Persepolis: The Video Game?

The following essay by Matt Weise appeared late last week on the blog for the Singapore-MIT Gambit Games Lab. My readers who are interested in games might well have encountered it there. But what he has to say is apt to be of interest to those of you who are interested in comics and animation, so I wanted to cross-post it to this blog. I read this essay with a certain pride: Weise was a Master's Student in our program before he went into the games industry (and then came back to play a central role in the operation of our games lab). His master's thesis (look under the class of 2004) dealt centrally with issues of how meaning and emotion get expressed through games, themes to which he is returning to within this post. Here, you see an example of a particular mode of games analysis which has become more wide-spread in our program through the years: Rather than writing an ideological critique which stressed the limits of the original text (or in this case, of games a medium), Weisse engages in a thought experiment -- first, comparing the game Just Cause to what he sees as a more rewarding media experience, Persepolis, and then imagining how games as a medium might be able to more fully realize what he sees as lacking in the text under examination. This is a mode of analysis which doesn't simply point out limitations but also imagines alternative possibilities; it doesn't just accept the text as given but rather writes beyond the ending of the text, reconstructs an alternative version of it to show what might be missing in the original. We've found that these kinds of thought experiments can generate more concrete discussions and may become the spring board for more creative interventions. In a space like Gambit, which is involved in developing playable prototypes which stretch the games medium, this ability to move between current examples and alternative versions can be a springboard for design activities. It represents one way that we can blur the lines between theory and practice.

Persepolis for Xbox 360?

by Matt Weise

Last week I bought a game I swore I wouldn't buy: Just Cause. I

">swore I wouldn't buy this game when I read that its politcal premise--the overthrow of a corrupt South American regime through guerrilla warfare--would involve the typical American rhetoric that, it would seem, no war-themed game can exist without: the protection of American interest. Thus a game that could have been, provocatively, Che Guevara meets Grand Theft Auto became yet another emulation of Chuck Norris barf bag cinema, the kind where some helpless country needs a swaggering yank to pull it, kicking and screaming if necessary, to democracy. This is why in Just Cause you are some CIA dude, and not just a suffering citizen of the (fictional) country who's finally had enough. One might imagine that a horrific dictatorship would be reason enough to go guerrilla, but in Just Cause we need the threat of WMD's which could possibly be used on America to justify ass kickery. Viva la Revolucion!

The notion fills me with disappointment. I know better than to expect a serious, documentary-like experience from a mainstream videogame, and yes many games are just elaborate power trips. But what's wrong with a power trip in which the indigenous population gets empowered in a way that isn't filtered through America's big brother mythology? Ugh. Still, I bought it last week.

I bought Just Cause because I played it at a friend's house, and it turned out to be pretty fun. The American aspect of the story is more or less in the background. Your avatar is Latin American at the very least, though he does appear to work for the CIA. The story itself is still moronic, full of Hollywood cliches. But those cliches make for fun gameplay at times, like when you perform all manner of ridiculous stunts. My friends and I had a ball riding cars, boats, and even planes like surfboards as we ran from government stooges. After that, I decided to swallow my political angst and pick it up for cheap.

Then, yesterday, my girlfriend and I went to see Persepolis.

The movie had a huge effect on me. I actually didn't know much about it, aside from the fact that it was based on a comic and was an autobiographical account of an Iranian woman's life. I wasn't expecting it to go so far into the politics and cultural fallout of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. I found the film deeply moving for many reasons, but I think what affected me most was how the protagonist was portrayed, as a wonderfully intelligent girl who was just trying to have a normal life while simultaneously dealing with a deeply repressive political shift. It humanized the recent history of Iran form me in a way that I hadn't experienced before. On another level the film worked simply as the story of a promising life tragically complicated by authoritarian religion... a concept that, at least in the abstract, strikes home for me.

I came home after watching this movie and didn't feel like doing anything. I just needed to sit and let the film sink in. My girlfriend kept asking me if I was okay because I basically stared into space for the rest of the evening. I thought maybe I could break out of my reflection by playing some videogames, but I stopped short at the thought of playing Just Cause. In light of something as moving and personal asPersepolis, the idea of playing a game that dealt with repression and revolution like Just Cause did made me recoil. My initial revulsion at the game's shallowness came surging back even more intense than before. Disgusted, I asked myself why it seemed impossible to make a game that dealt with social upheaval the way Persepolis did. Why couldn't Just Cause have been like Persepolis? Did I have to be embarrassed at the thought of picking up a controller every time I came home from a movie like Persepolis?

I don't have an answer to these questions, suffice to say that if it's not possible to make a game like Persepolis I've clearly been wasting my time with this garbage we call videogames. I wonder what it would take to make a game like Just Cause express ideas closer to what Persepolis is expressing. Leaving aside the typical objection of "you'd never get a game like that funded!" it seems a game design question worth exploring.

One striking aspect of Just Cause is how, for a game about a repressive regime, the regime doesn't actually seem to be repressing anyone. The NPC's--whom you see everywhere going about their daily lives--don't seem to do anything other than walk around and drive cars. They don't seem particularly unhappy. They are, essentially, exactly like characters in GTA: more of a decoration than a meaningful aspect of the virtual world. In GTA this is fine since the world is not about the NPC's, but in a game that's about revolution and freedom in the name of The People you'd think The People would be... well, people. Not that we need hyper-advanced A.I., but we at least need a game design where political repression is part of the world you are trying to simulate.

How do you do this? There's obviously no single, right way to do it. But we can start by observing that repressive states are, in essence, extremely limiting rule systems that every citizen must learn and deal with. This is something that Persepolis illustrates extremely well, especially in the first half where the protagonist is struggling to deal with all the new rules that are being imposed on women in the first years of the Islamic Republic. The women in the film learn to survive by quickly mastering this rule system, by learning exactly when to wear the veil, how to behave towards men in public, etc. As time goes on both men and women learn the system well enough that they are able to subvert it in small ways, such as having illegal parties with alcohol and banned western music.

It's easy to see how one can take the logics of state repression and model them as a game system. Because a citizen in a police state is in a game of sorts, a game with extremely dire consequences. But citizens try to game the system in order to survive, to express their sense of self and hope. A select few of those citizens might go further,and game the system with the intent not just to survive it but to change it. When the rules of the game are successfully rewritten, you've had a revolution.

Why can't Just Cause follow a model like this? One can imagine a virtual world in which citizens have simple behaviors. They wake up, eat, socialize, work, and go to bed... sort of like in The Sims. But they have to do all these things within a strict framework of government rules that sometimes conflict with their desires. For example, citizens might be expected to dress a certain way, stand at attention during a patriotic hymn, etc. If any deviation from this behavior was witnessed by patrolling police, citizens might be arrested, which would affect the happiness levels (like in The Sims) of the citizens around them.

The goal of a game like this, from the player's perspective, would involve two distinct

aspects:

Firstly, the player would have to learn the behavioral rules of the repressive society.This would be necessary so that the player could be invisible within the society in order to be able to subvert it. This layer would be somewhat like a stealth or spy game,in which players must learn to dress, act, and talk a certain way in order to avoid suspicion. Only instead of some military espionage scenario, the environment would just be everyday life.

Secondly, the player would have to perform acts that would affect the happiness levels of the society at large. This could be manifest concretely as a list of civil liberties which the citizens don't have. Restoring each one of these liberties would be a goal of the game, like a series of non-linear missions. Once all the liberties were restored,the society would be transformed.

This idea is interesting for its emergent possibilities. I am not imagining a game where society changes instantly, as the hard-coded result of a cut-scene or boss battle. I'm thinking that each "rule" that the police enforce (i.e. what clothes you can wear) correspond to a certain civil liberty on your list. Once that liberty is restored, the police stop enforcing it, changing the dynamics of the game. Thus "freedom" is something you experience as a player by having restrictions removed, and it is also something you see in the citizens around you because they no longer have to deal with those restrictions (i.e. there are less arrests, therefore happiness levels increase.)

And how exactly do you restore all these freedoms? Well, that's the real trick. Do you assassinate and intimidate? Do you organize peaceful protests in secret? It might be interesting to have a game where you could do both kinds of things, and each would have an affect on the citizens you are trying to help. For example, if you want to assassinate a government official by blowing up his house, that might work. But if you blow up his house, it will also affect the happiness levels of the population. Is the trade off worth it? What if you affect political change but end up alienating the population? Have you accomplished your goal? Is your goal to check all the liberties off your list? Or is it to make the population as happy as possible?

I don't know if the game I just described is subtle or complex enough to do justice to the personal nature of something like Persepolis. Of course, Persepolis isn't about being a revolutionary. It's about a citizen trying to keep her life and identity from falling apart under repressive rule. A game where you played a citizen under a repressive regime could be its own kind of game, with maybe some similarities to the game I described above.

Perhaps we're not ready for a Persepolis game on Xbox 360. Perhaps we're not ready for a Persepolis game at all. Perhaps I am dishonoring the reality of the author's life experience by even suggesting that we entertain such a notion. But I hang onto the notion that I am not doing that, that games are not somehow intrinsically superficial in their engagement of political ideas. Political and social ideas need not be trivial in videogames. They are not trivial by default. They are full of reality, tragedy, and emotion. The only reason they become trivial in videogames is because the makers of games choose to trivialize them.

I have no idea if a game like the one I described would work, but I believe that a Hollywood bubblegum crapfest like Just Cause could only benefit from such an experiment. Then maybe I could come home from a movie like Persepolis and not feel like a moron for having spent $400 on an Xbox 360.

I could feel proud.

Matthew Weise

Producer, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

Matthew Weise is equal parts gamer and cinephile, having attended film school before segueing into game studies and then game development. Matt is a producer for GAMBIT and a full-time gamer, which means he not only plays games on a variety of systems but he also completes (most of) them. Matthew did his undergrad at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he studied film production before going rogue to design his own degree. He graduated in 2001 with a degree in Digital Arts, which included videogames (this was before Game Studies was a field). He continued his research at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he worked on Revolution with The Education Arcade. After leaving MIT in 2004 Matt worked in mobile game development for a few years, occassionally doing some consultancy work, before returning to work at GAMBIT.

A Critfan Yearns for the World As It Was

One of the more unorthodox policy decisions we've made at the Comparative Media Studies Program is to allow students to include non-academics as outside readers on their thesis committees where they can demonstrate that the person has relevent experience and expertise. This has opened to door to bringing alternative kinds of knowledge into the thesis process. When Sam Ford, who now runs the blog for the Convergence Culture Consortium, wrote a thesis about soap operas and convergence, I ended up sitting on a committee which included both a veteran soap opera writer Kay Alden (The Young and the Restless, now writing for The Bold and the Beautiful) and a long time soap fan who had written for Soap Opera Weekly, Lynn Liccardo. Needless to say, it was a fascinating discussion -- one which allowed Sam to test his ideas against real world feedback from within both the industry and the fan community. As one of the the non-soap people in the room (along with William Uricchio), I learned a great deal from listening to both of

our visiting experts. This term, Sam Ford has been teaching a course through our program on soap opera and the blog for the course has attracted a range of outside participants, including, once again, Lynn Liccardo. I asked Lynn if I could share with you some thoughts she has about what has happened to the soap opera genre in recent years and why she is becoming increasingly frustrated with a genre which has been part of her life for decades.

A CRIT-FAN WHO'S YEARNING FOR THE WORLD AS IT WAS

by Lynn Liccardo

Over the past few weeks I've been checking in on the blog Sam Ford set up for his class on The American Soap Opera: here. The student comments touch on many of the issues that underlie the current, sorry state of the American Soap Opera. Of course, being only a few weeks into the course, and from what I can tell, relatively new soap viewers, they lack the contextual understanding to connect the dots.

They're watching As the World Turns, a show I've watched since it premiered in 1956, the year I started kindergarten. But they're watching and studying ATWT as it exists today; I'm watching the same show and yearning for the show it used to be. So when a student comments on how certain characters are either actors or reactors, I hesitate to respond. I could reiterate Sam's point that characters often switch between actor and reactor depending on the circumstances. He's absolutely right. But that barely scratches the surface; what I really want to tell them is that there used to be a time on soap opera when characters might switch between actor and reactor in the course of a single conversation.

It's been a good long while since that happened on ATWT, certainly not in the time that they've been watching. So long in fact, that I'm hard-pressed to think of a specific example to give them, one downside of the sheer volume of soaps' text. Then, is there available video, or do you have to try to explain the context? And even with video, how to capture the full depth of a story that ran over months, if not years, by showing just a few isolated episodes?

All of which brings me to Ryan's Hope, a show that ran from 1975-89, and is currently shown on SOAPnet, a digital cable channel created by ABC to rebroadcast their soaps. (How the channel has evolved from its original mission is a subject for further discussion.)A few months ago, just as when the RH's 1982 episodes were to begin, the show went back to its 1975 premiere. There was a huge hew and cry from viewers; SOAPnet claimed that they couldn't clear the rights to the music used in shows after 1982. While I appreciated the outrage, I was thrilled; RH was a show I'd dipped into now and then over the years, but had never really watched. When it premiered in 1975, I had a fulltime job, no VCR and had just begun working on my undergraduate degree at night. I could barely keep tabs on ATWT, but could depend on my mother to fill me in - Guiding Light, too.

Since I'd already been watching RH for a while before the switch, there was little about the actual opening story that surprised me since I already knew how much of it had turned out. What did shock me was just how awful the first few episodes looked - flat and dull - dreadful lighting. The graphics were amateurish, and have only slightly improved. And, I have to say, Frank Ryan, the show's ersatz hero, in a coma for weeks on end was less than scintillating storytelling. But that first day, when Mary Ryan met Jack Fenelli in her family's bar, I was in for the duration.

As I write this (March 2008), what's currently on screen is just over a year into the show's run. I have to say, as much of a pleasure it's been to watch the first year of RH, it's been a bittersweet experience since in that year's worth of episodes (they run two a night Monday-Friday) I've seen more genuine soap opera drama than I have in I don't know how many years of ATWT and, occasionally, GL. In the soap opera of recent memory, I have to settle for a moment here, some subtext there. In RH, I get to see fully-developed characters and fully-integrated storytelling - albeit, 30-years old. But, has it ever held up.

However, what's truly jarring - surreal, actually - is the juxtaposition between the down-to-earth Ryans, et al - characters who actually wear coats and scarves in the winter - and the SOAPnet promos featuring the current crop of soap opera characters where women's most important piece of clothing is a pushup bra and men often go shirtless - regardless of the weather. And then there are the promo taglines: "Ruthless people who will do anything to get what they want." That one's for Y&R. The OC's described as "Pretty people, pretty messed up."

This is not to say there aren't ruthless people on Ryan's Hope: Roger Coleridge comes to mind. But the insecurity that underlies Roger's behavior is so transparent, it's hard to think of what he's doing as pure ruthlessness. Even the local gangster (and neighborhood undertaker), Nick Szabo is clearly a devoted and loving, if infuriating, father and when a major character died, he behaved decently and compassionately.

And there are certainly pretty people on Ryan's Hope, and yes, some of them are pretty messed up, but messed up in ways that real people can identify with, not just watch agog. Anyone who grew up without a family can understand the behavior of those characters on the outside looking in: Jack, who's been so traumatized by growing up in an orphanage that he never misses an chance to sabotage his relationship with Mary and her family - a tension the writers continued to play years down the road as Mary's father, Johnny, never forgot how much pain Jack's fears created for Mary, and her mother, Maeve, never forgot the cause of Jack's fears. I always wondered if those early conversations between Johnny and Maeve discussing their concerns about Jack resembled conversations my own parents has about my boyfriends

And then there's Delia, who also lost her parents young. Dee's so unhappy in her marriage to Frank Ryan (and who can blame her, he was cheating on her for years, yet being the golden boy, no one ever really blamed him), so in need of the love that Roger Coleridge wants to share with her (cruel as some of Roger's actions seem, he really does love her), and yet she's willing to give it up to remain a Ryan.

But my all-time (thus far) favorite juxtaposition between Ryan's Hope and the SOAPnet promos came during the most recent mindless bloodbath on General Hospital. Bruce Weitz, best know as Mick Belker on Hill Street Blues, played Anthony Zacchara, leader of said bloodbath. Back in 1976, Weitz also had a one-day gig on RH playing an assistant district attorney prosecuting a euthanasia case (the love story between Seneca and Nell Beaulac remains a powerful testament to forgiveness, reconciliation, and the real meaning of love between grown-ups). In a single conversation with Seneca's lawyer, Jill Coleridge a very young and smooth-faced Weitz expressed compassion for, and understanding of, a tragic situation while making it clear he intended to win the case. I had really looked forward to seeing how Weitz would play the trial and was disappointed to see another actor playing the role. Seeing Weitz as Zacchara in the GH promos stood in stark contrast to the depth and complexity he brought to his one day on RH.

The issues underlying those juxtapositions explain a lot about the current sorry state of soap opera and I'll be writing more about how down the road. But back to my initial point: how characters might switch between actor and reactor in the course of a single conversation. I've always believed that the higher one's tolerance for ambiguity, the better one can experience the full emotional impact of soap opera. What happed on RH recently provides a perfect example:

Frank has found out about Delia's affair with Roger and wants to use that information to divorce her and win custody of their son, Little John. Except that Frank cheated on Dee with Jillian first, but since Dee took him back she can't use that first adultery to block the divorce Frank wants so desperately. So she enlists Frank's brother Pat (they were an item in high school), to find evidence that Frank has resumed his affair with Jillian. The repercussions play out among all the characters, including the deeply-Catholic Johnny and Maeve, who don't believe in divorce, yet know that the marriage was never right. They want to defend Frank and blame Dee, but Pat never lets his parents forget that it was Frank who cheated first.

These scenes are long enough (another big change; the short choppy scenes currently on ATWT and GL make me dizzy) that the characters move from actor to reactor seamlessly, and the camera shows each character's ambivalence in the reaction shots. And viewers get to experience the real life emotions of characters far more real than those on any reality show.

I know these kinds of moments happened on As the World Turns in the past, most recently, during the Douglas Marland era. Marland was ATWT's headwriter from 1985 until his untimely death in 1993. One of his best stories involved legacy characters Bob and Kim Hughes, Kim's ex-husband, John Dixon, their son, Andy Dixon and Susan Stewart, a longtime rival of Kim's.

I've always believed that the most powerful and compelling drama is created when all of the characters involved in a storyline are trying to do the right thing - the right thing for the situation, not necessarily the right thing for their character - and it's their efforts that come into conflict. The situation in this case was John and Kim's son, Andy's alcoholism. So, of course Kim and John were spending time together; their son was in trouble. And, of course, Bob wanted to help, but he wasn't Andy's father; John was. Susan may have been a troublemaker in the past, but here, she was Andy's AA sponsor. And so when Bob and Susan finally hit the sheets, viewers were sighing to themselves, "oh no," not screaming, "what the fuck!," as is all too often the case with current daytime soaps.

Sad to say (sad for soap viewers, anyway), these days the only place to see this kind of character-driven drama routinely played out, with the depth and intimacy that used to be the hallmark of soaps, is on primetime: Friday Night Lights; Ugly Betty and Dirty Sexy Money are three examples of the best of what primetime has to offer. In these shows, as in the soaps of old, conflicts between and among characters begin with the emotional conflicts within the characters; as the audience watches the former unfold, they are never permitted to lose sight of the latter.

The question of whether these primetime shows are in fact soaps came up last summer in the follow-up to a discussion between Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea here, which led to further discussion on Just TV here and C3, here. And Sam has opened up a discussion with his students as to what exactly defines a soap opera here.

Given the deep-rooted stigma long attached to daytime soaps, it's not too surprising that fans of primetime serials invest time and effort parsing the textual and structural differences between daytime and nighttime soaps. What did surprise me, though, was the resistance that came from within daytime, in particular the daytime media. One daytime critic actually said, "Daytime drama and primetime drama are two very different genres with two very different audiences," an understandable, albeit specious, argument. I would argue (and will in an essay for the book Sam, Abigail and C. Lee Harrington are co-editing that grew of last summer's discussion) that daytime would do well to understand what is working on primetime soaps, and why, because it's what used to be working on daytime. And right now, daytime soaps are in so much trouble that none of us can afford to be territorial if it stands in the way of figuring out how to save this long-marginalized segment of popular culture.

Lynn Liccardo began writing about nursing after graduating from Harvard

University in 1983 with an undergraduate degree in the humanities. Her articles appeared in The Boston Globe, Revolution: The Journal for Nurse Empowerment, and Soap Opera Weekly, where she published a piece on how nurses are portrayed on soap operas. In the early 1990s, she wrote several articles for SOW, including, "Who Really Watches Soap Operas," a

demographic analysis cited in numerous scholarly articles. She currently posts on several soap boards and media blogs and still watches As the World Turns, as she has since its premiere in 1956, the year she started kindergarten. From 2005-2007, she also advised on a Master's thesis project on soaps at MIT. Lynn is also a playwright and screenwriters, with short plays performed in greater Boston, New York and Los Angeles. She's completed one screenplay, Never Can Say Goodbye, and a treatment for a second, The Good Father. In 2007, her one-act play, Settling In, was broadcast on Somerville Community Access Television (MA).

Why Academics Should Blog...

The Chronicle of Higher Education, this week, features excerpts from my remarks at their Technology Forum earlier this year. In the talk, I described some of the ways that our program has deployed new media technologies to expand its outreach to the public and I have suggested some of the benefits to academic programs in embracing the potentials which these technologies offer for us to extend our roles as public intellectuals. Since much of this deals with this blog, it seemed only appropriate to share it with my readers here. In the week after September 11, 2001, the students, faculty members, and alumni of the MIT comparative-media-studies program rallied forces to create a Web site called (http://re:constructions). It was designed to provoke public reflection on the media's role in shaping our responses to national tragedies. Over the course of an intense weekend, students produced films, identified quotations, wrote essays, and contacted friends and family around the world. When the site went live, we had generated more than 100 separate entries, including reports on media responses to the attacks in more than 30 countries.

In many ways, re:constructions represented a turning point in our conception of the new graduate program, setting up a model for what might happen if we deployed the new technologies we studied as a vehicle for opening up a larger public conversation about media change. Today the Comparative Media Studies home page hosts feeds from seven different blogs affiliated with our various research groups and faculty members. Our site regularly offers podcasts from conferences (like Futures of Entertainment and Media in Transition) and colloquia we hold at MIT. My own blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, attracts several thousand readers a day. We also recently made the decision to offer our masters' theses online so they can be read by researchers around the world. These efforts have had an impact on our relations with our current students, prospective students, alumni, faculty members, the news media, the general public, and other readers.

Current students. By design, students in our program come from many professional and disciplinary backgrounds, and will follow many career paths after they graduate. Early on, several students began to create blogs around their thesis projects -- in part to motivate them to write regularly, in part to get feedback on their ideas. Ilya Vedrashko, for example, started a blog called the Future of Advertising, which quickly became a favorite among industry insiders and reporters. The blog's visibility opened up new contacts and resources, which supported his research. Before long, he was also being courted by some of those companies for postgraduation jobs. Eventually, a major company created a position specifically for him.

Something similar has happened for subsequent student bloggers, who have gained visibility for their writing about "serious games", hip hop culture, music distribution, data visualization, and media policy. In each case, their work brought them into contact with key thinkers and professionals. Historically, scholars might develop a reputation as public intellectuals once they became senior statespeople in their fields; increasingly, younger researchers are using blogs as resources for reputation building, especially in cutting-edge fields that lack established authorities.

When I started my own blog, I was able to use it to showcase the writing of a broad range of students, allowing me to encourage them to refine class assignments into something that could be shared with a general readership. Several of my students have received invitations to publish their work based on the traffic they drew on my blog. Many graduate programs push their students toward academic publications, but we also see a value in helping students cultivate their skills as public intellectuals, finding ways to translate their ideas into a more citizenly discourse that speaks across disciplinary boundaries and communicates with a diverse audience.

When my blog first went live, a reader compared it with MIT's Open Courseware project, which makes material from the university's courses available online to the public. While Open Courseware allowed the public to view the content of an MIT education, the blogs offered a chance to witness the instructional process. Day by day the blogs unfold, offering a glimpse into the research culture and the ways we think about current issues in our field.

Running the blog feeds through the media-studies home page means that the site is continually refreshed without much conscious effort on the part of program administrators. Students become accustomed to checking our site daily, which means they are more likely to read other announcements we put up, thus enabling better information circulation.

Prospective students. A rising percentage of the students we admit list these blogs as the primary way in which they learned about the media-studies program. New students come to us with a much sharper understanding of the strengths of our program and how their interests might align with our continuing research efforts. The blogs thus raise the number and quality of applicants, and may have had some impact on our yield -- the percentage of accepted candidates who enroll. New students are increasingly integrated into the life of the program well before they arrive in September.

Alumni. At a time when many universities are starting to think about the value of lifelong learning, alumni of the program continue to engage with our current faculty members and students long after they graduate. Just as we feature student work through our various blogs, blog posts may also emerge from tips from our alumni working in industries.

Faculty members. The blog posts represent what might be called "just-in-time scholarship," offering thoughtful responses to contemporary developments in the field. Because they are written for a general rather than specialized readership, these short pieces prove useful for teaching undergraduate subjects. We are seeing a growing number of colleagues using blog posts or podcasts as a springboard for classroom discussions and other instructional activities. Having developed a steady readership for such content, we are also able to use our blogs to showcase innovative ideas and research from colleagues around the world. Through my blog, I regularly offer interviews with other academics whose work touches my areas of interest. Some of those academics have started their own blogs, having enjoyed the public response to their interviews on my site.

Last summer I responded to signs of continuing gender conflicts in the field of "fan studies" -- the study of the grass-roots creative expression of fans of television, films, comics, and video games -- by hosting a series of paired conversations between male and female researchers working on the topic. The duos used emerging collaboration tools, such as Google Docs, to be able to construct dialogues that at times came from opposite corners of the globe. Altogether, more than 30 academics contributed to this forum over a six-month period. Many of those involved have gone on to propose panels for conferences or collaborate on book projects that emerged from their blog conversations.

The news media. Our blogs provide a platform from which we not only publicize our research findings and conferences, but also focus news-media interest on issues we think deserve greater attention. Historically, academics have been put in a reactive position, responding to questions from reporters. Blogging places academics in a more proactive position, intervening more effectively in popular debates around the topics they research.

Following up an interview with a blog post allows us to provide interested readers with more information or to correct misinformation. A portion of readers now seek additional information online when they encounter an interesting quotation from an academic in the press.

The general public. Our society is undergoing a phase of prolonged and profound media change, which is having an impact on every aspect of our lives. In this context, there is tremendous hunger for insights into the changing media landscape. As honest brokers of information, academics may be ideally situated to bridge these more specialized conversations. As a consequence, our various blogs attract readerships that extend well beyond the academic sphere -- public-school teachers trying to foster new-media literacy, creative people from the media industries seeking to understand shifts in consumer behavior, advertising executives looking for new models of engagement and participation, fans and "gamers" (those who participate in computer and video games) trying to understand the objects of their passion. Since the program has multiple blogs, we have been able to develop and maintain diverse constituencies of readers.

Readers. I started my own blog a few months before the release of my most recent book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006). Over time, the blog has become central to the book's success. Most writers struggle to edit their books, often frustrated that interesting tidbits end up on the cutting-room floor. Having a blog gave me a place to publish outtakes from the book, nuggets that were interesting in their own right but clogged the flow of the argument. Another key frustration of anyone who writes about contemporary culture is that the world is changing so fast that certain details become out of date before a book sees print. Having a blog has allowed me to return to some of the case histories and explore those changes, as well as to extend the argument in order to deal with more-recent developments. I was able to flag aspects of the book that might appeal to different kinds of readers, and thus expand the potential market for the book over time. The global reach of the blog has helped generate interest in publishing translations of the book.

So how do you do these things? The crucial point is that running a blog is a commitment, and has to be understood as part of a larger set of professional obligations. When I first began blogging as an academic, I sought advice from other bloggers. They stressed that it was important to set a schedule for publication for your blog and stick with it. It mattered less whether you blogged once a week or once a day, so long as you were consistent in putting up material. Otherwise, on any given day it would be easy to miss a post. And over a period of time, giving over to that temptation would eventually push you out of blogging altogether. But setting deadlines and developing strategies for generating content during difficult periods insured a level of discipline that would allow one to maintain momentum over time.

Media studies as a discipline has been quick to embrace the potentials of new-media platforms as channels for sharing our research and scholarship. A growing number of junior and senior faculty members in our field are becoming bloggers. At the same time, media scholars are pooling their efforts to contribute to larger projects, such as the biweekly webzine Flow, which runs pieces on many aspects of contemporary television and digital culture, and In Media Res, which each day offers a short video clip and commentary by a leading media scholar.

These same strategies can be and are being adopted across a range of academic disciplines, as scholars make a greater commitment to circulate their findings more broadly and to respond to contemporary issues in a thoughtful and timely manner.

the following post is [about] anonymous

The following blog post was prepared by a CMS graduate student who, appropriately enough, wishes to remain anonymous. S/He has been watching with some interest the emergence of the Anonymous movement, a grassroots effort to protest against the Church of Scientology organization, which has adopted a range of references and models from popular culture to further its goals. It offers a rich reference point for those of us in better understanding the ways that participatory culture can offer a spring board for civic engagement. It seems like an appropriate followup to the interview I ran earlier this week with Witness's Sam Gregory in that it represents another example of how video sharing might contribute to civic discourse. The author closes the post with a call for academic discussion of the implications of this phenomenon. S/he and I offer this post as a resource for further study.

On March 15, 2008, over 9000^* people worldwide took to the streets to protest practices of the Church of Scientology organization. Without any clear leadership, masked individuals descended upon local organizations with signs and flyers. They stood outside, chanting phrases like "tax the cult" and "why is Lisa Dead?" They gave speeches, recruited new members, and granted press interviews. Then, they sang and danced to Rick Astley's epic 1987 hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Hi, We're from the Internet

The protesters call themselves "Anonymous" and their movement originated on several loosely affiliated web sites. The long-standing site Something Awful had built a community through its forums and a popular image manipulation competition called Photoshop Phriday. Other sites spun off of or grew up in parallel with Something Awful, including the always-offensive image posting site 4chan.org. The most popular "board" on 4chan was "/b/", which featured doctored photos, inside jokes, and porn. Through 2007, the community was pulling online pranks like taking down web sites and defacing Myspace pages. Their culture grew out of the pursuit of these sophomoric "lulz" and spawned several internet memes. Perhaps most well known is the LOLCats. Their language became filled with sarcastically self-referential bastardizations of English.

The community began coordinating "raids" against various sites, online games, and people that they deemed idiotic (or, in their words, had broken "teh Rules of teh Internetz"). They successfully shut down a white supremacist's page, lashed out at a site that copied one of their images, and flooded virtual games that they considered inane. They coordinated these efforts through several sites, but most prominently through a collaboratively maintained wiki. Plans would form as a result of many proposals, one of which would gain a critical mass of support. There were no leaders. At some point, the group decided to start calling itself "Anonymous," inspired by the largely anonymous web-posting tools they used. On July 26, 2007, KTTV Fox of Los Angeles did a news report on the group, calling them "hackers on steroids" and "domestic terrorists." The Fox report was quickly spread, parodied, and made fun of. It also formed the foundation for the group's ironic self-identity, and cemented the "Anonymous" moniker for months to come.

Throughout, Anonymous maintained a rough edge. Their "raids" often seemed more like cyberstalking or bullying. Their image boards continued to feature mostly porn, gore, and insults. Their conversations were peppered with what sounded like hate speech -- constant references to "fags" or "niggers". To be sure, it was a community made up largely of young white males acting somewhat immaturely. On the other hand, there have emerged more subtle undercurrents in their behavior. To some extent this language is used ironically and critically. Anons are equal opportunity offenders, and they seem to value free speech far more than they feel true hatred. They also use this harsh language when referring to each other just as much as when discussing the targets of their attacks. In a way, the phrases have been removed from their contextualized meanings in standard English discourse and reappropriated as part of the memetic language of the group.

On January 15, 2008, the online gossip site Gawker posted an internal Church of Scientology video featuring Tom Cruise riffing on the wonders of Scientology. The church had already successfully used legal tactics to remove the video from other sites, but Gawker claimed, "it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it." Lawyers for the church claimed copyright infringement, and Gawker claimed fair use. At some point, some members of Anonymous became incensed at what they saw as an attempt to silence free speech and violation of internet principles. Debate ensued, and one member stated:

"Gentlemen, this is what I have been waiting for. Habbo, Fox, The G4 Newfag Flood crisis. Those were all training scenarios. This is what we have been waiting for. This is a battle for justice. Every time /b/ has gone to war, it has been for our own causes. Now, gentlemen, we are going to fight for something that is right. I say damn those of us who advise against this fight. I say damn those of us who say this is foolish. /b/ROTHERS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO RISE AS NOT ONLY HEROES OF THE INTERNETS, BUT AS ITS GUARDIANS."

Scientology had thrown down the gauntlet, and Anonymous awoke. In a YouTube video addressed to the church, Anonymous explained that, "for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment, we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." Anonymous promptly took down Scientology's web sites, endlessly faxed them black sheets of paper, and called their public phone numbers with loops of... you guessed it... "Never Gonna Give You Up."

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the LULZ

The initial objective of the campaign was a success. By all accounts, Anonymous was frustrating the Church of Scientology and generating amusement for Anonymous. The church replied publicly, counter-attacked Anonymous sites through legal (and, allegedly, technical) means, and was forced to move its servers to a more robust and costly provider. Soon, long-time Scientology critics began to take notice. Some of these critics had worked to expose the organization's practices for decades, and the massive influx of energy was both exhilarating and frightening. One critic, Mark Bunker, replied via YouTube:

"I think it's incredibly exciting to have an army of young, passionate people wanting to do something about Scientology's fraud and abuse. However, I think you're making some major mistakes that are going to hurt in the long run. They're going to make you look bad, they're going to get you in trouble... they're going to get us in trouble, those of us who have been long-time critics of Scientology. Scientology is good at tar-and-feathering us with other people's actions. It may seems like fun and games, but Scientology is serious, you have to be prepared... I'm mainly concerned because you shouldn't be doing things that are illegal. You just shouldn't. It's not morally right, it's not right when Scientology does it, and it's not right when we do it... a better way to get at them would be to try to get rid of their tax-exempt status... now I know that doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting as attacking their websites. It sounds dull, but that's going to hurt them. Going out and protesting, that's wonderful. I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but please please please reform your movement the way we want Scientology to reform their movement."

Bunker later commented that "I thought they'd lash out at me." Instead, they celebrated him and named him "Wise Beard Man." In his video, he sounds like an earnest and concerned parent. It's hard to imagine such an uncouth and authority-hating group taking him seriously. But, they did. They began to educate themselves about Scientology's various alleged abuses, including the 1995 death of Lisa McPherson who was under the care of the church at the time she died. When someone posted a YouTube video claiming to speak for families that had been torn apart by Scientology, one Anonymous replied:

"Fucking rise up, sons and daughters of the Internet. Rise the fuck up and stay up. Let 'em know we'll take the fight to them, and that we'll help every single person that wants to leave the cult. We have lawyers and social workers and therapists in our ranks, and we can, and will, give aid to those who want out. We are Anonymous. For the lulz, but moar than that now. For teh most epic win. Revoke Scientology's tax-exempt status. Great Justice for Lisa McPherson."

Nearly overnight, Anonymous shifted focus. The Anons began planning for a worldwide protest, they compiled research, started a lobbying campaign, and cranked out flyers and informational pamphlets. On February 10, they staged their first major protest with several thousand participating. Many Anonymous donned "guy fawkes" masks, made famous in the film "V for Vendetta", as a symbol of their resistence to oppression and their commitment to anonymity. There is a long history of Scientology protesters allegedly being harrassed and otherwise attacked by the church. When anonymous translated its digital anonymity into real-world anonymity, Scientology faced something it had never before experienced.

Nevertheless, just before the second wave of protests on March 15, the CoS began agressively pursuing members of Anonymous that it had managed to identify. In some jurisdictions, local anti-mask laws had actually made it difficult for Anons to protest anonymously--a sharp contrast to their accustomed protections online. The church posted videos "outing" members and accusing them of hate crimes and terrorism (Anonymous responded by cloning the site and replacing the videos with Rick Astley). The CoS claimed to have filed criminal complaints at federal agencies, with these allegations. It tried to get an injunction against protestors in Clearwater, and failed. The worldwide protests grew, and Anonymous declared March 15 a success. The protests had been timed to coincide with the birthday of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Anonymous donned birthday hats, ate cake, and danced to a cheesy song with the lyrics, "When it's time to party we will party hard."

After the March protests, CoS sent nastygrams to some de-masked Anons via at least two law firms, which in themselves constituted no legal action. In a couple of limited cases, CoS actually took demonstrable legal action. It accused LA-based Sean Carasov of making death threats, and the LAPD dismissed the charges. It also filed a complaint of Trespass and Criminal Harrassment against Boston-based "Gregg" who knocked on the door of the local CoS and attempted to give them fliers. Gregg has yet to be heard in court, but Anonymous feels confident that the legal merit is weak and that the actions were filed solely as an attempt to intimidate.

By all measures, the intimidation isn't working. The next protests occur on April 12th, and are focused on bringing attention to the families that have been "disconnected" by the CoS. Anonymous plans monthly protests for the forseeable future.

An Academic Opportunity

Anonymous presents an array of opportunities for interesting scholorship. It is a cultural community, a political movement, a legal battleground, and more. It straddles between internet and "real world" existence. We need to study Anonymous... and to study hard.

Academics from cultural studies, media theory, and anthropology might seek to better understand what holds this unique community together. How have they appropriated anime and internet culture into the core of their identity and used it to unify their movement? How do neighbor communities like cosplay and video gaming cross pollinate with Anonymous? How does Anonymous connect with the earlier Internet vs. Scientology effort? What do we make of their obscure and offensive language?

Legal academics also have a great deal to consider when it comes to Anonymous. How do our laws regarding online vs. real-world anonymity differ? For example, should a Kentucky bill banning anonymous online posting pass or should a New York statute banning anonymous protesting in real life be overturned? Is the CoS using official-looking lawyer letters to intimidate and chill free speech? What can be done to defend Anons who claim that they are the target of fair-gaming through the legal system? What about the larger questions of Scientology's tax-exempt status and their controversial 1993 settlement with the IRS?

Political scientists studying movements and agenda-setting might want to consider how this group organizes and affects political change. What has made Anonymous able to grow and adapt so dynamically? How can such a decentralized, leaderless collective maintain potency in the long term? What are the means that the group is using to lobby and advocate anonymously? How is the movement gaining newcomers while staying on message and not becoming fragmented?

Some academics have already begun to take notice, but their work is preliminary. PBS's digital news project "Idea Lab" recently posted a thought-provoking article on the Anonymous transition from the Internet to the "real world." Anonymous demonstrates the principles of digital learning as they translate their online skills into collective action. They leverage viral-like promotion strategies through efforts like youfoundthecard.com. They use language and tactics from the video game world. They have developed a decentralized news making and gathering service in support of their cause. What can academics learn from this?

Rise up, sons and daughters of the academy.

More About Anonymous

A Sample of Anonymous Media Coverage

• Radar Magazine, April Issue: Cult Friction
• City Paper (Baltimore), 4/2/08: Serious Business: Anonymous Takes On Scientology (and Doesn't Afraid of Anything) [and yes, that's intentional]
• Christian Science Monitor, 3/17/08: Anonymous Activists Gaining Strength Online
• The Guardian (UK), 3/19/08: Taking The Rick

Anonymous-related Sites

• Why We Protest
• Reconnect.org (April 12 Protest Site)
• Enturbulation Forums
• Ex Scientology Kids
• You Found The Card
• Operation Clambake

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with human rights advocate Sam Gregory, who I met at USC's DIY Media event earlier this year. In this second part, Gregory explains why Witness is creating its own video distribution site, discusses the role of remix in the realm of human rights activism, and explores what it might mean to "do it with others" rather than "do it yourself." Tell us more about The Hub. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of creating a platform specifically for distributing human rights videos as opposed to tapping into the power of shared or general portals like YouTube?

The Hub, WITNESS' most recent project tries to address what's missing in the online media sharing ecosystem for human rights activists. It's in Beta at the moment, and launched on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2007. In our first four months of quiet beta, we've had in the region of five million views of media, and going on eight hundred items of media uploaded.

It's envisioned as the human rights channel for the online community, as a place where anyone can upload human rights-related footage, share it with others and self-organize into affinity groups, comment on material there, and most importantly access online tools for action, and guidance on how to turn their video into compelling advocacy material. It places a strong emphasis on security both for the uploader and for those filmed, on providing contextualization for imagery wherever possible, and also seeks to provide normative leadership around the impacts of participatory media creation and distribution in oppressive contexts. For me, that option to act is critical. There's nothing worse from the activists' point-of-view than risking your life to film a piece of footage, and to then to have that experience dismissed. From the viewer's point-of-view there's nothing worse than being exposed to scenes of misery, and to have no way to take action. It's deeply draining and de-motivating for people to watch and not be able to act, it misses the opportunity to engage support, and it contributes to the compassion fatigue that we all already experience.

We're not in favor of walled gardens, and to create something like that would be to waste so much of the potential of the networked online environment. So why not just use YouTube? (or Daily Motion? LiveLeak? etc.). In fact, many of the videos on the Hub have also been placed by activists on YouTube (it is possible to use YouTube or any other commercial or non-commercial site to host content, and then embed it on the Hub), and in many cases we can see real value in drawing on the mass public reached by YouTube. The power of YouTube is that it is increasingly becoming the most prominent platform (at least in the global North, and for English-language media) for video online - although finding an appropriate human rights video can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. From an advocacy perspective, we can see how IF a video achieves either prominent placement, or takes off virally on YouTube it can take off in terms of public prominence. Similarly for many non-governmental advocacy organizations that are trying to engage a general public either with a single video or via a channel, YouTube is likely to be the first place that public will look. And we also recognize that YouTube is a pushing-out point for footage that finds homes in many other subculture-specific media systems, including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch's commentary on this.

However, we see some significant current limitations on YouTube as a platform for human rights activism. For some publics - namely concerned citizens on a global scale concerned about security, looking to ensure that their footage galvanizes action, and suspicious of corporate and government surveillance, it may not be the best choice. These issues of concerns include questions of being a small fish in a big pond raised by the Center for Social Media's report last year, opportunities for meaningful community and to generate action, and the dilemmas raised by the Transmission network and others of commercial exploitation of human rights imagery, safety and security for the uploaders and filmed, surveillance by corporations and state, inflexibility in redistribution, downloading and sharing, and where editorial control is vested.

To illustrate one of these points, human rights video is generally among the least-viewed content on YouTube amidst the proliferation of music videos, parodies and commentary. A March 2007 Center for Social Media study found (though this was before the launch of the YouTube Nonprofit Channel which has increased slightly the visibility of social issue videos, and the pro-active work of the Citizen Tube editor at YouTube), public-issue videos find themselves 'small fish in a vast sea' . The most popular social/public issue video in the Center for Social Media study had 150 times less viewers than the most popular video on YouTube, and the terms on which they must compete for the public audience are the co-option of the characteristics of humor, celebrities, popular culture touchstones and music that are most common in the top-ranked YouTube videos. You yourself talk about the vaudevillian aesthetic of online video in which 'the best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared'. Some human rights video can play in this field. A powerful example is the 'Waiting for the Guards' video developed by Amnesty UK for their Unsubscribe-me campaign that feature a recreation of the stress position enhanced interrogation technique used by the CIA, as the center-piece of a web 2.0 campaign focused on action via social networking sites. But with some exceptions much human rights material is not immediately powerful performance, and may not be most effectively or honestly presented in that mode.

Another aspect is what happens to grassroots human rights video on YouTube if it does secure viewers. WITNESS' own experience with YouTube has included two videos that were very fortunate to be picked as Editor's Picks - 'Shoot on Sight,' produced by partners Burma Issues documenting military attacks on ethnic minority civilians in eastern Burma, and picked during the height of the crisis in Burma in autumn 2007; and 'Awaiting Tomorrow' highlighting lack of access to HIV/AIDs treatment in Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced by locally-based partners Ajedi-Ka, and placed on YouTube's homepage on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day. Both videos received reasonably high viewer levels (approximately 380,000 and 225,000 as of now) and significant levels of comments ('Awaiting Tomorrow' ranks among the top forty most-discussed ever videos in the Non-Profit and Activism Channel with almost 1,400 comments before comments were disabled preventing further belligerent commentary). These levels of viewership are great in terms of reaching an audience that would know little about ethnically-targeted violence in eastern Burma, or access to anti-retrovirals in the Congo. However, the comments ranged from the constructive to the racist, and conspiracy-theory obsessed, and the framework of the YouTube page does not lend itself to using individual videos to focus action of the type WITNESS or local human rights advocates seek, or to foster discussion.

From the point-of-view of human rights advocacy, it was very hard to turn a transitory audience into an engaged public, or to measure the transition from viewing to action or impact. For human rights activism you want a community oriented towards action, recognizing also that online environments where no-one 'listens' to others and responds constructively are the opposite of the empowerment of voice that grounds WITNESS. As Howard Rheingold has observed in relation to youth participation online, in an analogy that could easily be extended to over-stretched, marginalized human rights advocates, "it isn't "voice" if nobody seems to be listening". Our experience illuminated the need for a channel dedicated to human rights and related action.

Recognizing that YouTube should not be viewed solely as a single site, but as a nexus of content that circulates in more detailed, niche contexts, I should note that the most effective uses of the YouTube version of 'Shoot on Sight' were in blog postings where it was embedded in additional context, commentary and recommendations for action, and in its use by venues such as the Facebook 'Support the Monks in Burma' action group.

As additional factors to consider -- in contrast to many commercial platforms -- the Hub carries no advertising, does not track IP addresses and advises users on how to avoid surveillance, and will soon include functionality allowing downloads so that people can use it in the most appropriate setting to generate action. Although we do currently have an editorial process to ensure fit of videos to guidelines, our hope is that the community will eventually monitor, rate and control the content that is on the site; and WITNESS does not claim ownership on the footage and allows the user to choose a Creative Commons license that will exactly lay out how they would like their work to be used

What, if any, kinds of remixing are appropriate in the space of human rights video? How can we reconcile this mash-up aesthetic with the evidentiary claims made for traditional documentaries?

Remixing is one of the most powerful aspects of the new participatory culture. From a human rights advocacy point-of-view, the positive dimensions of this are clear: the narrative possibilities of remixing footage are extensive and build on an increasingly reflexive contemporary media literacy, and there is a possibility to benefit from the creativity and capacity of a distributed network of peer production which can rework the 'raw' audiovisual material to appeal to diverse communities of interest, and within which the opportunity to be a 'co-'producer rather than just a user may promote sustained engagement.

Some of the most powerful political commentary in the US over the past 5 years has featured powerful remixes of news, archival and user-generated footage, especially around President Bush and his actions in Iraq, and groups WITNESS have worked with at a local and regional level around the world have used karaoke remix formats to communicate effectively around human rights issues. One example of the karaoke remix style I've seen in Southeast Asia is a video by one of our Video Advocacy Institute alumni, Dale Kongmonts's from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers. The rub is in how this remix culture relates to a human rights culture that is concerned for the dignity and integrity of victims and survivors, and the role of ethical witnessing. We love seeing George Bush remixed, but where would we draw the line? For me, that's a bigger concern than the evidentiary aspect. I think we have to recognize that the process of narrative creation is always subjective.

The remix question raises the underlying problem that bothers many human rights advocates when they consider visual imagery. WITNESS has wrestled for years with how to try and ensure that people filmed in human rights contexts understand how the video will be used, and the implications both positive and negative (we produced a whole chapter on 'Safety and Security' in our recent 'Video for Change' book), emphasizing model that relies on presenting worst case scenarios for impact, to enable genuine informed consent to be given. Simultaneously, human rights culture emphasizes the value of the integrity and dignity of the individual survivor of abuse on the basis of the first principle that every human being is possessed of 'inherent dignity', a concept which runs through every right articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A particular concern in the victim and survivor-centered human rights model is to avoid re-victimization either directly or indirectly (as can happen when an image is distributed and exploited inappropriately). The most graphic issues - of violent attacks, or at the most extreme, sexual assault - is seen as the material that most easily translates into a loss of dignity, privacy, and agency, and to the potential for real re-victimization. Individuals featured in videos who are not victims or survivors, but bystanders or witnesses, are also understood to be in positions of vulnerability and risk.

But that's a practice that's difficult enough to promote in the 'professional' documentary world, and impossible to sustain in an online participatory media culture of user-generated citizen media. How do we support emerging norms in the emerging online culture that, promote respect, tolerance and an understanding of risks? Over at Internet Artizans Dan McQuillan talks about "propagating an online culture pervaded by a sense of fairness & justice" and suggests "writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in to all web 2.0 Terms of Service". I think this is really one of the key tasks ahead for a concerned community online, only brought home more and more as we increasingly experience global human rights crises - Burma, Tibet - via imagery circulated online. The urgency of this normative work is clear if we think about the implications of increasing live eventcasting from cell-phones facilitated by technologies like Flixwagon and Qik. These technologies will have powerful positive implications for sharing footage and engaging constituencies immediately, but at the same time consent and security norms become even more critical once more video is streamed immediately rather than edited/uploaded after the fact?

You are an advocate of a "DWO" (Do With Others) approach to video production.

Explain. What value does collaborative production and distribution bring to the field of advocacy and activism?

The biggest concern for human rights activists is how video can be deployed to create real change. Alongside renewed opportunities for individual production and targeted advocacy both online and offline, I think collaborative production, distribution and advocacy offer powerful new possibilities for a network-centered video advocacy.

This DIWO (Doing It With Others) recognizes the advocacy possibilities of drawing on some "audiences" as collaborating publics both between themselves and with you, and as co-producers and not just as consumers or passive distributors of advocacy video. This means attention to how to facilitate meaningful and responsible ways in a many-to-many environment for people to speak to each other and create locally-specific and contingent media.

Collaborative production, distribution and advocacy allows for the possibility of drawing on all the potential resources in a given advocacy community. At the most simple format, it includes efforts like the video collages created by campaigns including 24 Hours for Darfur, which gathers expert, citizen and refugee voices to speak out on the situation in Darfur and join an online montage of voices, that was also screened at the UN. It also includes the YouTube and MoveOn.org approaches to user-generated or citizen-generated video contests, and what Greenpeace did last year in the environmental community, where it provided a stock of footage to supporters and encouraged them to "... Download our footage from the e-waste yards in China and India to edit and use in your video. Use it to make your own video about e-waste and how Apple should be a leader in helping tackle this problem...only limitations are please use the logo provided, a positive campaign message and the website URL somewhere in your video"

What is often most effective in advocacy are trusted voices, and often advocacy videos are blunt weapons in terms of finding a trusted voice that will speak to a broad and divergent audience. You either do it by finding a powerful story of a non-famous individual and find ways to engage your audience emotionally, or you take a default option of going with figures with a broad-based of 'authority' or just plain recognition, such as a celebrity. But with collaborative production of advocacy video you can go beyond that - you can mix together, say the footage from Burma or Darfur with the most trusted voices for a specific audience, to create locally-specific advocacy videos.

As a concrete example of this approach, I am currently working with the US Campaign for Burma, which has student chapters across the country on how to facilitate student action around divestment campaigns in universities. One idea in involves collaborative video editing, in this case using a software called Kaltura. At an online editing site they will find a set of stock clips of what is going on in Burma, including some interviews and visual footage as well as tips and advice from the coordinators and their peers about how to construct an effective advocacy video. They will then shoot their own material (for example, someone at University of Iowa could include a clip from a supportive academic or community leader) and create a localized video. All these clips, as well as the contingently finished films are shared online for all the student groups, so that another group has the option to borrow a useful video from others in the campaign, use it straight or remix it, or if they like just one of U-Iowa's local-specific clips borrow it for their own.

This is an example of a situation where collaborative production produces a range of advocacy videos, each locally-specific and targeted. We see the potential here for pressuring at a local level, by using shared footage and adding material that taps into local power dynamics - drawing on influencers and authority figures with specific resonance, or who have the 'ear' of a key person - and by making calls to action as specific as possible. You could also imagine collaborative production being used to produce one product that drew on the capacity and collective knowledge of many to create a more effective advocacy strategy

This approach - which relies on dense information connections to allow individuals to draw on and act with networked, shared resources has been termed 'network-centric advocacy' by Marty Kearns. As he defines it, network-centric advocacy differs from traditional advocacy in the strategy used to 'form and deliver an argument as well as the methodology used to build alliances across stakeholders'. Where traditional advocacy involves the advocate organization picking and packaging an argument for delivery to an audience, a network-centric approach 'asks the network to find, package and select the arguments (think MoveOn Bushin30Seconds example). The network picks the message.' Similarly whereas a traditional advocacy campaign has a core communications team at its center 'managing' the campaign, a distributed network campaign trains 'many spokespeople to speak their own voice'. We're seeing this in political campaigns in the US - see for example the excellent analysis by Connect US (which is doing work on doing network-centered advocacy here in the foreign policy community in the USA) of Obama's campaign.

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part One)

I came back from the USC DIY Media Event with a whole range of new contacts. One hallmark of this outstanding conference was that it brought together people from very different social networks -- people who are working in parallel across different communities to explore the potentials of participatory culture. I've already featured through this blog an extensive interview with independent filmmaker and critic Alex Juhasz exploring her efforts to teach through and about Youtube. Today, I want to showcase another participant in the USC event -- human rights activist Sam Gregory. Gregory's comments about the strengths and limitations of Youtube as a site for media activism were eye-opening to me and I hope you will find them equally illuminating. In the interview which follows, Gregory describes the evolution in the thinking of his organization, Witness, from the aftermath of the Rodney King video, to the recent use of Youtube as a platform for the Burmese democracy movement. Drawing a phrase from Jamais Cascio, Gregory speaks here about the "participatory panopticon," the potentials of a world where citizens can use light weight portable cameras, including those built into their cellphones, and video distribution platforms to alert the world about human rights violations in their country. The past decade plus of DIY activism has taught veterans to be skeptical about some of the more utopian claims of the previous generation, even as they are learning to be more effective at exploiting every available opportunity to capture and distribute harsh realities that much of the world doesn't want to watch.

Sam Gregory, Program Director, is a video producer, trainer, and human rights advocate. In 2005 he was the lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007 he lead the development of the curriculum for WITNESS' first ever Video Advocacy Institute. Videos he has produced have been screened at the US Congress,the UK Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide. In 2004 he was a jury member for the IDFA Amnesty International/Doen Award. He was a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where his Master's in Public Policy focused on

international development and media. He has worked as a television researcher/producer in both the UK and USA, and for development organizations in Nepal and Vietnam, and holds a BA from Oxford University in History and Spanish. He is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Tactical Technology Collective. He speaks fluent Spanish, conversational French and basic Nepali.

Can you tell us something about the thinking which led to the creation of WITNESS? How has your organization's vision shifted over time in response to shifts in the nature of participatory culture?

In the late 1980's, our founder, Peter Gabriel had been participating in the Amnesty Human Rights Now Tour, travelling the world and meeting human rights activists at each concert stop. And in many cases, it struck him that their stories were not being heard, and that new tools like the consumer video-camera could perhaps change that. Fast-forward a couple of years, and the Rodney King incident brought the possibilities home. From the window of his apartment George Holliday filmed a sequence of graphic human rights violations that generated massive media attention. That provided the impetus for the creation of WITNESS - founded in the assumption that if you could place cameras in the hands of the people who chose to be "in the wrong place at the right time", i.e. human rights advocates and activists around the world living and working with communities affected by violations, then you would enable a new way to mobilize action for real change.

For the first decade of our work we wrestled with how best to operationalize this idea. In the early 1990's we were focused on the technology. We distributed hundreds of cameras to human rights groups around the world, assuming that they would be able to gather footage that could get on television or be used as evidence -two polar extremes of usage, one very specialized and targeted at a judicial fact-finder or jury, the other playing to a vast, undifferentiated court of public opinion.

In those first years we learnt that without technical training, you could shoot raw video but you could not create the finished narratives that matter in most advocacy contexts outside of providing raw footage to the news media. We evolved to a strategy of working intensely with a select group of 10-12 'core partners' - human rights groups on the ground who approach us to collaborate in helping them integrate video into their campaigns; as well as doing extensive trainings, producing online training materials like our Guide to Video Advocacy and writing books like 'Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism' to promote effective ideas in our community. And most recently we embarked on a new project, the Hub, which is the most DIY part of our work - a participatory media site where individuals and organizations can safely upload footage of abuses and finished advocacy videos, share it, learn how to deploy it in their campaigns, and present clear context and links to more information, groups working to address the issues, and actions that viewers and supporters can take.

Over the past fifteen years, a number of factors came to characterize the WITNESS approach. We focus on the empowered voices of those who are closer or closest to rights violations - including victims, survivors, community members and engaged advocates on behalf of affected communities. And until recently we've generally sought to use "smart narrowcasting" rather than "broadcasting" to reach key audiences. So for example, the video 'Bound by Promises' was framed for and used in screenings to government officials and legislators in Brazil to push them to prioritize concrete programs to reduce rural slave labor. Our work has also always blurred the line between amateurs and professionals in terms of using video -we are training human rights workers, and now concerned citizens, to use video as an everyday facet of their work, rather than to turn them into documentary film-makers.

We've seen a progressive expansion of the participatory possibilities of video: first, increased access to cameras, the increased access to editing capacity, then the dramatic growth of online video-sharing for distribution. And in the past three years we see the possibilities for increased collaboration in editing and production, for online distribution, and for more immediate and widespread filming - all facilitated by a digitally-literate youth, by mobile technology with still image and video capability and by new online tools.

What role does do it yourself video play in heightening public awareness of human rights issues around the world?

I would identify three spheres of usage of DIY video in raising awareness of human rights issues around the world: advocacy videos, witness documentation and perpetrator video. All three are facilitated by ubiquitous technology for documentation (via video-cameras, digital still cameras with video functionality, and cell-phone cameras), by increasing digital literacy, and by increased opportunities for sharing, remixing and re-circulating.

To date most of our focus has been on advocacy video and on working to find the spaces where bringing the visual story into the virtual or real room can make a difference. Here we're trying to change the vernacular language of human rights advocacy, to make a space for the voices from outside, and to push a new way of communicating around rights abuses.

Frequently we've promoted an approach that's all about smart narrow-casting, speaking to a particular audience at a particular time, and seeking a distinct change in policy, behavior or practice. Videos are always part of a continuum of action -- and a strategy -- rather than stand-alone. Here we're working in the middle ground between the extremes of undifferentiated mass media attention and direct evidence in the courts. This could include showing video to an international or regional tribunal (we've been involved in a precedent-setting case to present video before the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, on land rights in Kenya), it could involve bringing to the voices of victims and the visual evidence of abuses in Burma into a Congressional briefing or a meeting of Security Council representatives, and it can involve engaging communities themselves to take action on a rights issues, for example by showing a video on voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in villages across eastern Congo. Videos always provide a 'space for action' by the audience, encouraging them to participate in solving the problem.

The scope of this use of video is increasing by the day, alongside more traditional human rights documentaries. We can see it on the Hub, where many of the videos uploaded are produced by NGOs, both at a national and an international level - for example, Video Volunteers' 'Stop the Privatization of Water, films by Amazon Watch, and 'Drying up Palestine.

The two modes that we're seeing now in increasing prevalence are witness documentation and perpetrator footage. Both are circulating increasingly in online video sharing contexts, and in the blogosphere. It's partly in response to the radically increased possibilities for participation in creating human rights video online that we've created our Hub project. In some senses with both witness documentation and perpetrator footage you're revisiting a Rodney King moment - only this time, there is a potential global audience of both activists and publics who can have access to the footage, and there are distribution options to get it to them, and knowledge about how to frame action around them. It's an exciting moment as people experiment with what can work with this radically expanded access to production and distribution.

Our founder, Peter Gabriel talks sometimes about "little brothers" and "little sisters" watching Big Brother, and this world of the 'participatory panopticon' as Jamais Cascio calls it - is one filled with emancipatory potential as long as we can make sure that the footage that circulates helps facilitate voice and change, rather than enable repression.

You've written that the project was initially shaped by assumptions about the "transparency" of the video medium. Explain. What happens to human rights video as we become more self conscious about the properties of the medium and the ways that it can be manipulated?

Our starting point was what the scholar Meg McLagan has succinctly termed a moment of "1990s technophilia and (with a) model of change based on the transparency of media". So it was very technology-focused and grounded in a perhaps naïve belief in the indexicality of the image - a firm conviction that 'seeing is believing' and that seeing would create action, in the same way that the Rodney King had seemingly inspired mass outrage and in the same way that at first.

Our initial assumptions about audience and how footage would be perceived and used, were not correct. In those days before widespread online video sharing, the modes to access broad publics were ineffective. We focused on video in judicial processes, and sharing video with the mass media - both of which are premised on the 'evidentiary' value of human rights footage. Yet both news media and evidentiary settings were challenging to access. The Rodney King experience was anomalous. Although George Holliday's footage permeated the mass media and was used in the subsequent state and federal trials, the overwhelming majority of human rights video cannot and does not reach those venues. And if it does, as many marginalized groups have experienced in their media advocacy, it is often presented in ways that are contradictory to the desires and intentions of the communities affected by the rights violations. The reasons for this - of course -- vary. But the result is the same. In some countries it may be that media is government, or corporate-controlled, or won't screen graphic imagery -- or is only interested in screening graphic imagery. And in many cases news media focuses on episodic framing that emphasize individual actions, victims and perpetrators, and is less interested in structural violence, systemic challenges or the ongoing problems that characterize many of the most pernicious abuses, and especially violations of economic, social and cultural rights. So, for example, a group I work with in Papua, Indonesia documents the systematic, ongoing and pervasive exclusion of indigenous Papuans in an economy dominated by migrants from other parts of Indonesia, and in a justice system that moves rarely against the powerful. In seeking widespread media attention they will face the triple barrier of government censorship, popular neglect and an issue that is not easily reduced to blow of a security force baton.

Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence frequently does not work. The rules of evidence are hard to navigate. And even if the evidence is admitted, we need only see how the Rodney King footage was flipped around and manipulated both to prove that the Los Angeles Police Department officers were following the training they had been provided to deal with a resisting suspect, and to demonstrate the grotesque abuse of power evident in the fifty-six strikes delivered on Rodney King.

So what this boiled down for us - alongside some re-thinking on audience --- was the need for framing and narrative to create effective advocacy videos. This framing can come both within the video and in the way it is presented within a campaign. Rather than relying on the 'visual evidence' in and of itself, you have to place this in a rhetorical framework that explains it, and offers ways to act. Seeing may be believing, but it may also lead to pessimism, and compassion fatigue in the absence of opportunities to act. We're not promoting a journalistic model of studious neutrality - our experience is that marginalized voices are excluded enough, without the need to balance their voices in a one-for-one ratio to the voices of authority or perpetrators. So most advocacy videos do have a point-of-view and an outcome in mind, but the best do this with clear respect for the facts of the situation.

You've argued that some of the most effective videos for dramatizing human rights issues have come not from activists but from the oppressive regimes themselves. Can you cite a few examples? Why were these videos produced in the first place? What new significance has been ascribed to them as they move into new contexts?

The futurist Jamais Casco has suggested that the 'Rodney King' moment of the digital camera era may hav e been the Abu Ghraib photos, and I would argue that the analogue for cell-phones was the footage of Saddam Hussein's execution. Yet both sets of images were filmed by perpetrators or by insiders, not by concerned citizens, advocates or observers. More broadly we can see a proliferation of images, particularly of torture by police, security force and military personnel.

One of the most viewed videos on the Hub is a redacted version of footage shot by Egyptian police in which they humiliate a Cairo bus driver by slapping him repeatedly. These and other more graphic videos that include the sodomization of another driver were filmed by the police themselves. They were then used to humiliate the victims - including by sending the images to other drivers-- and to intimidate other people by demonstrating what would happen if they didn't follow police orders. They share many similarities with the psychology of happy-slapping: adding for the victim the humiliation of the act of filming, as well as the humiliation of the probability of preservation, and allowing the perpetrator to relish the memory, and share it with their friends. Similar cases have galvanized debate in Greece, Malaysia (the notorious Squat-gate incident) and a number of other countries. And of course, footage is also shot increasingly by government to document and apprehend protestors and dissidents - here in the US, there has been the contentious suit around the NYPD and activists filming at the Republican National Convention in 2004, while most recently we can see official cameramen in the footage of protests from Burma and Tibet (for example, at 00:32 in this clip).

What happens is that these videos then circulate beyond the circles for which they were intended - and are re-ascribed new meanings. For example in Egypt, bloggers and journalists lead by Wael Abbas and Hossam el-Hamalawy circulated leaked cell-phone videos to challenge repeated denials of accountability for police brutality and torture by the government. By circulating the videos, and connecting online to both a local and international audience, they were able to generate media attention, and force an official response. Although the government initially tried to discredit the activists, it was very hard to deny the truth of the images, and for the first time, there was an investigation into the conduct of police officers in two of the leaked videos leading to a prosecution.

One issue that does arise is around the re-victimization of individuals featured in the footage. They are often doubly humiliated in the first instance - by what happens to them in custody, and by the act of filming, and then they are further exposed as the footage achieves widespread circulation. We've tried to address this in our own practice - for example, by respecting the victim's wishes in the Squatgate case and not re-posting the video on the Hub pilot project, but I think the most important thing we can do institutionally is to support the growth of norms in the online video community that are respectful of individuals' dignity and rights (the Transmission community has been leading on this concept)

Human rights videos, you've claimed, need to be thought of as "transnational stories." What are the implications of that statement? What factors insure that the video will achieve its desired effect as it encounters alternative audiences?

Much human rights activism is still about speaking to distant audiences, often to generate a 'boomerang' effect in your home country. In these cases you are telling transnational stories that must speak to an audience inevitably less grounded than you in the everyday realities of the oppression. So, the footage in the video produced by our partners working undercover in Burma 'Shoot on Sight' must speak to activists not only within Asia, but to government officials, decision-makers and solidarity supporters in North America and Europe. Most human rights situations are embedded in contexts of structural complexity, long histories of repression and reaction and many actors with different agenda. As activists and concerned citizens create human rights advocacy videos they face a dilemma. They want to resist a globalization of local images stripped of their meaning, by keeping intact local voices in local contexts, and in a way that is faithful both to the direct visible violence of a situation as well as the underlying structural causes. But at the same time as you move testimony and images between different advocacy and media arenas it often 'helps' to strip out some of the markers of specificity. From experience, I know that with many audiences too much analysis of the particularity and nuance of a testimonial story may undermine it as an advocacy call.

You are balancing the ethical demands to be true to the people who speak out, a recognition of the real complexities and the desire to make viewers genuine ethical witnesses, against the need to convince, shame or horrify a distant audience with a medium whose power often lies in directness both visually and in narrative. You also have to make tough choices in balancing the visceral power and problems of raw visual evidence (for example, of graphic violence) with the use of testimony.

Now as human rights video circulate increasingly unmoored from its original location - i.e. embedded, shared, remixed - it becomes key to place context and ways to act within the video and imagery itself rather than outside it since no sooner has your video been forwarded from YouTube, the Hub or elsewhere it becomes de-coupled from options to act unless those are built into the video itself, and unless your message comes through loud and clear.

Links, Links and More Links...

I have been pulled in so many directions lately that I've been having trouble finding time to blog about everything that has been happening. So consider this post as a chance to catch up on some materials which may be of interest to my regular readers. A few weeks ago, I joined my CMS colleague Beth Coleman for a conversation about virtual worlds, hosted by the MIT Club of Boston and webcast to alumni around the country. You may recall that Coleman and I were two participants in a three way conversation with Clay Shirky about virtual worlds a while back. Coleman is in the process of writing Hello Avatar!, which is intended as a primer about virtual worlds. She regular writes about such topics over at her Project Good Luck Blog. The fine folks at the MIT Alumni Office offer a streaming version of the conversation. And Ravi Mehta, VP of Publishing for Viximo, a virtual goods start-up, has posted a thorough and perceptive account of the event over at Virtual Worlds News

Those of you who have been engaged by my recent posts on "The Moral Economy of Web 2.0" might be interested in the podcast of a recent colloquium CMS hosted which focused on "viral media." Berkman Center Fellow and C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf moderated a candid converation with Natalie Lent from Fanscape and Mike Rubenstein of The Barbarian Group. The session offers some rich insights into the thinking behind contemporary branding and advertising practices.

For those of you more interested in the world of games, check out this podcast of our event last week with Dennis Dyack, the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Under Dyack's direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. In this podcast, Dyack discusses his views on why video games may represent the 8th Art and describes some of the thinking going into their Too Human trilogy, currently under development. This event was sponsored by the MIT-Singapore GAMBIT Lab.

You might also be interested in listening to recordings of two other recent events hosted by the MIT Communications Forum:

A conversation with John Romano, writer and producer on more than a dozen shows including Hill Street Blues, Party of Five, and Monk as well as creator of Class of '96, Sweet Justice, and Michael Hayes.

A discussion of the globalization of contemporary television featuring CMS's co-director William Uricchio, Utrecht University's Eggo Müller and University of Nottingham's Roberta Pearson.

Both events are moderated by David Thorburn, the director of the MIT Communications Forum.

Coming up soon: two events jointly hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and the Center for Future Civic Media: one featuring a conversation between Cass Sunstein and Yochai Benkler; the other a program on Youth and Civic Engagement (which features Lance Bennett, editor of Civic Life Online: How New Media Can Engage Youth; City Year's Alan Khazei; and MTV's Ian V. Rowe).

Catching Up on Project NML

I am currently in New York City participating in a range of sessions at the American Educational Research Associaton conference designed to showcase the work which we are doing on New Media Literacies. Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion with James Paul Gee, Nichole Pinkard, Howard Gardner, and Connie Yowell. Last night, at a MacArthur Foundation reception, our team showcased some of the work we've been doing on the NML Learning Library (see below). Today, we are showcasing our collaboration with Harvard University's Good Play Project (Under the supervision of Howard Gardner) which is designed to encourage reflection on the ethical challenges young people face as they navigate through the complexities of the online world. All of this is part of an effort by the MacArthur Foundation to publicize the creation of a national network of researchers, scholars, educators, and activists who are focusing their attention on Digital Media and Learning. This has been one of the most exciting collaborations of my academic career. I love working with all of these people. Individually, collectively, we are starting to make a difference in the conversations that impact young people's relations to new media technology and participatory culture. Project NML recently launched a new blog designed to create greater "transparency" around the development of curricular materials and activities supporting the teaching of new media literacies. An early highlight is a post by Jenna McWilliams, our outreach coordinator, talking about how working on a teachers strategy guide designed to support the teaching of Moby Dick has forced her to reconsider this great American novel. She writes:

Before I came to NML, I had long lived among the multitudes who for many reasons--actually, for me it was mainly out of guilt and the heavy weight of cultural duty--keep a copy of Moby-Dick on a bookshelf with the really truly honest intention of getting through it some day. My guilt was compounded by my personal history as first an English major and then a student-writer in an MFA program. Every time I looked over at that fat little book sitting plumply on my bookshelf, I got just a little miserable all over again. But then I thought, you know, it's a very long novel. And hard. And word on the street is that it's kind of...boring. But then I joined NML and started in on this teacher's guide and I figured, okay, it's time to end the shame. And I took a deep breath and I jumped in....

There's no doubt that reading Moby-Dick is not the same kind of rollicking good time as, for example, reading Harry Potter. I won't argue about the degree of concentration, deliberation, and discipline required to make it through...

When I started the book, I prepared myself for serious tedium, determined to charge through for the good of the project (good-hearted team player that I am). But--I promise you I'm telling the truth--I actually had a really good time. I think this is mainly because as I started to read, I was surrounded by some very smart people (Henry Jenkins and Melville Scholar and MIT professor Wyn Kelley) who framed the novel for me as the work of a kind of proto-fan--a writer who channeled a lifelong love of literature, science, mythology, and the tiniest details of whaling culture into the classic text we engage with today. I couldn't help but imagine Melville as a sort of geeky fanboy, running around from library to museum to shoreline to dock and collecting information that he couldn't wait to share with readers.... When you picture Melville like that, and when you think about the book as evidence of his fandom, it starts to get really fun. You can even slog your way through the pages and pages of whaling history and lore, because you understand that Melville has collected all the information he could possibly find and is presenting it to you, the reader, because he thinks it's really, really neat.

McWilliam's post captures beautifully the excitement we are all experiencing reading Moby Dick through the lens of participatory culture.

I have long argued that the New Media Literacies should not be conceptualized as an add on subject or as something teachers do on Friday afternoon if the students have been good all week. It requires a paradigm shift on the same order as the ways schools have started to confront the challenges of multiculturalism and globalization. It impacts everything schools teach. In this project, we are focusing on Literature and Language Arts. Our hopes is to provide a model for how we teach authorship and classic literature differently in an era of remix culture. For more of my thoughts on this project, see earlier blog posts -- The Whiteness of the Whale (Revisited) and

href="http://henryjenkins.org/2007/09/was_herman_melville_a_protofan.html">Was

Herman Melville a Protofan?

MIT's Tech TV site is also showcasing some of the materials Project nml is producing for its forthcoming learning library. As Erin Reilly explains in the blog:

The Exemplar Library that was once documentary videos highlighting best practices of participatory culture is now an integration of learning activities embedded into multimedia material. In addition to videos, the Exemplar Library now has animated data visualization, flash movies, and other motion media as launching points. The learning activities are a combination of online activities that teens can do on their own to group activities that can happen both in and out of the classroom. This new informal approach to learning through the Exemplar Library encourages teens from passive viewing into interactive participation... and we saw just that in our first focus group of the semester.

The featured videos include several segments focused on what young people are learning through their participation in cosplay, some thoughts about the value of simulations and visualizations including a segment dealing with animation.

We welcome your feedback on these works in progress -- especially from Educators (whether based in schools or after school programs) or Librarians.

I will be giving two talks next week focused on these materials -- on Weds. as part of a webcast for Association of College and Research Libraries and on Friday before the New England Educational Media Association. Hope to see some of my regular readers there.

The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part Four)

Prohibitionists and The Moral Economy

"The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important." - Tim O'Reilly (2005)

"Our entire cultural economy is in dire straights....We will live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising." -- Andrew Keen (2007)

Despite the apparent long-term necessity of the entertainment industry reshaping its relations with consumers (both in the face of new technological realities that make preserving traditional control over content difficult and in the face of new models of consumer relations which stress collaborations with users), media executives remain risk-averse. Andrew Currah (2006) argues that the reluctance of studio executives to risk short term revenue gains accounts for their reticence to experiment with alternative content distribution models despite growing data that suggests some forms of legal file-sharing would be in the industry's long-term best interests. Many executives at public companies are paid to draw incremental increases in revenue from mature markets rather than to adopt more long-ranging or entrepreneurial perspectives. New ventures might violate agreements media producers maintain with big-box retailers, decrease revenues from established markets (DVD, PPV), or spoil the balance of release windows and the geographic management of content distribution. According to Currah (2006, pp. 461-463), the executives best placed to authorize such changes are not likely to be around to see the long-range benefits and thus they opt for the stability and predictability of the status quo.

Both industry leaders and creative workers worry about a loss of control as they grant audiences a more active role in the design, circulation, and promotion of media content; they see relations between consumers and producers as a zero-sum game where one party gains at the expense of the other. For the creative, the fear is a corruption of their artistic integrity, according to what Deuze (2006) calls an editorial logic (where decisions are governed by the development and maintenance of reputations within the professional community). For the business side, the greatest fear is the idea that consumers might take something they made and not pay them for it, according to a market logic (where decisions are governed by the desire to expand markets and maximize profits). A series of law suits which have criminalized once normative consumer practices have further inflamed relations between consumers and producers.

If the hope that consumers will generate value around cultural properties has fueled the collaborationist logic, these tensions between producers and consumers motivate the prohibitionist approach towards so-called "disruptive technologies" and practices. If the collaborationist approach welcomes fans as potential allies, the prohibitionist approach sees fans as a threat to their control over the circulation of, and production of meaning around, their content. Consumers are read as "pirates" whose acts of repurposing and recirculation constitute theft. The prohibitionist approach seeks to restrict participation, pushing it from public view. The prohibitionist response needs to be understood in the context of a renegotiation of the moral economy which shapes relations between media producers and consumers.

The economic and social historian E.P. Thompson (1971) introduced the concept of "moral economy" in his work on 18th century food riots, arguing that where the public challenges landowners, their actions are typically shaped by some "legitimizing notion." He explains, "the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. In other words, the relations between landowners and peasants, or for that matter, between contemporary media producers and consumers, reflect the perceived moral and social value of those transactions. All participants need to feel that the involved parties behave in a morally appropriate fashion.

Jenkins (1992) introduced this concept of "moral economy" into fan studies, exploring the ways that fan fiction writers legitimate their appropriation of series content. Through their online communication, fan communities develop a firm consensus about the "moral economy"; this consensus provides a strong motivation for them to speak out against media producers who they feel are "exploiting" their relationship or damaging the franchise. The growing popularity of illegal downloads amongst music consumers, for example, reflects the oft-spoken belief that the record labels are "ripping off" consumers and artists alike through inflated prices and poor contractual terms. The controversy surrounding FanLib spread so rapidly because the fan community already had a well articulated understanding of what constituted appropriate use of borrowed materials. Fans objected to profiting from fan fictions both because they saw their work as gifts which circulated freely within a community of fellow fans, and because they believed rights holders were more apt to take legal action to shut down their activities if money was changing hands (Jenkins 2007a).

In a review of the concept of the "moral economy" in the context of a discussion of digital rights management, Alec Austin (et. al. 2006) writes, "Thompson's work suggested that uprisings (or audience resistance) was most likely to occur when powerful economic players try to shift from existing rights and practices and towards some new economic regime. As they do so, these players seem to take away "rights" or rework relationships which were taken for granted by others involved in those transactions." A period of abrupt technological and economic transition destabilizes relations between media producers and consumers. Consumers defend perceived rights and practices long taken for granted, such as the production and circulation of "mix tapes", while corporations try to police behaviors such as file sharing, which they see as occurring on a larger scale and having a much larger public impact. Both sides suspect the other of exploiting the instability created by shifts in the media infrastructure.

This moral economy includes not simply economic and social obligations between producers and consumers but also social obligations to other consumers. As Ian Condry (2004) explains, "Unlike underwear or swim suits, music falls into the category of things you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family, and friends. Yet to date, people who share music files are primarily represented in media and business settings as selfish, improperly socialized people who simply want to get something -- the fruits of other people's labor -- for free." Industry discourse depicting file-sharers (or downloaders, depending on your frame of reference) as selfish doesn't fully acknowledge the willingness of supporters to spend their own time and money to facilitate the circulation of valued content, whether in the form of a "mix tape" given to one person or a website with sound files that can be downloaded by any and all. Enthusiasts face these costs in hopes that their actions will generate greater interest in the music they love and that sharing music may reinforce their ties to other consumers. Condry says he finds it difficult to identify any moral argument against file sharing which young people find convincing, yet he has been able to identify a range of reasons why people might voluntarily choose to pay for certain content (to support a favorite group or increase the viability of marginalized genres of music). The solution may not be to criminalize file-sharing but rather to increase social ties between artists and fans.

Contemporary conflicts about intellectual property emerge when individual companies or industries shift abruptly between collaborationist and prohibitionist models. Hector Postigo (2008) has documented growing tensions between game companies and modders when companies have sought to shut down modding projects which tread too closely onto their own production plans or go in directions the rights holders did not approve. Because there has been so much discussion of the economic advantages of co-creation, modders often reject the moral and legal arguments for restraining their practice.

Some recent critics of Web 2.0 models deploy labor theory to talk about the activities of consumers within this new digital economy. The discourse of "Web 2.0" provides few models for how to compensate fan communities for the value they generate. Audience members, it is assumed, participate because they get emotional and social rewards from their participation and thus neither want nor deserve economic compensation. Tiziana Terranova (2000) has offered a cogent critique of this set of economic relationships in her work on "free labor": "Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited....The fruit of collective cultural labor has been not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices."

Consider, for example, Lawrence Lessig's (2007) critique of an arrangement where LucasFilm would allow fans to "remix" Star Wars content in return for granting the company control over anything participants had generated in response to those materials. Lessig, writing in the Washington Post, described such arrangements as a modern day version of "sharecropping." Fans were embracing something like this same critique in their response to FanLib, rejecting the idea that the company should be able to profit from their creative labor.

On the other end of the spectrum fall writers like Andrew Keen (2007), who suggests that the unauthorized circulation of intellectual property through peer-to-peer networks and the free labor of fans and bloggers constitute a serious threat to the long-term viability of the creative industries. Here, it is audience activity which exceeds the moral economy. In his nightmarish scenario, professional editorial standards are giving way to mob rule and the work of professional writers, performers, and media makers is being reduced to raw materials for the masses who show growing contempt for traditional expertise and disrespect for intellectual property rights. Keen concludes his book with a call to renew our commitment to older models of the moral economy, albeit ones that recognize the new digital realities: "The way to keep the recorded-music industry vibrant and support new bands and music is to be willing to support them with our dollars -- to stop stealing the sweat of other people's creative labor" (Keen 2007, p. 188).

Lessig, Terranova, and others see the creative industries as damaging the moral economy through their expectations of "free" creative labor, while Keen sees the media audiences as destroying the moral economy through their expectations of "free" content. Read side by side, the competing visions of consumers as "sharecroppers" and "pirates" reflects the breakdown of trust on all sides. The sunny Web 2.0 rhetoric about constructing "an architecture for participation" papers over these conflicts, masking the set of choices and compromises which need to be made if a new moral economy is going to emerge.

Final Thoughts

Rebuilding this trust relationship requires embracing, rather than resisting, the changes to the economic, social, and technological infrastructure we have described. The prohibitionist stance adopted by some companies and industry bodies denies the changed conditions in which the creative industries operate, trying to force participatory culture to conform to yesterday's business practices. While prohibitionist companies want to maintain broadcast era patterns of control over content development and consumer relations, they hope to reap the benefits of the digital media space. NBC enjoyed the viral buzz that came with fans sharing the Saturday Night Live clip "Lazy Sunday" but issued a take down notice to YouTube to ensure the only copies available online came from NBC's official site (within the proximity of their branding material and advertising) (Austin et al 2006). The network's prohibition of file sharing reflects NBC's discomfort with YouTube drawing advertising revenue from consumer circulation of its content. While perhaps completely defensible within broadcast era business logic, the decision ignored the ways that the spread of this content generated viewer interest in the broadcast series. For the network, the primary if not soul value of the content was as a commodity which could collect rents from consumers and advertisers alike. In attempting to re-embed "Lazy Sunday" within the distribution logics of the broadcast era, locking down both the channel and context of its distribution, NBC also attempted to re-embed the clip within an older conception of audience impressions. Many viewers responded according to this same logic - skipping both commercials and content in favor of producers who offered them more favorable terms of participation.

Navigating through participatory culture requires a negotiation of the implicit social contract between media producers and consumers, balancing the commodity and cultural status of creative goods. While this complex balance has always shaped creative industries, NBC struck down their fans in order to resolve other business matters, such as their relationships with advertisers and affiliates, sacrificing the cultural status of creative goods for their commodity value. The alternative approach is to find ways to capitalize on the creative energies of participatory audiences. Mentos' successful management of the Mentos and soda videos that emerged online in 2006 represents a more collaborative approach. Noticing a fad around dropping Mentos mints into bottles of soda and filming the resulting eruption, Mentos permitted, supported and eventually promoted the playful use of their intellectual property. Mentos could have issued cease-and-desist notices to regulate their brand's reputation, as FedEx did after a college student built a website featuring his dorm furniture made out of free FedEx boxes (Vranica and Terhune 2006). Instead, Mentos capitalized on the cultural capital its product had acquired, collaborating with audiences to construct a new brand image. Engaging and promoting fan engagement offers media companies a more positive outcome than attempting the wack-a-mole game of trying to quash grassroots appropriation wherever it arises. Doing so also brings corporations into direct contact with lead users, revealing new markets and unanticipated uses.

The renegotiation of the moral economy requires a commitment on the part of participatory audiences to respect intellectual property rights. We see the potential of rebuilding consumers' good will when anime fans cease circulating fan subbed content when it is made commercially available or when gamers support companies that offer them access to modding tools. Collaborationist approaches recognize and respect consumer engagement while demanding respect in return. Working with and listening to engaged consumers can result in audiences who help to patrol intellectual property violations; though their investment may not be measured according to the same market logics as the production and distribution companies, fans are likewise invested in the success of creative content. In doing so, media companies not only acknowledge the cultural status of the commodities they create, they're in a position to harness the passionate energies of fans.

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The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part One)

I wrote the following essay on the cultural politics around web 2.0 with Joshua Green, a post-doc in the CMS program, who is speerheading the Convergence Culture Consortium and who is my partner in crime in organizing the Futures of Entertainment conferences. Green came to us from the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology. This paper blends work out of Queensland on creative industries with work out of MIT on Convergence Culture. Green is currently completing a book manuscript about Youtube with Jean Burgess, who was interviewed here at my blog earlier this year. The Moral Economy of Web 2.0:

Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins

"The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence....The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era." -- Tim O'Reilly (2005)

" please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.

you make all the content. they keep all the revenue." -- Bash.org

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, fans were emblematic of audience resistance (Jenkins,1992; Fiske, 1989), understood as actively appropriating and transforming mass media content as raw materials for their own cultural productions. Mass media depicted fans as living in the shadows of mass culture (if not the basements of their parent's suburban split-level houses), and media companies saw their tastes and concerns as "unrepresentative" of the general population. By the early 21st century, fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued, if still imperfectly understood, by media companies interested in adopting Web 2.0 strategies of user-generated content, social networks, and "harness[ing] collective intelligence." (O'Reilly 2005)

This new talk about "putting the We in the Web" (Levy and Stone 2006) was initially embraced as granting consumers greater influence over the decisions that impacted the production and distribution of culture. By 2007, contradictions, conflicts, and schisms have started to appear within the Web 2.0 paradigm around the imperfectly aligned interests of media producers and consumers.

Consider, for example, FanLib.com, a start-up company that included established media players such as Titanic producer Jon Landau and entertainment lawyer Jon Moonves as advisors, and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh as Chairman (Jenkins 2007a). FanLib began by hosting officially sponsored fan fiction competitions around The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer. Soon, the company sought to become a general interest portal for all fan fiction, actively soliciting material from leading fan writers, deciding not to solicit prior approval from the studios and production companies. The company's executives told fans they wanted to promote and protect fan fiction writing and informed initial corporate investors that they would teach fans how to "color within the lines." When fans stumbled onto the corporate pitch online, there was an intense backlash which spread across blogs, LiveJournals, and various social networking sites.

Fans raised a number of objections. The company wanted to profit from content fans had historically circulated for free (and adding insult, they refused to share the generated revenues with the fan authors). This debate revealed a rift between the "gift economy" of fan culture and the commodity logic of "user-generated content." At the same time, the company promised to increase the visibility of once cloaked fan activities, thus, fans argued, heightening the legal risk that media producers would put the entire community under closer legal scrutiny. (There has been an unofficial truce between fans and producers: most producers weren't going after fan fiction sites as long as they didn't intend to make money off of what they created.) Yet, FanLib.com denied that it bore any legal responsibility to defend fan writers against cease and desist letters from studios and networks. All of this fit within a growing debate about whether corporate distribution of user-generated content constitutes a form of unpaid outsourcing of creative labor, contributing to the downsizing of internal production teams (Scholz and Lovink 2007). These fans refused to be the victims of corporate exploitation, quickly and effectively rallying in opposition to FanLib and using their own channels of communication to inflect damage on its nascent brand. At the same time, Fanlib.com did attract more than 18,000 participants (personal correspondence with Chris Williams, March 2008), including both those new to the world of fan fiction and thus not part of existing communities and those who, for whatever reason, felt disenfranchised from the existing fan fiction groups (Li, 2008).

This example shows how media companies are being forced to reassess the nature of consumer engagement and the value of audience participation in response to a shifting media environment characterized by digitization and the flow of media across multiple platforms, the further fragmentation and diversification of the media market, and the increased power and capacity of consumers to shape the flow and reception of media content. The result has been a constant pull and tug between top-down corporate and bottom-up consumer power with the process of media convergence shaped by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms and in corporate boardrooms.

Mass media are increasingly operating in a context of participatory culture, but there is considerable anxiety about the terms of participation. Some media producers adopt what we are calling a collaborative approach, embracing audience participation, mobilizing fans as grassroots advocates, and capitalizing on user-generated content. Others adopt a prohibitionist posture. Frightened by a loss of control over the channels of media production and distribution and threatened by increasingly visible and vocal audience behavior, some companies tighten control over intellectual property, trying to reign in the disruptive and destabilizing impact of technological and cultural change. Most companies are torn between the two extremes, seeking a new relationship with their audiences which gives only as much ground as needed to maintain consumer loyalty.

This essay focuses on the resulting reworking of the "moral economy" that shapes the relations between producers and consumers. "Moral economy" refers to the social expectations, emotional investments, and cultural transactions which create a shared understanding between all participants within an economic exchange. The moral economy which governed old media companies has broken down and there are conflicting expectations about what new relationships should look like. The risks for companies are high, since alienated consumers have other options for accessing media content. The risks for consumers are equally high, since legal sanctions can stifle the emerging participatory culture.

To understand this debate, we must bridge between the historically separate spheres of audience studies and industry research. Industry research - at least within academic circles - has taken a top-down approach, emphasizing the power of media companies and the impact of the decisions they make upon the culture; audience research has historically taken a bottom-up approach, emphasizing audience interpretation and cultural production read in cultural rather than economic terms. The result has been two conflicting claims about the current state of our culture: one emphasizing media concentration and the narrowing of options; the other emphasizing the expansion of grassroots participation. This essay proposes to read these two trends against each other and in doing so, provoke a conversation between two sets of literatures - one derived from business research, the other derived from cultural and media studies. This conversation, in our case, is a literal one, since many of the ideas here emerged from work done through the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, which facilitates regular dialogues between academics and industry insiders. This conversation also reflects the increased focus on social and cultural factors, even among tech industries, as people come to grips with the implications of "web 2.0." This conversation might also be understood in global terms as this article combines work done by American researchers interested in "convergence culture" with that done by Australian researchers focused on "creative industries" and "produsage." Historically, both audience research and industry studies have concentrated on single media industries rather than examining trends which cut across different media sectors and platforms. Our contention is that this research increasingly needs to adopt a comparative or transmedia approach because of the increased flow of media content and audiences across every available platform and the speed with which developments in one media sector impact thinking in every other corner of the entertainment industry.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

GDC Roundup 2008: Diversity and Innovation in the Contemporary Games Industry

Every Friday afternoon, the team at our GAMBIT Lab hosts a game critique session. Lab staff and students pick a theme, bring out a range of contemporary examples for people to play and pick apart, as the lab seeks to develop their own strategies for game design. GAMBIT's remit commits it to trying to expand and diversify our understanding of games as a medium of expression. A few weeks ago, Eitan Glinert presented the group with his perspectives on the games which had been nominated or won awards at the recent Game Developers conference and they individually and collectively generated a lot of buzz and excitement in our group. There is especial interest here in games which manipulate time and space in creative ways. Some years ago, I was part of a group which organized a series of Creative Leaders workshops for Electronic Art. One of the exercises we did was have game designers read passages from Alan Lightman's novel, Einstein's Dreams. Lightman, a physicist, was interested in describing worlds with radically different structures of time and space and then playing out how they would impact the lives of their residents. Our conversations with game designers focused on how they might giv e players the experience of "visiting" such worlds, though I have also had fun in class discussions getting students to imagine what it would mean to design media for the inhabitants of such worlds

Much of the creativity which Eitan saw exhibited at this year's conference emerges from the newly revitalized indie games movement -- a topic which we explored here through a series of interviews with Greg Costikyan, Stephanie Barish, and Eric Zimmerman a little over a year ago. I have long argued that games need a strong independent sector if they are going to escape the constraints which a studio mode of production can impose on artistic expression. This seems to have been the year where that surge of creativity was felt in the games industry much as this year's Oscars reflected the continued creative dominance of independent films (not to mention the globalization of the movie industry, another topic for another day!)

In any case, the conversation which Eitan has started aroung GAMBIT was so interesting that I wanted to share it with my readers.

GDC 2008 Round Up

by Eitan Glinert

The Game Developer's Conference, GDC for short, is the annual meeting of the entire video games industry: from studio executives to indie developer to academics, just about everyone who works with games for a living either attends or follows the proceedings. Last year I covered some of the more interesting presentations; this year I'll discuss some of the prevalent themes to come out of the conference.

Conventional wisdom tells that commercial video games are generally derivative. Almost all first person shooters inherit huge portions of their gameplay from Doom, which in turn borrowed from Wolfenstein 3D. Most of today's racing games have the same core game mechanics as Pole Position, an Atari offering from early 1980's. Now, this isn't to say there say that there hasn't been any innovation; surely, objective based missions, multiplayer capabilities and narrative storylines have improved the FPS genre, likewise realistic graphics and physics engines have made racing games far more enjoyable. However, it seemed that these innovations tended to be incremental in nature, and that the best selling games tended to be the ones that didn't stray too far from prior accomplishments (the Madden football series comes to mind).

Well, at least that was the conventional wisdom. Recently there has been a shift in the industry, and it seems like this year more than most innovation has been greatly rewarded. This was especially evident at the Game Developer's and Independent Game Festival awards ceremonies, the video game world's version of the Oscars. Many of the winners and nominees were relative newcomers with interesting new game mechanics, and these games frequently beat out competition from large studios with long standing franchises. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the "game of the year" category, in which Portal, a short puzzle game in which you use a personal wormhole generator to escape a prison-like lab, beat out favorites like Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band.

I feel that much of what I saw can be grouped into three non-exclusive themes: Games as art, space/time manipulation games, and user generated + independent games.

Games as Art

I've heard a lot of talk about whether or not games can serve as art, and apparently several developers have tried to address this issue in the past year with games that have heavily artistic components. Nominated for just about every award out there, Everyday Shooter is a game by Jon Mak which, on it's surface, is just a regular "shoot anything that moves" game. However, it presents itself in album format - each level has a unique song track that marks the level's progression, and gameplay that reflects the mood of the song. When the song ends, so does the level. Jason Rohrer's Passage, downloadable here, is a short and interesting game that has a lot to say about life. Winning the best downloadable game of the year, flOw is a beautiful game that has you exploring an ocean, eating other fish, and probably enjoying the relaxing experience. Finally, The Night Journey is an interesting experimental offering that really is more of an art piece than a game. In it, the player explores a strange valley during the last minutes of dusk before nightfall, meditating upon past experiences along the way.

Space/Time Manipulation Games

A second theme I noticed was the prevalence of games that focus on manipulating space and time in interesting new ways. The most well known of this group is Portal, which made huge waves this year with it's puzzle/FPS/comedy mix. In the game you have a portal gun, which can shoot two sides of a wormhole upon (just about) any surface. These two sides are then linked in space, allowing users to rapidly hop between two remote locations. If the concept sounds confusing, pick up the game or watch one of the myriad youtube videos and it'll make more sense. Another game called Fez has the user taking the role of a 2D avatar in a 3D world, shifting the world viewpoint to solve spatial puzzles.

Playing with time was also prominently showcased, with many popular games like Cursor x10 and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. In both these games, a single player is faced with what is essentially a multiplayer game, and needs to control different versions of himself in time to accomplish certain goals. Need to get over a gap? No problem, just clone yourself several times, and stand on a tower of you!

User Generated + Independent Games

With all this focus on new and innovate games, it should come as little surprise that the game dev environment is becoming much friendlier for indie developers (i.e. anyone with a computer, some talent, and the desire to make their own game). Microsoft announced the creation of the XBox community, which promises to be the youtube of the games world. Of course, it is only available on the Xbox 360, but at least it will give burgeoning developers the chance to release their work to the greater community. Microsoft should also be commended for releasing useful toolkits for these indie developers, the only real problem as I see it is the lack of a payment structure in which the person who made the game can actually make money off their work. Then again, youtube doesn't have a payment structure, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of people clamoring to put their content out for the world to view.

Beyond the Microsoft announcement, many of the award winners and nominees were small, interesting games made by small or single person teams. Audiosurf, Crayon Physics, and World of Goo all took big honors, and show the creativity people can have when they think outside the realm of what's normal for games. Even Portal started out as a small student project, with a few Digipen students creating the prototype as a Half Life 2 modification. Valve was smart enough to pick them up and now, two years later, they won best game of the year. Will other big developers follow their example?

What Will be Next?

So that's my analysis of the big themes from this year's GDC. I'm now going to do something dangerous and potentially foolish, and hazard a prediction about one interesting theme we'll be seeing in coming years: new user interfaces. We've been playing video games for years with roughly the same interface - joystick(s), buttons, mouse, keyboard. But that's now changing. We've already seen how new controllers like the Wiimote or Guitar Hero guitars can radically change how we interact with games. I suspect that the future games will really drive in this direction, and we'll start seeing incredibly intuitive new user interfaces that are so natural that you don't even need instructions to play. Several companies had their own take on head tracking virtual reality displays, copying work by Carnegie Mellon grad student Johnny Lee, and despite some hiccups during a live demo Emotiv had some interesting new brain motoring hardware which could be used as controller input. I think this is the tip of the iceberg, and that over the next few years we'll see some really engaging new interfaces that will make today's controllers seem quaint by comparison.

Eitan Glinert is a MIT Computer Science Master's student, graduating this May. He's worked on educational and accessible game titles like Immune Attack and AudiOdyssey, and most recently helped create Zen Waves, a digital take on the Zen garden. After graduating he will be doing a startup to explore how to make games with meaningful new user interfaces. For more information you can check out his blog at www.eitanglinert.com.

If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest...

On Saturday, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You) and I delivered the opening remarks at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. Conference organizers told me that we were heard by around 2000 people, including those in the large auditorium and in various overflow rooms. So, I've got to figure that a certain percentage of those people are going to be visiting this blog for the first time in the next week so I am pulling together a guide to where they can read more about some of the topics we discussed. For the rest of you, you might want to check out this very elaborate chart which was "live drawn" during our discussion and which does a reasonably good job of mapping out some of the core topics. For those of you who want to learn more about the New Media Literacies, you might want to check out the white paper my team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation which identifies 11 core skills and cultural competencies which we think young people need to acquire to become full participants in this emerging media culture. The MacArthur network has generated a series of books on key topics surrounding digital media and learning which can be downloaded for free.

If you'd like to read more about the politics of fear and the ways it blinds us to what's really going on as young people engage with media, you should consider this blog post and this document which danah boyd and I co-authored in response to the push to regulate school and library access to social network software.

I discussed the concept of collective intelligence in relation to Wikipedia in this post, which is an early draft of an article which will appear soon in The Journal of Media Literacy. For the distinction I raised between "collective intelligence" and "the Wisdom of the crowds," you might read this post which considers how both might be tapped through serious games.

Steven and I chatted a bit on the relative merits of The Wire (which I described as one of the best shows "inside the box") and Lost (which I characterized as one of the best shows "outside the box"). Here's an earlier discussion of Lost in relation to shifts in how we process television content. For a fuller consideration of Lost as a new form of television, you might check out CMS alum Ivan Askwith's Masters Thesis on engagement television. For an interesting take on The Wire, see Jason Mittell's essay here. And of course, Johnson's own Everything Bad is Good For You brought the debate about complexity in popular culture to a much larger public.

I spoke at some length about Harry Potter fandom. These ideas are more fully developed in the "Why Heather Can Write" chapter of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I expanded my thinking on Harry Potter fandom this summer here at the blog. The remarks on Harry Potter were inspired in part by the fact that I appear in a new film (which I still haven't seen), We are Wizards, which was premiering at the South by Southwest film festival.

I've had several people ask me about what I meant when I suggested that the amount of energy and creativity that surrounds fan culture might be understood, at least in part, in the context of a culture which fails to tap the full intelligence and creative energies of its citizens. I suggested that many of the women I had met in the fan fiction writing community, for example, held jobs, such as those of a librarian, school teacher, nurse, or nanny, which require high level of education for entry but often do not tap that knowledge as regularly as might be ideal. Many of these women use fan fiction as an outlet for their surplus creative energies, as a way of getting recognition for their accomplishments outside of the workplace, and as a means of forming community with others who share the same frustrations and fantasies. The same is true for fans of many other types: they are able to do much more outside of the workplace than they are allowed to do in their jobs. Someone asked me if I had meant women. Well, women are certainly as a group devalued and under-utilized in our society and this may account for why such a large number of them are participating in online communities of all kinds and accomplishing extraordinary things. But the same would be true of many other groups, including a larger number of young men. The point is that we look in the wrong direction when we pathologize fans for finding creative outlets through participatory culture rather than asking why America is not more actively cultivating that intelligence and creativity through every aspect of our society. (None of this is to suggest that fan activities are meaningless in their own right or need to be justified by appealing to more 'serious' values. As I also said during my remarks, humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.)

We talked about the Obama campaign and its relationship to collective intelligence and social networks, a topic that I explored in my blog very recently. From there, we extended to talk about the concept of civic media, a topic which allowed Steve to talk about his new project, Outside.in, and for me to talk about the work we are doing through the newly launched Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

In response to a question from the audience, I spoke about the newly created Organization for Transformative Works, a project by and for fans, in response to the commercial exploitation and legal threats surrounding their culture. It's a good example of how we can use the mechanics of participatory culture to exert pressure back on other institutions.

And if you want to hear my conversation last year with danah boyd, you can find it here.

For those of you who are new to this blog, welcome. Explore the backlog of posts. Stick around for more conversations on participatory culture, collective intelligence, and new media literacies.

Multimedia in Spanish Classrooms: Harry Potter Comes to School

The Comparative Media Studies Program often provides a temporary home to scholars from all over the world who want to learn more about our approaches to research and teaching. At the present time, we have scholars in residence from Spain, Denmark, Austria, China, and the Czech Republic. Spain's Pillar Lacasa has come back for a second stay with us. Her background is in psychology and her current interests center around the educational use of computer games and other digital resources. She and her collaborators shared some of this research during the Media in Transition conference a year ago. Here, she shares some more of her impressions and insights based on field work in Spanish schools -- in this case, work which involves teaching children and adults to think about what we call transmedia navigation. Here, she is using the Harry Potter franchise to encourage a closer attention to what each media platform brings to our experience of this popular adventure saga. SPANISH CLASSROOMS AS MULTIMEDIA CONTEXTS: CHILDREN, FAMILIES, TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS WORKING TOGETHER

by Pilar Lacasa

Recently, Henry shared some field notes about the place of digital media in Chinese society, considering not just how particular people use these media, but also how this use has a specific meaning in the Chinese political and cultural context. He was speaking about the rhetorical use of the "games addiction" concept, which specifically considers that "playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive" i.e. that game-playing is taking up the time of young people that they could better be spending doing their school homework and preparing for standardized testing. Henry's comments suggested to me that very similar reflections could be made about these debates in many other parts of the world.

Let me explain a little bit about Spain, my own country. Our team has been working in Spanish schools as participant researchers and ethnographers, exploring how games and other digital tools might be used to enhance education. Many families, some teachers and even school principals have complained to us about how children waste their time playing games or surfing the Internet looking for information that adults do not regard as very suitable for children. What are the reasons for these opinions? Put simply, many adults are afraid to approach these new worlds and digital universes that they don't know how to explore or don't find interesting.

When chatting with such adults and exploring these thoughts in more detail, we begin to understand than behind this less than enthusiastic approach to digital tools lie much stronger beliefs about what learning in and outside of school actually means. For many we spoke with, the idea of learning is related only to schoolwork, the content of the curriculum, and particularly those specific materials that have almost always been present in the classroom: books, paper and pencils, textbooks, etc. All of these cultural tools are associated with the academic culture and the school context. What people think is learning is closely related to the formal context in which people have traditionally always learnt; that is, the schools and the tools that have been used there for centuries. However, as educators we believe that an important challenge today is to redeploy certain technologies that were originally designed for leisure-time use towards educational purposes.

How can digital technologies, not just computers, be of value as learning tools? This is the question. To recognize the question is easy, even simplistic, but, for the time being, to achieve this goal demands the participation of teachers, families, investigators, companies and, not least, children. One of the first steps in meeting this challenge will be to introduce digital tools other than computers into classrooms, not just occasionally but on a permanent basis, at least as much as other traditional objects. But how can they be used? Could specific tools that have being designed just for fun also be used in schools? From our perspective new ways of teaching and learning need to be explored, enabling children's and adults' activities as active learners, capable of creating new knowledge by using the tools that they use in their everyday life.

Adopting this perspective, our team of researchers in Spain are exploring the possibility of constructing these new educational innovative settings, in which families, children, teachers and researchers, and even industry, working together, learn to use some of the digital tools that are present in everyday life. Why are these digital technologies especially appropriate for supporting new approaches to learning? Through our project, teachers and researchers begin to prepare relatively innovative school homework in which parents and children could collaborate in interesting tasks that motivate them to bring to the schools topics and ideas from their everyday life, such as family stories, real problems people need to solve in their own work, and so on. We were thinking about how to open the school doors to topics beyond the curriculum. This homework was usually presented in the form of paper and pencil tasks. What happened in these families after they had been working for at least three months in this way with their children? We recorded many conversations at home when parents and children were working together, but contrary to our expectations, no innovative educational settings appeared. Family members were acting at home as teachers do into the classrooms, but in an even more traditional way. They were evidently using the same strategies by which they were taught many years ago.

After this experience we began to look for new educational tools, which we found in the mass media. We brought Newspapers, television, videogames, consoles and any other new technology that the children use in everyday life into the classrooms. But how should we use these new tools? In the course of the past ten years many questions have arisen in our classrooms that discussions and readings at the Comparative Media Studies are helping us to answer. It is obvious that it is not enough to introduce all of them in the classrooms. It is also necessary to design new educational settings within which to develop the new media literacies in order to deal with these new media in a critical, creative and responsible way.

When teachers bring movies, newspapers, television programs, or the internet into their classes, one of the most important conditions for a successful experience in terms of children's motivation and reflective processes is that the teachers should feel secure with the materials that they are using. But bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms is still an especially challenging experience. At the moment, adults are much less familiar with games than other entertainment mass media. Today, commercial videogames are far from what many families or even teachers think could be used in classroom instruction.

Given our starting goals, it was clear that we wanted to integrate games into learning, but we weren't sure how to do so. Our previous work in Spanish schools tell us that at least three main conditions need to be present for innovative experience to be successful in both teaching and learning processes:

• First, to establish close relationships between teachers, families and researchers
• Second, to be involved in a multimedia context in which games are only one of the possible tools we can use
• Finally, to establish a working methodology that attempts to bring into a multiplicity of expressive multimedia codes that children and adults can learn to use together.

Let us show you how these three conditions are present in the Spanish classroom in which we are working. I will try to help you to observe this situation and to construct the meaning that the situations has for us as ethnographical researchers. Please, think for a moment of the context involved. It is January 2007 in a working-class neighbourhood near Madrid. The children and their teacher are waiting for the "new video game teachers", this is the name that the children give to the University of Alcalá research team. They have become used to meeting once a week with some people who do not belong to their school, but who are participants in their classroom; the children understand that we teach in other schools where they are going to be teachers in the future. For the whole of the school year we have been coming to work with them once a week, with the goal of learning together, children and adults, using new media.

This particular day we are going to begin a workshop on Harry Potter; in the previous session we had chosen the topic by reflecting on the pros and cons in a large-group discussion. We all voted for our favourite video game. By this time each of us had different expectations about what would happen on subsequent days in the workshop. Given our previous experiences with other children, the teacher and the researchers tried to find a common task for the workshop: after having talked, played and reflected about Harry Potter, we will write our opinions of the game in our blogs, so that other children should know about our adventures with Harry Potter. Both children and adults will be journalists; people who write so that others members of the community and all over around the world will know the opinions of the class.

During the next three or four session the children were playing at home and in the classroom with the PlayStation 2, with family members and the research team, to find out much more about Harry and his world.

Now let us move on a little further in our schedule by observing a more advanced session during this workshop. As always, this new session begin by talking about Harry Potter. The children knew more than the adults about him. They even bring from their homes objects related to his adventures; they all belong to the popular culture based on Harry and represent this heroic figure, who is very popular in Spain at the moment. For example, there is a game of chess designed with the main characters of the Harry Potter books, films and games, an album of stickers, T-shirts with his image, card games, etc. By showing these treasures to all the participants in the workshops and discussing them, the children showed that they were conscious that Harry is not only the main character of a video game, but it is also present in other media.

In order to look in more depth at Harry's presence in various media, a new activity was designed. We decided to compare selected parts of the film and game based on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. After an introductory discussion on the film, we all watch together the chosen chapter. Later, we talk about Harry and invented a new collective oral story about him. By doing so, the children learn not only to tell stories but also to understand how stories spread across media systems. Moreover, by writing in their blogs the children understand that many other people, such as their families and friends, will be able to read the work that they have done in class, and in that way they begin to understand that there exists an audience that can read their texts and look at their drawings although it is not present in the classroom.

Let us see now the text that two children wrote together to be published in their blog after watching a small part of the film and discussing its relationship with the game.

Blog of Sergio and Miguel

Session 8, 02-06-07

Hello, we are Sergio and Miguel:

In the class today we played with the videogame Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and have seen a little bit of the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Today we learned what are the differences and similarities between the video game and the movie. They look alike in that the characters are the same, as are the magic spells and the adventure involved. And they differ in that in the video game you move the characters and in the movie they move by themselves. The movie is more fun, thinks Miguel. Sergio prefers the video game because you can play.

This brief description of the experience enables us to comment on what conditions need to be in place when introducing entertainment games into the classroom.

First, the text shows that the children are conscious that stories can be told via several different channels of communication. Moreover, the children also knew that each of them has different, ways of expressing particular messages. At that time they were exploring various ways of being in touch with Harry Potter's adventures; e.g. the movie, the video game, the objects that the children had brought to school, the information that they had found on the Internet and the texts that they themselves have published. But what did they learn? I would want to interpret this text by considering that these children show an understanding that each medium has its own rules. Conversations with teachers, researchers, and other students, helped to increase their grasp of abstract concepts such as audience, messages, and the different affordances of different media. How have they learned this? By talking, reflecting and publishing about new media, always being supported by teachers, researchers and families, as more expert members of the community. Doing such tasks at school helped them to understand their lives beyond the schoolhouse walls.

In order to understand this educational innovative experience a little better, something more needs to be emphasized. Let us focus now on the interpersonal relationships among participants. Collaboration between the teacher, the children, their families and the research team was probably the main driving force behind these experiences. This becomes clearer when we study the video-recordings of the workshop sessions or analyse our field notes taken as ethnographers and participant observers. Two main ideas emerge:

• First of all, the classrooms were transformed not only through the introduction of games but also because relationships among participants changed in the course of the workshop. Both children and adults were learning from each other. In many cases, they adopted new and different roles. The relations between children and adults were much more symmetrical at the end of the workshops than they had been at the beginning, even though what each of the participants were teaching was really different. While the children were focusing on the procedural dimensions of the games (e.g. how to solve a specific problem to go to another game screen), adults were orienting the conversations towards a much more reflective level, e.g. how the individual media related to each other, what were their specific messages, who were the people for whom the children were writing in their blogs.
• Secondly, extensive observations of recordings of the classroom conversations show that the participants' goals also differed according to their own particular roles. For example, when the games consoles arrived in the classroom, or when we compared the video game and the movie, the teacher's interest was vividly aroused by the way in which the children can learn from the game certain content that is closely related to the curriculum. In contrast, and just as was to be expected, the most important goal of the children was just to play the game; to become immersed in it. Their families, who know of their classroom work by reading their blogs or because they were working with their children at home became interested in the games consoles as learning tools. What is was our goal as a research team? We think that we tried to be "good mediators". At the end, we came to a deeper appreciation of just how difficult it was to address these different goals through a common workshop.

Pilar's background is in Psychology and Media Education. During the past ten years she has been working with her students at the University of Alcalá (Spain), collaborating with teachers and families to facilitate the acquisition of new forms of literacy that enable children and adults to develop as global citizens in their community, as producers as well as active receivers of media content. She's a visiting scholar at CMS where she's looking for new theoretical and methodological approach to a transmedia education. At this moment they are working on a collaborative project with Electronic Arts to define innovative educational settings, introducing specific video games and other new media into the Spanish classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools in both formal and informal contexts. She recognizes that when she was lost, looking for new perspectives to design these new educational contexts, it was very useful to discover Ravi Purushotma's work and the MacArthur Foundation's report.

Politics in the Age of YouTube

A few weeks ago, Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, and I held a public conversation about "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy: Politics in the Age of You-Tube" at Otis College. The conversation ranged across many aspects of the current campaign season -- from "Obama Girl" to Huckabee's relationship to Chuck Norris, from The Daily Show to this anti-Hillary video -- suggesting the ways that social networks and participatory culture have impacted this most unlikely of campaign seasons.

Otis has now release a YouTube video featuring highlights of the exchange, mostly focused on the Obama campaign.

I am heading out soon for Austin, Texas where Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) and I will engaged a conversation about the contemporary media landscape which will open South by Southwest this year. I hope to see some of my regular readers in the audience.

Links for Those Who Attended My Tampa Talk

On Monday, I spoke in Tampa at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Forum. My central topic was on the ways that the new media landscape was enabling the emergence of new kinds of public intellectuals. I promised folks in the audience that I would provide them with links to some of the examples which I cited. I began the talk with some thoughts about Marshall McLuhan as a model for what a public intellectual looked like in the 1960s -- at a moment where mass media still was the only channel for reaching the public, when middle brow culture still embraced academics as part of the national culture, and when media studies was first forming as a discipline. I described the ways that McLuhan exploited mass media channels -- from Playboy Magazine to Annie Hall -- to increase awareness of his key ideas and developed the concept of the "probe" as a way of translating theoretical debates into effective soundbytes ("the global village," "the Medium is the message.") At the same time, I discussed McLuhan's use of newsletters and recordings as looking towards more grassroots modes of communication such as blogs and podcasts.

I then argued that if there was a modern equivalent of McLuhan, it might be someone like Cornell West, who has made extensive use of mass media (from talk television to The Matrix Reloaded) to direct attention towards his critical perspective on American race relations. I referenced seeing West's picture on a billboard in L.A. as well as his conflicts with Harvard President Lawrence Summers over some of his more "public" activities as an activist and as a hip hop recording artist.

I argued that one reason why there couldn't be a McLuhan today is that there are so many other important thinkers about media change speaking from outside the academy, including game designers (Eric Zimmerman), journalists (Steven Johnson) Science fiction writers (Bruce Sterling), comic book creators (Scott McCloud), and sex activists (Susie Bright), to cite just a few examples. Each of these writers provide important perspectives on the mediascape, often with much greater impact on public perspectives than anything coming out of the academy.

I cited several important ideas about public intellectuals taken from an MIT Communications Forum event on Public Intellectuals featuring Alan Lightman and Steven Pinker.

I cited some examples of other academics and intellectuals who are effectively deploying participatory media, especially blogs and podcasts, to reach a larger public with their ideas, including:

Douglas Rushkoff, who has translated his insights into Biblical Studies into the Vertigo comic book series Testament, using the forums around the book to spark intellectual exchanges.

Howard Rheingold – Howard Rheingold's Video blog and recent article for MIT Press/MacArthur book on using participatory media to increase civic engagement – has increasingly turned towards blogs and videopodcasts as a platform for what I call "just in time" scholarship, responding to contemporary debates and controversies from a theoretically informed perspective.

Alex Juhasz – interview on my Blog – has used YouTube as a platform to teach a class and frame a critique of YouTube's particular vision of participatory culture.

Randy Pausch – Final Lecture on YouTube (Part 0, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10) and Blog – is battling terminal cancer. His public summation of his life's work and his discussion of his life philosophy has enjoyed enormous circulation via YouTube, leading to his appearance on Oprah and a contract to produce a mass market book.

Peter Ludlow – Second Life Herald – helped to establish a "town newspaper" for the virtual world, Second Life, and in the process, helped the community reflect on its own practices.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson – two distinguished film scholars, now retired – use their blog as an extension of their succesful textbook, offering real time responses to developments in contemporary cinema.

I referenced several young scholars who were gaining wide recognition for their work while still finishing off their PhDs through their public roles as blogger:

Jane McGonigal

danah boyd

danah boyd recently announced that she would no longer publish her work in any journal which "locks down" content, a gutsy move for someone at the start of their professional career.

I mentioned that many of our own Comparative Media Studies graduate students have also built wider followings through their blogging activities:

Ilya Vedrashko -- Ad Lab blog

Michael Danziger -- Visual Methods blog

Sam Ford -- Convergence Culture Consortium blog

I described several recent projects in media studies where scholars were trying to use new media platforms to offer more immediate reactions to developments in the media landscape and in the process broaden the public visibility of their work:

Flow

In Media Res

A central theme of my talk had to do with my belief that part of being a public intellectual in the digital age is allowing yourself to be appropriated by various publics, becoming a resouce for their ongoing discussions, rather than necessarily exerting top down control over the circulation of your own ideas. As you give up control, you in fact achieve greater public impact. I cited, for example, what happened when I released my account of my testimony to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee and the ways it was picked up by diverse communities, representing very different ideological agendas but sharing a concern for the ways that political leaders and school officials were declaring war on popular culture. I pointed to the ways that my image, and that of other theorists, have been appropriated playfully through the practice of LOL Theorists, and I cited the ways that various reporters have projected alternative frames around my work, often radically different from my own understanding of who I am but opening the work up to audiences I might never have reached otherwise. And I described my visit to Teen Second Life at an event hosted by Global Kids and the ways that the youth group produced and circulated

a music video, which in the process spread the word about some of my thinking about new media literacies and participatory culture.

I made reference to a recent essay in Flow which compared my blog to Steven King's columns for Entertainment Weekly, arguing that we need to offer a pithier style of writing if we want to be embraced by the general public. I suggested that some of the suggestions in the piece would require us to sacrifice what we as academics bring to the table that is potentially valuable to a larger public conversation about media change. I feel strongly that we do need to become more accessible but that accessibility was not the same thing as dummying down. It refers rather to the act of taking responsibility for giving the reader the information they need to follow our arguments rather than writing to a reader we assume is already inside academic conversations. As we do so, we can challenge them to think more deeply than they are asked to do by the popular press as long as we provide the scaffolding which will enable them to join the conversation.

Examples from My Blog

One of my goals for the talk was to describe some of the uses I've made of my blog to date. I see the blog as an ongoing experiment into how we can build bridges from the academy and the larger public. Some of the ways I use the blog are designed to serve the needs of the CMS program, some are designed to serve the larger discipline of media studies, and some are designed to serve a range of publics to which I feel a strong allegiance. Having a blog...

• provides me an opportunity to share works in progress with my readers and get feedback before I go to press. This also allows me to get my ideas out in a timely process as compared to the slow academic publishing time table. "The Tomorrow That Never Was"
• allows me to share ideas from conference presentations, sometimes on the same day as I spoke. "Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube"
• allows me to publish interesting "out takes" from my published works which would otherwise end up on the cutting room floor. "Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape"
• allows me to be more proactive, shaping media coverage."Vidder Luminosity Profiled in New York Magazine"
• allows me to respond to media coverage or provide fuller context to the ways I am qouted by reporters."Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut)"
• has given me a platform to advocate on the part of cases which matter to me. "Chris Williams Responds to Our Questions about FanLib"
• has expanded my contact to a global network of MIT alums, sometimes pulling them into the conversation."City Blogging in Beirut"
• has allowed me to encourage students to continue to work on interesting assignments and introduce their perspectives to a larger public. "Ordinary Men in Extraordinary Times"
• allows me to showcase work by other interesting academics which I feel should be better known in the field. "Manufacturing Dissent"
• has allowed me to host important conversations amongst multiple scholars. "Gender and Fan Culture"

Comparative Media Studies Program online

The Comparative Media Studies has made a very strong commitment to public outreach, including the use of blogs to publish our research findings and to spark larger conversations in the field. Here are a few examples of CMS affiliated blogs:

GAMBIT

Project Good Luck

Similarly, we are committed to podcasts, as often as possible, of our many events, including our weekly colloquium and our conferences (such as Futures of Entertainment and Media in Transition):

Futures of Entertainment

CMS Podcasts

Our most recent step has been to begin to publish our graduate student thesis online:

CMS Theses on Line

I fear this is too sketchy for those of you who weren't at the talk. I hope to write more about some of these topics before much longer.

Obama and the "We" Generation

Several years ago, I heard my colleague and friend Justine Cassell sum up what she had learned after more than a decade of tracking the lives of hundreds of young people from around the world she had been helping to facilitate through the Media Lab's Junior Summit. These young leaders had been working both face to face and via electronic communications to try to bring about changes in their society, focusing their energies on problems both local and global, and finding solutions through both policy and technology. Cassell is a linguist so one of the things that interested her was the language these young people used. Adult leaders, she suggested, tend to rely heavily on the first person pronoun: 'Here's what I will do for you', 'this is my position on the issues,' 'I have the experience needed to do the job.' By contrast, the youth leaders tended to deploy a third person language: 'what do we see as the problem here,' 'what do we want to do about It,' 'what are our goals for the next steps.' The young leaders were interested in the process as much as the product, trying to make sure that every perspective got heard and weighed appropriately before reaching a decision. They pooled information from multiple sources, valuing diversity of input because of what it would contribute to the final outcome. All of this came back to me as I have been listening to Barrack Obama in recent weeks. Commentators have noted his tendency to use "We" far more often than first ("I")or second person ("You" pronouns, often with only minimal understanding of what is at stake in this language choice. Some of this no doubt emerges from Obama's experience as a community organizer, a very different role from Hillary Clinton's early experiences as a litigator or legal council for nonprofit organizations.

Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement. Campaigns are very much top down organizations focused on short term results -- let's get this person elected president -- while movements are constructed bottom-up with more long-term goals -- let's reshape the American political landscape. What Obama has been building can last longer than the individual campaign because it is as much structured around connections between voters as it is around connections between the candidate and the electoriate. We see this in the use of MySpace, Facebook, and other social network sites, which both build on the set of social ties (of all kinds) that link voters together and also enables new people to get into contact with each other. I predicted in Convergence Culture that the parties and the political leaders were going to lose control of the campaign process in a world where the general public was increasingly taking media in its own hands. In a campaign season strongly influenced by grassroots media contributions, it is striking how many of the so-called "viral videos" -- from the 1984 ads and the Obama Girl spots through to the recent "Yes We Can" music video were dedicated to supporting Obama's efforts. Grassroots media makers seemed to be welcomed into the political process by Obama's staff and he seems to inspire more people to apply their craft as contributions to his efforts.

You see it in the contrast between Obama's embrace of Martin Luther King (himself a veteran of movement politics) who brought about change from below and Clinton's embrace of LBJ, a consummate political insider who brought about change from the top down.

There is a sharp contrast to be drawn here with the ways that Bill Clinton changed the language of American politics a decade ago when he embraced the informality and intimacy of the town hall meeting, stepping to the edge of the stage to get as close to the voter as possible, repeating their name as part of his responses, trying to forge links between his experience and theirs, and channeling their pain as he offered a more empathic version of old style policy wonkism. Clinton was praised for embracing and incorporating his questioners into the discourse of the campaign. Yet, the Clinton approach still was very much focused on the connections between the politician and the voters as individuals ("I feel your pain") and the recognition of a still tangible division between the two. This can be seen as the last gasp of a broadcast era model of the American public.

What Obama embodies is something different -- a networked model of the relations amongst all of us who are involved in the process of transforming American society. The differences between Obama and Clinton have less to do with issues of policy but rather differences in process, in notions of governance, in cultural style, though the subtle differences in policy may reflect differences on these other levels, as when Clinton wants to require everyone to buy health insurance (top-down) and Obama seeks to make insurance accessible to everyone (bottom up). Those of us who are passionate about Obama (and yes, I'm an Obama boy) are responding to an alternative vision of the country -- one based less on fragmentation around identity politics or partisan differences than one which values diversity of perspectives as opening up the possibility of refining our collective organization and enabling us to solve problems together which defeat us as individuals.

In this context, the fact that the vision is blurry and not yet well defined is a virtue rather than a limitation: it is a virtue if we set up processes which enable us to collaborate to find further solutions. I look on Obama's more vague statements as something like a stub on wikipedia -- an incitement for us to pool our insights and to work through a range of possible solutions together.

After eight years which have sought to revitalize the once discredited notion of an Imperial President, it is refreshing to imagine a more open, participatory, and bottom up process. In such a model, the experience of the leader is less important than the ability to channel all of those voices and the commitment to make sure that everyone is heard. This is like the difference between older notions of expertise (based on monopoly and control of information) and newer notions of collective intelligence (based on creating a self-correcting and inclusive process by which we collect, evaluate, and distribute knowledge.) This may be what commentators are groping towards when they talk about a generational shift or discuss Obama as the candidate of the future. It is certainly what is implied when Obama makes fun of the Clinton as wanting to build a bridge back to the 20th century, a comic reversal of the contrast they had set up a decade ago between the future-oriented Clinton and the backwards-leaning Dole. It may be this focus on a different kind of political process which resonates so strongly with younger voters who have, like those Cassell described, grown up in a networked culture and have developed different processes for working through problems together.

This is why Obama's "Yes, We Can" slogan resonates so powerfully. As Stephen Duncombe pointed out to me when we appeared on stage together recently at Otis College, the slogan comes from Cesar Chavez's migrant workers movement and thus can be understood cynically as an attempt to engage the Hispanic voters who have not yet embraced the Obama movement. Yet, Duncombe suggests, the music video based on this speech only uses the Spanish version one time and otherwise seeks to demonstrate the value of the concept to the society more generally. We can see this as a bottom-up contribution to a national discourse rather than as a localized appeal to identity politics.

When I first heard the "Yes We Can" speech, I was struck by the ways that Obama was linking his campaign to a range of other historic struggles for social justice, most of which are better captured by the image of bottom-up movements rather than top-down campaigns. (These aspects are accented even more fully in the Black Eye Peas music video, where Obama's lone voice is expanded through a singing chorus.) I was impressed with how he integrated those various fights together to offer a shared vision of America's past and future, breaking out of the more fragmented understanding of these incidents within different chapters of the history of specific minority groups. In many ways, his language recalls that of Walt Whitman whose Leaves of Grass sought to develop a synthetic construction of what America was like as a nation, linking together a range of individual experiences, memories, perspectives, sense impressions, to create a vision of the nation as one big organism. Here's Obama:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

Here's Whitman from Leaves of Grass:

We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,

We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,

We are executive in ourselves—we are sufficient

in the variety of ourselves...

These States are the amplest poem,

Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation

of nations,

Here the doings of men correspond with the

broadcast doings of the day and night,

Here is what moves in magnificent masses, care-

lessly faithful of particulars,

Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, com-

bativeness, the soul loves,

Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality,

diversity, the soul loves.

Race of races, and bards to corroborate!...

Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, the

rapid stature and muscle,

The haughty defiance of the Year 1—war, peace,

the formation of the Constitution,

The separate States, the simple, elastic scheme,

the immigrants,

The Union, always swarming with blatherers, and

always calm and impregnable,

The unsurveyed interior, log-houses, clearings,

wild animals, hunters, trappers;

Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines,

temperature, the gestation of new States,

Congress convening every December, the mem-

bers duly coming up from the uttermost

parts;

Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and

farmers, especially the young men,

Responding their manners, speech, dress, friend-

ships -- the gait they have of persons who

never knew how it felt to stand in the

presence of superiors,

The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the

copiousness and decision of their phrenology,

The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their

deathless attachment to freedom, their fierce-

ness when wronged,

The fluency of their speech, their delight in

music, their curiosity, good-temper, open-

handedness,

The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large

amativeness,

The perfect equality of the female with the male,

the fluid movement of the population,

The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries,

whaling, gold-digging,

Wharf-hemm'd cities, railroad and steamboat lines,

intersecting all points,

Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery,

the north-east, north-west, south-west,

Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern

plantation life,

Slavery, the tremulous spreading of hands to

shelter it -- the stern opposition to it, which

ceases only when it ceases.

For these, and the like, their own voices! For

these, space ahead!

Writing at a time the union was still in crisis, Whitman constructs a unified vision of America, one which may seem overly nationalistic by modern standards, but one which sought to be inclusive of many different kinds of Americans. Obama is charting a map of the future by mobilizing what is most valuable, most precious in the nation's past. In doing so, he is constructing a shared mythology which speaks to us across historic divides in our national consciousness. Nothing could be further removed, say, than Edward's talk of 'Two Americas.' In Obama's version, there are at once many Americas, each self contradictory and refusing to be reduced to stereotypes, and one America, a collective intelligence ready to process all of that diversity and arrive at shared solutions to shared problems. Obama is speaking for this 'we generation' in the closing moments of that speech:

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --

Yes. We. Can.

Think of the speech as a mash-up of JFK, RFK, Ceasar Chavez, and Walt Whitman, delivered with the candences of Martin Luther King. Think of it as thus a new synthetic mythology for a new kind of knowledge culture. It may be the most powerful remobilization of historical and contemporary perspectives since the Popular Front movement of the 1930s. The music of Aaron Copeland, the art of Norman Rockwell, the films of Frank Capra were unafraid to mobilize historical images towards constructing a contemporary model of our shared experiences. We can criticize that model today for who and what it excluded, yet most of us are still touched by the emotions embodied in that art.

My hope is that Obama's rhetoric may evoke a similar response in future generations and in that sense, it will be, to use a word Obama likes to talk about, 'transformative.' Historians regard the campaign of Barry Goldwater as 'transformative' in that sense -- transforming the directions of American politics, paving the way towards the modern conservative movement and the so-called 'Reagan Revolution' even in defeat. As an Obama supporter, I certainly hope that this new movement achieves its immediate political goals but my sense is that as a movement which is larger than the individual candidate it paves the way for a modern progressive movement.

This is certainly what I felt as I stood in the freezy cold with some 8000 other Obama supporters in Boston on the eve of Super Tuesday, an experience which gives new reality to the news report of turnouts across the country as this candidate has addressed the public. Then consider that few of those people were there because of mainstream media coverage; most were there because of text messages, social network sites, e-mails, blogs, podcasts, and cellphone calls. They weren't there because of a message broadcast from above; they were there because someone they knew within their existing social networks contacted them and encouraged them to come. My wife and I were among the oldest people there; the hall was packed by young people, many of whom had never voted before.

This is what politics looks like within the 'we generation.' This is what politics looks like to "We The People," circa 2008.

Editor's Note: I have from the first chosen not to take partisan positions through this blog, hoping to reach out to conservative, libertarian, and independent readers. I have taken stances on particular policy issues which deal with the communications infrastructure and I have tried to frame these in ways that include rather than exclude those with other political perspectives. I don't see this post as representing a change of these policies. I just felt that there was something that needed to say about the intersection between Obama's style of campaigning and my own work on participatory culture. I express above my support for Obama in the name of full disclosure and not out of an effort to get any of my readers to change their minds about the candidates. I do hope, however, that any of you who are American citizens will exercise your right to vote.

Ordinary Men in Extraordinary Times: An Interview with Iranian Underground Band, Kiosk

If you have seen the film or read the graphic novel of Persepolis, then you will recall the joy that the young protagonist took in listening to western Rock music and the risks that she was willing to take to get access to tapes of recent heavy metal or punk recordings. In many ways, music was the gateway into her political consciousness. Talieh Rohani, an Iranian-born CMS graduate student, recently wrote a paper for my Media Theory and Methods proseminar which shed light on what has happened to the rock music scene in her home country and suggested the ways that new digital tools for production and distribution were impacting the Iranian underground music scene. These insights emerge from an interview she did with Kiosk, an Iranian underground band which recently immigrated to America. An Interview with Kiosk

By Talieh Rohani

The 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran brought so many social changes and so much repression to the lives of Iranians including the decision to ban the western music. The young generation found it impossible to access any music from the rest of the world. As a result, pop music abruptly stopped progressing in Iran. At the same time in the Western World, the progressive rock scene was allegedly terminated by the arrival of punk rock, because many punk admirers incorporated progressive elements and were inspired by progressive rock bands.

Although the Iranian youngsters had already been influenced by progressive rock music from the late sixties to the late seventies, the war years made it irrelevant for the younger generation to listen to and embrace this musical goldmine. But with the arrival of satellite the Iranian young generation became aware of the current world rock music. The introduction of the Internet and the possibilities it presented allowed the Iranians to participate in the music scene.

Iranian underground music became an alternative to the mainstream pop Persian LA music. Most Iranians started to recognize this revolutionary movement. Underground bands like 127, Hypernova, Kiosk, and Abjeez have received great support in their debuts outside of Iran. And as a result, a new taste in music has emerged within Persian communities that are no longer satisfied with the mainstream LA music. What you'll be reading is an interview with the underground Iranian rock band Kiosk conducted in Boston in November 2007. Kiosk is a Persian Blues/Rock/Jazz band established in Iran's basements. The band's first album Adame Mamolli (Ordinary Man), released outside of Iran by Bamahang Productions, was known as one of the most successful of Iran's underground music recordings.

Over the past few years, Arash Sobhani, the founder and the lead singer of the band, left Iran to US and released his second album Eshgh-e Sorat (Love of Speed) in May 2007. What distinguishes "Kiosk" from other Iranian bands are the social commentaries in their lyrics. The music video clip for Love of Speed has been viewed almost 400,000 times on YouTube.

Babak Khiavchi is the founder of Bamahang Productions, which aims to help Iranian underground music gain recognition across the globe. He is also one of the main guitarists of Kiosk. Babak talks about the restrictions that were enforced on the Iranian Music Scene. He says he finds the red lines invisible but he cannot ignore their existence. According to Babak musicians cannot address certain things in their lyrics. In order to produce an album, the musician needs to get permission to start a band from Iran's Cultural Ministry. He will also need to get permission for the lyrics, the music and even the vocals of the singers. If the ministry feels that the band is imitating a famous Persian singer in Los Angeles, it probably won't give them permission to sing unless that music promotes the government. Babak talks about something called Laleh Zar Mafia that basically controls all music productions and distributions in Iran. This mafia knows both the audience and the market and has a monopoly on it. He refers to O-Hum group. Their lyrics are all from Hafez and Rumi and there is nothing illegal about that. However, O-Hum could not get permission for production in Iran because it was trying to fuse traditional Persian music with Rock music. This is something that is not acceptable in Iran.

According to these red lines, any presentation of Western values and style is considered decadent. Babak doesn't face such restrictions in the American music scene. When he started working in the IT industry about 10 years ago, he decided to help his friends in Iran who were trying to get their music recorded and heard.

Babak claims that Kiosk's Ordinary Man album was probably the first Persian underground band that was officially released and copyrighted here and he managed to add it to the iTunes catalog. He thinks that is a big step and it gives a lot of motivation to all these underground musicians in Iran to know that there is a channel for underground music on the Internet and there is an audience there for the music they are producing.

Babak believes that one of the significant things about O-Hum is that their sound engineer, Shahram Sharbaf, recorded everything on his home computer using Pro-Tools software and some other sound engineering devices. He showed everyone that they can do this at home and they wouldn't have to go to a multi-million dollar studio. Babak strongly believes that it is the content and the idea that matters. From his perspective, it is okay to have a low quality production. But the originality of styles and ability to integrate culture into music makes it attractive to people. Babak claims that everyone followed O-Hum example and learned how to use the software and started recording. "The qualities aren't good," he says, "They are mostly demo quality. But even the demos have so much raw emotions."

He compares it to the LA music market. From his point of view, the underground Persian music has so much emotion that the audience tend to forget about the quality. "You really feel the pain and frustration that these musicians burden and how they found music as an outlet to express themselves," says Babak.

Arash sees a life that is going on in Iran underground. He describes the ways people meet and socialize with each other in underground parties. Arash says, "What you see on the streets and on TV is different than what the true life is". This reminds him of the movie Underground. "The majority of people in Iran live underground," he says. Arash believes that most Iranians do not live according to the values that are reinforced on TV or the Islamic values that the government wants people to live with. So he finds underground music as a medium that is exposing the emotions of those people who cannot talk on TV or newspapers to reflect their opinions to others. That's why "These people turn to underground music and blogs...This gives voice to majority of people who do not have access to any kind of media to get heard," Arash says.

On the other hand, Babak finds the restrictions imposed on the music scene to be the main reason for the emergence of underground music. According to him, the music produced and distributed in the LA area, although they have many resources available to them without any limitations, has no content. "What suffers here is art itself. If art is the means of self-expression, and if you can't do this through the legal channels, and the channel that gives you the most audience, you just have to go and find your own channel underground and express yourself the way you want to be heard," says Babak.

Some people commented that their two albums have major differences in terms of culture and restriction. The first album, Ordinary Man was made in Iran facing government restrictions. The second album, Love of Speed was released here in the US facing none of those restrictions. It took Arash three years to write the lyrics of the first album. It covers three years of his life when he was going through "different emotions," he says, "than when I moved to San Francisco". Most of the social commentaries of Love of Speed were created in Iran. And he only polished them here. He calls it the process of growing up. Different things are more important for him now than four years ago. I wonder what those different things are. Arash says, "Nostalgia".

When Arash was writing the lyrics of Ordinary Man, he never planned on recording and releasing this as an album. He used to write for other people to sing and after Babak heard his demos he told him that he had to sing it himself instead of giving away such good songs. When he was writing Love of Speed, he knew he had more room to express himself. There were fewer limitations. He knew he had a chance to talk more about the social issues instead of just on a personal level.

Arash does not see the existence of censorship within his personal life in Iran as a positive factor in forming his music. He says that he did not plan to release the first album when he was writing it. He was doing it for himself so the red lines didn't matter to him. He claims that after Khatami's presidency, many people felt sorry for waiting for 8 years to see a progressive stable change in the society. And after, this guy, Ahmadinejad, came and took over and ruined everything. So he does not have that much time for personal songs anymore, he explains.

Kiosk received two major criticisms from people within the underground music scene. First, many people consider Mohsen Namjo Music revolutionary because it introduced new sound and rhythms to the Iranian Music. Some people believe that Kiosk has nothing new to offer other than the lyrics, and it's an imitation of Dire Straits and Bob Dylan. Secondly, many people believe when the underground musicians moves from Iran to US, they can no longer be a part of the underground music scene. In order to be known underground, the music will need to remain underground. Kiosk no longer suffers the restrictions and limitations in underground music scene in Iran.

Arash accepts that his music sounds like Dire Straits but he says he is proud of that. "I don't know any band that wasn't under the influence of any other band," says Arash, "And I don't know any good band that wasn't influenced by Bob Dylan." According to him, the challenge was to use the Farsi language in a rock context, using guitar and bass. Adapting Farsi with its own music. Arash describes that this challenge started in the 70s with Koroush Yaghmayi, Farhad and Faramarz Aslani. They tried to challenge different angles. He says that the best they could do was to take poems from Rumi, Hafez and other traditional songs and mold them to Rock music.

Kiosk's success is that it adapts Farsi lyrics to Rock and Blues. In the second album, Love of Speed, they were trying to find their own sound, similar to other rock bands that are always looking for their unique sound. "Dire Straits' first album was influenced by JJ Cale," claims Arash. From his perspective, everyone starts with an influence. "The important thing is that everyone is trying to find his own sound" Arash says. He thinks the second album was a big step for Kiosk in trying to establish a new sound and he finds himself hitting in a right direction.

In Babak's opinion, if you want to get the audience's attention, the best approach is to start from an angle that the audience is familiar with. "If you listen to "Dailiness(Roozmaregi)" you might think that it sounds like Dire Straits but it actually reflects Iranians' social issues," claims Babak. He argues that in Love of Speed there is a lot less influence of Dire Straits.

Babak considers Kiosk as an underground band still. He explains that they always try to call themselves an alternative to mainstream Persian music generated in Los Angeles. "Not that there is anything wrong with LA music. We all like to dance," Babak says. Apparently Andy played in his wedding. Babak argues that Kiosk is trying to give people another alternative. "People are fed up with recycled ideas of the same old cheesy lyrics about eyebrows, eyes, lips and how tall she is," claims Babak.

Babak mentions that they are not promoting themselves through any mainstream channels. All their concerts are being organized by grass roots support. They rely a lot on Persian student organizations in all cities that they go to. They approach them directly and ask for help. Students volunteer to do the CD sales and T-shirts. "You never see any of the big Persian promoters backing us," says Babak.

I wonder if they know their audience and if they define underground as an alternative to the LA Mainstream music, what they would tell those people that think that Kiosk has lost the reality of Iran by immigrating here and can no longer be the voice of the underground life. Arash is concerned about that. But he believes that fortunately or unfortunately, many things has happened to him in Iran that he has content to write for many more years, he says it while laughing hysterically. But he is concerned that sooner or later he will be talking about things that people in Iran can no longer relate to. He is trying not to fall in that path. "Once we become distant from contemporary Iran we will also join others to write about hips and eyebrows." he laughs.

Babak recalls when they started in basements. He says that they are trying to stay close to the vibes that they came up with in the basements. According to him, they were never concerned about the audience. They just did it for themselves. Fortunately there seems to be a wide range of Iranians all over the world who could relate to their music. They are from all ages. "We hear from them through emails, fan communities and social networking sites," says Babak. They have some fans that are analyzing every word in their lyrics. He believes that no one ever sees Persian lyrics being analyzed this much. "If people would analyze LA Persian music, maybe they could do better by now," he says sarcastically. He says that the first feedback they have got was from Persian middle-aged divorced men. Recently they have had a much younger audience. Arash thinks that is because people got exposed to their music through the Internet. They were underground and they couldn't be played on radio or TV. So their audience was among those who had access to the Internet. Mostly educated and mostly divorced!

Arash explores more the issues regarding the restrictions on music in Iran. He reminds us that Iran has the youngest population in the world. The Islamic republic is backing up inch by inch. He remembers the time that VCRs weren't allowed in Iran. And when satellites came around the government removed restrictions on VCR and video clubs. And then Internet came and they accepted it. So Arash believes that the government is giving room but very slowly. And the young generation wants more. They want more concerts and more music and this is not something that the government has allowed. This is because Iran is young and they need music and Radio Payam is the best they can get, says Arash. There are no other resources available to people. In Arash perspective, that's not even what people want.

Babak recalls an incident in Iran. There was a raid at a party in Karaj (a city close to Tehran). It was a private concert in which two hundred people participated. The police arrested all of them. And the news agency announced that it was the gathering of the devil worshipers. Babak believes they were just a rock band and maybe someone was wearing an Iron Maiden metal t-shirt. In his perspective, this proves that there is a demand for rock music.

Traditional Persian music just wouldn't satisfy Iranians. He believes that people need to have the energy of Rock music. The government knows that there is a big demand for this. That's another thing that is pushing the boundaries in his opinion. So he believes that in the long term it might work out.

Talieh Rohani studied filmmaking at Soureh University in Tehran, Iran, before going on to do a BFA in Image Arts/Film Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto and to pursue an MFA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. She has directed four short films and worked, variously, as a director, art director and production designer, cinematographer and editor. She is interested in the emergence post-revolutionary popular culture in lives of young Iranian women and in the larger impact of technology on the development of a new global imagination. She sees CMS as a place to broaden and strengthen the ideas and skills that she hopes to bring back to her flimmaking practice.

Sharing Notes about Collective Intelligence

Last week, my travels took me to San Antonio where I delivered one of the keynote addresses at the Educause Learning Initiative conference -- a gathering focused on the application of technology for learning at the college and university level. My presentation, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About New Media Literacies," drew on materials we have been developing through Project nml and was based in an article, originally published here on the blog, soon to appear in The Journal of Media Literacy. The conference organizers are distributing a podcast of the talk. One of the highlights of the Educause Learning Initiative conference is the release of the 2008 Horizon Report. Each year, the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative work together to prepare a report "that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expressions within learning-focused organizations." The report positions these technologies in terms of their likely horizons of impact on higher learning -- hence the report's name.

This year's report profiles the following technologies:

• Grassroots Video -- "virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software."
• Collaboration Webs -- "collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation."
• Mobile Broadband -- "each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured -- or a new phone for every six people on the planet....New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content -- content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network."
• Data Mashups -- "mashups-- custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are 'mashed up' into a single tool -- offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets."
• Collective Intelligence -- "the kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence."
• Social Operating Systems -- "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content...Social operating systems will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know."

The presenters, and some of the attendees, signaled some disappointment that Virtual Worlds did not make the final cut this year, suggesting that there is still some disagreement about their viability and their long-term impact on education.

The Horizon report can be downloaded off the web and goes into some detail about each of these technologies and processes. I was personally very pleased to see such a strong focus not simply on collective intelligence but in other forms of collaboration and social networking. As we suggested in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation, newer forms of literacy might best be understood as social rather than individual skills, having to do with the ways we share knowledge and pool resources within a larger community. Our white paper identifies collective intelligence as a core social skill and cultural competency which young people need to acquire if they want to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape.

The Horizon report situates collective intelligence on a Time-to-Adoption Horizon of Four to Five Years, though they identify forms of collective intelligence at work within many of the current Web 2.0 applications. They identify a range of current applications of collective intelligence principles in projects shaping environmental studies, history, meteorology and astronomy.

In the past, I have drawn a distinction between collective intelligence (based on the work of Pierre Levy) and "the Wisdom of the Crowds" model (proposed by James Surowiecki). The first is based on a model of deliberation in which diverse groups of people consciously compare notes and work through problems together. The second is based on a model of aggregation as individual decisions made autonomously get collected and mapped through some technology. The Horizon report makes a similar distinction:

"Two new forms of information stores are being created in real time by thousands of people in the course of their daily activities, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge stores like the Wikipedia and Freebase, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and action....Explicit knowledge stores refine knowledge through contributions of thousands of authors; implicit stores allow the discovery of entirely new knowledge by capturing trillions of key clicks and decisions as people use the network in the course of their everyday lives."

Both forms, the report notes, have educational implications:

"Sources of explicit collective intelligence provide opportunities for research and self-study and give students a chance to practice the construction of knowledge -- they can contribute as well as consume....Implicit collective intelligence is already revealing a great deal about everyday patterns of activity based on programs that mine datasets of information from huge numbers of human actions."

There are several important implications of this move towards the use of collective intelligence in education:

• As I noted in my keynote remarks, the push towards collective intelligence requires us to rethink the nature of expertise and the historic monopoly that schools and institutions of higher learning have claimed over the production and circulation of knowledge. Collective Intelligence recognizes that there are diverse forms of expertise and that we learn more if we draw on as many different minds as possible rather than placing our trust in singular minds. At the same time, this push towards collective intelligence should force academics to engage more actively in public dialog with other kinds of "experts" who operate outside of the so-called "Ivory Tower." We have much to contribute, and much to learn, through participation within these larger conversations, which are being enabled through networked computing.
• Most of our current educational practices are based on the assumption that schools produce autonomous thinkers. We need to rethink our pedagogical practices to reflect the way knowledge is being produced and distributed within a networked culture. This means that we need to help young people identify and foster their own expertise while giving them skills at weighing evidence and arguments presented by others who also participate within their knowledge community. It means that we need to help them develop a set of ethical practices which holds them responsibile for the value of the information and insights they contribute to the group.
• Collective intelligence is going to work best on a scale larger than the individual college or university. As such, the push towards collective intelligence is closely linked towards moves for distance learning and for open courseware. Yet, it may force us to rethink some of the models shaping our first steps in that direction. Most of these efforts start from the assumption that information travels from an elite centralized institution to a range of peripheral locations. Collective Intelligence, however, starts from the premise that information must circulate freely and equally among all of the participating institutions.
• Collective intelligence places a new value on diversity -- this is true in both the explicit (deliberative) model and the implicit (aggregative) model. The greater diversity of inputs into the process, the richer the output. Higher education still often thinks about diversity through a lens of affirmative action and remediation. Instead, incorporating greater diversity into a collective intelligence process benefits all of the participants.

As it happens, Project nml has been developing a range of classroom activities focused on helping young learners develop a better understanding of the practices and values associated with collective intelligence. Erin Reilly, the Project's Research Manager, recently shared with me a report about a field test of some of those materials which they ran with teens from Boston's Youth Voice Collaborative. I offer it here as an illustration of some of the ways these principles might be incorporated into classroom teaching practices:

The first group activity was called "Stump the Expert". This activity put their adult facilitator, Julian ("The Expert"), in the position to work on his own and write down all that he knew about Caribbean culture …his own stated expertise. While Julian was making his long list, the girls collectively worked to jot down phrases and words on the board; anything they knew about the Caribbean culture. When Julian came back into the room, he looked at the board and laughed, stating, "Wow. You guys got a lot." He then showed the girls his paper and said how he'd written full sentences. He had started his list with the etymology of the word Caribbean. Lana Swartz, a NML Research Assistant and the Focus Group Facilitator, remarked how starting out with the origin of a word was a really good example of what an expert does.

The two lists were very different and very good in different ways. The one from the girls was totally random and not connected with each other; while Julian’s list was more like an expert where things were organized. With the two lists together, the knowledge pooled was that much greater and when the girls were asked what Collective Intelligence means to them. One girl said, "all together" and they all agreed.

This low-tech group activity was an introduction to the Exemplar Library. The group searched the skill Collective Intelligence and a video on Wikipedia pulled up. With the learning activities embedded into the multimedia material, the cue-point was when Kevin Driscoll says, "and nobody owns that sandcastle, you all built it together, you're all proud of it, and you all get the benefit of each others’ work so you really are relying on each other. And Wikipedia is like that sandcastle, except no ocean is going to wash Wikipedia away." At that point, the girls could have continued watching the video or pause and step into the exemplar to participate in the online activity. Stepping in, they were introduced to the Platial.com website, where collective intelligence is used to make maps. The clip provided a demonstration of how to make a map mash-up and they began to create their own maps.

The girls worked in two groups of two and one girl worked on her own. They were given the choice and this is what they chose. Interestingly, both 'working alone' & 'working in a group' had its drawbacks. For the kids who were in groups of two, one of the girls tended to do the whole computer part, (though in both groups, the other girl didn't seem to mind). For the girl on her own, she had the drawback of not having anyone to brainstorm and make a plan with (Luckily, Julian, the adult facilitator, jumped in and played that role which was a good example of the informal mentorship that is a key trait in participatory culture).

The girls had a great time with the activity and a picture was taken of the whole group and posted on the YVC marker on their Platial.com map. There was lots of laughing when they saw the picture. It's a fun picture. When asked if they would make these maps with their friends, they all had a resounding "Yes!"

If you'd like to learn more about collective intelligence, check out the following resources:

Podcast of a session from the Media in Transition 5 conference focused on Collaboration and Collective Intelligence -- featuring Mimi Ito, Cory Ondrejka, and Trebor Scholz, and moderated by Thomas Mallone.

Podcast of a MIT Communications Forum event focused on Collective Intelligence featuring Karim R. Lakhani, Thomas W. Malone, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland and moderated by David Thorburn.

Podcast of a conversation at the ELI conference between George Siemens and Michael Wesch about "Future Learning." I saw Seimens present an outstanding workshop on Connectivism which lay out some core assumptions about the value of social networks and collective intelligence for education.

Those of you who are in the Boston area might want to try to attend another MIT Communications Forum event this term, which is certain to consider issues of collective intelligence:

our world digitized: the good, the bad, the ugly

visionary and skeptical perspectives on the promise and perils of

the internet era

yochai benkler, harvard law school, author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

cass sunstein, univ. of chicago law school, Author of Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

april 10

5-7 p.m., bartos theater

Games and Social Responsibility -- Perspectives from Shanghai

Shortly after the start of 2008, I traveled to Shanghai to attend the International Games and Learning Forum, an event organized by the MIT Education Arcade team in collaboration with Peking University and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. The gathering brought together some leading American thinkers (including Sasha Barab, Eric Klopfer, and Scot Osterweill) about the pedagogical potentials of games with their Chinese counterparts in education, government and industry. Special thanks to Alex Chisholm who organized the event. This fascinating series of conversations started broadly with a consideration of the current context of digital games in China and ended with a concentration on the value of games as a resource for teaching foreign languages. Here I want to share with you some impressions about the current state of games in China which emerged from these exchanges.

The concept of the 'social responsibility' of games companies was a much more central concept to these conversations than in an American context. The western discussion of 'serious games' is framed by the assumption that pedagogy is an unrealized potential of the medium but without any expectations that games companies have an obligation to create games which might transform societies. Perhaps because of the ways that media industries in China seek to walk a line between some emerging capitalist impulses/opportunities and an overarching state economy, the industry representatives at this event sought to continually reassure participants that they were fully aware of their ethical and social responsibilities. These responsibilities operate at multiple levels -- not simply a repressive notion of ethical responsibility (focused on what they exclude from games in order to protect impressionable young people) but also a generative notion (what they included in games in order to promote national culture or ethical self-consciousness). And it is this affirmative or generative notion of social responsibility which holds open the greatest promise in terms of promoting a serious games movement in China.

One attendee went so far as to link this focus on serious games to the United Nation's statement on children's rights which identified a 'right to play' as a fundamental expectation. (It's hard to imagine such a U.N. resolution playing a central role in any American discussion of games given our national disdain at the moment for such international agreements, but one can imagine such a fit carrying greater weight in China at a time the country is courting global respectability through hosting the Olympic games.)

Game Addiction

Let me break this down a bit more. First, I was struck by how little of the conversation about the negative social impact of games centered around issues of media violence or even sex. I had noted a similar disinterest in games violence when I had visited China five years ago in the wake of a tragic fire in a cybercafe started by a high school student frustrated that he was not being allowed to access the internet or play games. My essay on this incident for Technology Review is reprinted in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. Basically, I argue that the Chinese had little interest in the argument that games violence causing real world violence. Rather, the incident was read in terms of concerns about the breakdown of traditional community life and the loss of the moral influence of the extended family in Chinese culture, both of which were seen as a consequence of rapid cultural, technological, and economic changes. The incident was also read partially in relation to a focus on 'games and internet addiction.'

We need to be careful about taking this 'addiction' rhetoric at face value even though there are some highly publicized incidents where Asian youth played games to the point of physical collapse. For one thing, Chinese youth used cybercafes as their point of access to both games and the internet. To some degree, the Chinese government is using a rhetoric of addiction to rationalize their periodic crackdowns on young people's digital access, knowing that concern about media effects is more likely to be accepted by western governments. In that sense, addiction rhetoric does some of the same work that the Firewall does in terms of restricting youth participation in the online world.

The addiction rhetoric, though, carries force within China where it is connected to a number of concerns which the Chinese have about their children's culture. First, at a time when aspects of capitalism are reshaping Chinese society (especially in Shanghai), addiction rhetoric gives the Chinese a way to talk about the impact of leisure culture and consumer capitalism on their lives. Playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive (or seen as such). This focus on unproductive play rather than productive labor takes on particular significance when you recognize that time spent playing games was time “stolen” from exam preparation in a culture where one's future (and that of your family) often rested on how well you perform on standardized testing. It is the high pressure nature of Chinese education which helps to account for the attractiveness of games as a cultural outlet.

Of course, this focus on play is not unique to Chinese youth, even if the forms that play takes breaks along generational lines. On most residential streets, you can see people squatting around a card game, Chess, or Mah Jong, the game providing a context for face to face interactions within the adults of the community. Many of the public parks we visited on this trip included plastic playground equiptment, not aimed at small children but rather targeted at senior citizens, who used them to exercise. Seniors are being encouraged to play but that play is organized around keeping young and improving their physical health (that is, play is redefined as enabling self improvement). Chinese youth, by contrast, are more likely to be interacting online (or within the closed space of the cybercafes) and often to be playing games with people they do not meet face to face.

This brings us to a second aspect of gaming from a Chinese perspective: government policies have promoted birth control and the single child family. Several folks in the Chinese games industry stressed the ways that online gaming reflected the loneliness and isolation of single children who were forced to reach out beyond their own families or even local communities in search of playmates. Whether understood literally or metaphorically, this link between the one child family and the debates about games addiction helps to explain the intensity of this concern.

Finally, the games addiction debate takes on a historically and geographically specific reference point. Several of the speakers talked about the addiction to western games as the modern equivalent of the opium wars, with games suspected as vehicles for inculcating western values or simply as distractions which insured that Chinese youth would under-perform in other aspects of their lives. Here, we can read the introduction of games consoles alongside ongoing debates in China about the appropriateness of recognizing Christmas, an alien holiday which never the less fit well with the gift giving focus of traditional Chinese culture (and in effect, extended the shopping season around Chinese new year.) Walking around Shanghai one saw strange overlaps between the decorations that still lingered from Christmas sales campaigns and the decorations which had already appeared in anticipation of New Years celebrations. I was amused by a sign I spotted in the Shanghai airport wishing visitors a "Merry Chris". The rest of the world talks about putting the Christ back in Xmas, but here, it is the Mass which has dropped off altogether as Kris Kringle and not the Christ child becomes the icon for this merchant's festival. Games, not surprisingly, are popular gift purchases during these holiday seasons but like Christmas, they were often understood in terms of unwelcomed western influences upon Chinese cultural traditions.

So, on one level, the social responsibilities of games companies were framed in terms of managing games addiction with the companies falling all over themselves to talk about devices and programs they have developed to limit the amount of time Chinese youth spent playing games. There are parential controls which allow adults to set and enforce fixed limits on how long their children can play. And games produced by Chinese companies are designed to provide stop points appropriate for the anticipated limits set on game play. One speaker at the conference even suggested a plan which linked access to game worlds and assets to performance on exams. Good test scores might translate into tokens which could be redeemed in games, thus providing gamers with a stronger incentive to spend time studying.

There was also a great deal of discussion about the need to develop games which encourage families to play together, insuring that gaming helps to reinforce strong family ties rather than representing one more factor of modernity which separated youth from the influence of their parents. (This is a society where a group sitting down to lunch is still given a single menu with the expectation that the patriarch will order for the entire group.) One Chinese games industry speaker described the ways that games focused on national culture might bridge generation gaps: young people could use games to help older players to master new technologies while adults could use game play to transmit traditional cultural values and practices.

Serious Games

On the other hand, many of the speakers defined the social obligations of games companies in a more generative sense -- in terms of the introduction of elements into the game play which are seen in more positive terms by the adult society. Games in China, then, are seen as part of a national cultural policy aimed at restoring pride in Chinese history and cultural traditions, traditions which were severely disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and just now beginning to gain some traction in the society once again. Parents worry that their offspring are being drawn to alien cultural experiences --not only games but also anime and comics from other parts of the world -- rather than embracing aspects of their own cultural tradition which adults want to see transmitted to the next generation. The computer here is seen as an important educational resource, one which prepares Chinese youth for a greater engagement with the world beyond their borders.

At the conference, several Chinese game designers proudly displayed games which included historically accurate and precisely realized recreations of historical villages and cities from pre-20th century China. They have filled these historical recreations with artifacts replicated from cultural museums or used them as settings to re-enact cultural rituals, such as wedding ceremonies. Many of the games were based on classical Chinese literature, especially Three Kingdoms.(For more on the relation of games to Chinese cultural policy, check out this earlier blog post.)

One participant noted that western games did much better in the cities but Chinese games rooted in traditional cultures were expected by more rural consumers. Such a distinction makes sense if we see games as part of the process of modernization, westernization, liberalization, and capitalization of China. Those young people who will have the most contact with western travelers or business men were being educated through their play to understand the world beyond while those who would have the least contact were more invested in protecting their national culture from outside influences.

Social responsibility was also being expressed in terms of promoting games which encouraged ethical reflection and thus transmitted the country's philosophical traditions and in terms of the potential educational uses of games. Games companies had a much stronger commitment to the development of serious games, even though most of them were no closer towards developing a business model to support edutainment titles than their counterparts in the west.

One unfortunate downside of this emphasis on games as a means of transmitting national culture was a tendency to link the idea of educational games to a particular kind of content -- to this idea of historical reconstructions -- rather than to a pedagogical process. Several of us in the group of westerners attending the conference were struck by how little our Chinese counterparts spoke about game play as a learning process, saying very little about what you did in the games and much more about the worlds that players could observe. At a western conference on serious games, there is much more likely to be a schism between educators who have a curricular focus and game designers who insist that good game play is necessary for games to be able to motivate or facilitate learning. As a result of this conceptual gap, the two delegations spent a lot of time talking past each other rather than sharing insights about the challenges of designing educational games.

The western participants were more likely to embrace games in terms of a conception of enrichment activities -- things we might learn which went beyond national standards and exams. The Chinese were, as a whole, much more likely to embrace drill and practice models of educational gaming with all education understood in relation to school policies and testing practices.

Piracy and the Chinese Games Industry

This discussion was also shaped by the particular character of the Chinese games industry which is being profoundly shaped by the culture of media piracy. All we had to do was to walk outside of our hotel and we could see a thriving business in the sell of illegal copies of western media content -- games, software, films, television series, and music. I spotted several Hollywood films on dvd which had not reached the screens in the states at the time I had left for the trip. Walk anywhere in the city and you will get accousted by row after row of merchants asking you to "Lookie, Lookie" at their "Watches, DVDS, ipods, suitcases, pocket books, shoes", all knock offs or copies of western produced goods.

I spoke with one college aged young woman here who offered a range of explanations: western copyrighted materials were priced too high for most people to afford; the government set limits on how many western media properties could be imported legally and there was aggressive censorship of anime and manga (with almost no Japanese content available legally here). The black market was the only place they could go to access such cultural goods, allowing them to work around both political and economic obstacles to access.

Yet, the presence of the black market also made it difficult to make a profit off the distribution of their games in this country and caused equal difficulties for local games producers. The game company folks explained that there was almost no legal market in China for platform or pc based single player titles since there was no way to stop the rapid distribution of such materials at low prices through the black market. The only kinds of games which could make money were multiplayer games, where companies could create incentives for buying legal copies. These games were funded on subscription models or on the basis of the sale of assets and services. This focus on multiplayer experiences, then, forced the Chinese companies to compete within a space where production costs and labor demands are highest and this made it very hard for commercial companies to embrace a serious games model, even in the face of the other strong policy incentives for them to do so.

Another factor pushing against the wide spread embrace of instructional games in China has to do with the technical infrastructure of their schools. A government official from the Education ministry described a 10 billion dollar national program to insure that every school in the country had at least one computer. While Urban Chinese youth enjoyed increased access to digital technologies at home, at school, and through the cybercafes (more on this next time), the rural youth still had little or no direct access to computers. So, a school which has only one computer would not be equipt to integrate computer games into its normal instructional practices as anything beyond the focus for teacher demonstrations. No wonder there is so little focus in their thinking about game play experiences: games may be seen much more as a simulation technology performed in front of the classroom than as anything that young people get to actually play themselves.

Live Action Anime? Only at MIT!

When I heard several months ago that some of my MIT colleagues and students were helping to stage a performance of Live Action Anime, I knew I had to be there. I anticipated the experience with a kind of "only at MIT" amusement -- not sure what to expect but knowing that the results would be dazzling.

The performance, Madness at Mokuba, opened with a spectacular battle between two giant robots (see the image above) staged against the backdrop of projected anime images and accompanied by an awe-inspiring soundtrack of metallic clanks and engine sounds which instantly reminded me of my first experience watching RoboTech and Star Blazers several decades ago. I didn't know what live action would look like but as the performance continued, I was more and more impressed with the craft and research which went into this performance.

The show was staged by SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, and Technology, a collective of artists and researchers established in 2003, which seeks to explore "connections between acts of performance, formations of culture, and interventions of technology toward an end of

original theatrical storytelling."

Madness was scripted by Ian Condry, an associate professor of Japanese cultural studies in the MIT Foreign Language Program. Condry is the author of the recently published Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Some readers will recall an interview with Condry I ran some months ago about his research into Japanese popular culture. Condry is now working on a new book, tentatively titled Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture, which emerges from field work spent in Tokyo animation studies. (I was lucky enough to tag along with Condry during one his trips to Japan, getting to visit Studio Ghibli, and getting some behind the scenes perspectives from the producer of Pokemon. I've described some of my impressions of seeing cosplayers in Yoyogi Park in a previous blog post.)

Condry runs the Cool Japan program, a joint efforts between Harvard and MIT, which regularly brings to Cambridge leading researchers, producers, writers, and others involved in the production and distribution of Japanese popular culture. In an e-mail interview, Condry shared some of the thinking which went into this production:

One of the things that interested me about the live action anime project is that it got me thinking about the many ways that anime crosses over from the "virtual" to the

"real." The most obvious example is cosplay and the many forms of licensed merchandise,

such as toys and models, that in effect bring anime through the screen and into

people's hands. When fans take anime and manga characters, and use them to create their

own fanzine manga (dôjinshi), a similar kind of translation effect is underway, that

is, taking imagined characters, re-imagining through our own minds, and the creating

something new in the world.

It shows how inaccurate in some ways the distinction between virtual and real is, and I

think that partly explains why debates about the division between the two worlds has

slackened in recent years.

During fieldwork research in Tokyo, I have also been struck by how often the term "real"

(riaru, in Japanese) comes up when anime creators talk about what makes particular works

distinctive. Anime creators always struggle with challenge of bringing the "real" into

the "virtual" space of animation.

The original Mobile Suits Gundam series, which began airing in 1979, is looked back on now as the moment when "super robot" anime, with its happy heroes, child audiences, and 30-minute resolutions, gave way to "real robot" anime, in which war was represented in a

more realistic manner. Real had other connotations in this context as well. In real

robot anime, so-called heroes are often despised for their violence and wanton

destruction, audiences were older, and the stories seldom had clean-cut endings, but

rather meandered through the gray zones of war's ambiguities, hypocrisies, and senseless

violence. Gundam turned robots from heroes into mere weapons of war.

In the end, the notion of live action anime may be paradoxical, but it also reflects

some of the most fascinating aspects of anime as a medium.

Anime fans have long debated whether Anime is best understood as a genre (or perhaps a set of related genres), as an aesthetic style, as a mode of production, or as a transmedia phenomenon. Informed by Condry's theories and research, the MIT show managed to cover all of these bases and then some.

The show's characters (see below) each embody archtypes from the anime tradition, collectively taking us on a tour of its core genre elements and linking them to larger trends in Japanese society and culture, including "giant robots, a Japanese schoolgirl, a lovelorn otaku, a masterless samurai, a gamer woman, evil media magnates, and a vengeful deathgod who all battle for truth, justice, and the anime way."

As the story opens, the protagonists, including Schoolgirl and her sidekick, Sam Rye, and their arch rivals, Flux and Ota Ku, are preparing their robots for the Makuba Institute of Technology's annual giant robot battle. Yet, something strange is going on. Their classmates are falling prey to VIRTIGO, a strange mental illness which involves altered states of consciousness. We learn that the illness has been manufactured by an evil media conglomerate (The Infinite Channel Network) in order to produce a state of constant consumption, transmitted through the use of flash rhythms similar to those that alarmists claimed caused epileptic seizures when Pokemon was first released. Falling prey to what is described as a "Neo-Postmodern Trans-subjectivity syndrome," victims "fall from one reality into another." As the corporate scientists spell out their plans to use anime to achieve global dominance, they become the vehicles for Condry and the show's cast to explore the historical evolution of the anime movement. As scenes from Astro Boy, Gundrum, Neon Genesis: Evangelion, and Pokemon, among other defining texts in the anime tradition, are projected on the wall, the cast stages a gender-bending re-enactment of key moments, such as the creation of Astro-Boy. There's a very funny re-enactment of Pong with actors moving a giant cardboard ball between two massive paddles. Cyberpunk has long been a vehicle for authors and animators to reflect upon the influence of media on contemporary culture and this high tech plot provides an ideal vehicle for Condry to express his own insights into the cultural and economic factors which have enable anime to straddle genres, to reach across multiple media platforms, and to shape youth culture world-wide.

The performance loving captured the anime aesthetic. While the performers are live, the voices are dubbed, capturing the slight mismatch between lips moving and spoken language which is part of most westerner's experience of watching anime. (During the question and answer period, one anime saavy spectator asked when they might see the subtitled edition of this performance and offered to help launch a fan sub project!) The soundtrack wittily samples effects from classic games and anime which sparked some audience members to shout out the references -- and trust me, at MIT, a high percentage of those attending the show were deeply immersed in games, anime, and other aspects of geek culture.

The acting style was designed to convey some of the limited animation techniques most closely associated with anime -- even including repeated gestures which hint at the longstanding practice of recycling footage at certain generic moments -- transformation scenes for example -- in some series.

The show's director, Thomas F. DeFrantz, who is a Professor of Theater Arts and the current head of the MIT Program in Women's and Gender Studies, shared with me some reflections about the stage design and choreography for Madness:

To construct movement for the piece, I often had my dancers think of themselves as if 'in camera.' I asked, "if you were the animator, how would you draw this moment?" The piece is based on stillness, rather than on motion. In many anime, you don't see every bit of a gesture, just the edges. This took a technique of 'clenching' the body, strangely enough, to reveal the edges of each silhouette that stood for a character emotion. More than anything, we had to work against the casualness of everyday gesture, in which there might be many silhouettes of little interest to an animator or someone watching anime. For this work, we had to focus on the silhouettes that could reveal character, attitude, and opinion all at once. The performers developed their 'signature poses' and we worked from those to generate a language of motion. In the end, it was much harder than I thought it might be, to go through the entire piece in this sort of 'physical karaoke' but without ever speaking a word. It helped us reconsider the importance of breath and sound as components of human expression, because in the live action anime, working with the pre-recorded soundtracks, the performers never got to make a sound.

The costume and make-up were equally iconic, designed to transform the student performers into cartoon characters. Here, for example, is a portrait drawn by castmember Ashley Micks of Ota Ku, one of the young people who helps overcome old school rivalries and work together to defeat the evil corporations.

Milo Martinez, an undergraduate major in the Comparative Media Studies Program, describes the challenges he faced bringing this larger-than-life character to the stage:

I can honestly say that Live Action Anime was an experience worth having. As a Dancer, Cosplayer, and Anime-fan, I saw it as a perfect fit for me. The entire piece is gesture based, and a lot of focus was placed on creating phrases with our bodies. "How can our body say this sentence for us?" was a common question we asked ourselves while constructing the choreography. Since our voices were "dubbed over" we had to make sure that our movement could speak for us.

We were very particular in everything we did, each character had a walk, pose, attitude, and each needed to agree with the others. As an Anime fan, it was important to me to try and make my movements big and crazy, if it looks like it hurt, then it probably did. How fast can I run from this side of the stage to the other? How high can I jump? A lot of this show I pushed my body to its limits to try and create a character that had indeed walked out of a screen.

As his comments suggest, Milo came to the show with extensive experience in cosplay, a form of costuming and performance which thrives within the anime fan community. Indeed, Milo was interviewed on camera as part of a series of short documentaries on cosplay we have been producing for Project nml (New Media Literacies). Here's a segment from this documentary, which is still in production, which features Milo talking about his cosplay experience and suggests the ways that these fans are, as Condry has suggested, already involved in finding ways to translate the look and feel of anime into physical reality.