick, I am discovering, absorbs all of the genres of writing and speaking of its own times, sucking up stories and cultures, juxtaposing them with each other in fresh and unanticipated ways. The abrupt shifts in language, the desire to record every detail of life on board the ship, to catalog every piece of equipment, to dissect the whale from skin to bones, to trace stories across every possible mode of representation and to question all existing accounts of the Whale, these all become part of the work's encyclopedic drive.

Somewhere around page 400, I came to another realization. We might see Melville as adopting a range of interpretive strategies and modes of reading which would be recognizable to contemporary fan culture. What if we looked at Melville as a fan of whales and whaling lore. After all, only a true fan would be so obsessed with every detail and would chase the damned "fish" all around the planet the way Melville does.

Speculating

Here is one of the many passages in the book where Melville examines the story of Jonah:

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:- He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head- a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless

.-- Moby Dick, Chapter 83

In this case, he is describing a process of speculation through which his fellow whaling fans -- the old sag-Harbor whalesman and Bishop Jebb -- try to make sense of contradictions in the source text, extending beyond the information given in order to try to reconcile what they know of whales in the real world with what the story tells them about Jonah's encounter with the Leviathan. Any one who has been in fandom for very long recognizes this conversation -- you take an element which doesn't quite work and rather than discarding it, you keep speculating around it trying to figure out under what circumstances it might make sense. Fans often describe such creative work as "repairing the damage" created by a distracted artist who didn't think through all of the implications of their own story and such speculation clearly leads step by step towards a whole scale rewriting of the narrative to better satisfy the fan's own fantasies and interests. What emerges is a kind of proto-fan fiction.

What if we imagined Jonah inside the Whale's mouth rather than fully swallowed -- maybe even inside his tooth? Ah, but we've already figured out that the Leviathan must have been a Right Whale, and not wanting to discard all of that earlier fannish labor, we want to preserve that theory and so we have to discard this new layer of speculation.

Nitpicking

In this case, the speculations also constitute a form of nitpicking. As I've discussed nitpicking here in the past, it involves a fan reading the text in relation to another body of knowledge. The example I used a while back was a site where doctors and medical students "nitpicked" House. Such nitpicking comes through most vividly when Melville takes on previous representations of the whale. Here, we see Melville boldly assert his superior knowledge and his desire to "set the record straight," both motives I recognize from myself and other contemporary fans:

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

But, before he can do so, he must clear away previous representations, in this case, focus on the anatomical inaccuracies created by artists who have had no direct experience of the living beast:

These manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young suckling whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

I am reminded of a recurring feature on Sequential Tart, a long-standing webzine by and for female comics fans, which regularly posts and critiques unlikely depictions of the female body in various superhero comics. Here, for example, is an excerpt from one tutorial on "Bizarre Breasts":

Bizarre proportions are nothing new to comics; be it the desire to cater to the cheesecake crowd or simply the preference of the artist, distorted anatomy has become commonplace. The fact that "professional" artists may utilize distortions in published works is a bit disappointing, but frankly, if they've gotten the job the odds are they aren't going to feel the need to change their style. That's fine, the world needs laughter. However, what does bother me is the possibility -- hell, the reality -- that amateur artists are copying this exaggerated anatomy and making these mistakes their own. So, in hopes of reaching those for whom this advice may actually have some impact, I have utilized my meager knowledge of anatomy and admittedly unpolished art skills to bring the world a brief tutorial on one of the comic artists' greatest challenges: the breast.

I don't want to push the parallels here too far but it seems to me that they are both fascinated with showing the absurd and inaccurate representation of anatomy which comes from artists who don't really understand the first thing about the subjects they are trying to depict.

Cataloging and Collecting

Melville, like modern day fans, refuses to restrict himself to a single text or even a single mode of representation. As he explains, "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." (Chapter 82) And indeed, some of the most productive modes of fan interpretation involve rampant interdisciplinarity and free association, creating unexpected juxtapositions of texts, tracing real and imagined allusions to other works, or simply doing the kind of "connect the dots" activity that is expected of readers of transmedia stories. Melville reads everything he can get his hands on -- ancient books, religious texts, paintings, scrimshaw, currency, tavern signs, even the stars in the sky, as he tries to find every available reference to his object of fascination. He exhibits here the fan's fascination with cataloging and collecting:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

I particularly like that last bit about becoming part of a "fraternity" of others who share his passions and knowledge for this touches about as well as anything I've read on the social bonds which link fan communities together. Doesn't this sound like someone trying to pimp his fandom?

Appropriation and Transformation

So far, I have shown Melville to be in many ways a classic fan boy -- trying to master a complex body of knowledge and show off to his fellow fans by nitpicking less satisfying works. Nothing we've described so far would be out of place on a contemporary discussion list -- although this last passage suggests that he sees his fandom in terms of his relationships with other fans and not just as a personal quest towards knowledge. Yet, there are brief passages in these sections of the novel that he may also be more openly rewriting classic stories to better satisfy his own fancies and that act of rewriting pushes him closer to contemporary fanfic practices. Consider, for example, how Melville manhandles the canon in his retelling of the story of St. George and the Dragon:

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda- indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it- is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowers we are much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

Fans might describe what Melville does here with St. George as a kind of Alternate Universe story: what if St. George had been a sea-faring rather than land-loving man? Indeed, we can see him here as involved in a struggle with another fan community over which one of them "correctly" captures what is interesting about this character and his adventures. Why should we not be surprised that Melville was involved in a battle with another "ship"! :-)

But like many later fans, Melville also struggles with how much fidelity the fan writer owes to the original. The author discusses the ways that multiple whalers approaching the same creature determine who can assert ownership over it, declaring some whales to be "fast-fish," that is, already harpooned and bound by a particular ship, and others to be "loose-fish," that is, free of any binds or constraints and thus subject to being grabbed by whichever ship approaches them first. Melville, then, extends this metaphor to talk about the work of the imagination: "What are you, reader, but a Loose-fish and a Fast-fish, too?" (Chapter 89) In other words, Melville is exploring to what degree we get hooked into a story and thus get captured by its authors and to what degree our imagination remains unmoored, capable of taking the story where-ever we want it to go. In a sense, that's exactly what fans are trying to make sense of when they debate how much they need to follow canon and to what degree they can construct their own fanon.

Read in this way, we can see Moby Dick, often described as the Great American Novel, as a piece of fan fiction which grows out of Melville's fascination for the whale and his mastery over whaling lore. Drawing on a range of stories, responding to competing representations, Melville constructs his own original fiction, which he asserts better captures what fascinates him about man's eternal struggle against the natural order.

Melville was one of us. Pretty cool, huh?

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Sixteen, Part Two): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee

art, Art, and aesthetics DK: Other acafen have told me that my fan fiction tastes are highbrow and shaped by external literary standards (see below), and my lack of appreciation for id vortex stories -- that is, stories which revel in extreme emotional connections to pain, romance, torment, and the like in ways that can be deeply satisfying to a reader but which we have been taught to despise as over-the-top -- is a weakness in understanding, appreciating, or analyzing fan fiction.

AM: This is a good example of my current obsession (as you'll know from the book) - the forms of discrimination used by non-academic consumers. It fascinates - and appalls - me that so much cultural theory - Left and well as Right leaning - is predicated on the assumption that non-academics consume indiscriminately. It makes me angry to read authors such as Habermas and Adorno claiming that non-academic consumers will take whatever they're given, and that the level of 'trash' in culture is due the producers forcing their wares onto a helpless public. Anthropologist Daniel Miller has analysed everyday purchasing decisions and shown the level of intellectual work that goes into deciding to choose, say, one band of meat pie over another. Fan cultures fascinate me because they provide well documented examples of such decisions, and particularly their aesthetic elements. Because there's much discussion between members about these decisions, the systems are both complex and accessible. What you're talking about here is clear example of an aesthetic system generated within fandom - not from within academia, but in direct response to it. Which is interesting. My own fan interests - Doctor Who is the strongest, and the fan culture with which I am most familiar - don't have anything like the same sense of resentment to 'traditional' literary forms of analysis. They don't really show up much in our aesthetic systems, either as good or bad objects. Although there's a lot of fun to be had making fun of Tulloch and Alvarado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, which is seen to be full of jargon, and to take the program far too seriously ...

DK: Nobody has told me that my taste in comics are too highbrow but I have to admit that I've been known to be unattractively smug that most of my comics are indies. Even more unattractively, if a trip to the comic book store has me buying only DC/Marvel comics, I've been known to pick up an independent comic that was lower on my shopping list just so I wouldn't be seen buying only mainstream publishers in a shopping trip (I will do the same thing if I realize that all of comics I've bought are written by men, and pick up something on my list which was written by a woman). Interestingly, it's not the act I find unattractive but my rationale. Making sure I'm supporting independent comic book publishers and female creators is admirable, but doing so because I don't want the cashier of my favorite store to think that I am a lowbrow reader is fairly ugly. (That being said, I've also been told that my taste in fantasy and science fiction books is entirely lowbrow. I don't have much of a taste for the classics, for the grand old wizards of science fiction. If you tell me to read Ursula Le Guin I'll pick Wizard of Earthsea (lowbrow simply by nature of being written for children, and don't even get me started on that problematic valuation) over The Dispossessed in a heartbeat. I prefer early David Eddings to Stephen R. Donaldson. I want my books to have happy endings, and can you get more lowbrow than that?)

AM: I often describe what I'm looking for in a film as 'singing, dancing and a happy ending'. I think that's one of the main differences between entertainment and art. And given the choice, I'll always go for the former.

DK: Though I absolutely love it when something is both!

AM: Ah. Here we go. The old definition - 'What is art'. I mean, I'm happy to say that the Buffy season 5 finale, 'The Gift' is art.

DK: Well, duh, she interjects, proving herself intellectually.

AM: A definition which simply means anything that is beautifully done on its own terms. But in the more institutional definition of 'art' - ie, that which is taught in Art History courses at University, or for which one can get an Arts Council grant - then I would have to demur. That kind of 'art' does everything in its power to make sure that it's never entertainment. Which is why I hate it so much. (have a look at this for a laugh - http://flowtv.org/?p=107)

DK: See, I agree with your Flow essay, but not with the way you phrase it here. I think a lot of the art which gets you an Arts Council grant is quite wonderful, and is often entertainment. For all my bragging about how lowbrow I am, I adored ballet as a child, and not just The Nutcracker Suite, but everything from Balanchine to modern dance. Just because The National Endowment for the Arts decided it was worth funding, doesn't mean it isn't Entertainment. The focus in your Flow essay is more the inverse, which I do agree with -- just because it doesn't get National Endowment for the Arts funding doesn't mean it isn't Art.

AM: But I think that when Art becomes entertaining, the ideological apparatuses that manage the sector swing into play to start stripping it of its status. There's a great chapter on opera in Jim Collins's collection High Pop. It points out that when Nessum Dorma was used to sell the soccer World Cup in 1990, and became massively popular, many opera critics despaired. The music had become familiar and unchallenging - in short, entertaining - and was therefore, no longer Art!

DK: There's this fascinating bit of Walter Benjamin where he makes the usual arts/entertainment division (regarding Germany's reading habits in the 1920s) -- and then goes on to attack criticism for being wholly concerned with the literature of the public sphere. It's exactly the same dichotomy we have now except with the critical lens focused in the opposite direction.

Kristina Busse and I have had a number of conversations that went something like this (and keep in mind I am paraphrasing her -- her end of the conversation is much more intelligent than I am probably making it sound here):

Me: Yadda yadda yadda high quality fan fiction --

Kristina: Hold it right there, buster. What do you mean by "high quality"?

M: [I ramble on about a number of things including technical skill, narrative consistency, character consistency, metaphorical layering, and a whole lot of other value judgments which have led Kristina to name me, much to my horror, a New Critic.]

K: And who decided that was the correct axis on which to measure the quality of fan fiction? What about the Id Vortex?

M: There's a conversation I could start here about how I think you need to use the master's tools to get the people who live in the master's house to pay attention, but that's not important right now. Why don't I just rephrase it as "I find it a more enjoyable reading experience to read a story which has both Id Vortex AND the measures that the academy would call quality."

K: That's just because you have been trained by the academy to think that way.

M: No it isn't. It's my aesthetic sense of what I find enjoyable to read and what I find to be quality.

K: How do you know? Brainwash victim.

M: ...

K: *looks victorious, or at least as victorious as a person can look over the phone*

M: Look, a yak!

So in some senses I am insufficiently aligned to the fangirl axis, or I am too brainwashed by the patriarchal academy. (Of course, when I phrase it this way with Kristina she gets rightfully disgruntled because that's not what she's accusing me of at all, but I'm speaking hyperbolically. Kristina, I hope you forgive me for any misrepresentations!)

AM: A better response would be: 'No - YOU'RE a brainwash victim'. And she would have said 'No - YOU are'. And so on, until you fell out and stopped being BFF...

This raises an important point for me, about the different between saying 'I like this' or saying 'This is good'. Again, back to my book - you've got the whole history of philosophy of aesthetics (spit!), dealing with this distinction, but not getting very far, because most of the philosophers want to find a way to make the claim of 'This is good' into an objective statement of fact - which it never can be. It makes more sense to me to see the desire to go beyond the simple personal response of saying 'I like this' to say 'This is good' as a desire to open up dialogue - to get other fans into a conversation about what criteria you might use in order to judge your favourite texts, to try to persuade each other ... and then it becomes about the conversation, about community formation, and about using the text, and your discussions about it, to form a shared system of making sense, and a community. The discussion itself is the point. And so my question is - was your conversation with Kristina, in itself, pleasurable? And if not, why not?

DK: Oh, of course it is pleasurable! Because the act of coming to terms with definitions and their flaws is itself a joyous part of literary analysis for me. Unsolvable, but so much fun.

AM: Exactly! It provides a space in which it is possible for the two of you to keep on talking about the common object which is one of the things that holds you together. In the conversation you cite, I see two points of possible friction. The first is the use of the term 'quality'. I've been tracing the uses of that word for some time now, and it seems to function quite explicitly as a synonym for 'highbrow'. And with that comes a simultaneous denigration of its implied opposite - 'trash'. It's tricky to try to explain why you think something is good, without denigrating other points of view - but it is possible. I think it involves a playfulness, not taking yourself too seriously. That's more possible when dealing with lowbrow culture than highbrow culture, simply because we know, as we discuss who is the best gay porn director, that there's something a bit silly about talking in those terms.

DK: And yet it's so meaningful, and as you point out in Beautiful Things, everybody does it every day. I could tell you what I think is the best porn, gay or otherwise, without even having to stop and think -- and it doesn't correspond to highbrow artistic style mapped onto the porn genre You're right, too, that this phrasing -- "highest quality porn director" -- provokes a double take. This moment of cognitive dissonance makes apparent the disturbing correlation between "quality" and our ideas of "highbrow".

AM: I think that when you start pulling in the language of the oppressors - which I think 'quality' is - it becomes harder to do that playfulness. From an empirical point of view, there's almost a 100% guarantee that when somebody says that something is 'quality' - quality television, quality film, quality writing, quality journalism - I know that I'm not going to like it. Whereas, if it is described as 'trash', there's a high probability it's going to engage, delight and excite me.

On the other side of your debate with Kristina, the idea that somebody's pleasures should be denigrated because of 'false consciousness' makes me pretty angry. Which is why I suggested the riposte of 'No, you are'. Cos that's the problem with false consciousness - it applies to everybody equally. There's nobody who's got true consciousness - or at least, who can prove to my satisfaction that their consciousness is true and mine is false ...

DK: Definitely. And if in my humorous paraphrase above I represented Kristina as someone who would denigrate someone else's pleasures, that is about the most extreme misrepresentation of her I can conceive of. But we have different tastes, different aesthetic senses, and it's valuable to me to be challenged on my definitions of objective quality. It's always startling to me to discover I have these; on the one hand I'm a relativist and a social constructionist, and on the other hand I'm a book reviewer who makes absolutist statements about the value of a text. I'm telling you, there's nothing that can shock a good deconstructionist literary theorist into analyzing her own assumptions more than being called a New Critic. *shudders*

AM: Which raises an interesting point. The only place that I make fully absolutist statements about the value of texts is in doing academic book reviews and refereeing journal papers (leaving the marking of student essays to one side - not because it's not important or relevant, but just because, as they say 'Don't get me started on that'. It's a whole other book about power, authority and knowledge). And even there, I have to admit, I'm getting more and more relativist. I learned a lot from editing an academic journal for eight years. Often I would send a paper off for blind refereeing, and get back one report that said 'Publish exactly as is', and one that said 'Must never be published, this is crap'. Getting that response, over and over again, was an eye opener ... so now I tend to say, 'This is a very good example of its genre ...' or 'The paper does not have a clear linear argument, but you may not feel that this is important'. On this last point, I'm a huge fan of the clearly made linear argument supported by evidence - but of course, that means that whenever I get a paper of cultural theory to referee, my first response is just to tick the box marked 'This is a load of nonsense'.

DK: One day I will send you this self-published science-fiction novel I had to review. Just when I think I am getting relativist about the aesthetic quality of texts I get a complete and utter pile of rubbish sent to me for judgment. (On the other hand, I work closely with a teacher who brings many of the young adult novels I review into her seventh grade classroom. Although for the most part I think her students are excellent readers with what I would call in any other conversation "excellent taste", I do get continuous reports about books I found mediocre which get gobbled up, and books which I found sublime which get ignored. Which brings me back to questioning what it means to be a reviewer, what it means to make objective statements about texts which are really more objective statements about my own taste.)

AM: ['excellent taste' = 'taste just like mine'. In my definition of the term anyway]. My response to this point is an anthropological one with a commitment to conversation. The decisions about what is good and what is bad can be entirely subjective - but if you are the only person who thinks that way, then we call you mad ('Gigli is the best movie ever made!'). But it gets interesting when you start looking at what communities of people agree are good and bad. And those decisions are never final, and change over time. Criteria alter. Finnegans Wake, for example, fails to be a good book on every criterion that is normally used to make those judgements. But there is a community of people who can make an argument that it is a good book in quite another way. At the moment, there may not be a single person who agrees that the utter pile of rubbish you had to review was anything other than an utter pile of rubbish. But it may be that in fifty years time it will have been rediscovered as a forgotten classic that showed us a completely different way to write such a novel. Or it may remain an utter pile of rubbish. You can't tell from the text itself. Which isn't to say that "anything goes". It depends on what the communities discussing the texts decide, and no individual has control over those. Your job as a reviewer is to play your part in this debate, to offer interesting and insightful and intelligent comments about the texts that other people can then engage with, and thus keep the whole game ongoing - the game of a community making sense of the world. And - importantly - don't get angry when people disagree with you. Delight in it and take it as an opportunity to make contact with the thinking of another human being. Which brings joy and makes life worth living. For me, at least.

DK: That does it, I'm sending you this book. Trust me, you will agree that there is at least one book in the world about which absolutist statements of quality are true. (Yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek; what you are saying is very true. And yet if in fifty years time this particular book has been rediscovered as a forgotten classic, I despair for the future.)

You conclude here with what for me is the most important part of any intellectual debate, conversation, or interaction. Delight, joy, the opportunity to interact with others and learn from them.

Baseball, Doctor Who, and gender

DK: I don't think there's anywhere to go with this unrelated thread, but reading the other conversations has gotten me interested in one other fandom with which I identify myself (and possibly the only fandom for which I am a participant but not a scholar): baseball. I am a proud and true citizen of Red Sox Nation, and the fact that it is a fandom I didn't choose but was born into by virtue of geography doesn't make it any less real and visceral for me. I think I fall in a place between highbrow (which in baseball fandom I would identify as following statistics, knowing what's going on off the team, reading all of the sports news and being aware of potential trades) and lowbrow (which I would identify as wearing "Yankees Suck" T-shirts and spilling beer all over a residential street). I'm fanatic about the team but without participating in any of either highbrow or lowbrow activities. Several years ago, when I lost my old blue Red Sox hat, I decided to buy a pink one. I was in the mode of branching out from my youthful "pink and high heels represent all that is evil about women's fashion" fashion consciousness, and I thought it was fun to have a pink hat. I came to love that hat, which I still have and wear.

And then about three years ago, the Boston sports media went on a rampage about the "pink hat brigade". The basic argument goes like this: Only women wear pink baseball caps. Women don't really like baseball, and they are only here because the team is winning and because they think that Jason Varitek has a really nice ass. [Editor's note: he does. He is also a fantastic catcher.] Fans who are here for the wrong reasons ruin the sport. If a woman says "I wear a pink hat and I have loved the sport and followed it religiously since you were a glint in the postman's eye, you asshat", she is required to prove her "real fan" nature by reeling off some statistics about players. At this point, if it is a public conversation and not a newspaper article, somebody else usually burst in with "well, I like the pink hat brigade, because they are eye candy."

Now, letting aside the fact that I HAVE followed the sport religiously for many, many years, I do find it interesting how gendered the assumptions of what ruins a sport become. Very few people rail against the legions of male fans who didn't start paying attention to baseball until the Red Sox won the World Series, and then bought up a factory's worth of "Yankees suck" T-shirts instead of "Red Sox world champions" T-shirts. Which makes me wonder if I looked around the much more female space of livejournal fandom if I would find people attacking practices that they think are particularly male. I don't think so, actually. Far more of the practices that get attacked based on unwarranted assumptions of the "bad fans" backgrounds assume that the bad fans in question are 16-year-old girls.

AM: So sports and academic cultures both attack feminised fan practices - I think that's true. Again, the Doctor Who comparison is interesting. I think there are gendered practices here too. I've never heard a female Doctor Who fan recite the production story codes for every episode of the program, but I know boys who can do it. And in the latest revamp of the program, the showrunner, Russell T Davies, made a point of introducing more emotional content to the drama as a way of locking in a female audience that previously hadn't been so interested in the show.[Of course, it's important to say in relation to this that some of the best known fan work has undermined these general trends, with the two most important fan writers who introduced emotional content to the program being Kate Orman and Paul Cornell, the latter of whom is definitely male - and, surprisingly, a heterosexual one at that].

So there are differences there. But I don't see the same kinds of attacks on gendered cultures in the DW community. Because of the revamp, we now have a huge number of female fans coming in to the Doctor Who community who weren't there before - and I haven't seen much evidence of resistance to that from the men. Indeed, I'd say there's almost a gratitude. For a long time we've been seen as sad, geeky nerds, in this exclusively male hobby whose very maleness seems to show how sad and geeky it is (it's very different from Star Trek fandom). And so the fact that women are joining the fan community - many of them focussing on the emotional relationships in the program - is seen as something of a relief - we are becoming like normal people rather than geeks.

But what caught my eye about your final comment wasn't the gender - but the age. 16 year old. Because although I haven't seen any resistance in the Doctor Who community to women joining, I have seen resistance to young people joining. There was recently a poll for 'the best Doctor', which was won by the current incarnation (David Tennant. Also a favourite with female fans for his 'floppy fringe'). This led to some venomous outbursts from older fans against the (presumed) young fans who had voted for him from a position of (presumed) ignorance. The young fans have become an enemy, without the proper historical knowledge of the program, who haven't been here for 40 years like we have, watching every story and learning the nuances of the program. (as I'm writing this, I can see that as many of the new fans are female, there could be an overlap between the hatred of young fans, and the hatred of female fans - but I can honestly say I haven't picked up any of this in the discussions that I've seen. The attacks haven't drawn on language that is gendered either in the imagined bad fan, or in their supposed interests in the series).

DK: I'm fascinated to see you say that. Mostly I've avoided online Doctor Who fandom since the new series began. I know the quirks of the female fan community which has adopted the show wholeheartedly, and I remember the craziness of rec.arts.drwho, and I was looking forward to watching those two communities meet like matter and antimatter. I know that there have been enough conflicts in my own off-line life between those who are fans of the old show and new show both, and those who discovered the show with the new series. Primarily we argue about 'shipping, about relationships and whether or not the Doctor can be romantically involved with a human Companion (the Eighth Doctor movie never happened I've got my fingers in my ears I can't hear you la la la la). And I know from tidbits I've picked up that our conflicts mirror many of the conflicts between old-school fans and new-school fans of the show in general.

But I have to admit I would have assumed the conflict would be more gendered in tone. After all, you've got a fandom that (me notwithstanding) is primarily male, heavily gay. And suddenly it's interacting with a new group of fans who are primarily female, many of whom eroticize male homosexuality. I guess I would just expect that to turn into a gendered conflict.

I'm also interested in your characterization of the new-school fans as "young". In the places where I've seen new-school Doctor Who fans, they're not necessarily any younger than the male fans -- they are just new to Doctor Who. I admit I see a very small corner of fandom, and like I said, I'm generally avoiding online Doctor Who fandom.

AM: You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a national difference here. The new Doctor Who isn't huge in Australia, but it's absolutely massive in the UK - always in the Top Twenty programs for the week on telly, often in the Top Ten, often the number one rating non-soap drama. And it's marketed as, watched as, and known as, a 'family' program - ie, the core audience are kids, with their parents watching alongside. I suspect that this isn't true in the US? Probably because of its positioning on the Sci Fi Channel - and also because there is a pre-existing community of female SF fans in the US into which Doctor Who can enter?

DK: That makes perfect sense, though I admit it's an unexamined point. It's not a "cool" show here, except among geeks, and I'd be surprised if it had a large child audience. But you're right, in the UK I know it's very much a family show. So my assumption is that any new fans are adult female media fans -- the pink hatters, I suppose, allegedly looking for attractive stars instead of good scripts. I assume, based on my unexamined hypothesis about the audience, and that the new viewers will fall into a certain demographic and any conflicts will follow from that demographic. But if I were in the UK I think I would have a very different set of assumptions.

AM: We have to leave it there. In closing, I'd just like to thank you for a conversation that was exactly what, I think, aesthetic discussions should be like. We don't agree on everything, but we've treated the differences between us as points of interest that we wanted to learn more about. You've made me think, you've made me laugh, you've delighted me by coming up with ideas and jokes that I wouldn't have seen myself. It's been a genuine pleasure. Thank you.

DK: And thank you, for exactly the same thing.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Sixteen, Part One): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee

Introductions DK: I'm Deborah Kaplan, and I'm not actually working as an academic; for the last several years I've been employed in university digital libraries and digital archives. More than most in this conversation, I exemplify the insider/outsider, amateur/professional divide with which Karen opened the first-round and which Kristina later discussed as well. I'm one of the few in this detente without a Ph.D. or on track to get one. I have a Master of Arts from the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College (as well as a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the same institution, but I think of that as a professional degree more than an academic degree). I've published and presented on children's literature, fan studies, and media studies, and I've taught children's literature both to undergraduates and to Ph.D. candidates. Like Karen, I've found that not having an affiliation to place on paper submissions has resulted in confusion, and at conferences, I have found that having a name tag which says "independent scholar" leads to other academics being sweetly and patronizingly (and I'm sure well-meaningly) supportive. For this reason, I've started putting the names of my university employers as my affiliation, even though, as a librarian, I get no institutional support for my scholarship.

AM: And I'm Alan McKee. I'm a fully traditional academic - PhD, series of tenured academic positions at Universities, publications with University Presses. I'm not proud of that, although I do love having a regular income. And I appreciate exactly what Deborah is talking about - there's an authority and security that comes with being credentialed, and speaking from a tenured academic position. It means you don't have to fight so hard to have your voice heard - in the media as much as in intellectual circles. I believe that many very intelligent people don't work in the university sector, and many stupid people do. My research interests involve popular media, particularly television. The thrust of my work is bringing vernacular thinking into intellectual debates. Although we are finally getting female and Black voices in cultural theory, I'm particularly interested in the way that working class voices are still excluded, by means of a methodological inequality. We approach Art, Literature and Philosophy through the methodology of exegesis - let's explore the ideas presented here. And we approach soap operas, romance novels and pop music through ideological criticism - what are the hidden relations of power? I'd like to swap those around. Learn useful insights about how culture works from romance novels - and deconstruct Adorno for his hidden, ugly prejudices ...

My latest book was Beautiful Things in Popular Culture - a collection of essays by connoisseurs of various areas of popular culture describing 'the best' example in their area of expertise, and using that as a way into discussing the vernacular aesthetic systems by which consumers make such judgments - 'the best Batman comic'; 'the best basketball player'; 'the best action console game', etc.

Lowbrow culture

DK: Reading Beautiful Things shone an interesting light on many of my own experiences with consumption. I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children's and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don't watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people's) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don't read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women's literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I'm fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don't listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow. When I discuss romances academically, I've been told by some that because I primarily read romances by a particular group of highly educated, highly literate, occasionally-to-highly subversive romance novelists (Jennie Cruisie, Julia Quinn, Suzanne Robinson), my experiences of the genre are incomplete. As a reviewer and a children's literature scholar, I've been told that the books I recommend (Peeps, Queen of Attolia, Flora Segunda) are highbrow and high-quality but not what children actually read, since they would definitely prefer to read Captain Underpants (this, incidentally, is demonstratably untrue; young readers are extremely discerning about what they read but the measures they used to decide what is, in your words (or your mother's, in Beautiful Things), "shit" and what is not are their own and cross highbrow/lowbrow boundaries easily).

AM. I don't get the same comments. My tastes are pretty standard - my favourite Doctor Who stories are usually in the top ten as voted by fans, and my tastes in gay porn are pretty standard (eg, I avoid Genet). This raises an interesting point for me. There's a useful article by Simon Frith and Jon Savage called, 'Pearls and swine' (New Left Review 1993) which chastised academics who did fan studies for pretending to be just like other fans, and called on them to acknowledge that they are different. That never made sense to me. I know that I'm an academic - after many years of resisting the label, I've now come out and admitted it to myself and others (although I still don't put it on my Gaydar profile, as it does put guys off wanting to have sex with you). But for me, the difference this involves from other fans is in terms of the time I am granted to study these issues, the resources I have access to, and the authority my pronouncements are given. I don't see much evidence that my tastes or my engagements with the texts are that different from those of other people. I don't like opera, or philosophy, or literary fiction. I don't have to pretend to like Big Brother. I genuinely embrace it. And I often feel quite inadequate when I look at the amount of work done by non-academic fan scholars, whose knowledge of an area, their understanding of its relationship to wider culture, and the sheer amount of research they do makes my own work look shoddy by comparison.

Fan expertise

DK: As a scholar, I'm also often overwhelmed when I look at the incredibly intelligent responses nonacademic fans give to their favorite source text, whether it's a television show or a sports event. Certainly there are plenty of responses which aren't trying to be thoughtful, and I'm not saying every thoughtful post is brilliant. And certainly nonacademic fans often don't have access to prior discussions about the fields that interest them, but assuming that a fan's response is going to be less thoughtful than an academic's is asking for trouble.

AM: Amen to that! I'm always amazed when I hear this argument - 'But a lot of fan writing is badly researched and badly written and poorly thought out'. Well, yeah. And so is a lot of academic writing (have you ever read any Adorno?). But some academic writing is insightful and full of interesting information and beautifully written. And so is some fan writing. Neither academics nor fans have any monopoly on bad writing about culture.

DK: I remember a couple of years ago a segment of the livejournal fandom (the blog service livejournal.com, in which a female-dominated segment of media fandom has made its home) started asking "is there such a thing as queer heterosexuality" -- completely unaware of queer heterosexuality as an emerging, cutting-edge theme in queer theory. Fandom's thoughts on the topic are often as or more thoughtful than the scholarship I have seen. I'm not saying that every bit of meta-discussion that emerges from fan communities is useful or productive (nor is all of the scholarship which emerges from academic communities, to be fair). But I am saying that at last year's Popular Culture Association conference, I heard a number of papers on currently popular television shows which were less insightful than many a fannish reaction blog post.

AM: And I recently refereed a paper written by an International Relations scholar about using TV programs to think about politics - interesting and thoughtful, and with no idea that cultural studies had been thinking about this topic for thirty years. And I'm sure that the same is true in reverse of cultural studies scholars who know nothing about the work taking place in other disciplines. Similarly, I think it would do no harm for academics interested in community, identity and politics to have to watch both seasons of the British version of Queer as Folk. If they haven't seen it I think they're well behind on thinking about the relationship of ambivalence, passion and love in community formation and politics.

DK: This is reminding me of Peter Walsh's "Expert Paradigm". I'm not thinking of it as it's discussed in Convergence Culture, with traditional expertise held in opposition to the collective intelligence of the Internet -- the Wikipedia model, say. Rather, I'm thinking of the Internet's ability to both expose and hone the expertise of the non-credentialed. Exposure: surely a blog post gives a level of exposure unmatchable by presenting a paper to a room containing 16 overtired academics at an MLA conference. Honing expertise: a community of intelligent, thoughtful individuals sharing their cultural reactions acts like an advanced graduate seminar for the participants. I can't even count how many times I've seen teenagers on livejournal posts thoughts on culture or media which I couldn't have even approximated until graduate school. These communities, these discussion groups comprising teenagers, tenured faculty, professionals, laypeople who just like television -- all of their thoughts and responses feed in to this massive intellectual crucible, creating a wonderful, vibrant, dynamic pool of uncredentialed experts.

DK: My first published essay, on the children's fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, reportedly provoked Jones herself to take the piss for my overly-academic interpretation of her work, and particularly for using the phrase "rooted in fluidity" (which was intentionally self-contradicting, I'll have you know!). I'm always trying to find a balance in my own scholarship between jargon and accessibility. My bias is towards accessibility but because I write in fields which are heavily denigrated by the academic establishment I always feel an invisible pressure to make my work seem more highbrow. My essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet is probably the most jargon-filled essay I've ever written, much to its detriment, because while writing I felt a hypersensitive need to prove myself as a serious scholar. Even within fan studies my work is unusual, in that I focus on texts rather than fans. (I'm not sure who I'm trying to prove myself to; one big advantage of being an outsider in academia is that I don't have to convince a tenure committee of anything.)

AM: I'm going the opposite way. Probably my most jargon-ridden piece of writing was an article I published early in my career in Cultural Studies that drew on Baudrillard's notions of banality and fatality (everybody who knows the current version of me will be wearing shocked expressions right now - philosophy? Moi?). It was a necessary piece of badging (you can't get into Cultural Studies unless you 'do' jargon, preferably with some literary theory, focussed on a philosophical or art object). Now that I'm tenured Associate Professor, I don't need to do that any more. Now I work on the assumption that if you can't express at least the basic outline of an idea to first year students using everyday language then you don't really understand it.

The Mud-Wrestling Media Maven from MIT and Other Stories

This has been a big few weeks for me and the Comparative Media Studies Program -- with lots of media attention. The title of this post comes from the headline of an article, written by Jeffrey R. Young, for Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's how the story starts:

My Life: The Transmedia Version

If this profile of Henry Jenkins III were a YouTube video, it would begin with footage of the influential scholar mud-wrestling his wife at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If it were a podcast, the introduction would note that Jenkins has been called the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. And if this were an interactive graphic, it would trace the millions of dollars in research grants he has won from foundations, companies, and the government of Singapore.

Any of those media would be a fitting way to tell the story of a scholar who is at the forefront of exploring how digital technologies are reshaping popular culture. But just as Jenkins still reveres words on paper (and online), so too does much of his story lend itself to good old ink on paper.

In fact, the Chronicle's online edition uses a variety of digital media to tell my story -- including digging up some YouTube footage of my wife and I wrestling as part of a big party our dorm throws every year, not to mention a podcast interview and an interactive chart showing the range of research the Comparative Media Studies program is doing and where our funds come from.

Young spent an extraordinary amount of time preparing this story. We started doing interviews together back in January. He came to campus and spent several days following me around; he interviewed students, colleagues, and a range of others who have touched my life; he flew out to San Francisco to see me participate in a panel discussion at the YPulse conference with danah boyd. (You can listen to the podcast version of a similar conversation I did with danah at South by Southwest last year.)

Actually, it now looks like YPulse has just put up a podcast of the talk the article describes if anyone is interested.

In the end, I personally think the hard work paid off. I was very flattered -- if a bit unnerved at times -- to have a reporter dig this deeply into my life and work. I winced a few times at some of the descriptive details -- my wife is still giving me a hard time about a stain on my shirt which he spotted at a particular speaking gig and I am not sure I accept the idea that my body is "pear-shaped." I am sure that I wouldn't hold up to the withering critique of how academics dress offered by Project Runway's Tim Gun elsewhere in this issue. :-) But he really does capture both the serious and playful sides of my personality. I'm not sure what to make of the split personality of a cover which wants to proclaim me the new Marshall McLuhan and an inside headline which makes me sound more like the new John Nash (A Brilliant Mind).

To Serve Them All My Days...

Several readers have asked for more details on my experiences as a housemaster at a MIT dorm. The article has a fair amount to say about this aspect of my life:

For all his scholarship, Jenkins has always had a playful side. Just ask his brood at MIT's Senior House, known as a home for those who might be considered misfits elsewhere. "At Senior House, it isn't an insult to be called 'weird' -- it's a compliment!" says a welcome message on the dorm's Web site. "Residents are comfortable in their skins. We are straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or poly. ... Tolerance is the one virtue we value even more than individuality."

This is where Henry Jenkins lives -- and he's the one who wrote that message. He and his wife, Cynthia, have served as housemasters here for more than 12 years, and they seem well suited to lead this unusual community.

"Henry is very good at keeping an eye on the pulse of Senior House and stopping things that are particularly dangerous before they get out of hand without crushing all creativity and spirit in the house," says Laura Boylan, a senior in his program. Jenkins has intervened to stop residents from hijacking a construction crane and from rewiring the dorm's electronic locks, she says (MIT students are known for their elaborate pranks), but he is "hands-off about things that are going to end up fine."

The dorm is best known for its springtime Steer Roast party. It starts with a flaming roll of toilet paper zipping down a wire from the roof, igniting fuel-soaked kindling in a pit below. Enormous slabs of meat cook over that flame all night, while rock bands play and students and alumni frolic. Some wear elaborate costumes, or dress only in body paint.

Jenkins is protective of Steer Roast, a 40-plus-year-old tradition. He has fended off administrators who want it toned down, and refused to let an Academic Life reporter or photographer attend, citing a "policy" of not allowing news coverage. But it's easy to piece together details of the gathering from student blogs, photos posted on Flickr and other photo-sharing Web sites, and videos on YouTube.

One of the main attractions of the two-day festival is mud-wrestling. A homemade ring is set up in the dorm's courtyard, under the shadow of a giant black banner that reads: "Sport Death: Only Life Can Kill You." Announcers provide amplified color commentary, as pair after pair of wrestlers face off. Every year one of the first matches is Henry Jenkins vs. Cynthia Jenkins.

Jenkins once published a scholarly paper arguing that professional wrestling was a form of melodrama aimed at men, allowing "a powerful release of repressed male emotion." He demonstrated a fan's knowledge of the subculture's colorful characters, analyzing the moves and costumes of the Mountie, the Million Dollar Man, and the late "Ravishing" Rick Rude, among others.

Jenkins doesn't wear a cape or costume when he appears at Steer Roast, but last year he scripted his match with the help of one of his students, Sam Ford.

"The game plan we came up with," Ford says in an interview, was to have Jenkins fake a knee injury early in the match. "Then, when Cynthia turned her back, Henry got up on his knees and held his finger up and said 'Shh,'" signaling to the crowd that he was unharmed, while a concerned Cynthia turned to look for help. "One of the other grad students comes out of the crowd and jumps up and pushes Cynthia's shoulder," and she trips over Henry, who pins her to the mat.

"It was the first win of his mud-wrestling career," Ford says proudly....

Not long ago, I visited the Jenkinses at home -- their spacious apartment is at one end of Senior House.

The living room is decorated in grad-student chic, with beat-up couches and pop-culture artifacts. Jenkins points out a replica of a crescent-shaped Klingon blade weapon, a bat'leth, that was featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And there are vast shelves of books, videos, 'zines, CD's, and comic books. "This space definitely gives you the sense of the full range of media that we regularly consume here," he says.

The room is also the emotional heart of Comparative Media Studies. Nearly every Thursday, students in the program are invited over after a colloquium by a visiting speaker in the early evening. Over catered dinners, they often continue conversations well into the night.

Jenkins says he believes in integrating his personal and professional lives: "I think it allows you on some level to give more to both, instead of less to both." And he likes to stay in motion, according to a post on his blog headlined: "How to Become a Compulsive Workaholic With No Life ... Or the Secrets Behind My Success."

Cynthia Jenkins occasionally works part time grading papers at MIT. These days she is learning glass blowing. But she is in many ways a partner in her husband's work. She edits most of his writing, and they have co-written articles about fan cultures. It's hard to say which one of them is the bigger fan. When the latest Harry Potter book came out this summer, the Jenkinses hit the campus bookstore at midnight to pick up their preordered copies. They stayed up all night reading, by flashlight, on a hammock in the dorm courtyard.

We've been pushing the university for sometime to get us some new furniture. You can bet that I sent the dean's office a note saying that even the Chronicle of Higher Education was reporting on the ratty condition of my couches. :-)

In case you are wondering, our decision to become housemasters was partially inspired by seeing a PBS series years ago, To Serve Them All My Days, about the life of a British boarding school don. We were both taken by the ways the series depicted the integration of his life as a teacher inside the classroom and in the dorm. I have to say that living in Senior House has been everything I have hoped for and more. We've been living here for a dozen plus years and I can imagine myself continuing for much much longer. Living with students has not only made me a better teacher but also a better scholar, since the dorm is a lab where I can observe youth interacting with media of all kinds just by walking down the hallway.

I faced an interesting ethical challenge while doing the photo shoot for this article. I was asked if they could take my picture holding the Klingon battle sword which I keep leaning against my fireplace. (This picture appears only in the print edition.) I wondered whether I could pose for such an image and avoid the stereotypes and cliches about fans which I have critiqued in my work. I wasn't worried about making myself look foolish but I didn't want to do any damage to the fan community. In the end, I decided that the best way to handle this situation was to be as dignified as possible and act as if there was nothing unusual about being photographed holding a replica of a television show prop. My big fear, now, though, is that hardcore Klingon fans will tell me that I am holding the weapon all wrong. While I was once a card carrying Klingon in a role play game, I have never really been a student of Klingon culture. :-)

The article focuses heavily on the work I have been doing with media companies, both as an individual and through the Convergence Culture Consortium. If you'd like to know more about the later, you might want to read some recent posts which review key things and topics over the past year. You can start reading with this entry.

Meanwhile... Games and More Games

On other fronts, I was one of several games researchers asked by Gamasutra to share our thoughts about whether there is life after World of Warcraft. More specifically, they wanted us to speculate on when and why players abandon one virtual world and move to another. To be honest, I am one of the few games scholars I know who is not hooked on WOW. So I ended up relying much more on my experience of fan culture than on my games research. Here's part of what I had to say:

I know less about what happens when multiplayer games start to implode than I know about the migrations of television fans, which is a phenomenon that I've had a chance to observe over more than 20 years. In both cases, the holding power has to do with at least two variables: the degree to which individual members value what the franchise is giving them (including both content and corporate/community relations) and the degree to which the members feel attached to the social network which grows up around the franchise.

Typically, a bad decision or decisions by the company compromises, at some point, in the cycle the interests of the community, creating growing dis-satisfaction within the community. Certain key thought leaders in the community move elsewhere, often issuing some final message to the group, which feeds the discontent. Initially, the group may move outward in several different directions, testing new franchises to see if they offer either new pleasures or more of what attracted them to the earlier franchise.

In a networked culture, the word gets out where they went and what they thought and then there's a larger migration which can, under the right conditions, turn into a stampede. I suspect when this happens to WoW that people will be searching in several directions: some following the genre, looking for other worlds with similar elements; others will follow the game play mechanics, looking for games which either offer features they like about WOW or which fix the things that bugged them about the game; and others will follow the community, wanting to move to where-ever their friends relocate.

This whole process unfolds over several months or longer as the pieces sort themselves out. The key point here is that it is never social to the degree that other elements of the experience don't matter at all but the choice between equally satisfying experiences will frequently rest on the decisions made by the social network as a whole.

The article also features responses from some better informed sources -- Edward Castranova, Aaron Delwiche, Jeff McNeil, and Florence Chee. Check it out.

While we are on the subject of games, there was a nice piece on CNN's website focused on one of the games we produced through the GAMBIT lab this summer. The game in question, AudiOdyssey, was designed to facilitate play between sighted and visually impaired players. Here's some of what CNN had to say about the game:

Forget shoot-em-up addicts -- video games are reaching out to the rest of us.

The greatest symbol of this is the Wii console from Nintendo. Its innovative wireless control -- the Wiimote -- has even non-gamers excited as they swing it through the air to control, say, a tennis racket on the screen.

art.wii.afp.jpg

Wii's Wiimote may play a pivotal role in bringing the visually impaired into the electronic gaming fold.

But not quite everyone has been reached. One group is still largely ignored by video game makers: the blind.

With that in mind, a team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Massachusetts set out this summer to make a music-based video game that's designed for mainstream players and also accessible to the blind.

Appropriately, perhaps, they incorporated the Wiimote into the game-play, though it's optional.

The resulting DJ game, designed for the PC, is called AudiOdyssey. In it, players try to lay down different tracks in a song by swinging and waving the Wiimote in time with the beats. Or they can just use keyboard controls.

The game reminded this writer of my lack of any rhythm whatsoever. I used the keyboard version, where you're instructed to follow the beat by hitting an arrow key. Miss a beat and you get an ugly sound. Things sounded pretty ugly. But I did start to get a little better after 15 minutes and was awarded occasionally by crowd cheers. It's a fun game. And I got a kick out of it.

So did 41-year-old Alicia Verlager. For her, though, the fun is a bit more significant. She's visually impaired.

"Play is one of the ways in which people build relationships," she notes. "It's fun to take on the challenge of a game and take turns encouraging and laughing at each other's sillier mistakes. That's the experience I am really craving in a game -- the social aspects."

AudiOdyssey is presently single-player only, and there's no scoring system. But a multiplayer online version will be released in a few months. Intriguingly, players in this version won't necessarily know whether their opponent is blind -- and it won't make a difference in the game.

If you would like to know more about this project, check out the GAMBIT home page where they are starting to post some of the games developed by a team of some 50 Singaporean and MIT students working together this summer. I am going to be sharing the back story behind these titles as the semester runs along but you can download and play some of the titles whenever you want.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen , Part Two):Bob Rehak and Suzanne Scott

RDM and Mrs. Ron or: How we can't seem to stop worrying about textual authority BR: Hmm - a paragraph or two can make all the difference, and for whatever reason I now find myself feeling more upbeat about fanification, complexification, and all those other n-ifications I was grumbling about earlier. I agree with you that the productive conversations coming out of Lost, and before it Buffy, and before that The X-Files (just to reiterate my own path of entry into acafandom) are to celebrated, not disparaged. Indeed, the work that you and I and our colleagues do is a crucial part of this. (Another dimension of acafans I'd love to address at some point is the function of a fan-oriented pedagogy: surely it's meaningful for undergraduates that they can now take courses in fan culture, soap opera, or videogame culture, with professors and graduate students who not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.)

But your question brings up one of the most interesting points of our initial conversation: our shared fascination with - and skepticism toward - the "author-gods" who seem increasingly to sit at the center of the textual webs we acafans explore: Tim Kring of Heroes, J. J. Abrams (or really, Cuse and Lindelof) of Lost, Russell T. Davies of Doctor Who, and of course Ronald D. Moore of BSG. We're both interested in RDM and the way he's positioned himself as both "the decider" of all things Galactica, and a regular ol' fan like - I suppose - us. Perhaps the notion of a fan-who-is-also-an-author is not as chimerical as it seems; I seem to recall us starting this chat by swearing that such binaries were a thing of the past. And Moore's fan/author hybridity might be said to echo the undecidable nature of the vast quilt that is the Galactica text, embroidered as it has been by so many different creators, critics, viewers, debaters, and celebrants over the years. At what point does the canonical give way to something more collaborative and open-ended? I'm not sure, but the diffusion is homologous to RDM's Janus-faced mode of authorship.

That said, I don't trust him. He's got too much power: not just the power to make Lee fat or shuffle Baltar and the Cylons offstage for too much of season three or decree that the inside of a Basestar looks like a disco rec-room, edited like Last Year at Marienbad and accompanied by an endless loop of cheesy piano muzak. I don't trust him because in those blasted podcasts, to which I am more addicted than I am to Cheetos and Pringles combined, he insists on answering questions to which I kind of want to know the answers but really, on another level that likes to imagine possibilities freely, don't. Moore's not just an author-god, but a fan-god; he's like the friend I ate lunch with in high school who had memorized the complete text of The Lord of the Rings and who therefore possessed Neo-like argumentative skills. That guy's word was law, because he was acting as an agent for another kind of law, J. R. R. Tolkien's. RDM collapses the functions of author and interpreter into a single beast, and in so doing gets the final word on what a character was "really" thinking, or what "really" happened after that cutaway.

But as I say: I do listen. I enjoy the sense of intimacy and participation that Moore's side-industry of authorial commentary gives off like narcotic fumes - I get a kind of contact high from the podcasts' immediacy, the sense that I too have am puffing on a cigar, sipping whiskey, and interacting with my kids when they walk through the room while I discourse about "my" show. So when you ask, Suzanne, whether you should focus on the enrichment and expansion of fan experience through producer-approved content, versus viewing it as just another guise of "access," I have to say: let's do both at the same time! The example of RDM, whose cunning is no less insidious for being so genuinely forthright and self-deprecating, demonstrates that de Certeau's distinction between tactics and strategies needs to be rethought along with everything else. And the class of being that RDM represents - the showrunner - marks a distinct evolution of ancestors like Gene Roddenberry and J. Michael Straczynski. (Does this model make Joss Whedon a missing link?)

SS: Well, it's no secret that RDM was the author-god (or fan-god) I had in mind in my last post, as I share your addiction to his podcasts and your wariness of his self-positioning as both fan benefactor and textual authoritarian. Hearkening back to Cynthia Walker and Derek Kompare's discussion of the powers that be, I feel compelled (perhaps by my gender) to point out the boys club you've assembled above. Thus far, we haven't been tackling gender, because we both seem more concerned with the conditions under which contemporary fandom is functioning for everyone than how those conditions stand to effect fanboys and fangirls differently. As we've arrived at how TPTB are shaping these conditions, and RDM's podcasts in particular, I think a number of gender-specific issues need to be addressed.

Our mutual, avid consumption of the podcasts might point towards their gender neutrality (at least in terms of who the intended "audience" is, or who is actually comprising the audience). Likewise, our mutual concerns about how the podcasts' function to reinscribe authority and restrict our play with the text is something that's clearly being interrogated by both gendered "teams." The issue for that might be fangirl-specific, building off of Cynthia's take on TPTB, is how these authorized/official (and, noting your examples, almost always masculine) texts ultimately bolster fanboyish creativity/production while making fangirlish modes of creativity/production more difficult (or, at the very least, canonically invalidated).

And here's where we might see a gendered rift forming: with every bit of information RDM passes in those podcasts, he's further authoring the canon text (resolving its ambiguities), and authorizing a narrow interpretation (namely, his own). I'm glad you invoked de Certeau's strategies and tactics, as RDM is a both master of collapsing the categories between author and interpreter and often appears to collapse de Certeau's categories in the process. The discourse surrounding RDM's webisode battle with NBC Universal is the prime example- by framing NBC Universal as the Empire to his Rebel Alliance, RDM's positioning within the very strategic system he was fighting began to seem secondary to his tactical struggle. In fandom, I think we tend to associate tactical responses to the text with fangirl-oriented practices, and the more these male creators strive to frame themselves as "one of us" (gooble-gobble), the more they seem to poach our ability to poach.

As you note, the podcasts' intimacy, their blatantly amateurish aesthetic, makes them attractive to fans (myself included) and makes me question their intent. This intimacy is literally embodied in the many of the podcasts through the vocal presence of RDM's wife, tellingly referred to as "Mrs. Ron." Funnily enough, RDM and Mrs. Ron often appear to fall neatly into the essentialist definitions of "fanboy" and "fangirl" we've all been striving to complicate and/or debunk. Mrs. Ron is a fixture on the Scifi.com forums (often in the role of running interference between her RDM and the fans), and I find her "role" in the podcasts supports this. She focuses on character development, frequently asks the burning questions you or I might upon an initial viewing, and has enough "insider" awareness of the community to vocally acknowledge when one of RDM's asides will stir debate or controversy. What we should make of this (potentially performed) binary, and the fact that so many fans express annoyance with her "intrusions" on RDM's commentary, is something I haven't quite sussed out yet.

Finally, it's interesting that you should bring up Joss Whedon, as I've spent some time thinking about why I find his breed of masculine authority endearing and Moore's occasionally condescending, or why I rejoice over "canonized" Buffy season 8 comics but take Moore's BSG webisodes as a mixed blessing. To use fannish parlance, just as you've traced an authorial evolution to Moore (who has collapsed the binary of creator and fan), fans have evolved from being Jossed to being Moored. Fanfic authors don't just have to contend with the evolving source text, but podcast episode commentaries and creator blog entries and forays into transmedia storytelling. Worst case scenario, this trend could become the equivalent of the "no girls allowed" sign on the clubhouse, as more and more of the ambiguities we fangirls love to, say, write/read fanfic about are elucidated and weighed down by creative/canonic (and, importantly, male) authority.

BR: Brilliant points, and I'm glad that gender is back on the table - I'm aware of my tendency to sideline the more challenging and politically provocative aspects of my chosen objects of study, lest they threaten my fanboy comfort zone. As Lacan pointed out in relation to Freudian parapraxes, multiple discourses are always contesting control of the tongue, and my appetite for digression clearly has its symptomatic side.

Looking more closely at the RDM/Mrs. Ron dynamic, then, is it possible that what makes certain fans uncomfortable is the sense that some basic binary is being liquefied - a binary rightly or wrongly tied to gender difference? We confront with the uneasiness that Derrida observed of the zombie (both dead-and-alive) a entity both male-and-female. If the Moores really do bring together fanboyness and fangirlness at the Galactica text's point of origin, then this can be seen (fascinatingly, in my opinion) both as a strategy of incorporation (a text that is both male and female) and a tactic of resistance (a text that is always in conflict, or at least negotiation, with itself).

In saying all this, I think it's important to keep the performative and culturally-constructed definition of gender uppermost: we are not talking about "real" men and women (or what was termed "biobodies" in an earlier post), but conventional understandings of what it means to relate to texts from male and female perspectives. I like to work from Judith Butler's performative definition of gender because it lets us talk about our fannish affiliations as themselves a kind of performance and identity play: my choice of text enables me to (temporarily) play at being a different kind of fan/boy/girl, as does the way I read the text and the relationships I form around that practice of reading. It's fandom as a kind of masquerade - of transvestism - with all the polymorphous perversity that dress-up gives us.

So are BSG and the pair-of-Moores at its center emblematic of how gendered difference is being remapped, exploded, and/or reinforced by new media? Thanks to podcasts, webisodes, wikis, and other transformations of the commun(ication)al, Galactica permeates popular culture in a different way than, say, its late 70s prototype was able to. Looking back over our discussion, the image I see is that media evolution may have gotten us to a point where (A) many texts come pre-fitted for fannish investment (whether or not they are successful in seeding those investments is another question - cf. The Nine or Driven); (B) many audiences arrive at these texts already enculturated as fans, already liberated and "out of the closet" (and hence, as some critics have accused the beneficiaries of feminist and gay-rights struggles, no longer quite conscious of themselves as such); and (C) the tools and technologies of new media have both created spaces for the amplification of authorial control and riddled that authority with gaps from within.

Amid these fundamental shifts and reorientations, gender increasingly seems to be up for grabs, even as it persists (for better and worse) as a way of getting our bearings. Speaking as aca-fans of the new millennium, is it presumptuous to compare transformations in gendered fandom to the way in which the chromed robot Cylons of the original series, so reliably identifiable as different, have been transformed in the new series into something much more subversive, omnipresent, and unsettling?

SS: I'm fascinated by this analogy, especially given the cold/masculine force of the centurians on both incarnations of BSG and the current series' comparatively (and literally, check the sexy LED spinal cord) "warm" female skinjob models, with their alternating emphasis on their predatory sexuality and matriarchal attachment. But that's a whole other can of worms...

Looking at your summary of our conversation above, I think the general shifts in textual production and consumption we've been discussing impact all fans (regardless of gender, degree of "activity," etc.), but some fan practices more than others (and, thus, perhaps some "gendered" categories of practice more than others). Looking back over the conversations this summer, your final summary point ("the tools and technologies of new media have both created spaces for the amplification of authorial control and riddled that authority with gaps from within") seems the most charged in terms of gender. The issue of women and fangirls being written out of technological histories has been brought up on a number of occasions (I believe mostly in terms of machinima and its vidding roots, but certainly should be in terms of normalizing girls as gamers as well), and I worry that these oversights only stand to be compounded by the amplification of male authorial control we've been discussing. We're running short on time and space here, and this is clearly an emergent issue we're both invested in exploring further, so I'll leave the rest to be debated through comments and responses.

In closing, it's been a pleasure conversing with you Bob. Hopefully we'll carry on informally as BSG comes to a close, RDM gets his creative closure, and fans (hopefully) continue to complicate and expand the text on their own terms. Many thanks to Henry for providing the forum, and to all the other contributors this summer (and on into the fall)- it's been thought-provoking, to say the least!

BR: I second those sentiments wholeheartedly, Suzanne. This was a fun and exciting discussion that pushed me to think in new ways, even as I hauled some of my cherished axes out for a good grinding. And yes, let's stay in touch: Razor arrives soon, with the riveting Admiral Cain at its center - talk about grist for the gender mill!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen , Part One):Bob Rehak and Suzanne Scott

Bob Rehak: *tapping mic* is this thing on? OK, I'll kick things off with the usual self-disclosure: I'm an assistant professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College, where I'm starting my second year teaching classes in introductory media studies, animation, television and new media, video production, and fan culture. I've published here and there on videogames and special effects (reflecting my M.A. and Ph.D. interests respectively), but the most relevant bit of textual cred is probably my article "Lara Croft and New Media Fandom," which appeared in Information, Communication and Society in 2003 and is being reprinted in the upcoming second edition of The Cybercultures Reader. In terms of fandom, I'm one of those who stands on the sidelines, self-identifying as a fan even though I don't really "do" fan things, create fannishly, or consort with other fans (except in online fora of questionable pedigree such as Aint-it-cool.com). There are several ways to read this - as another kick at the dead horse of disengaged "man-style" fandom, or maybe more productively as part of the aca-fan trend in which scholarly activity substitutes for, augments, or mutates traditional fan engagement - positions my preliminary chats with Suzanne suggest might well come up later in this conversation. For now, let me just fan the deck of my media passions (Stars Trek and Wars, Battlestar Galactica, the many paneled and animated incarnations of Superman, computer games ranging from the Apple II era to id's first-person shooters) and signal that my preferred mode of engagement with these things tends toward the solitary, obsessive, and archival. I'm the guy who builds model kits and wonders who would win in a fight, the T-800 or a Cylon Centurion.

In terms of where this dialogue might go, of course that's up to us and the Brownian motion of the discourse. My sense, though, is that Henry put us together because we share an interest in how fandom is being reconfigured by the dynamics of new media, especially "transmedia" and "collective intelligence." In this online plasma of spoiler-swarming, social networking, and long-tailing, lots of venerable signposts are dissolving, among them binaries central to the debates on this blog: expert/amateur, author/reader, text/context, official/illicit. To this upending of oppositions we now add the pairing female/male. Now I'm a closet structural linguist, so all of these terms seem to me to exist primarily in negation of each other: we recognize each for not being its partner. But that stance only gets us halfway, to the kind of dull essentialist standoff that many of this summer's conversations have worked at unraveling. I think the place to go from here is to ask how new forms of difference (since I believe we can't make sense of things without difference) are nowadays coalescing and coming into being; what traditions of power are being broken with or inherited; and to what degree - since I'm also a closet "ideologist" - these transactions are themselves disavowed and softpedaled, even by, yes, we well-meaning critics who purport to see and speak clearly and honestly.

Suzanne Scott: Clearly, there's something pressing that needs to be addressed before I make my official introductions...the T-800 would probably win the fight, but would undoubtedly suffer from endoskeleton envy. In short, style points go to the Centurion. Now that we've settled that, down to business: I'm currently a doctoral candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, working on a dissertation exploring Harry Potter fandom and new media narratives. More specifically, I'm interested in the shifting cultural significance of canonization, how a literary fan community embraces or rejects the openness of new media texts, and what this might say more broadly about our shifting relationship to media texts. My involvement in the HP fan community led me to serve as Chair of Programming for Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter symposium designed to encourage dialogue between academics, professionals, and fans. As even I need a break from JKR on occasion, I recently completed a chapter for the upcoming collection Cylons In America on the potential effects of the Battlestar Galactica's webisodes and podcasts on fan production.

Given the definitions of "fanboy" and "fangirl" that are being used, I find that my alignment with one title or the other tends to be fandom-specific. In terms of Star Wars, or various horror properties such as Army of Darkness, my engagement skews blue, whereas my involvement with Buffy, BSG and Harry Potter has been far more communal/creative in nature. I'd be needlessly shooting a few rounds into the aforementioned dead horse to say that these poles don't function neatly for me. My growing consumption/critical interest in comic books and video games should be noted, as should my lack of interest in slash (though I find studies of it fascinating), but I primarily find my thoughts turning towards what I might cynically call the corporate appropriation of fan practice, and its effects.

Fanification, Complexification, and Categorization

SS: Bob, you tossed out a few reasons why were paired up, and I have one to add: we're both in the privileged position of coming up through the ranks of academia in an age where aca-fen aren't experiencing the derision they once did. I think this is intricately bound with the current critical fascination with new media's dissolution of the binaries you've noted above. I'm certainly not alone in perceiving fans as spearheading these cultural shifts, and perhaps the fact that fan studies troubled these binaries long before we were all talking excitedly about user-generated content has made them a more acceptable scholarly pursuit. Granted, I have yet to experience the perils of the job hunt. Maybe my n00b aca-fan romanticism will be dashed, but I think there's something to be said here about fans as early adopters and our own abundant inheritance as new fan scholars.

Taking this idea about the increased popularity/reputability of fan studies one step further, something that stuck with me after our phone conversation was your comment about the current "fanification" of the audience. As so many of the conversations here on the blog this summer have been invested defining who has the creative/communal/consumptive credibility to take on the mantle of "fan," I think you and I might agree on a more flexible definition. This isn't to say demarcations shouldn't be debated (they should, and have been eloquently all summer), or that a hierarchical model of fannish activity is pointless (quoth Buffy, it's entirely pointy), but that the general "fanification" of contemporary media users means that we need to drop some of the baggage about how "active" a consumer must be to be equated with a "good" consumer/fan. What do you make of the fact that activity and creativity/fan production are still being conflated, given how even casual consumers are engaging with texts in broader, more "fannish" terms? To my mind, it's becoming increasingly impossible to neatly delineate between, say, the creator of a Star Wars: Legacy discussion board, a poster on that discussion board, someone who lurks on that discussion board, and someone who just avidly reads the comics.

BR: Well, as someone who did recently jump through the multiple hoops of the job search, I can testify to the apparent lack of friction/hostility triggered by the more fannish elements of my research profile. If anything, building my job talks about Star Trek and Star Wars seemed to win warm approval from most of the audience, some of whom were familiar with the literature and already took aca-fandom seriously, others of whom seemed simply to enjoy having their inner fan validated. (If I had a brick of gold-pressed latinum for every person who came up afterward and said, "I'm a Trekkie too!" ...) Of course, the friendly reception likely had other ingredients, including the selection process I'd already gone through - they knew what they were getting when they invited me to campus - and, more troublingly, the unearned authority a deep-voiced white man with a beard presumably brings to whatever he's babbling about.

I do think that the majority audience has undergone fanification in the past 10-20 years, and that this transformation feeds into both positive and negative aspects of the contemporary mediascape. On the plus side, the level of intensity, focus, and sheer memory we now bring to media texts has been matched by an increasing complexification of those texts. Serial dramas and comedies, as well as multi-sequel media franchises and transmedia storytelling systems, just wouldn't work unless we had all grown very good at collectively paying attention in the way that fans do. Ah, but who is this "we"? Well, the "we" doesn't really matter - which is the problematic part of the equation. Instead of the good old days in which small tribes of readerly hunters-and-gatherers stumbled across rich groves of cult texts and absorbed them into a way of life, texts now come fandom-ready, dense with continuity, haloed with enigmatic online tie-ins, and packed with casts of characters varied enough to ensure that somewhere, someone will find a point of identificatory purchase. Mass texts, in short, have learned to present themselves as anything but, enjoying a prefab and illusory fringe-ness.

An edge seems to have crept into my voice here. I suppose that's because I'm enough of a purist at heart to resent the cooptation of fannish affect and modes of reading/writing by culture industries all too eager to sell us anything we'll buy. Fans used to put money into the system, sure, but there was always a kind of grass-roots perversity to it, like voting for Nader in 2000. As much as I love Heroes or BSG or Doctor Who, to be a "fan" of these shows means constantly pretending that I'm in a much smaller and more elite group than I really am.

So my mood at this point in the conversation is rather grim: I see the breakdown of categories like those in your Star Wars: Legacy discussion board example as evidence that those categories nowadays don't make much sense - or else make sense only in terms of an older, now obsolete formation of fandom which we now resurrect as contrarian myth in order to disavow our always-already complicit role.

But before I disappear into my Frankfurt-School navel-gazing, let me ask you for a reality check on my pessimism. Does your work on the openness of new media texts point in a more optimistic direction than what I've outlined here?

SS: Well, you've hit directly on the catch-22, and my increasingly conflicted feelings towards our contemporary fan-savvy mediascape. I'm all for increased narrative complexity, as it provides fans with a plethora of analytic and creative ways to play with the text. Of the mass-masquerading-as-fringe trend you're noting, Lost might be the ultimate prefab creation (having taken a page or two out of the Twin Peaks playbook), but I think that the critical acclaim is warranted despite how calculated or contradictory its positioning as a "populist cult" program might be. As a big proponent of the Everything Bad is Good For You school of thought, I think that a widespread cultural acknowledgement of media texts as cognitively challenging (particularly videogames, and I'd offer Bioshock as evidence) has yet to occur, and these shows are fueling productive conversations. Because of this, I'm less pessimistic about how these texts tout their diversity as a selling tool, and more interested in fan culture's increasingly niche approach to theses prefab texts.

Admittedly, this is a chicken/egg dialectic, but I think it relates to your response to my Star Wars: Legacy model. While such categorization might be a nostalgic attempt to cling to the "contrarian myth" (love that, btw) of analog fandom, it also seems to be a direct response to the vast, ephemeral nature of online fan culture. Defining a space of one's own through (often highly specific) textual affiliations in an overwhelmingly populated online fan community such as Harry Potter, for example, makes participation in the larger community more manageable. The Hogwarts house model functions similarly (and is a key tool in how the HP fan community functions and its members shape their identity): creating micro-communities within the macro school community. While I wholeheartedly agree with you that fandom can never return to its elitist "secret clubhouse" model, I see the desire to keep that illusion intact as a coping mechanism for the modern fan rather than mass disavowal of our complicity. A sense of participation and community is a strong draw for fanboys and fangirls alike, and being a generalist fan in this day and age poses problems on both fronts. In short, the categories may no longer make sense or be relevant, but to garner a localized sense of stability within a fan community, categorization still serves a vital purpose.

Though I'd paint myself fairly utopian, I'm growing less celebratory of the openness of new media texts, especially when it comes to the powers that be. The increased textual flexibility and agency consumers have come to expect means that producers are finding new ways to concurrently indulge (or appear to indulge) these cultural shifts and still retain a sense of authority and control. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the relative openness of the texts you describe above is illusory, I do worry about how the narrative territory we frequently affiliate with encouraging fan creativity is being steadily encroached on by producers and transmedia storytelling systems (which, if they're aiming for consistency of vision, are more about delegation than collective creation to my mind). So I'll see your pessimism regarding the corporate cooptation of fannish affect and raise you a paranoid theory on the culture industry's plot to quell fan production through increased consumption of their own "authorized" fannish texts.

Again, as with the case of increased narrative complexity, the abundance of ancillary online content being aimed at fans would superficially seem to be a positive thing: more "direct" contact with the show's creators though online Q&As and podcasts, a more detailed look at the creative process through blogs and streaming video, supplementary narrative content in the form of free online comics and webisodes, etc. Ultimately though, I wonder about motive. Sure, it's unabashedly promotional, but I also can't help but feel this is the new media-savvy equivalent of sending covert cease and desist letters. The fangirl in me, knowing that the author-god behind this content is male in most cases, chafes at this reinscription and dispersal of canonic masculine authority over the "open" aspects of the text as questions that would have prompted discussion are answered definitively, as narrative ambiguities are resolved concretely. And, since it seems that gen fic is being read as a team blue trait, the fanboy in me is wary that "downloading" has started to replace "doing" when we talk about DIY fan culture.

I don't want to fall into the activity=productivity trap I rallied against earlier in my call for a looser definition of "fan." So it's my turn to ask you for a reality check- should I be focusing on how this producer-approved content enriches and expands how the average fan experiences the narrative? Or is this guise of "access" just another prime example of fans trying to feel like they're part of an inner circle?

PART TWO WILL RUN ON MONDAY.

The Art of Horror and the Horror of Art: An Interview with Christian Jankowski (Part Two)

Due to some miscommunications, there will be a delay in posting the next installment of the Gender and Fan Culture series. We hope to have it up by tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am continuing to share with you the strange saga of how my head ended up in a glass case in an art museum. Enjoy! For Lycan Theorized you worked with theorists who had written about horror film and asked them to give you impressions of various body parts. Can you give us a list of the theorist and body parts involved? Can you describe the range of responses you got from theorists to this request?

Lycan Theorized is composed of two parts: one is my film that piggybacked onto a B-movie horror production called Lycan. My film incorporates lines of dialogue that were taken from horror academics' writings and emails. The second part of Lycan Theorized is sculptural, and consists of the prosthetics used in the film that were molded directly from the bodies of the participating theorists. When you see Lycan Theorized, you have the film and then a vitrine that encases these body prosthetic body parts.

The Lycan script had basic scenes that climaxed in the horror moment, the moment the body is destroyed. I had the actors recite bits of horror theory in the seconds before they are killed off. In this moment, the actor would drop lines of theory as if in a moment of enlightenment, representing the moment between life and death, and a transition from actor to theorist, even philosopher. Immediately after the body part gets chopped off, the actor would continue as usual, according to the script.

Prosthetics are of course a big part of horror film productions. The producers know they'll need a hand, a leg, a neck, ear, etc. for the special effects of the killing scenes. I thought that instead of using just basic props, it would be nice to load these objects with a more specific meaning.

I gave each film character an alter ego in the world of horror academia. The werewolves were cast as the founders of horror theory: Robin Woods, Barbara Creed, Nöel Carroll et. al. Marc Jankovich (who edited the horror reader that guided me through the entire project) became Kwan, the werewolf hunter.

To have theorists' physical involvement in the project, and not only their words, we cast their bodies for the prosthetics used in the film. When asking their permissions to use their texts AND make prosthetic casts of their bodies, most of them were thrilled by the chance to see their heads roll across the screen

One of the strangest moments I had was with Vivian Sobchack. I had asked her if we could cast her leg. Her initial reaction was weird, then she said, 'You know one of my legs is a prosthetic, right? I lost the leg in an accident. But you're welcome to make a cast of the other one." Knowing this changed my reading of her work.

I decided to exhibit all of the body parts. As they were cast from theorists, it was 'Frankenstein-esque' to put all of them together: an ear from Brigid Cherry, a head from Julian Petley, a neck from Linda Ruth Williams, your head, all of the thinkers together under glass. It symbolized the quotes that were chopped out of their bodies of text, and re-formed into a new body.

On another level, the prosthetics inform the audience. Next to the prosthetics table there is a list of the theorists and the academic institutions where they teach. If you only see part of the film and see a head flying, you could reference the body parts and their labels to help you identify the quote and their cinematic alter ego.

Fingers: Melissa Ragona, Assistant Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon University

Right leg: Vivian Sobchack, Professor of Film and Television, UCLA

Spine: Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies,

University of Essex

Head: Cynthia Freeland, Professor of Philosophy, University of Houston

Head: Julian Petley, Professor of Film and Television, Brunel University

Right ear: Brigid Cherry, St Mary's College, University of Surrey

Neck: Linda Ruth Williams, Professor of Film Studies, University of Southampton

Head: Henry Jenkins, Professor and Co-director of Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT

Left arm, right arm :Dr. Raiford Guins, Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of the West of England

Hand: Linda Williams, Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Can you describe in some detail the specific use you made of my head in the film and in the exhibit?

I clearly remember your head being shipped to the studio and the weird sensation of pulling the head out of a box. On my way to London and the installation of the exhibition I carried your head in my hand luggage. The security at the airport put it all through the x-ray machine and one guard joked to the other, 'Hey, this guy is carrying a chopped-off head in his bag!'

When I altered the Lycan script for Lycan Theorized, I kept your thoughts on stealing ideas from high and low cultures in mind. Lycan had a scene about theft, where a group of vandals try to steal copper pipes and get caught (and of course, punished) by a werewolf. Since I like to think of you as the vandal between high and low culture, you became Vandal 1.

Ultimately they cast an actor for the role who was bald, so they had to shave your prosthetic head. When they finished up, they let it roll on the asphalt for the decapitation scene. I had a very intense moment when I thought, this is not cool, because it seemed disrespectful and weird to treat an exact replica of someone I knew, so casually. It became a very physical experience of looking. But then also remembered filming one scene where your character says, "In horror films, this is the way the most radical ways of seeing the world can be accepted.' And that made me think, It's okay. It's okay to chop off Jenkins's head.

You also drew on excerpts of theoretical writings to form the basis of dialog in the film. Explain. So, what use did you make of my quotes?

In the original Lycan script, Vandal 1 is a thuggish thief. The actor who plays Vandal 1 has to say things like 'What the fuck...' or 'Leave us alone, man!' In Lycan Theorized, you're still a thief, but you talk about theft in a different way. Using your words, the same actor would say, 'The word 'theft' here is problematic. Let's think of it as like a dialogue or exchange. High and popular artists borrow from each other all of the time.' Actually, these lines are not direct quotes from your blog or an essay, but taken from your email responses where you discuss the link between pop culture and fine art. Your fellow Vandals in Lycan Theorized quote, and in a way become, Raiford Guins and Vivian Sobchack. And you all get attacked and killed by the werewolf, no matter what you say.

You worked with an existing film production as part of this project. What relationship exists between the film they set out to make and the film you have produced using the same sets and actors?

The films are like brothers. The goal of one is to be very popular as a feature film (straight to DVD feature), and the other aspired to be an art installation. Mine is a reflection about the multiple aspects of horror film and I use the visual aesthetics of their work and mixing them with theoretical writing. But some scenes appear in both films. The theorist body parts, including your head, made the final cut of the Blockbuster version.

The Lycan producers tried to reach a commercial horror audience, so they had to play by certain rules. The considerations were definitely on sales and that werewolf movies were popular right then. And the higher the body count, the more explosions there were, the more screen-time the monster had - the better the sales.

They had a young, enthusiastic, low-budget director team to make the horror production, but wanted a commercial film to sell to a big studio; which in the end, they did. The filmmakers were realistic about the limited budget, so they did a lot with their enthusiasm. They didn't have the funds to hire professional actors, but they wanted to do a funny horror movie, and part of the humor is the acting. They wanted to entertain the audience with killing, gore, a bit of sexiness, and aimed the film more at teenagers.

I remember the fights between the directors and the producer because the werewolf didn't look like a "real" werewolf; they thought it looked more like a big hamster or the Abominable Snowman. It seemed funny, but I know there was serious tension between them, because the producer wanted to see a lot of werewolf in scenes but the filmmakers thought. not too much -- because you might laugh instead of being scared.

I wanted to layer the film production system and the landscape of theory on top of one another. If you have a female monster who talks self-reflexively about the presence of a female monster, you see a very condensed image of meaning. I thought it could be scary, funny, and informative at the same time. I thought that this horror film would "throw back" theory that was normally superimposed onto it. Theory normally comes after the horror film arrives. This time theory would be thrown onto the audience instead of only body parts.

Also, theorists normally have this academic distance. If you want to analyze something, you need a certain distance from it, and I wanted to erase that distance physically by using their body parts and theories as a script. The normal forum for theorists is the essay, book, or conference. Instead of a conference or panel discussion, what if we gave them costumes and special effects, and have this discussion in front of a camera during a horror production.?

How have gallery visitors responded to the more horrific aspects of the exhibit? Do you think the exhibit is having an impact on the ways they perceive the horror film genre?

The openings were crowded until the very end, so I couldn't have scared too many people away! But I remember two days after the New York show, I toured the show with a group of museum trustees and collectors. I started with a group of thirty, and after they walked into a very gruesome scene in Lycan Theorized, I lost about a half of them. I hadn't even started talking about the project; it just seemed like they couldn't handle these images. Another scene came on, using a quote from Raiford Guins, "The libertines dancing around the tortured bodies are Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush," and the question up came up about how political this exhibition was.

I used this quote because it was one of the few quotes that see horror as something related to present-day politics. It is the opinion of one academic, but I felt that we could not leave such an extreme voice out, because it represents a whole tradition of horror writing linked to politics, Nazism, photos of corpses in newspapers, and consumer-zombies in shopping malls. For me, it was only one way to look at horror and the exhibition. But it's an important, and a possible reading.

I remember at the (Art Basel) Miami fair, a bunch of younger people came over and over to see Angels of Revenge. Maybe they liked the shock value of it, and the weird stories. I suspect that a lot of people didn't consciously re-think their perceptions of the horror film genre (after viewing Lycan Theorized), but maybe they think more about how horror exists in their own lives, whether it's in politics or even when the cell phone gets stolen. If horror impacts you individually, then you know it's not just a fantasy.

How does this exhibit relate to your larger body of work?

Looking at the whole body of my work, the horror pieces might be a brain tumor: linking the gruesome with the physical, and affecting thought.

I've used similar strategies in the horror works to works I've done in the past, but each experience becomes its own story. I usually participate directly in the artwork, I infiltrate an existing production, and the element of chance always plays a huge part in the outcome of a piece. There is a performative element, a cinematic element, and a self-reflective element. I've worked with pop-culture genres like televangelism and karaoke to structure the projects, and when I learn about another culture, there are fun collaborators who guide the way.

The Art of Horror and the Horror of Art: An Interview with Christian Jankowski (Part One)

Last Spring, I ran two blog posts which described the curious process by which my decapitated head (or at least a replica thereof) ended up being used in a low budget horror film, featured in an experimental movie, and displayed in art galleries in London and New York City. The man who pulled me (and my head) into this fine mess was Christian Jankowski, a contemporary multimedia artist who largely works in video, installation, and photography. He has created a number of television interventions, including "Telemistica" (1999), in which he asks Italian television psychics if his new art work will be successful (the video he then created is comprised of recordings of these psychics answering his question), and "The Holy Artwork" (2001), in which he collaborated with a televangelist pastor. One of his early works, "The Hunt," is currently on display at Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art: in this video, he takes a bow and arrow into a grocery store, vowing to live only on food that he shoots himself.

My head was one of the featured attractions of "The Violence of Theory," part of The Frankenstein Set, a larger exhibit of his works which explored Horror films, their fans, and their theorists.

Given my rather intimate involvement in this particular exhibit, not to mention its clear relevance to those of us interested in fan culture and on the relationship between high and popular art, I had long hoped to feature an interview with him here about the work. Until now, his schedule has not allowed him to respond to my questions. But, now, as he is preparing the printed catalog for the exhibit, he has taken some time out to talk about the work, including his own version of the travels and tribulations experienced by my prosthetic head. A fuller version of this interview will be published as part of the exhibit catalog.

Some of what follows may scare you. Some of what follows may shock you. But all of what follows is true. This interview is not for the weak of heart. Nurses are standing by to attend to anyone who faints as a result of reading this blog.

The exhibition The Frankenstein Set (Lisson Gallery, UK. Sept. 2007) consists of three artistic interventions in and around Horror film culture. Can you describe your relationship to the horror genre? Were you a fan before you began this project? What drew you to do a series of works based on the horror genre? (*Note: the US exhibition title at The Kitchen in NYC was 'Us and Them').

When I begin working on an art project, it can start with a fascination about something I know little about, or am ambiguous about - but then it normally sucks me in. This time it was horror and I guess you can say now I'm a horror fan.

Although thinking more about it, bits of the horror genre were present in my life early on. When my parents first started dating they were shooting a horror short on 8mm in their spare time, a kind of thriller. They co-wrote the story, acted in it, and filmed it. I grew up in Göttingen, a little university town in Germany where the Brothers Grimm were once professors and my mother put me to sleep reading their folk tales of children being eaten by witches and of a little boy who went out into the world to learn about fear. Later, as a teenaged electric-guitar player, I wore black leather and used kohl eyeliner to shock my parents and teachers. My favorite book back then was Freaks and Monsters (which also inspired my first band name „The Freaks"), and I loved H.R. Giger and of course, Hieronymus Bosch. Some of the first films they showed us in art school were The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Un Chien Andalou. I also think the photographs I saw then from the Orgien Mysterien Theater of Hermann Nitsch and the other bloody performances of the Vienna Actionists may have guided me in the direction of performance art - which is still the base of what I'm doing today.

The horror project started when I attended a lecture of yours at MIT on horror imagery in Matthew Barney's work. There was this high level of interpretation given to these super-popular horror images. To my mind Barney took horror visuals and used freakish characters like a woman with a prosthetic leg or even himself as a Satyr and then filmed a big budget art movie in the Guggenheim Museum. I thought it'd be more interesting to do something closer to actual horror film productions, infiltrate their vocabularies and work within their world.

Historically, many would have regarded horror as one of the most debased of entertainment genres. What do you see as the implications of incorporating this genre into your work for a gallery exhibit? What relationship are you positing here between popular culture and high art?

'Low culture' and popular culture have been a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists, so I don't think that distinction between low and high necessarily stands in the art world any more.

I'm not interested in putting horror on an intellectual, 'high', bloodless level. The work has to be sensual experience combined with an intellectual way of seeing things that you might not have seen before. I thought in this overlap between theory words and gruesome images, something surprising could happen. It's a kind of collage.

You could say The Blair Witch Project is a fiction disguised as a horror documentary, and Angels of Revenge is a documentary disguised as horror fiction. Normally it's all fiction that the horror fans watch and like. In Angels of Revenge though, they get to see their own fantasies and real life stories entering this half-documentary, half-fiction movie. Of course, you're never quite sure where the 'real' and 'fiction' begins and ends in their stories, because these fans are so influenced by horror film characters they follow.

One of the Angels of Revenge cast members organized to have the film shown at this year's Fangoria 'Weekend of Horror' convention, so in a way the work now has a life in two worlds: the world of the galleries and the world of horror films.

For Angels of Revenge, you attended a horror fan convention and drew fans there into your film production work. What were your impressions of the convention? Can you describe your working relationship with these fans? What did you discover about the horror film audience through this process?

I came across the website of the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors when researching horror film productions. It's a yearly convention for the horror industry and fans with film screenings, panel discussions, presentation of new products etc. But the event that grabbed my attention was the advertised costume contest, which anybody could participate in. I imagined obsessed fans in elaborate costumes and figured it could be an interesting starting point for a project. So me and the cinematographer I usually work with, Max Petzel, flew to Chicago and arrived at this hotel in the middle of nowhere.

It looked deserted from the outside, but was packed. Three types of people were there: first, baseball fans. (I think there was a game going on). Second, groups of families going to bridal showers. And third, there were leather people, horror people, Goths. It was a pretty surreal mix of people.

The next morning, crowds lined up for tickets to the convention, and I saw the first fans in costumes. I met Anthony the Green Monster, who had a full face mask skillfully done by a makeup artist, so he could hardly speak. Another guy was the Butcher lugging around bloody body parts - I knew I had to have him in front of the camera. Some of them were there as fans, others were horror fans but also promoting their businesses - special FX make-up etc.

I approached various costumed fans, explained the project I had in mind and asked them to participate. We had built a small set in a conference room, a dark corridor that I wanted them to walk along towards the camera.

Before filming, I asked them to think of a person in their lives who had wronged them or disappointed them deeply, relive the experience and come up with a revenge fantasy. So part of the project was documenting their history, telling what had happened. And the other part was fiction, coming up with a just punishment for the betrayal or cruelty. Sort of a cathartic experience.

My favorite was the Anthony the Green Monster. His costume was crazy. It even had a remote control that could move something on his head for extra effect. He started talking about making horror costumes and how his former business partner stole his ideas and clients. He stood in one of his own costumes and told this self-reflexive story about the horror of the horror business. The costume had these big claws, but he was talking about using a little knife to kill this traitor. I thought, you are a big, green monster and you are going to use a knife? It was similar to the Butcher: Instead of chopping someone to pieces, as you'd predict, he talks about taking photographs of someone to blackmail them. This is where the projected image and their words go two different ways, which was absurd and great.

Some of them fell quickly into this stereotype of their characters' revenge cliché and not their own, personal stories. I'd give them the chance to rethink their revenge, some of them reconsidered and would reveal more personal details and the motivations that suited the revenge: Not only did you fire me, but I know that you're having an affair and I'll make that public as the revenge - instead of chopping your head off. Some were caught up in hate, I could feel it. In the moment, it was really sincere. I might ask them, 'You think this is a just revenge?' But in the end it was all up to them.

Part of my fascination in the horror genre is how it creates a free zone from these imposed social mores and standards, but ironically at the same time I found myself horrified at some of the revenge fantasies that the Angels cast members were voicing. Which of course was hypocritical because I had prodded them to do so, had created the free zone and was hoping for gruesome stories that would make for a good film; and on the other hand I was judging them by the accepted moral standards -- Girlfriend got stolen? They're going to rip her to pieces. Someone borrows money, doesn't give it back? He'll peel off their fingernails. So it also brought out the double-sided moral in myself.

I can't generalize horror fans. I met many fascinating characters but the most interesting to me were the people who had a certain personal approach. The last guy in Angels of Revenge had had a kidney transplant and thus had a distorted relationship to his body and the disease that had attacked him. It made him reflect on his body differently and to take uncommon things as normal. So horror could be a logical step to address a dysfunctional body or a trauma, or a way to deal with your own situation.

Horror deals with supernatural powers, and I think that many fans live very regular lives. I think horror films can help people break out of the power structures that they're in. And not by starting a revolution or riot, but for a moment in the theater.

Of course there is a certain body obsession with horror people; you see piercings, tattoos, physical transformations. And I'm sure you can easily get addicted to horror because of these incredible images you see on screen: another body opens up; you feel the thrills of excitement. And it's also a fascination with going beyond certain accepted human taboos. You get to rethink your standards, your moral standards, and pain standards.

The Second Part of this interview will run next Monday following the forthcoming installment of our ongoing Gender and Fan Culture series. It deals primarily with Lycan Theorized, the film which made use of my dismembered head. I will at last learn the details of what happened to my head when it, er, left my hands.

My essay on Matthew Barney and the horror film genre can be found in The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2006).

Looking Back: The Re:Constructions Project

In the fall of 2001, my graduate media theory seminar at MIT met every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. Classes had started a week before 9/11. The opening discussion focused on Thomas McLaughlin's concept of vernacular theory. I had emphasized that all kinds of groups for all kinds of reasons both produce and consume media theory, although they do so with different languages and with different institutional norms. From here, we had discussed the ways academic theorists might more fully engage with other producers and consumers of theory and how this would require a shift in rhetoric. We talked a lot about the concept of applied humanism, which is one of the cornerstones of the comparative media studies approach--the idea that insights from the humanities and social sciences need to be applied and tested at actual sites of media change. MIT has applied physics, applied math. It was time it had applied humanism. We challenged our students to do projects that had real-world impact and that confronted pragmatic challenges. I had to go almost immediately from hearing the news of the tragedy on 9/11 to conducting a seminar. As I walked toward the classroom, I passed graduate students huddled around radios or reading information off the Internet, many of them openly weeping. Afterward, everyone focused on New York City, but at that moment Boston was profoundly affected because the airplanes that had crashed into the towers had departed from Boston's Logan Airport. No one felt like class, yet nobody wanted to be alone. Since I live on campus, I phoned my wife to tell her I was bringing the class home to watch news reports.

Most of the students came with me. Some made calls on their cell phones to friends and family members; others channel zapped before focusing on BBC America, which MIT Cable had just added a few days before; and some used wireless laptops to glean information from the Web.

The students gathered in my living room hardly knew each other. Most had arrived on campus a week or so before. This was the most heavily international cohort we had attracted since MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program had been launched three years earlier. The students were acutely aware of the tragedy's international dimensions and frustrated by how intensely nationalistic much of the coverage was.

Over the next several days, e-mails flew fast and furious on the departmental discussion list. When the class gathered again on Thursday, the students demanded to know what role theory might play now and wondered whether there was any way they as students at the beginning of their professional training could make a difference. We talked a lot about ways the program might respond and about some of the statements issued by public intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. Many students found these statements unsatisfactory in their abstract tone and their "told you so" attitude. A meaningful theoretical response needed to be humane, to acknowledge the author's own emotional experiences, and to respect the reality of several thousand deaths. Political analysis might come later, although the Bush administration was already cutting short the mourning process and preparing us for military action.

We called a "town meeting" of all our faculty and students. Several ideas surfaced, the most compelling being to produce a Web site that would provide resources for people who wanted to lead discussions about the media coverage. Although the Web project, operating under the title re:constructions, would involve faculty, students, and staff, it was voluntary, outside formal class requirements.

Many of us--faculty and students--gathered the following day in an MIT classroom, where we outlined topics we wanted to cover and divided up the tasks. All the blackboards were covered with chalk and post-its by the end of the discussion. William Uricchio, then CMS's associate director (now my Co-Director), recalls:

What impressed me about the experience was that fellow faculty and students were bound together in a shared project far different than the classroom. In the classroom, we approach one another from different sides, with different agendas. In the case of re:constructions, we worked side by side, exchanging insight and expertise without ever sliding into the collaborative opposition that typifies the classroom. That this happened so early in the semester made for an excellent set of working relations for the rest of the year.

Some of the students formed teams to videotape events on campus and elsewhere, the more experienced students teaching novices how to use the equipment. Other students began scanning media coverage in their home countries or reaching out to friends and family members around the world. Our goal was to provide summaries and links to media coverage in as many countries as possible. We contacted additional faculty members and urged them to write short essays modeled after Raymond Williams's Keywords to explain the historical contexts behind some of the language being used to describe what had happened. Others read essays about news and propaganda, developing questions teachers could use to generate discussions. Students circulated drafts of their essays electronically, giving each other advice and feedback.

The work went on all weekend, with students coming in and out of our offices at all hours, day and night. One student, Philip Tan, did all the coding for the site himself, working eighteen-hour shifts, pasting in text as quickly as the other team members generated it. Alex Chisholm, a member of our staff, proofed everything as it passed across the mailing list. Sometimes, students and faculty would huddle for quick discussions about core theoretical concepts. Sometimes, faculty sent e-mails with advice. A few faculty expressed reservations, concerned that a programmatic response might be inappropriate or ill timed. Each of these exchanges produced animated conversation about what we were doing and why.

Often, we had to make quick decisions about how to deal with evolving controversies. For example, many different people sent us reports that CNN had recycled footage from the earlier Gulf War to give the impression that Palestinians were celebrating the attacks. We also received a detailed rebuttal of these charges allegedly issued by CNN insisting that the Palestinians were chanting Bin Laden's name and that he had not been a figure in the previous conflict. We were left uncertain which was more likely--that conspiracy theories with little foundation might quickly circulate on the Internet or that a major news organization might lie about its own production processes in order to manufacture consent. All of this gave us a greater appreciation of the decisions practicing journalists made as they generated the news coverage our site was critiquing.

As we read earlier attempts to theorize catastrophe, some rang remarkably hollow, preoccupied as they were with describing and critiquing discursive practices that they lost sight of the human costs. In other cases, theory proved enormously comforting, much as my colleagues in the arts and humanities took comfort in poetry or music.

Some of the most interesting discussions centered on the design of the site itself. Candis Callison, a second-year student, was the primary designer. She has written this description of her process:

Quite honestly, my original instinct . . . was to stay away from images entirely, fearing their power to repel, and mesmerize. But after receiving an e-mail from one of my classmates requesting the use of photos, I realized I was probably alone and quite likely misguided. Against my own desires, I plunged into the photo archives of Time, CNN, and others. This was a task I dreaded. The devastating impact of watching these acts of terror live on television or on video is one thing. Seeing these acts suspended through the lens of a still camera is another. Still photography often provides more detail, and more time for the enormity of the recorded events to sink in and stay awhile. I chose photos representative of what I had seen most often on television, thinking rightly or wrongly that if people had to see these photos, they might as well see those they most associated with September 11. From these photos, I created the first iteration of a collage for the front page of our Web site. I purposely blurred them and removed the color, trying somehow to dim the impact of the horror they represent. The response from our CMS team was overwhelmingly against this collage. Why? In a nutshell: too stark, too shocking, and not the right tone. What we were going for was reflection, compassion, and something different than what was available anywhere else. . . . I skimmed through images shot by my fellow classmates of MIT's Killian Court memorial gathering, the dedication of MIT's Reflecting Wall, and other gathering areas within MIT. What I found were compelling images of grief, compassion, and gestures that grasp at that understanding and hope in humanity we all so desperately desire.

We preserved both collages on the site to provoke discussions about the ethical implications of digital design.

By Monday morning, the site, http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions, had launched with more than one hundred essays, including summaries of media coverage in some twenty countries or regions. Many of the students and some of the faculty found they were unable to complete projects they had started, but the efforts had drawn the community together, and the process of producing the site had enormous educational payoffs for everyone involved. Our introduction offered this rationale:

As millions of people around the world sit glued to their television sets, even as we write, we feel it is important to encourage critical analysis of the words, images, and stories which fill the media--as well as the ones we are not hearing or seeing. We hope this site will be used to help inform discussions in schools, places of worship, union halls, civic gatherings, and homes as people struggle to make sense of what is happening and to sort through their competing emotions about these events. We are not offering answers here so much as encouraging people to ask hard questions before they rush to judgment and action. We do not present these essays as the work of experts--although in some cases we have included pieces from important commentators, past and present. Most of us are still learning how to think critically and theoretically about the media ourselves. All of us are too torn apart by these events to have any certainty about the adequacy of our words and our knowledge to respond to such a situation. But we want to share what we know and what we think and what we feel. We want to see if these ideas might be useful in helping someone else begin a similar process of exploration and examination.

The MIT home page saluted our efforts, remodeling its logo to reflect elements from Callison's design. Within two days, word of the site had spread outward to major mailing lists for educators in the United States and elsewhere and Yahoo had chosen re:constructions as its site of the day. We continue to receive regular mail from teachers using the site.

Scholars and students elsewhere responded to the site's provocation to "let's think this through together" and contributed their own essays. One of the most compelling responses was a thesis project produced by a Massachusetts College of Art master's student, Kate Brigham, who developed a digital tool that allowed users to redesign the screens from a television newscast, the front page of a newspaper, and the layout of a news-magazine story on the events, enabling students to explore the ideological consequences of the different graphic choices that the news media had made.

Re:constructions has been referenced again and again across a range of classes and research activities. We put our ideals to a test and proved to ourselves that it was possible, at least for short bursts of time, to move theory out of the academy and into a larger public dialogue.

This article was written in 2003 and appeared in a 2004 issue of Cinema Journalfocused on academic responses to 9/11. We still receive a limited number of requests to reproduce some of the essays written during this intense period of activity. I am posting it here today so that we will never forget -- not only what happened on 9/11 but the many different ways we, as a society, could have processed and reacted to these events.