If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Seven): Aesthetic and Structural Strategies

This is part seven of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting. Spreadability: Aesthetic and Structural Strategies

Cadbury's "Gorilla" spot -- an ad featuring nothing but a life-size Cadbury-purple Gorilla belting out the drumline to Phil Collins classic "Something in the Air Tonight" -- didn't spread just because it was "producerly." It was also incredibly amusing. There is still truth in the notion that good, compelling content remains a crucial factor in the spreadability media. If a "producerly" openness is required in order for content to be adopted into the gift economy, not all gifts are equally valuable, and thus not all content is equally spreadable. Producerly engagement encourages individuals to take on content as their own and invest their own identity in it, making it a potential tool of communication. But, in thinking back to what we outlined as some of the key motivations for spreading content, we must remember that in order to become spreadable, the content has to be able to create worth. In other words, openness and an abundance of meanings and uses may make some advertising material a potential gift, but it has to be able to communicate something that is socially meaningful before someone will give it.

Humor

If one looks at the videos that have spread most successfully, a clear pattern begins to emerge: a lot of them, like "Gorilla," are really, really funny. The success of humor should come as no surprise -- we intuitively understand that sharing funny anecdotes or cracking jokes that everyone gets is an easy way to build camaraderie and put people at ease in formal situations. Conversely, making a joke that people don't understand is a fast way to inject awkwardness into any situation and induce a sense of alienation in those left out of the punch-line. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) has noted the very thin line which separates a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something the community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn't want to talk about. The act of recognizing a joke is an act of exchanging judgments about the world and thus the spread of jokes can strengthen social ties.

Humor, therefore, has the ability to define "insiders" and "outsiders" within a community: insiders may take pleasure in making fun of outsiders. Consider how jokes form around rivalries between colleges or companies: MIT folks don't really imagine that folks at Harvard are foolish but making Harvard jokes signals that we are all part of the same community and close ranks against those "up the river." But tell the joke in the wrong time or place and we can damage social relations, insulting those we sought to include, alienate those we sought to bring close to us. Humor, thus, is not simply a matter of taste: it is a vehicle by which we articulate and validate our tastes.

If we look more closely at the spread of videos, we can identify two extremely popular forms -- parody (often in partnership with certain elements of nostalgia, usually ironic) and humor that uses absurdity or shock/surprise. To be clear, these categories are by no means mutually exclusive, and successful videos quite frequently use a blend of both for added effect. Cadbury's "Gorilla" is a prime instance in which parody, nostalgia, and absurdity are blended in order to create an provocative and spreadable ad. To be fair, parody in general always has elements of absurdity, since its humor relies on the intrusion of unexpected elements into an "normal" or common situation. In "Gorilla," however, the dominant form at work is absurdity. This is established from the very beginning, by starting with a close-up of the gorilla, and pulling out to reveal the drum kit. The opening moment is one of surprise, emphasized with a sudden rise in the music, upending our expectations of what we would see following a series of shots of a gorilla's face. The strangeness of the set-up itself becomes the punch line, rather than forcing any complex interpretations or outside references as is more common in direct parodies.

The video is primarily funny because it asks us to confront the limits of our expectations. The implicit parody elements present are used to keep the absurdity within the bounds of comprehension, however. It is not purely surreal, but rather references a number of clichés and cultural touchstones. The way the gorilla drums, for instance, is a familiar exaggeration of drummers, and Phil Collins in particular, getting swept up into the music. The gorilla, too, is incredibly realistic looking and the opening close-ups are reminiscent enough of nature programs that several users on YouTube commented that they mistook it for an animal rights advertisement until the drumming began. The surprise comes from overturning certain expectations of normality precisely because it is able to set up and evoke them in the first place. The good-natured irreverence exhibited through absurdity and parody in this instance is central to what makes a video spreadable. In enacting reversals and disruptions of standard patterns, the "Gorilla" video poses a sort of abstract challenge to formality and authority. In effect, its informality gives users permission to transgress the audience/producer boundary, to adopt and adapt the content for their own purposes. In other words, if the advertisers don't take themselves too seriously, it invites users to get in on the fun as well.

This worked beautifully for Cadbury, resulting in a slew of remixes and mash-ups that helped promote the original and turn Cadbury into a sort of cultural benchmark in its own right. One user interpreted the video to be melodramatic and "cheesy," and thus created a response called "A glass and a half full of cheesiness" which redid the video using the over-the-top 80s ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Another remix plays up the fact that the drummer is a gorilla, using "Welcome to the Jungle." Still more use artists ranging from Nirvana to 50 cent, the latter song not even having much by way of a traditional drum beat. Further spoofs went on to re-shoot the video with other unexpected drummers, from a tiny stuffed monkey, which plays off the fake primate aspect, to a model in her bra, which does a riff off of the strap line "a glass and a half full of joy," replacing it with "two cups full of joy." Both by depriving the video of a specific message and engaging forms that are primed for participation, "Gorilla" serves as an exemplar of a "producerly" text that spreads as more and more people have a go at remaking it for their own comic effects. Its absurdity creates gaps "wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them" (Fiske, 1989, p.104).

Parody's Promises and Perils

Another thing that "Gorilla" does well is provide different levels of engagement -- the video works whether or not you get the Phil Collins references. However, this is not always the case with humor. The strength of parody as spreadable media is the fact that it is a predominantly participatory form. That is to say, for something to be recognizable as parody requires certain cultural knowledge on the part of the viewer. This is precisely what makes parody valuable for spread -- it can express shared frameworks of reference within a community and, especially when it plays on nostalgic references, a shared history as well, thus marking those inside as those who "get" the joke. But as we mentioned briefly, this has the potential to alienate as well, and unless advertisers want the spread of their content to be siloed exclusively within small niches, they must be careful to build different levels of "insider" knowledge.

Two instances of well-executed parodies are the efforts by Coca-Cola and Toyota in addressing the gaming community, a large, but undeniably specialized interest group.

With the rise of advertising interest in immersive online worlds, such as Second Life, and the increasing visibility of enormous, global networks of online gamers, big trans-national corporations have started to take notice. Following it's now legendary Chinese World of Warcraft commercial, Coke launched another video game parody/homage during the Super Bowl. Though it premiered on "traditional" media, Coke quickly posted the spot onto YouTube, where it now has over 2.2 million views and nearly 2,000 comments (this, of course, doesn't even count repostings by other users). The spoof features a game-world that references the popular Grand Theft Auto -- grimy, crime-ridden streets, and a rough, swaggering male protagonist -- but when the protagonist has a Coke, the entire game experiences a dramatic reversal. The protagonist slams down exact change on the counter, behind which the store clerk stands rigid, with his hands raised, as if he's being held up. The protagonist drags a blond yuppie, complete with a sweater tied around his shoulders, out of his convertible only to give him a Coke and share a toast. He puts out fires as he strolls on the streets, recovers purses for grannies, gives money to the homeless, and stuffs a passer-by into a convertible full of scantily clad babes. His good deeds attract supporters until he's leading a full-blown parade down the street, complete with helicopters. Every step along the way, every cliché of the crime game gets transformed into an act of giving and joy. Police cars running into fire hydrants, by instance, result into two perfect half-arches of water that creates rainbows.

Though the message is almost painfully sincere, the spot works because of the combination of a broad message (turn bad things good by giving back, part of their "mycokerewards.com" campaign) and very specific details about the game world it was parodying. The narrative works whether or not the viewer knows anything about Grand Theft Auto, but if the countless mentions of the game in the YouTube comments were any indication, the fact that it spoofed the popular game inspired many to help spread the word. Those who "got" the video game elements, especially the more subtle ones like the fact that the character is able to pull a seemingly endless supply of random objects out of nowhere, were able to share and discuss their knowledge, as well as make further "in" jokes ("I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek of Grand Theft Auto: San Francisco").

Even beyond the different levels of gaming knowledge, there is yet another layer of cultural references -- the song used in the spot, 'You Give A Little', is from 1976 musical called Bugsy Malone, itself a parody of cinema representations of 1930s gangsters. In the comments, fans of the film lobbied to see the musical released on DVD and responded to one another, declaring their alliance to that particular fan group.

Yet another recent success was the Toyota World of Warcraft commercial. What made this one different from the previous spot (which, for all its infamy, did not reach nearly the same level of online circulation) or even the Grand Theft Auto spoof, is that it not only utilizes details and aesthetics of World of Warcraft, but refers to a very specific event in the online gaming culture's history. The 30-second spot features a group of warriors standing around planning and arming for an attack, when all of a sudden one of them goes rogue, transforms into a truck, and goes rushing off into battle.

This is a direct reference to the Leeroy Jenkins incident that became so widespread as a cultural reference that it was featured as a question on Jeopardy. Within the World of Warcraft community, the Leeroy Jenkins incident was so well-known that an add-on was created so players could "invoke the power of Leeroy Jenkins" and a play a sound-clip from the original battle video. The key to this parody was how it managed to remain faithful to the cultural cues of the game and the incident -- the deadpan, matter-of-fact voices of the players, the crazy, over-the-top aggro yelling of the "Leeroy" character, who at one point utters one of the lines from the original Leeroy Jenkins video.

There is also an additional layer of self-reflexivity, when one of the World of Warcraft players responds with an exasperated "No way. There's no trucks in Worlds of Warcraft!" All of these things work as winking invitations to those involved in World of Warcraft to get in on the joke, and as over-the-top as it is, the spot is never more over-the-top than the original, carefully avoiding coming off as a mockery. Companies must be careful, however, that in trying to address a wider audience with different levels of shared cultural knowledge that they do not make the parody itself so broad and lacking in culturally specific details that the spoof comes across as mocking, lazy, or disingenuous.

Additionally, it should be noted that the form alone will not do all the work. Take, for instance, the Mini Cooper film series "Hammer & Coop," which, despite being designed to "go viral" as a parody of 70s and 80s cop shows (Starsky & Hutch and Knight Rider), got no where near the attention of the most successful spreadable media. Despite some impressive numbers boasted by the advertising firm behind the series, the YouTube view numbers flatten out in the tens of thousands, instead of millions. As a parody, it lacked a clear interest community due to the broadness of execution. While it parodied the general aesthetic and the dominant tropes of the 70s and 80s cop genre, it failed to draw clear attention to any specifics, and in fact relied on references to other parodies of the genre at times by making the protagonist resemble Ben Stiller's character from the recent Starsky & Hutch remake. Though by no means a failure, the video's limited circulation when compared with the Coke, Cadbury, and Toyota ads, suggests that it is not only the parody form, but the quality and subtlety of execution that matters.

Information Seeking

Another characteristic of popular "viral" content is some level of ambiguity or confusion that encourages people to seek out further information. This act encourages the sharing of content as people enlist their network to help with the problem solving, an act typically known as "collective intelligence" or "crowd sourcing." In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins (2006) argues that a successful media franchise is not only a cultural attractor, drawing like minded people together to form an audience, but also a cultural activator, giving that community something to do. Figuring out such spots offer many different communities something to do and thus a reason to continue to engage with its content. Often, these spots force us to look twice because we can't believe, or understand, what it is we are seeing. We need to verify their authenticity, intent, or simply figure out how it was accomplished.

The Cadbury Gorilla spot, for instance, did this to a certain extent, with some discussion surrounding just who was in the Gorilla suit -- Phil Collins himself was cited as a possibility -- and, to a lesser extent, whether or not the Gorilla was real. The VW Polo also engaged this kind of participation , provoking questions of whether or not the ad was "real" or in any way affiliated with Volkswagen. With Volkswagen's denial of any connection to the commercial, people became wrapped up in a search for the origins of the ad, locating information on the creators, the director, and even the budget as clues to whether or not it was a publicity stunt.

Yet another interesting instance of this logic is the "homemade" Ford Mondeo "Desire" video. The ad itself is a whimsical, if somewhat ambiguous, television spot composed of a series of still and near-still shots of cars lifting off the streets of London attached to colorful bunches of helium balloons. The video was uploaded to YouTube and received a few hundred thousand hits, a decent, if unremarkable, showing. What makes the Ford Mondeo case so interesting is that almost six months after the original ad went up on YouTube, a video appeared of two guys from New Zealand tying balloons to a car until it lifted off. The video, posted by a user by the name of homeschooled2, claimed to be a "homemade" version of the Ford ad. It received far greater viral circulation than the original, clocking in over a million YouTube views and thousands of comments, as well as news media coverage, as people tried to prove whether or not what happened the video was physically possible.

Two days after the initial "homemade" video went up, homeschooled2 posted a couple of "making of" follow-up videos that showed that the video was made with aid of a crane and some clever digital editing effects, with acknowledgment of help from the "team from Ford" in the video description. Leaving the nature and extent of Ford's involvement ambiguous, the "making of" videos forced us to consider whether Ford had orchestrated the whole thing, making the original ad with the addition of a viral campaign in mind. Many of the comments surrounding the "homemade" ad were focused on determining whether it was "for real." Even after the follow-up videos that revealed both the crane and the Ford involvement were posted, clearly linked from the original, discussion continued along these lines, suggesting that it was not the answer to the question of authenticity that was the point, but the process of questioning. What is finally at stake is not knowing, but seeking answers. The "homemade" video thus spread by opening itself to this search for authenticity.

This search for authenticity, origins, or purpose can be seen as yet another way of actively constructing the meaning of content, another type of gap that encourages producerly engagement. Here, it is the process of uncovering the "truth" that is more important that what is found. Whether the VW ad is proven to be an intentional stunt or an accidental leak, whether Ford had planned the "homemade" ad from the beginning or not, whether it really is Phil Collins in the gorilla suit, the debate, allows individuals to create and justify their interpretations by asserting control over what information they have about the ad.

Unfinished Content

In all of the previous examples, the "gaps" are in the meaning of the content, whether due to general ambiguity within or hidden information surrounding the ad. Burger King's Subservient Chicken interactive video site, launched in 2004, literally engaged users in the creation of the video's content. Visitors to the site saw a video window with a man in a chicken suit standing in a room. Below, there is a text input box with the words "Get chicken just the way you like it. Type command here." Once a command is typed, it triggers a video of the man in the chicken suit performing the command. There are nearly 300 different clips in all, each set to respond to a variety of similar commands ranging from "jump" to "lay egg" to "moonwalk." Commands that the chicken doesn't understand might result in a clip expressing confusion or boredom, while commands deemed inappropriate, such as those that are sexually explicit, result in a clip of the chicken wagging his finger in disapproval. All of the video clips fit within an amateur video aesthetic, with a single, low resolution camera, pointing head on not unlike a webcam mounted atop a computer.

Unlike other so-called "interactive" video campaigns, such as the Guinness domino website in which a user solves a series of puzzles to reveal parts of the finished video, the Subservient Chicken site creates a more dynamic interaction, engaging the user in a process of actually creating the video. The site does nothing until a command has been entered. That is, the particular video (or series of clips) that is viewed, the actual output, is controlled and triggered entirely by the user. Whereas the Guinness campaign is a matter of engaging with content that is only retrieved interactively, giving up control to the participant only at the level of access, Subservient Chicken gives up control at the level of creation. Though the videos are pre-made, the content itself fundamentally incomplete. Not only is there no meaning, but there is also no action, no finished content until the user enters a command. Thus, by creating a partial work, an archive of incomplete, component parts, the Subservient Chicken campaign offered the user agency that went beyond just access and choice, but tangible participation in the work's creation.

Subservient Chicken becomes producerly by explicitly engaging the user in the creative process. It also triggers an information-gathering urge, much like the Mondeo or VW Polo ads. Users debate how its mechanism works as much as they reinterpreted its meaning or questioned its authenticity. Gamers often seek to test the limits of a game to see how much actual control and agency they can exert. Here, users wanted to push against the limits of the ad to see what flaws they could locate in its execution. Websites soon appeared when catalogued the various commands and their responses. People worked together to test the limits of application and in the process, spread the video to other interested parties, trying to expand the ranks of the puzzle solvers. According to Axel Bruns (2007), some of the key characteristics of "produsage" -- the "hybrid, user-and-producer position" occupied by participants in user-led spaces such as Wikipedia and YouTube -- include that content is "continually under development" and highly collaborative. Working together, they hoped to outsmart the original producers or at least figure out how it all worked and thereby "beat the system."

Nostalgia and Community

Earlier, we noted that commodity culture and the gift economy operate on the basis of very different sets of fantasy. We turn towards commodity culture when we seek to express our individuality, when we want to break free of social constraints, when we want to enjoy opportunities for upward mobility or shift our status and identity. The fantasies which shape the gift economy have more to do with social connectivity and especially with reaffirming existing values and preserving and promoting cultural traditions. The fantasies of a commodity culture are those of transformation while those of a gift economy are often deeply nostalgic.

When materials move from one sphere to the other, they often get reworked to reflect the values and fantasies associated with their current context. Jenkins (1992), for example, argues fan media production and circulation often centers around themes of romance, friendship, and community. These values shape the decisions fans make at every level, starting with the choice of films and television programs which seem to offer the best opportunities to explore these concepts. When fans rework program content through vidding (a genre of fan music videos) or fan fiction, they tend to draw attention to those situations where such relationships are most vividly expressed. A fan music video for Heroes, for example, centers around moments when two or more of the characters are interacting, even though the structure of the original program kept these characters apart for the better part of a season. The selected music further emphasizes the social bonds within the community and the emotional links these characters feel towards each other.

These themes surface most often in fan made media because, consciously or not, these works allow fans to explore the nature of the social bonds and emotional commitments that draw them together as a subculture. Fan-made media is media that is shared with others with common passions and often its exchange can be understood as a marker of friendship or at least sisterhood. In some cases, fans produces stories or videos to give to other fans explicitly as gifts. But in many other cases, they understand their works as a contribution to the ongoing life of their community. The community tends to nurture writers and artists, seeing each member as potentially making a creative contribution, but they value more strongly those whose works reflect the core themes of fan culture more generally.

Other content which is commonly "spread" within the gift economy has an explicitly nostalgic tone. For many baby boomers, there is enormous pleasure in watching older commercials or segments from children's programs of their childhood. This is a generation which is using eBay to repurchase all the old toys, comics, collector cards, and other stuff that their parents threw away when they went to college. The exchange of these retro or nostalgic texts helps to spark the exchange of memories, which are often bound up to personal and collective histories of consumption and spectatorship. Robert Kozinets (Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry, 2003) has explored how such "retromarketing" practices have helped to revitalized older brands, giving them greater currency in the contemporary marketplace. As Kozinets and his collaborators explain:

Long abandoned brands, such as Aladdin (lunchboxes), Beemans (gum) and Chuck Taylors (shoes), have been adroitly reanimated and successfully relaunched. Ancient commercials are being re-broadcast (Ovaltine, Alka-Seltzer) or brilliantly updated (Britney Spears sings "Come Alive" for Pepsi). On the Internet, sites devoted to marketing a variety of retro merchandise--from candy (nostalgiccandy.com) to fabric (reprodepotfabrics.com), games (allretrogames.com) to home furnishings (modfurnishings.com)--have popped up. Retro styling is de rigueur in countless product categories, ranging from cameras and colognes to telephones and trainers. Even automobiles and detergents, long the apotheosis of marketing's new-and-improved, washes-whiter, we-have-the-technology worldview, are getting in on the retroactive act, as the success of the Chrysler P.T Cruiser and Color Protection Tide daily remind us.

In many cases, the release of these retro products sparks enormous conversation wherever there are consumers old enough to have fond memories of their hay day. In other cases, online discussions of long retired brands has led to a greater appreciation of their potential within parent companies, as in the case of Quaker Oats' Quisp cereal, which had been introduced in 1965, entered the popular imagination thanks to an inventive ad campaign created by Rocky and Bullwinkle's Jay Ward and Bill Scott, and finally disappeared from national circulation in 1977, though it remained available in some regions of the country. Internet discussions and eBay transactions sparked growing consumer awareness of the brand, helping to pave the way for more aggressive marketing effort by Quaker, including the development and online sale of a gourmet sized package of the crunchy sugary cereal.

While online fans contest the authenticity of the re-issued product, they also share personal memories of their childhood enjoyment of the product and in the process, spread the news of its reissue to others in their social circles. In discussing the values which shape successful retro-brands, Kozinets and colleagues describe something very close to the animating fantasies of the gift economy:

Utopianism is perhaps the hallmark of the retro-brand. The brand must be capable of mobilizing an Elysian vision, of engendering a longing for an idealized past that is satisfied through consumption....Solidarity is an important unifying quality of the retro-brand. Whether as extreme as a cargo cult or as moderate as fictive kinship, the brand must inspire among its users the sense of belonging to a community.

References:

Brown, Stephen, Robert V. Kozinets, and John F. Sherry, Jr. (2003). "Sell Me the Old, Old Story: Retromarketing Management and the Art of Brand Revival," Journal of Consumer Behavior, June, 2. pp.85-98.

Bruns, Axel (2007) "Produsage, Generation C, and Their Effects on the Democratic Process", paper presented at Media in Transitions 5: Creativity, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Digital Age, April 27-29, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA USA.

Douglas, Mary (1991) "Jokes," in Rethinking Popular Culture, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.291-311.

Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Six): Spreadable Content

This is part six of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.

Spreadable Content

Thus far, we have examined some of the technological and social conditions that allow for media to spread, but it remains clear that not all media content and materials are equally spreadable. Nor it is simply a matter of "good" or "interesting" content -- we do not pass on every bit of interesting information or every clever video. Content is spread based not on an individual evaluation of worth, but on a perceived social value within community or group.

Not all good content is good for sharing. In a gift economy, the gifts we share say something about our perceptions of the person we are passing them to as much as they express our own tastes and interests. Most importantly, the exchange of gifts serves to reinforce relations within the community and a badly chosen or ill-considered gift can cause hard feelings. Above all, we don't circulate gifts because advertisers ask us to do so -- and ideally, we'd like to minimize the hard sell contained in such gifts. We might well give someone a shirt with a designer label or even a T-Shirt which promoted a favorite film, but we are unlikely to stuff a catalog in the gift box in hopes that our friend will go back and buy more from the same company.

So, if we want to predict what content will "spread," we have to develop a fuller understanding of the ways that the circulation of information may strengthen or damage social relations. We must first come to understand what function the circulation of content and information serves within a social network -- that is, what is the relationship of the community to the materials that it circulates? From there, we can determine the necessary characteristics that advertising content must exhibit in order to have potential for use within a gift economy. We can then begin to draw out aesthetic and structural forms that lend themselves particularly well to this process.

What makes content worth spreading

There's a lot we can learn about how content circulates online by examining the existing literature on how rumors spread in face-to-face communities. Patricia A Turner (1994) has studied the circulation of rumors within the African American community. Turner makes the distinction between rumors, which are informal and temporary constellations of information, and contemporary legends, which are "more solidified rumors" (Turner 1994, p. 5) and maintain a reasonable consistency in narrative content as they are passed. Her description of such rumors bear a striking resemblance to what we've come to think of as Word of Mouth advertising -- testimonial accounts about a product or service -- and the circulation of advertising content itself that now most often characterizes "viral" media.

Many of Turner's cases center upon commercial products and corporations. In particular, the rumor that a number of different companies were owned by the Ku Klux Klan remained one of the most persistent and widespread in the African-American community during the period of her research. Various companies were implicated in such rumors, ranging from food and consumable products (Church's Chicken, Marlboro cigarettes) to clothing companies (Troop). Some were private enterprises and others public and none had any explicitly racist policies outside of marketing predominantly to African American populations. Church's chicken, for instance, managed to rally the support of the NAACP president at the time (Turner, 1994, p.96).

These rumors inflicted serious damage on these brands, resulting in "severe financial losses": Church's was forced to sell and Troop went bankrupt. (Turner, 1994, p.96). No sooner did one company collapse under the weight of the community's suspicions than new rumors of KKK associations were directed against other, similar companies. Though such claims may not have had much basis in fact, the accusations, Turner tells us, were far from random. In fact, the companies were linked by:

certain key elements . . . Namely, white-owned firms (with) . . . advertising directed solely at black consumers, that established nationwide franchises selling popular but nonessential commodities in primarily black neighborhoods (Turner, 1994, p.97).

Thus, what perpetuated the circulation of rumors about these companies had to do with what their products represented for their consumers. As Turner explains later in describing an instance in which the Church's Chicken rumor was successfully passed:

By sharing (the story) with my informant, (the person telling the story) was solidifying the bonds between them and, in a sense, bolstering their identity as potential victims of racist activity; in addition, a spotlight was trained on the potential aggressors, for one must never forget who the enemy is. My informant accepted the rumor because it functioned as a metaphor for the struggle he was facing in his attempt to establish himself as a man in American society (Turner, 1994, p.106-107)

By circulating the story, community members are able affirm their commonality and draw clear lines of who is friend and who is foe, express the shared concerns of that group (racism and discriminatory treatment) and bring their anxieties under control by responding to a symbolic embodiment of their concerns. These rumors reflect the reality of a world where racism often no longer takes the direct form of a KKK rally but may be implicit, tacit, and thus hard to locate or overcome. They are responding to what other social critics have called "enlightened racism" -- that is, racism which is recognized by its affects but not by its goals. Though clearly specific to this particular community, the example here offers valuable insight into the social factors that motivate sharing information and content within communities in general:

1. To bolster camaraderie and articulate the (presumably shared) experiences and values that identify oneself as belong to a particular community ("bolstering their identity")
2. To gather information and explain difficult to understand events or circumstances.
3. To establish the boundaries of an "in-group".

These same factors may come into play when fans advocate for a franchise or consumers promote a brand.

• They are doing so because the brand express something about themselves or their community.
• They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.
• They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.
• They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.

If the same content is passed between multiple communities, it is because that content serves relevant functions for each of those communities, not because it serves some lowest common denominator or universal function. Consider, for example, the campaign commercials produced by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Starting as a dark horse with limited cash on hand, Huckabee sought to insure his content would spread to multiple communities of potential supporters. One such spot featured action star Chuck Norris. After an initially limited television buy, this spot spread through YouTube and ultimately became the focus for news coverage as a consequence.

What made Norris an inspired choice for such a spot was that his name recognition worked well in several radically different social networks. On the one hand, Norris had increasingly become a recurring reference point for jokes on late night comedy shows and had become a camp icon, inspiring sites such as Chuck Norris Facts. Here, deploying Chuck Norris showed that Huckabee was cool, that he understood and embraced some aspects of contemporary popular culture, and as a consequence, the spot helped to defer anxieties which might surround his status as a Baptist Minister, allowing him to escape the cultural war discourse that surrounded previous evangelical candidates.

On the other hand, Norris himself had a solid base of support among evangelical Christians. He writes a weekly column for the conservative news service WorldNetDaily on which he announced that were he to be president he would "Tattoo an American flag with the words, 'In God we trust,' on the forehead of every atheist." Norris is an outspoken Christian and has actually written several books on the subject. The Norris/Huckabee spots, thus, managed to speak to two very different communities, religious conservatives and an internet savvy young audience. Both saw something that spoke to them and many decided that it was content worth spreading.

To give a more immediate example, we might think of the way the VW Polo spoof ad was circulated. The spot itself featured a man of in determinant but Arabic descent pulling up alongside a cafe in a VW Polo. After muttering a few indistinguishable words, he presses his thumb down on a detonator, at which point we cut to an exterior shot that shows the Polo containing the entire explosion. The spot was never intended as a legitimate advert for VW, but rather part of a show reel that was leaked onto the web.

First, the spot was commented upon and passed among a number of different niche groups online, used as a way to express a number of different sentiments, but all with the purpose of articulating some form of value system or viewpoint. There were a number of blogs that posted the video in the spirit in which it was probably intended, citing its strength as an advertisement for being memorable and one discussion board post framed it with the saying that "anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of," aligning the video with the humor tactics of popular media like The Daily Show.

But a quick look at the trackbacks to one of the early posts on the blog Whizbang, which range from "disgusting" to "humor to the rescue," suggest that as the video spread more widely, it generated a wider range of interpretations of its message. Some blogs used it as a sort of war rally, with comments such as "perhaps we should start issuing (the Polo) to British forces" and "If only we could ship an entire fleet of these things to the Islamofascists world-wide." On the other side, it was framed as offensive and tasteless; It was pointed out on the Snopes.com article that the man in the commercial not only had a "distinctive middle eastern appearance," but was also wearing a checkered keffiyeh that was reminiscent of Yasser Arafat, suggesting a pointed political message at work.

One blog that specializes in media surrounding the Middle East juxtaposed a description of the video against an article about a poll which "highlights anti-Israeli feeling in Germany", while another site listed the video as the number one most racist commercial, even beating out ads from white supremacy organizations. The commercial was spread through a number of different interest communities with a range of opinions, but what they all have in common was that each used the ad to articulate specific values and agendas. The blog about racist commercials, for instance, was able to express anxiety over a long-standing pattern of negative stereotyping of various minorities. Other blogs that took a pro-war stance were able to use their attitude towards the situation portrayed in the video to create us/them distinctions on both a national level ("we" versus the "Islamofascists") and an ideological one, implicitly drawing a line between those who support the message and those who find the message offensive.

As we have seen, not all of these communities are as clearly defined as the African-American community Turner studied. Some communities may be pools, organized around shared interests, ranging from politics to pet care. Some may be webs, organized through the crisscrossing social affiliations of them members. And some may be hubs, structured around a central personality and their friends and followers. In some cases, the motives which shape the groups activities are clearly articulated and there is an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a member of such a community. They may be very aware of their shared agenda and have a critical perspective on what kinds of values shape their transactions. They may also have a vivid conception of the borders of their community and may aggressively police them against those who do not share their views.

They may have ambivalent or even hostile feelings about the circulation of meaningful content beyond the borders of their own community. Heather Hendershot (2004), for example, has documented the complex set of social negotiations which occur around the production and distribution of Christian music. She finds that this music is perceived as serving two very different goals -- reaffirming the shared values within Christian communities and serving as a vehicle for "witnessing" to those who have not yet accept Christ. Yet, as artists sought to insure their spread beyond the borders of the self-defined Christian community and thus reach potential new members, they often had to downplay those messages which signaled their membership, a process which often provoked ire from their most hardcore fans. The strategies which insured their circulation in the cultural mainstream might cause them to lose the support of their initial niche market.

Hendershot documents how different artists reconcile these contradictory pushes and pulls on their performance, making peace with the decision to remain within or move beyond their initial base of support. In each of these cases, though, the same core principle holds: the sharing of content with others is fundamentally an act of communication within and beyond cultural communities. When advertising spreads, it is because the community has embraced it as a resource for expressing its shared beliefs or pursuing its mutual interests. Community members have embraced the content because it allows them to say something that matters to them, often something about their relations to other community members. In that sense, it has acquired worth. But the worth of an advertisement may and often does differ from one community to another.

Spreadable Texts

As this circulation occurs, the original producer no longer is able to determine what a particular piece of content means because they are no longer able to control the context within which it is seen. Meanings proliferate as people pass the video on, inserting it into a variety of different conversations. Like an elaborate game of telephone, the message morphs and mutates as each successive viewer sees not the original intent, but the interpretations just prior to their own.

This kind of intervention, however, is not only the product of circulation, it is also the required precondition: content will spread only when it can serve the particular communicative purposes of a given community or group, and only community members can determine what those might be. Corporations cannot artificially build communities around their brands and products, but rather must allow their brands to be taken up by pre-existing communities by creating content that supports and sustains this kind of expressive appropriation. In other words, in the spreadable media landscape, companies must find ways not simply to motivate consumers to talk about their brands but also enable them to talk through their brands.

This is, of course, not a novel concept. Advertising, as Grant McCracken (1998) notes, has always been a tool for mapping generalized cultural meanings onto specific brands and those brands must be meaningfully inserted into the life-world of their consumers. Advertising may convince us that particular products may become good gifts because they convey shared values. Yet, in the spreadable media content, the advertisement may itself become a gift which we pass along to others we care about. As they do so, they remake the advertisement -- sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively -- to reflect their perceptions of themselves and of the people to whom they are giving it.

Right now, many companies fear this loss of centralized control over the circulation and interpretation of their brand messages. They want to hold onto the idea that a brand may carry a highly restricted range of meanings. But in doing so, they run the risk of removing the value of the brand as a vehicle for social and personal expression. They produce commodities which we can not consume and in the long run, they will become products we will not buy. So, the challenge is how to rethink advertising strategies to generate brand messages that support these processes of personalization and localization.

How to Make Content "Spreadable"

If sharing and spreading content is a sign of its popularity, then to understand what makes videos spread, we must first figure it out what it means for media to be "popular." In Understanding Popular Culture, media and communications scholar John Fiske (1989), draws a distinction between mass culture, that is culture which is mass produced and distributed, and popular culture, that is culture which has been meaningfully integrated into the everyday lives of consumers. This act of turning mass media into popular media involves "the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures" (Fiske, 1989, p.23).

We must be careful here not to confuse messages with meanings. For the purposes of this discussion, messages refer to specific ideas that can be encoded into a media text by its creators, while meanings are the active interpretations of the audience, which may or may not align with the intended message. To return again to our previous example, in the VW Polo ad spoof, the intended message was that the creators were witty, creative, and irreverent. The meanings that were drawn from it were varied, ranging from patriotic to racist. Messages are encoded into a text; meanings are decoded from the text.

Fiske argues we produce culture when we integrate products and texts into our everyday life. When we hear a song in a music video, it is part of mass culture. When we sing it in the shower, we turn it into popular culture. When it is under the control of its producers, it is mass culture. When it is under the control of its consumers, it is popular culture. Fiske, thus, puts strong emphasis on the act of interpretation which occurs as a text gets embraced by consumers. He argues a text becomes part of popular culture when consumers recognize and embrace its potential as a vehicle for expressing their own meanings. To read this through the lens of the gift economy, it is at that moment when the commodity becomes a gift and when its worth gets recognized.

Cultural products or commodities, like videos, are simply what Fiske calls the "raw material" for the production of popular culture. What makes culture popular, both widely accepted by and belonging to the public, is the ability of people to use it to express, define, and understand their social and cultural relationships. To bring this to "viral video", the video itself can be seen as a cultural commodity, but its user-controlled circulation transforms it into a cultural resource. In other words, we cannot think of popular culture as a top-down process of mass marketing, but a bottom-up process of creative interaction with cultural commodities, a relationship with media that is neither simply consumption nor production, but an active negotiation between the two.

Producerly Texts: Cultural Commodities that become Cultural Resources

To imagine this simply, a video will become popular if it allows to consumers to participate in the production of meaning and is transformed into a cultural resource through which they communicate something that matters to other members of their community. This sharing of texts and meanings becomes the basis for social affiliations and often re-articulates or reconfirms the group's shared values. Fiske argues that some texts are more apt to produce new meanings than others. He calls such texts producerly, arguing that a producerly text:

offers itself up to popular production . . . it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them -- it is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control" (Fiske, 1989, p.104).

In other words, a media product doesn't have to give up having a clearly defined message, but in so far as it limits its potential meanings, it also limits its potential circulation. Propaganda is not producerly because it sets too rigid a set of limits over its interpretation. A text which articulated an overly confusing or completely incomprehensible message might also not be producerly because it would not offer sufficient resources for consumers. The VW Polo ad, on the other hand, was highly producerly; It had an intent and a set of preferred meanings, but in the end it was left ambiguous enough, with enough open-ended details, that it could be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on the contexts into which it was spread and the ways it was deployed by consumers within localized conversations. A producerly video then is one that can be enjoyed and accessed on multiple levels. It can be taken at face value, but also leaves openings for deeper, more active interpretation.

Fiske's notion of the "producerly" introduces the general guiding principle for transforming cultural commodities into cultural resources: open, loose ends and gaps that allow the viewer to introduce their own background and experiences. Such openness allows them to convey something of themselves as they pass the content along, transforming the video into a resource for self-expression. While the media industries cannot themselves produce cultural resources, they can produce cultural commodities that are primed to be used as cultural resources. Such materials only become gifts when we choose to give them to someone else.

Advertising as "Producerly" Cultural Commodities

Such texts must be producerly, must be open to multiple interpretations and use, before they are spread. The tight control over the message doesn't just break down through the video's circulation. The loss of the producer's control over meaning is a precondition for the video's circulation. When people feel that they can have a stake in the content, when it can be used to represent themselves and their views somehow, they are inclined to share a video with others. We must keep in mind, however, that a commercial is not just any type of video. More so that general art or entertainment, commercials have an explicit functional purpose -- to help position material goods within a cultural context.

Publicity and advertising is used, for instance, to ensure that a particular brand of designer sunglasses evokes a sense of "coolness" within a particular niche of consumers. Historically, this has required much tighter control over their potential messages and thus the idea that consumers may appropriate and rework brand messages may generate a high degree of anxiety. Media producers worry about losing control. The reality is that they have already lost control; consumers can take their brands and do with them whatever they want. And the more producers do to reign in this grassroots creativity, the more they will take away the "worth" of their goods and devalue their content in the eyes of those consumers.

Therefore, in order to become cultural commodities that can be made "producerly," ads must sacrifice some of their functional purpose. We don't post and share clips just because of what we have to say about the ad, but also because of what it might have to say about us, so the ad must be capable of users express something beyond their affinity for the product it promotes. Only when commercials have enough ambiguity in meaning that they give up control of their promotional function can they develop the gaps and spaces to becomes producerly. When that happens, instead of giving meaning to a pair of sunglasses, the ad itself becomes a cultural commodity not unlike a pair of designer sunglasses that we can "wear."

We can post the video or the widget on our social network sites, say, and in so doing, signal something about ourselves. But in such a context, the brand messages does not entirely disappear. Each new viewer encounters it afresh and is reminded of the brand and its potential meanings for them. Users remain aware of the advertisement's sources and goals and thus they become part of the process by which meaning transfer occurs. We might consider, for example, what happens when the template created by the PC vs. Mac advertising campaign gets used as the basis for parody videos which apply its images to distinguish between other kinds of products, say, between Nintendo and Sony Playstation, between DC and Marvel, or between Republicans and Democrats. When we see these other uses of the template, we still recall, on some level, its original function as a way of promoting Apple. The repurposing allows the brand iconography to spread to new contexts, even as it offers us a way back to its original source.

References:

Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

Hendershot, Heather (2004). Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCracken, Grant (1988) Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Norris, Chuck (2007). "If I am elected president," World Net Daily.

Turner, Patricia Ann. (1994) I Heard it on the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Five): Communities of Users

This is part five of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.

Communities of Users

Rethinking the Individual Consumer

So, does it make sense any more to speak about media audiences or for that matter, consumers in this brave new world of spreadable media? Probably not. Witness the profusion of new terms which seek to describe "those people formerly known as the audience." (Rosen, 2006) Some call them (us, really) "loyals," (Jenkins 2006) stressing the value of consumer commitment in an era of channel zapping. Some are calling them "media-actives," (Frank 2004 stressing a generational shift with young people expecting greater opportunities to reshape media content than their parents did. Some are calling them "prosumers," (Toffler 1980) suggesting that as consumers produce and circulate media, they are blurring the line between amateur and professional. Some are calling them "inspirational consumers" (Roberts 2005), "connectors" or "influencers," suggesting that some people play a more active role than others in shaping media flows.

Recently Facebook was struggling with definitions such as these. In an aim to separate the users from the businesses, Facebook created a new profile category called 'pages'. When relating with a business' page, instead of becoming a friend, in usual Facebook fashion, the user becomes a fan. Six months after Facebook launched this new category, the terms are already starting to become murkier, and now in the users profile it no longer says "Jane is a fan of" but "Jane's Pages", the term is more open yet also more ambiguous. Andrew Lockhart, at the Thinking Interactive blog, suggests that companies might want to allow the user to define what type of relationship they want to have, between, for instance, fan, advocate, friend, coworker. Such a move would also give businesses a better understanding of how these users want to engage with them. Sometimes we just want to buy things which are adequate to the purposes we want to use them for but not so vital to our sense of ourselves that we want to proclaim them to other people. The Facebook interface offered too limited a range of options for expressing our diverse affiliations with brands. Even where consumers actively seek to spread your content or advocate for your brand, they want to do it on their own terms and may be very particular about the kind of language they use to describe this relationship.

For some time now it was thought that the way to insure this success was by reaching the so-called "influencers", this term comes from Malcom Gladwell's (2000) book The Tipping Point. As Gladwell puts it, "What we are really saying is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." Gladwell's "influencer" model has become almost an article of faith in most discussions of viral media. The most widely quoted example is the comeback made by Hush Puppies shoes, according to Gladwell, due to their adoption by specific Williamsburg tastemakers. He bases his theory on Stanley Milgram's 'Six Degrees of Separation' study, where 160 Nebraskans were instructed to send a letter to a particular stockbroker in Boston by giving it to someone they thought was socially closer to that person. As is now widely known, it took roughly 6 people for each letter to reach its destination. When Gladwell analyzed the study he discovered that it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link, and this is where the "influencers" theory comes from, determining that certain connectors are more important than others.

For the past seven years, network-theory scientist Duncan Watts (Dodds, Muhammad and Watts, 2003) has been studying these results and running other experiments of his own. After testing Miligram's theory with 61,000 people he confirmed the average length of the chain was in fact six links, but he did not find any evidence of "influencers". There were as many chances for a message to get passed by a "super-connected" person than by an average one. Messages move through society from one weakly connected individual to another. So the question now becomes, not how to reach the influencers, but how do individuals choose to behave in a networked society and what kinds of social structures best support the spread of content.

Yochai Benkler (2007) argues:

Human beings are and always have been diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification and social connectedness.

This seemingly simple statement further more complicates the idea of a networked society and hinders attempts to predict the way communities of users will act. On the other hand, this more nuanced vision allows us to have a deeper understanding of the diverse online behaviors. For instance, there are countless explanation for why people might join a particular social network or make the decisions they do when they come there.

According to Benkler, this shift into a networked information culture does improves the practical capacities of individuals in that:

1. It improves their capacity to do for and by themselves.
2. It enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others.
3. It improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

It is because of these empowered individuals, their new capacities, and their desire for social interactions that spreadable media is possible. If the technology was available, but society hadn't undergone any cultural changes, we would still be operating exclusively under a sticky model. Benkler has observed that this new society gives "individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make."

Consumers are choosing to be part of participatory culture in diverse and fluid ways. Forrester Research has developed a useful taxonomy of the types of participation that occur in networked environments; it starts with the most passive users and finishes with the most active participants that publish their own content at least once a month. It's important to note that while this ladder helps us visualize a complex process, users don't necessarily adhere permanently to these roles, and more than likely, behave in different manners within different communities. Moreover, seeing it as depicting a process of ever more intense engagement with media content may mask the degree to which it also describes an economy, with each rung of the ladder performing tasks which are needed to support those below and sometimes above them. So, even some one who is a lurker may provide a sense of empowerment to contributors by expanding the scale of the community and thus motivating them to put more effort into their work. Someone who is a critic may create value for creators but so may someone who collects what the creators create. And the interplay between these different kinds of cultural participants creates opportunities for communication to take place and thus for content to be transmitted.

Rethinking Communities

Such communities are also quite diverse in themselves. In fact, games scholar James Paul Gee (2004) has defined some of these groups as "affinity spaces," affinity that is, for a common endeavor. He argues that the romantic notions of community do not apply here as engaging with one another is a secondary objective, if it exists at all, in some cases, though it may be a primary objective in others. Gee is interested in the kinds of informal learning which takes place in the cultures of gamers, for example, which depend heavily on the sharing of knowledge towards common if sometimes contradictory goals. Such "affinity spaces" can provide greater motivation for the production and circulation of information, may offer a "hothouse" context where new ideas may emerge, may offer motivation for people to intensify their participation. We form non-exclusive relationships to these kinds of "affinity spaces": we may have multiple interests and thus we may engage with multiple different "affinity spaces" in the course of any given day. Older notions of community often started from assumptions of exclusive memberships, whereas this focus on social mobility and multiple commitments helps us to understand how content might spread quickly between different "affinity spaces" as members trade information from one site to another. Not all "affinity spaces" operate according to the same social dynamics. Lara Lee, from Jump Associates, has offered a promising typography for thinking about the social structures of different kinds of communities:

• Pools: Here people have loose associations with each other, but a strong association with a common endeavor or with the values of the community. Most brand communities are pools, so are most political organizations.
• Webs: Webs are organized through individual social connections, so the ties with each member are stronger and they operate in decentralized manner.
• Hubs: In a Hub, individuals form loose social associations around a central figure, as in the case of fan clubs. Hubs may form around brands but they are more likely to form around dynamic figures who embody the values of their company -- a figure like Microsoft's Bill Gates, say, or Virgin's Richard Branson. Such strategies only work when there is a clear connection between the brand's values and the personality of this central figure.

Each of these social structures may be valuable from the point of view of a brand or a media franchise. Hubs are most likely to be influenced through dominant figures, whereas the other two may be shaped by any member. Media content which supports shared activities is most apt to circulate through pools, while that which sustains social connections is most apt to be valued within webs.

Lee's taxonomy seek to understand what motivates our membership in particular kinds of shared social spaces. Others have sought to explain the different barriers to entry which shape alternative kinds of communities:

• Open: These spaces do not require any registration in order to participate. Users can leave anonymous posts, as is the case on some kinds of blogs or online forums. However, without some form of reputation system, the possibility of engaging in a common endeavor is more limited, resulting in short lived communal experiences. Members feel little or no strong emotional ties to such communities which they enter and exit on a whim. They may move through many such social spaces in the course of a single session online.
• Free registration: This is the most common way of implementing a space for a community exchange, it's present in the majority of social networks (the ones that operate by outside selection are the exception) and most blogs and message boards. This model has given sites like Amazon the necessary data to customize itself to its community's and individual user's needs. It's in these open and free communities where the spread of media is possible and successful.
• Purchase: These spaces function within the logic of a sticky model. They operate under the assumption that once you buy your way in, you will stay in. Evidently most of the content within these spaces is proprietary and its spread is limited. The transmission of desired content beyond its borders poses a threat to its subscription model, though closing off that content from wider circulation often makes it harder for potentially interested consumers to determine the value of what it has to offer. These spaces tend to be hubs with very little interaction between the users and it is this lack of strong social ties which has led to growing skepticism about so-called corporate communities.
• Outside Selection: These are closed spaces with gatekeeper. Their value is in their exclusivity and specificity, but due to their closed off nature, they don't encourage the spread of media, although they might generate buzz.

Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers. To achieve that, they must embrace what filmmaker Lance Weiler calls "The Scattershot Approach." The idea is to be available for your users in whichever way and every way they deem appropriate, be it through a web site, widget, RSS feed or embeddable video, making the process of finding and communicating with you as easy and enjoyable as possible. That may be the strongest incentive for shifting from a sticky paradigm, which often is a one-size-fits-all model, towards a spreadable paradigm, which allows consumers with diverse interests to retrofit your content to serve their local needs and interest. Your job is to make it available to them in a form where they can deploy it and often to provide them with the tools or widgets required to make it accessible to others within their communities.

References

Benkler, Yochai (2007). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Networks Transform Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Muhammad, Roby and Watts, Duncan J. (2003) "An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks." Science, 301(8), pp. 827-829.

Domb, Ana. (2008) "Bringing Awesome to Self-Distribution," Convergence Culture Consortium Blog,

Frank, Betsy (2004). "Changing Media, Changing Audiences." Remarks at the MIT Communication Forum, Cambridge, MA. April 1.

Gee, James (2004). Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things can make a Big Difference. Boston: Little Brown.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Lee, Lara. (2007) "Lara Lee on brand Community Pioneer Harley-Davidson." Boston University.

Lockhart, Andrew (2008). "The 9 Types of Brand Community Expanded." Thinking Interactive.

Roberts, Kevin (2005). Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands. New York:Powerhouse.

Rosen, Jay (2006). "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." PressThink, June 27.

Toffler, Alvin (1980). The Third Wave. New York: Morrow.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Three): The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture

This is part three of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting. The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture

Spreadability and the Moral Economy

Consumers, both individually and collectively, exert agency in the spreadability model: they are not impregnated with media messages; they select material that matters to them from the much broader array of media content on offer. They do not simply pass along static content; they transform the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs. Content does not remain in fixed borders but rather it circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictible directions, not the product of top-down design but rather of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.

Consumers do not simply consume; they recommend content they like to their friends who recommend it to their friends who recommend it on down the line. They do not simply "buy" cultural goods; they "buy into" a cultural economy which respects and rewards their participation. Nothing spreads widely in the new digital economy unless it engages and serves the interests of both consumers and producers. Otherwise, the circulation gets blocked by one side or the other, either through corporations constructing road blocks (legal or technical) upon its spread or through consumers refusing to circulate content which fails to serve their interests. Nothing generates value in this new digital economy unless the transaction is seen as meaningful to all involved.

Too often, Web 2.0-era companies speak about creating communities around their products and services, rather than recognizing that they are more often courting existing communities with their own histories, agendas, hierarchies, traditions, and practices. So, rather than talking about the Saturn "community" as a "consumer tribe" (Cova, Kozinets, and Shankar, 2007), we might more productively analyze what the contemporary car company has done to capture the interests and win the loyalty of a hundred year plus history of motorist clubs. The first model implies that Saturn can set the terms for the consumers interactions with the brand. The second suggests the motorist culture created its own values and aspirations which Saturn has to address if it's car is to gain a central place in its social life.

The same is true of fandoms: we tend to discuss them in very limiting terms, often in relation to a single text as in "Trekkers" or "Potterheads," when in fact, fans tend to move nomadically from text to text in the course of their involvement within fan culture. They may be drawn into fandom by a given text but quickly their conversation broadens to include a range of other works also embraced by fellow fans and when their interest in a particular franchise ends, many will shift their fan loyalties to other programmes which satisfy similar needs and interests. As a rule, we are misled when we focus on what media does to people rather than trying to understand what people are doing with media and why. We start from the premise that consumers only help facilitate the circulation of media content when it is personally and socially meaningful to them, when it enables them to express some aspect of their own self-perception or enables valued transactions that strengthen their social ties with others.

Courting communities is tricky. Forcing communities to talk about a certain product is almost impossible. These obstacles were swiftly dealt with in the construction of the site "Being Girl" which belongs to the Tampax and Always brands. As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff comment on their new book Groundswell:

Beingirl.com is not a community site about tampons. (Who would want to visit that?) It's about everything that young girls deal with. The site is very lightly branded and it's loaded with information about music, make-up, relationships and spaces for the girls to talk amongst themselves and with experts. Procter & Gamble had launched different versions of the sites in other parts of the world and also a Latina-geared version section of the US site called "Solo de Chikas: hot topic, cool musik and your place to speak out.

Tampax are courting a more specific community that is underrepresented in traditional marketing endeavors, undoubtedly hoping that this interest will entice the participants to become loyal Tampax/Always consumers. At the very least, though, P&G has opened a fluid communication channel with an elusive demographic. Bernoff and Li suspect that the site's success is due in part to the fact that P&G "solved the customers' problems instead of its own", the costumers were willing to share. Add subtle brand messages and free samples and P&G was able to become part of the dialogue from which it was previously excluded. A key takeaway here is that companies should figure out what existing communities are most likely to use their product and what they are doing with it; they should identify basic needs of that community and develop informational resources to support them.

Knowing that the community pre-exists the brand or franchises engagement with it means corporations need to legitimate their entrance into this space. In earlier white papers (Austin 2006), we have introduced the idea that participants in economic exchanges are governed by an implicit set of understandings about what is "right" and what is "legitimate" for each player to do. This is what social historian E.P. Thompson described as a "moral economy." The moral economy describes the set of social norms and mutual understandings which make it possible for two parties to do business with each other. In some cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short term self interest in favor of decisions which preserve long term social relations between participants. In a small scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to "cheat" a customer because they need to count on continued trade with this person over an extended period of time and thus need to build up their reputation within this community.

The measure of a moral economy is the degree to which participants trust each other to hold up their end of these implicit agreements. When there is a sudden and dramatic shift in the economic or technological infrastructure, as has occured with the introduction of digital media, it can create a crisis in the "moral economy," diminishing the level of trust within participating parties, and perhaps even wearing away the mechanisms which insure the legitimacy of economic exchanges. At such times, we can see all involved making bids for legitimation, that is proposing new models or frameworks through which parties may reach a new understanding of what should provide the basis for fair and meaningful interactions.

We can see, for example, notions of "file sharing" and "piracy" as two competing moral systems by which we might make sense of the circulation of media content, one put forth by consumers eager to legitimate their idea of the free exchange of content, the other put forth by the media industry eager to close off certain practices as "illegitimate" and damaging to their long term economic interests. The excessive rhetoric surrounding the circulation of music at the present time suggests just how far out of balance the moral understandings of producers and consumers have become. New technologies enable consumers to exert much greater impact on the circulation of media content than ever before but they also enable companies to police once private behavior as it takes on greater public dimensions. These shifts enable some to describe a crisis in copyright, others a crisis in fair use, and all sides to be more or less accurate in describing the tensions which have emerged.

Discussions of "viral media," or of what we are calling "spreadable" media, point to places where a new moral economy may be emerging. They allow us to map forms of audience participation which are seen as valuable to advertisers and media companies. Spreadable media represents an alternative framing of the free circulation of media content to the prevailing metaphor of "piracy."

Focusing on what we are calling here spreadability may thus offer us some tentative first steps towards renegotiating the social contract between media producers and consumers in a way which may be seen as legitimate and mutually rewarding to all involved. For this to occur, we need to understand that consumers and producers often follow different dictates, not simply because of competing economic interests, but because they have different motives, make different judgments about value, and follow different social obligations; in other words, they operate within separate and parallel economic orders. We might describe these two worlds as commodity culture and the gift economy. Certainly, most of us who have grown up in capitalist economies understand the set of expectations which shape the buying and selling of goods. Yet, we also operate in another social order which centers around the giving and accepting of gifts. One (commodity culture) places greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (gift economy) on social motives.

Something of the mismatch between these two worlds is suggested by Ian Condry (2004) in his discussion of file-sharing among music fans:

Unlike underwear or swimsuits, music falls into that 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 someone else's labor -- for free. In fact, if asked directly by a friend to share music, sharing is the only reasonable thing to do.

Within commodity culture, then, sharing music is economically damaging, whereas in the gift economy, the failure to share music is socially damaging. We are never going to resolve such conflicts until we develop a better model for thinking about the interface between the two.

Gift Giving and Reciprocity Online

In arguing that much of what goes on in cyberspace might be understood in terms of a gift economy, we are in fact making a claim which is at least as old as the web. Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community, for instance, mentions the gift economy as central to the relationships across the online world:

Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift economy in which people do things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions; different kinds of things become possible when this mind-set pervades. Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community. In the virtual community I know best, elegantly presented knowledge is a valuable currency....Sometimes you give one person more information than you would give another person in response to the same query, simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or agreeable...A sociologist might say that my perceived helpfulness increased my pool of social capital. I can increase your knowledge capital and my social capital at the same time by telling you something that you need to know, and I could diminish the amount of my capital in the estimation of others by transgressing the group's social norms. The person I help might never be in a position to help me, but someone else might be.

Rheingold describes the gift economy operating in virtual worlds less in terms of a tit-for-tat exchange of value but rather as part of a larger reputation system in which one's contributions to the group are ultimately recognized and respected, even if there is no direct and explicit negotiation of worth at the time someone makes their contributions.

Richard Barbrook (1998), another early cybertheorist, argued that the gift economy trumped commodity culture in the world view of those who were the first to form online communities:

For most of its users, the Net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas. When they go on-line, almost everyone spends most of their time participating within the gift economy rather than engaging in market competition. Because users receive much more information than they can ever give away, there is no popular clamour for imposing the equal exchange of the marketplace on the Net. Once again, the 'end of history' for capitalism appears to be communism.

Such values were built into the infrastructure of the web which was designed to facilitate the collaboration of scientists and researchers rather than to enable the metered access expected within a commodity culture.

In the world of the web, companies were relative late-comers, even though they now represent the dominant users of digital networks. As commercial values have spread into the web, they have had to negotiate with the older web ethos: there still remains great resistance to "spam," for example, as unwelcomed advertising, whereas commercials are taken more or less for granted in traditional broadcasting. Similarly, Stewart Brand (1995), another key thinker in the early history of web culture, evokes the idea of a gift economy to explain how companies create valued relations to their customers within this new cultural context. In short, Brand argues that for any company or business to succeed online they need to join the gift economy that defines online relations. "It means often giving away content." Online success is based on the build up of good will which companies can convert into economic transactions through other channels.

Many of these same assumptions about the ways that digital communities are shaped by the norms of a gift economy surfaced much more recently in danah boyd (2007)'s discussion of Facebook's introduction of a "gifting" function. Facebook gifts operate within each person's profile. Gift-giving is completely decentralized so people can choose gifts directly from their own profile page and pay Facebook through their account. Most gifts cost $1 and every once in a while Facebook offers a gift for free. Now the system is in place, manufacturing and reproduction costs are negligible, and, even though they work under a direct payment revenue model, Facebook adds value to the users' experience by letting them be in charge of distribution.

Features such as these are what make successful social networks different from a more complete contact directory. As boyd explains, the popularity and value of gifts on Facebook come from their somewhat intangible nature:

They do not have the same type of persistence as identity-driven purchases like clothing in (World of Warcraft). I think that it is precisely this ephemeralness that will make gifts popular. There are times for gift giving (predefined by society)...People write 'happy birthday' and send glitter for holidays...These expressions are not simply altruistic kindness. By publicly performing the holiday or birthday, the individual doing the expression looks good before her peers. It also prompts reciprocity so that one's own profile is then also filled with validating comments.

Yet despite their intangibility and ephemerality, Facebook's gift-driven economy is valuable, meaningful and crucial to the participation of many members of the network. In evoking the gift economy to talk about gifts which are bought and sold via Facebook, even as they are given freely to those in our social networks, boyd is acknowledging a permeability in the relations between commodity culture and the gift economy.

This should not be surprising: most of us purchase Christmas or birthday gifts at stores rather than making them ourselves and do not necessarily fear that their origins as commodities diminishes the sentiments that are expressed through their exchange. Whatever our myths may be about "gifts of the heart" and "labors of love," most of our gifts these days are manufactured and store bought. Yet, once we have made our purchases, the gift economy takes over and so to understand how digital goods circulate within and between social networks we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of how gift economies operate.

References

Austin, Alec. with Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, Ivan Askwith, and Sam Ford, (2006). Turning Pirates into Loyalists: The Moral Economy and an Alternative Response to File Sharing. Report Prepared for the Members of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Cambridge.

Barbrook, Richard (1998). "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy," First Monday, Vol. 3, No. 12 (December), accessed 30 March 2007.

Bernoff, Josh and Li, Charlene. (2008) Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press

boyd, danah (2007). "Facebook's Little Gifts." Apophenia. February 13.

Brand, Stewart (1995). "High Stakes in Cyberspace," Frontline, June 15.

Condry, Ian. (2004) "Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan," International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, pp.343-363

Cova, Bernard, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar (2007). Consumer Tribes. New York: Butterworth-Heinemann

Rheingold, Howard (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Thompson, E.P. (1971) "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century." Past and Present, No. 50, pp.76-136.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Two): Sticky and Spreadable -- Two Paradigms

This is part two of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting. Sticky and Spreadable - Two Paradigms

From Viral to Spreadability

It is not hard to understand why the idea of both memes and the media virus would be attractive to marketers. If the right meme was deployed, theory suggests, it would successfully acquire people, reaching more and more possible consumers as goes. Similarly, Rushkoff's notion of "viral" circulation appeals to advertisers because it allows them to give up control over little more than the specific path of dissemination. In this scenario, they are cast as purposeful agent zeros, unleashing a message that spreads through its own volition, the instructions of replication imbedded in the DNA of the campaign.

But if the rising anxieties over brand equity, appropriation of content, miscommunication, lack of communication, and the ultimate value of viral campaigns is any indication, many advertisers are well aware that this model of "viral" media, which doesn't account for individual or social agency, does not accurately reflect the present media landscape. The idea of the "media virus" breaks down because people are making conscious choices about what media they are passing along and about the forms within which they are circulating it. As we saw in the discussion of the LOLcat meme above, the core message may be manipulated or turned against the original authors as it spreads across the internet. Consumers have shown a remarkable ability to turn advertising slogans and jingles against the companies that originated them. Fans have highjacked popular stories to express profoundly different interpretations than those of their authors.

Metaphors of "viral media" and "memes" emerged during a period of transition in the relationship between consumers and producers: first, this terminology reflected a shift away from the push-based model of the broadcast era towards the pull-based model of the early internet (characterized by talk of "stickiness"); second, the teminology maintained use value as we moved from an era of personalized media towards the increasingly communal practices associated with the rise of social networks and the emergence of what industry guru Tim O'Reilly (2005) identified as "the architecture of participation."

It is somewhat ironic that the idea of the media virus emerged at the same time as a shift towards greater acknowledgment of consumers as participants in meaning making within the networked media space. Shenja van der Graaf, in her 2003 article "Viral Experiences: Do You Trust Your Friends?" maintains "the main feature of viral marketing is that it heavily depends on interconnected peers. Viral Marketing is therefore inherently social" (van der Graaf, 2003, p.8). van der Graaf uses "viral" to describe a condition of movement and distribution of content that is linked to network behavior, and cites participation within a socially networked system as a central requirement of "viral" behavior.

Each step along this process made media companies more dependent upon the active engagement of their consumers and increased the urgency of understanding how and why cultural content circulates. Talk of "memes" and "media viruses" gave a false sense of security at a time when the old attention economy was in flux, resulting in widespread uncertainity about what might motivate consumer "engagement" in this new context. Such terms promised a pseudo-scientific model for thinking about consumer behavior, one which kept power firmly in the hands of media producers. In practice, they simply mystified the process, limiting the industry's ability to understand the complex factors which now shape the creation of value through the circulation of content within these new social networks.

We believe that the confusion wrapped surrounding the concepts of "memes" and "viruses" are not going to be easily resolved. As we have seen, the terms are at once too encompassing and too limiting; they introduce false assumptions about how culture operate; they distort the power relations between producers and consumers at a time when media companies and brands need to learn to respect the increasingly empowered roles which their users are playing in the circulation and production of meaning around their products. Given these limits, these words mislead more than they clarify and need to be retired. To put it bluntly, the viral is not only sick; it's pushing up the daisies.

For that reason, we are proposing an alternative terminology, one which we think allows us to construct a more effective model that might inform future strategies. Rather than speaking about "viral media," we prefer to think of media as spreadable. Spreadability as a concept describes how the properties of the media environment, texts, audiences, and business models work together to enable easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a networked culture. Talking about spreadability invites us to ask four basic questions:

1. What aspects of the contemporary media environment support the spread of media across different communities?
2. How do consumers create value for themselves and for companies through their spread of media?
3. What properties of content make it more likely to be spread?
4. How do companies benefit from the spread of their content?

The concept of "spreadability" preserves much of what was useful about the earlier models -- the idea that the movement of messages from person to person, from community to community, over time increases their effectiveness, and expands their impact. It recognizes the ways that later theorists such as van der Graaf or Knoebel and Lankshear have revised the earliest, relatively static and passive conceptions of "memes" and "viruses" to reflect the realities of the new social web, while suggesting this emerging paradigm is so substantively different from the initial conceptualizations as to require a new terminology. This new "spreadable" model allows us to avoid metaphors of "infection" and "contamination" which over-estimate the power of media companies and underestimate the agency of consumers. In so far as these metaphors distort the actual factors shaping the spread of media content in a networked culture, they result in less than fully effective campaigns. In this emerging model, consumers play an active role in "spreading" content rather than being the passive carriers of viral media: their choices, their investments, their actions determine what gets valued in the new mediascape. Recentering the discussion on choices consumers make, rather than choices media companies make, forces advertising and entertainment companies to pay closer attention to consumer's motivations and thus to design content which better aligns with their interests; it will also allow companies to adopt policies which sustain rather than repress this desire to help circulate relevant material throughout their social networks.

While older models of "memes" and "media viruses" focused attention on how ideas replicate and propagate, a spreadability model assumes that value originates as much through the act of transformation as through direct circulation. Spreadability assumes a world where mass content gets repositioned as it enters into a range of different niche communities. When material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it necessarily imperfectly fits the needs of any given group of consumers. As content spreads, then, it gets remade -- either literally through various forms of sampling and remixing -- or figuratively via its insertion into ongoing conversations and interactions.

Such repurposing doesn't necessarily blunt or distort the goals of the original communicator. Rather, it may allow the message to reach new constituencies where it would otherwise have gone unheard. C3 affiliated researcher Grant McCracken (2005) points towards such a model when he suggests that the word consumer should be replaced by a new term, multiplier, to reflect the fact consumers expand the potential meanings that get attached to a brand by inserting it into a range of unpredicted contexts of use.

There is something in the term that invites us to ask whether the product, brand, innovation, campaign does actually give the "multiplier" anything he can, er, multiply.... Furthermore, "multipiers" also bids us ask, down the road, whether indeed the product, brand, innovation actually produced anything in the world. Did the multipliers multiply it, or is it still just sitting there? Finally, the term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work.

We might compare these brand "multipliers" to "lead users" (Von Hippel, 2006): lead users (Ford, 2006) enable user innovation, helping to find and fix flaws, identify new markets, or model new uses of manufactured goods once they have shipped to market; these "multipliers" perform some of this same work for cultural goods, taking them places and deploying them in ways that would not have been envisioned by the people who produced them. Some of those uses will be tangential to the goals of the media companies; some may generate alternative sources of profit; some may expand the potential audience for entertainment properties or open the brand message to new interpretations and uses.

Consumers in this model are not simply "hosts" or "carriers" of alien ideas, but rather grassroots advocates for materials which are personally and socially meaningful to them. They have filtered out content which they think has little relevance to their community, while focusing attention on material which they think has a special salience in this new context. Spreadability relies on the one true intelligent agent -- the human mind -- to cut through the clutter of a hyper-mediated culture and to facilitate the flow of valuable content across a fragmented marketplace. Under these conditions, media which remains fixed in its location and static in its form fails to generate sufficient public interest and thus drops out of these ongoing conversations.

Spreadable and Sticky -- Two Models of Media Contact

We can understand what we mean by spreadablity by way of a contrast with earlier notions of "stickiness." A review of the top ten hits on Google for "stickiness" offers us a fairly consistent sense of the word's current functional definition. The term "sticky" first and foremost refers to websites which "grab and hold the attention of your visitor" (Meredian, n.d.). Some writers argue that "(customers will) come back and buy more goods, get more advice, and see more ads" (Sanchez, n.d.). Most others measure stickiness in terms of how long the visitor stays on a single visit or how many different pages the visitors looks at in the course of their stay.

Stickiness reflected the assumptions of personalized media: its central unit is the individual consumer. As one writer explains, "Measuring stickiness means that you'll have to track what individuals do, not just mass movements on your site. So you'll have to have them register or place cookies on their computers if you really want to know that much detail." (Nemeth-Johannes, n.d.) And stickiness is associated with pre-structured interactivity rather than open-ended participation with games, quizzes, and polls seen as devices for attracting and holding the interests of consumers.

This emphasis on "stickiness" was closely associated with the ongoing discussion of "push vs. pull" technologies: stickiness reflects anxiety about attracting and holding viewer interest in a world where consumers have to actively seek out the content they desire. Under the stickiness model, value comes either through charging for access to information (through some kind of subscription or service fee), by selling merchandise to consumers through some kind of e-commerce catalog, or by selling the eyeballs of site visitors to some outside party, most often to advertisers.

Sites such as Amazon or eBay represent the triumph of this "stickiness" model -- both sites depend greatly on the return of highly committed and strongly motivated consumers and upon multiple transactions per visit. Yet, even these sites depend on word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers, who more often than not discuss their interactions in other contexts, thus helping "spread" the word to potential visitors. As early as 1996 Amazon launched its highly successful affiliate marketing program, which offers designated 'Associates' as much as ten percent in referral fees for purchases made by visitors they helped to attract to retailer's sites. Consumers are encouraged to link their homepages or blogs back to Amazon, providing incentives for them to help increase their community's awareness of the site's products and services.

This program reflects the core insight that different books would be of interest within different communities, that people were more likely to buy books when they were recommended by people they already trusted in other contexts, and that discussion of books emerged organically in the midst of a range of other conversations and interactions. The Associates program, thus, reflects the value which comes in "spreading" one's message across a range of niche communities rather than seeking simply to attract and hold the attention of site visitors.

Put schematically, we might map nine core distinctions between Stickiness and Spreadability:

1. Stickiness seeks to attract and hold the attention of site visitors; Spreadability seeks to motivate and facilitate the efforts of fans and enthusiasts to "spread" the word.
2. Stickiness depends on concentrating the attention of all interested parties on a specific site or through a specific channel; spreadability seeks to expand consumer awareness by dispersing the content across many potential points of contact.
3. Stickiness depends on creating a unified consumer experience as consumers enter into branded spaces; spreadability depends on creating a diversified experience as brands enter into the spaces where people already live and interact.
4. Stickiness depends on prestructured interactivity to shape visitor experiences; spreadability relies on open-ended participation as diversely motivated but deeply engaged consumers retrofit content to the contours of different niche communities.
5. Stickiness typically tracks the migrations of individual consumers within a site; Spreadability maps the flow of ideas through social networks.
6. Under stickiness, a sales force markets to consumers; under spreadability, grassroots intermediaries become advocates for brands.
7. Stickiness is a logical outgrowth of the shift from broadcasting's push model to the web's pull model; spreadability restores some aspects of the push model through relying on consumers to circulate the content within their own communities.
8. Under stickiness, producers, marketers, and consumers are separate and distinct roles; spreadability depends on increased collaboration across and even a blurring of the distinction between these roles.
9. Stickiness depends on a finite number of channels for communicating with consumers; spreadability takes for granted an almost infinite number of often localized and many times temporary networks through which media content circulates.

In short, for media companies to fully grasp the advantages of spreadability, they have to unlearn the lessons of "stickiness," lessons which may be less effective than they once seemed, as a consequence of the next phase of evolution in the media ecology.

Not surprisingly, many sites today struggle to balance between these two competing models, often resulting in disappointment. Consider, for example, the case of Sonific, an early experiment in adopting the spreadable media model within the music industry. In 2006, Sonific offered 'customizable, flexible, Flash-based music widgets' enabling users to stream one or more songs from the Sonific catalog to almost any webpage. Material from Sonfic's catalog could be included in nearly any web-based application -- from modest blogs to social network pages and slideshows. Users could customize playlists and embed music from the catalog into their sites.

Sonfic offered full-length-tracks as free, promotional streams, operating under the "You hear, you like, you buy," rule proposed by UCE Birmingham Professor Andrew Dubber. By early 2008 Sonific had licensed over 200,000 tracks and had 80,000 users, but as of May 1 the service has closed operations citing unworkable licensing with the major record labels.

It seems that the industry's major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

- Sonific's CEO Gerd Leonhard, 2008.

The service's demise is certainly due, in part at least, to the recording industry's resistance to a spreadable model, a model that would actually encourage music fans to distribute content through decentralized networks. The music industry's anxieties about piracy lead them to want to lock down content rather than encouraging consumers to shape its circulation. All of this suggests a moment of transition: old assumptions are going to be hard to displace. For some industries and for some purposes, the sticky model will maintain even as other sectors of the branded entertainment sector are moving towards a more spreadable model. In the short term, we argue that companies need to know what model they are choosing and why.

The focus on spreadable media requires greater attention be paid to the social relations between media producers and consumers. There are significant differences between what motivates consumers to spread content and what motivates producers to seek the circulation of their brands. These differences can be understood in terms of the contrast between commodity culture and the gift economy.

References

Ford, Sam, with Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken, Parmesh Shahani, Ivan Askwith, Geoffrey Long and Ilya Vedrashko (2006). Fanning the Audience's Flames: Ten Ways to Embrace and Cultivate Fan Communities, Report Prepared for the Members of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Cambridge.

Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin (2007). New Literacies: Everyday Practices & Classroom Learning. Open University Press

Leonhard, Gerd. "Sonific Goes Offline on May 1 2008", Sonific.

McCracken, Grant (2005). "'Consumers' or 'Multipliers': A New Language for Marketing?," This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, November 10.

Meredian Design (n.d.) "Make It Sticky, Make 'Em Stay,"

Nemeth-Johannes, Cindy (n.d.) "Making Sticky Websites," The ABCs of Small Business.

O'Reilly, Tim (2005). "What is Web 2.0?," September 30.

Sanchez, Marcos (n.d.) "Eight Ways to Sticky Sites." Fuse.

van der Graaf, Shenja. "Viral Experiences: Do You Trust Your Friends," (author version), in Sandeep Krishnamurthy (ed.). Contemporary Research in E-Marketing, University of Washington. ed.. Pennsylvania: Idea Publishing, pp.166-185

Von Hippel, Eric (2006). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes

Over the next eight posts, I am going to be serializing a white paper which was developed last year by the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic of Spreadable media. This report was drafted by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.

I was able to share some of the key insights from this research during my opening remarks at the Futures of Entertainment conference last fall, where they have sparked considerable discussion within the branded entertainment sector. We are hoping that sharing this work in progress with you will spark further debate, allowing us to tap the collective intelligence of our readers. Green, Sam Ford, and I are developing this research into a book, which will further map how information circulates across the emerging media landscape.

Introduction: Media Viruses and Memes

Use of the terms "viral" and "memes" by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers. Definitions of 'viral' media suffer from being both too limiting and too all-encompassing. The term has 'viral' has been used to describe so many related but ultimately distinct practices -- ranging from Word-of-Mouth marketing to video mash-ups and remixes posted to YouTube -- that just what counts as viral is unclear. It is invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors. Needless, the concept of viral distribution is useful for understanding the emergence of a spreadable media landscape. Ultimately, however, viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or adhoc networks of consumers.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication -- that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry. A close look at particular examples of Internet "memes" or "viruses" highlight the ways they have mutated as they have traveled through an increasingly participatory culture.

Given these limitations, we are proposing an alternative model which we think better accounts for how and why media content circulates at the present time, the idea of spreadable media. A spreadable model emphasizes the activity of consumers -- or what Grant McCracken calls "multipliers" -- in shaping the circulation of media content, often expanding potential meanings and opening up brands to unanticipated new markets. Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of "memes," a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain 'purity' of message.

In this section, we will explore the roots of the concept of viral media, looking at the concept of the "media viruses" and its ties to the theory of the "meme." The reliance on a potent biological metaphor to describe the process of communication reflects a particular set of assumptions about the power relations between producers, texts, and consumers which may obscure the realities these terms seek to explain. The metaphor of "infection" reduces consumers to the involuntary "hosts" of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream." While attractive, such a notion doesn't reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes. A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations.

In the following, we will outline the limits of these two analogies as part of making the case for the importance of adopting a new model for thinking about the grassroots circulation of content in the current media landscape. In the end, we are going to propose that these concepts be retired in favor of a new framework -- Spreadable Media.

Definitional Fuzziness

Consider what happened when a group of advertising executives sat down to discuss the concept of viral media, a conversation which demonstrates the confusion about what viral media might be, about what it is good for, and why it's worth thinking about. One panelist began by suggesting viral media referred to situations "where the marketing messaging was powerful enough that it spread through the population like a virus," a suggestion the properties of viral media lie in the message itself, or perhaps in those who crafted that message. The second, on the other hand, described viral media in terms of the activity of consumers: "Anything you think is cool enough to send to your friends, that's viral." Later in the same exchange, he suggested "Viral, just by definition, is something that gets passed around by people."

As the discussion continued, it became clearer and clearer that viral media, like art and pornography, lies in the eye of the beholder. No one knew for sure why any given message "turned viral," though there was lots of talk about "designing the DNA" of viral properties and being "organic" to the communities through which messages circulated. To some degree, it seemed the strength of a viral message depends on "how easy is it to pass", suggesting viralness has something to do with the technical properties of the medium, yet quickly we were also told that it had to do with whether the message fit into the ongoing conversations of the community: "If you're getting a ton of negative comments, maybe you're not talking about it in the right place."

By the end of the exchange, no one could sort out what was meant by "viral media" or what metrics should be deployed to measure its success. This kind of definitional fuzziness makes it increasingly difficult to approach the process analytically. Without certainty about what set of practices the term refers to, it is impossible to attempt to understand how and why such practices work.

As already noted, the reliance on a biological metaphor to explain the way communication takes place -- through practices of 'infection' -- represents the first dificulty with the notion of viral media. The attraction of the infection metaphor is two-fold:

1. It reduces consumers, often the most unpredictable variable in the sender-message-receiver frame, to involuntary "hosts" of media viruses;
2. While holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream."

Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book Media Virus may not have invented the term "viral media", but his ideas eloquently describe the way these texts are popularly held to behave. The media virus, Rushkoff argues, is a Trojan horse, that surreptitiously brings messages into our homes -- messages can be encoded into a form people are compelled to pass along and share, allowing the embedded meanings, buried inside like DNA, to "infect" and spread, like a pathogen. There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that this spread of ideas and messages can occur not only without the user's consent, but perhaps actively against it, requiring that people be duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content. Douglas Rushkoff insists he is not using the term "as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses . . . (such as) the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS" (Rushkoff, 9, emphasis his).

Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The "protein shell" of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero -- as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code -- not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call "memes" (Rushkoff, p.9-10).

The "hidden agenda" and "embedded meanings" Rushkoff mentions are the brand messages buried at the heart of viral videos, the promotional elements in videos featuring Mentos exploding out of soda bottles, or Gorillas playing the drumline of In the Air Tonight . The media virus proposition is that these marketing messages -- messages consumers may normally avoid, approach skeptically, or disregard altogether -- are hidden by the "protein shell" of compelling media properties. Nestled within interesting bits of content, these messages are snuck into the heads of consumers, or wilfully passed between them.

These messages, Rushkoff and others suggest, constitute "memes", conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a sort of cultural version of the gene. Dawkins was looking for a way to explain cultural evolution, imagining it as a biological system. What genes are to genetics, he suggested, memes would be to culture. Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics:

1. Fidelity -- memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;
2. Fecundity -- memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;
3. Longevity -- memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.

The meme, then, is "a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds" (Brodie, 1996, p. 32). They are the ideas at the center of virally spread events, some coherent, self-replicating idea which moves from person-to-person, from mind-to-mind, duplicating itself as it goes.

Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation (Dawkins, 1976, p.189).

Dawkins remained vague about the granularity of this concept, seeing it as an all-purpose unit which could explain everything from politics to fashion. Each of these fields are comprised of good ideas, good ideas which, in order to survive, attach themselves to media virii -- funny, catchy, compelling bits of content -- as a vehicle to infect new minds with copies of themselves.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. (Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992, p.399)

Though imagined long before the rise of the Internet and the Web, the idea of the meme has been widely embraced as a way of talking about the rapid dispersion of informationn and the widespread circulation of concepts which characterize the digital era. It has been a particularly attractive way to think about the rise of Internet fads like the LOLcats or Soulja Boy, fads considered seemingly trivial or meangingless. The content which circulates in such a fashion is seen as simplistic, fragmentary, and essentially meaningless, though it may shape our beliefs and actions in significant ways. Wired magazine (Miller, 2007) recently summed it up as a culture of "media snacks":

We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).

This description of snacks implies that they are without nutritional value, trivial or meaningless aspect of our culture, a time waste. And if this meaningless content is self-replicating then consumers are "irrational," and unable to escape their infection. Yet these models -- the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist -- is a problematic way to understand cultural practices. We want to suggest that these materials travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them. At the most fundamental level, such an approach misunderstands the way content spreads, which is namely, through the active practices of people. As such, we would like to suggest:

1. That "memes" do not self-replicate;
2. That people are not "susceptible" to this viral media;
3. That viral media and Internet memes are not nutritionally bereft, meaningless 'snacks'.

The Problem of Agency

Central to the difficulties of both the meme and the media virus models is a particular confusion about the role people play in passing along media content. From the start, memetics has suffered from a confusion about the nature of agency. Unlike genetic features, culture is not in any meaningful sense self-replicating -- it relies on people to propel, develop and sustain it. The term 'culture' originates from metaphors of agriculture: the analogy was of cultivating the human mind much as one cultivates the land. Culture thus represents the assertion of human will and agency upon nature. As such, cultures are not something that happen to us, cultures are something we collectively create. Certainly any individual can be influenced by the culture which surrounds them, by the fashion, media, speech and ideas that fill their daily life, but individuals make their own contributions to their cultures through the choices which they make. The language of memetics, however, strips aside the concept of human agency.

Processes of cultural adaptation are more complex than the notion of meme circulation makes out. Indeed, theories for understanding cultural uptake must consider two factors not closely considered by memetics: human choice and the medium through which these ideas are circulated. Dawkins writes not about how "people acquire ideas" but about how "ideas acquire people." Every day humans create and circulate many more ideas than are actually likely to gain any deep traction within a culture. Over time, only a much smaller number of phrases, concepts, images, or stories survive. This winnowing down of cultural options is the product not of the strength of particular ideas but of many, many individual choices as people decide what ideas to reference, which to share with each other, decisions based on a range of different agendas and interests far beyond how compelling individual ideas may be. Few of the ideas get transmitted in anything like their original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs. Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process reveals little about the spread of these concepts.

By the same token, ideas circulate differently in and through different media. Some media allow for the more or less direct transmission of these ideas in something close to their original form -- as when a video gets replayed many times -- while others necessarily encourage much more rapid transformations -- as occurs when we play a game of "telephone" and each person passing along a message changes it in some way. So, it makes little sense to talk about "memes" as an all-purpose unit of thought without regard to the medium and processes of cultural transmission being described. Indeed, discussing the emergence of Internet memes, education researchers Michael Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2007) suggest Dawkins' notion of memetic 'fidelity' needs to be done away with altogether. Defining the Internet meme as the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea, presented as a written text, image, language, "'move' or some unit of cultural "stuff", Knobel and Lankshear suggest adaptation is central to the propogation of memes:

Many of the online memes in this study were not passed on entirely 'intact' in that the meme 'vehicle' was changed, modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by participants...A concept like 'replicability' therefore needs to include remixing as an important practice associated with many successful online memes, where remixing includes modifying, bricolaging, splicing, reordering, superimposing, etc., original and other images, sounds, films, music, talk, and so on. (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, p.208-209)

Their argument is particularly revealing as a way to think about just what comprises the object at the heart of the Internet meme. The recent "LOLcat" Internet meme, built so heavily upon remixing and appropriation, is a good case study to illustrate the role of remixing in Internet memes. "LOLcats" are pictures of animals, most commonly cats, with digitally superimposed text for humorous effect. Officially referred to as "image macros," the pictures often feature "LOLspeak", a type of broken English that enhances the amusing tone of the juxtaposition. On websites such as icanhascheezburger.com, users are invited to upload their own "LOLcats" which are then shared throughout the web.

Over time, different contributors have stretched the "LOLcat" idea in many different directions which would not have been anticipated by the original posters -- including a whole strand of images centering around Walruses and buckets, the use of "LOLspeak" to translate religious texts (LOLbible) or represent complex theoretical arguments, the use of similar image macros to engage with Emo culture, philosophy (loltheorists), and dogs (LOLdogs, see: ihasahotdog.com).

So just what is the "meme" at the centre of this Internet meme? What is the idea that is replicated? More than the content of the pictures, the "meme" at the heart of this Internet phenomenon is the structure of the picture itself --the juxtaposition, broken English, and particularly the use of irreverent humor. Given the meme lies in the structure, however -- how to throw the pot rather than the pot itself -- then the very viability of the meme is dependent on the ability for the idea to be adapted in a variety of different ways. In this sense, then, it is somewhat hard to see how contained within this structure is a "message" waiting to occupy unsuspecting minds.

The re-use, remixing and adaptation of the LOLcat idea instead suggest that the spread and replication of this form of cultural production is not due to the especially compelling nature of the LOLcat idea but the fact it can be used to make meaning. A similar situation can be seen in the case of the "Crank Dat" song by Soulja Boy, which some have described as one of the most succesful Internet memes of 2007. Soulja Boy, originally an obscure amateur performer in Atlanta, produced a music video for his first song "Crank Dat", which he uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube. Soulja Boy then encouraged his fans to appropriate, remix, and reperform the song, spreading it through social networks, YouTube, and the blogosphere, in the hopes of gaining greater visibility for himself and his music.

Along the way, Crank Dat got performed countless times by very different communities -- from white suburban kids to black ballet dancers, from football teams to MIT graduate students. The video was used as the basis for "mash up" videos featuring characters as diverse as Winnie the Pooh and Dora the Explorer. People added their own steps, lyrics, themes, and images to the videos they made. As the song circulated, Soulja Boy's reputation grew -- he scored a record contract, and emerged as a top recording artist. -- in part as a consequence of his understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural content circulates within a participatory culture.

The success of "Crank Dat" cannot be explained as the slavish emulation of the dance by fans, as the self-replication of a "compelling" idea. Rather, "Crank Dat" spread the way dance crazes have always spread - through the processes of learning and adaptation by which people learn to dance. As CMS student Kevin Driscoll discusses, watching others dance to learn steps and refining these steps so they express local experience or variation are crucial to dance itself. Similarly, the adaptation of the LOLcat form to different situations -- theory, puppies, politicians -- constitute processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them.

Next Time: We will compare and contrast "stickiness" and "spreadability" as competing paradigms shaping the practices of web 2.0.

References

Brodie, Richard (1996). Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Seattle: Integral Press

Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin (2007). New Literacies: Everyday Practices &

Classroom Learning. Open University Press

McCracken, Grant (2005a). "'Consumers' or 'Multipliers': A New Language for

Marketing?," This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics,

November 10.

Miller, Nancy (2007). "Minifesto for a New Age," Wired, March.

Rushkoff, Douglas. (1994) Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York:

Ballantine.

Stephenson, Neil (1992). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam.

Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

The above video is one of a large number posted via Youtube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening.

Huma Yusuf, a recently graduate Comparative Media Studies student, has shared an important analysis of the role which grassroots media played during the crisis through the Center for Future Civic Media website. While in our program, Yusuf wrote a thesis, "Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi, Pakistan," which she hopes to turn into a book about how everyday citizens in her home city make sense of the everyday experience of political violence. A native of Pakistan and a professional journalist, Yusuf offers a significant third world perspective to our understanding of the impact of new media on the public sphere. There's a wealth of significant information, including links to key blogs and videos, contained in "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)."

Yusuf's analysis was deeply informed by concepts she learned during her time in the Comparative Media Studies Program and her involvement with the Center for Future Civic Media, especially her understanding of the "hybrid" and "converged" media landscape which effected the flow of communications in her home land and her consideration of the ways that mobile technologies might be helping to close the participation gap, offering unique ways of bridging between the discourse of university students and the average man and woman in the street. In the post that follows, I want to flag some of her key findings in hopes that they intrigue you enough to check out the fuller report.

Yusuf offers this summary of the report's key findings:

This research finds that the Pakistani media landscape is multifaceted, comprising a combined--or alternating--use of different mainstream media sources, digital technologies, and new media platforms, depending on availability and security. Moreover, the study finds that the participation gap--the ability to meaningfully use digital technologies and new media--impacts participatory behavior and civic action far more than the digital divide, which is often overcome through the combined use of different technologies. The study also concludes that new media platforms are increasingly effective as tools for community organizing and information dissemination, that authoritarian regimes are quick to adapt digitally networked technologies to their own ends, and that news reporting in Pakistan is gravitating towards a hybrid model whereby old and new media platforms collaborate to keep the public informed.

Over the several month long crisis, the government sought to repress alternative channels of communication almost as fast as they emerged, yet activists and citizen journalists were able to exploit the proliferation of different communications channels to stay one step ahead of censorship:

As an increasing number of Pakistanis turned to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and SMS text messages as alternate media portals, the government clamped down on these sources. Between March 2007 and February 2008, cellphone networks were jammed, internet service providers were instructed to block the YouTube website, internet connectivity was limited or shut down, and blogging softwares were banned. Moreover, the authorities came to monitor the public's use of new media platforms: images of anti-government rallies posted to Flickr were used to identify and arrest protesters....

The only antidote to the government's control of digital and new media tools, this paper shows, was the widening of the networked public sphere to include Pakistanis in the diaspora and global media sources. For example, when the government blocked news channels and jammed cellular networks in November 2007, young Pakistanis across the globe continued to plan and organize protest rallies via the social networking site Facebook. Similarly, when university students demanding the restoration of an independent judiciary realized that security officials had prevented journalists from covering their protest, they submitted self-generated video clips and images to CNN's iReport, an online citizen journalism initiative. Indeed, as Pakistan's media landscape became a hybrid model in which professional and amateur journalists generated and disseminated news by whatever means possible, international mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the BBC, and the UK-based Channel 4 increasingly sought out hyperlocal reporting posted to local blogs, YouTube, and Facebook.

As students and other concerned citizens began to recognize the growing centrality of these grassroots modes of communication to public understanding of the crisis, they took on more and more responsibility, insuring detailed documentation, taking their cell phone cameras into the streets to record what was happening and sending it to the outside world as quickly as possible. Often, students inside Pakistan were working in concert with Pakistani students elsewhere to insure the smooth flow of information. Yusuf, for example, cites the efforts of Harvard undergraduate Samad Khurram, who helped mobilize protesters in Pakistan from his Cambridge dorm room by maintaining an important newsletter and mailing list.

In some cases, especially in regard to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, citizen journalists played a key role in undermining official accounts:

Soon after Bhutto's death had been verified, its cause was contested. Eyewitnesses in Rawalpindi reported hearing gunshots before an explosion. Members of Bhutto's entourage and her colleagues in the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) claimed that the leader had been shot. In the immediate wake of the attack, a team of doctors examined her body and stated in a report that she had an open wound on her left temporal region. A day after the assassination, government officials claimed that Bhutto had died when her head hit the lever of the sunroof of her car as she ducked to avoid an assassin's bullets and/or in response to the sound of a blast caused by a suicide bomber. The question of whether Bhutto died of gunshot wounds or a head injury riveted the nation because the truth would have implications on allegations about lax security and government complicity in the assassination.

An important piece of evidence to help settle this debate came in the form of images and an amateur video generated by a PPP supporter at the rally where Bhutto was killed and subsequently circulated by a popular Karachi-based blogger. By making the footage and images available to the mainstream media and public at large, these citizen journalists sparked an accountability movement that eventually forced the Pakistani government to revisit its account of Bhutto's death.

The web also served ritual functions in the aftermath of Bhutto's death, providing a means for the country as a whole to mourn the passing of a popular leader:

New media platforms were also embraced by young Pakistanis looking to express and archive their grief at the news of Bhutto's passing. Hours after her death, YouTube was inundated with tributes to Bhutto that edited together images from her life to the soundtrack of spiritual music or the national anthem. Online memorial websites such as Respectance.com also became spaces for national mourning featuring biographies and images of Bhutto, testimonies from Pakistanis across the diaspora, and memories of interactions with her. Flickr was also used as a memorial site, as users uploaded their favorite images of the former prime minister, tagged them with prayers and appreciative titles, or contextualized them with commentary on her legacy. Other users uploaded images of flowers and gardens as gifts for the departed leader. The popular social networking site Facebook also became a venue for reactions to Bhutto's death and the news of her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari's appointment as her successor. In the wake of Bhutto's death, over 400 Facebook groups commemorating her or showing solidarity with her politics emerged on the site.

Here, I am reminded of the ways digital media served similar functions for American students in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings or for that matter, although the web was at a different stage of its development, in the aftermath of 9/11.

When mainstream journalists were blocked from overseeing the elections in Pakistan, citizen journalists took on new responsibilities to monitor the polls and to spread the word about political violence:

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), an independent coalition of non-governmental organizations, enlisted over 20,000 civilians to observe polling stations and pre-election campaigning in more than 250 election zones. Such recruitment was unprecedented in FAFEN's history. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, the executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, another election monitoring group, said, "Never before has there been such large-scale mobilization for a Pakistani election.... The role civil society is playing has been a real positive."...

Mediated civic engagement was not restricted to activists, citizen journalists, and civilian monitors alone. On election day, average voters used SMS text messages to urge their friends, family, and colleagues to vote. One SMS that was widely circulated on the morning of the elections read: "With the elections, lets all light a flame of hope, that we will not let Pakistan be destroyed by people who are not part of us." Moreover, SMS text messages were used to counter widespread fear that there would be violence and bomb blasts at polling stations.

In the west, we often think of these tools -- Flickr, YouTube, text messaging -- primarily in terms of their place in our social and recreational lives. I've often argued that we are acquiring through our play and through our consumption of popular culture skills and knowledge which we will later deploy towards more serious ends in changing the world around us. I've also suggested that the recent presidential campaign pointed to many different ways that candidates and movements were building a bridge between participatory culture and participatory culture. In Yusuf's report on the Pakistan crisis, a somewhat different pattern emerges:

In Pakistan, however, access to information--rather than the desire to participate--has driven the adoption of new media platforms. When old media distribution channels were compromised, new media was harnessed to fill in the gaps and maintain a flow of news and information. As such, new media in Pakistan has helped old media survive. The result is a media amalgamation in which information is pushed to the public, promiscuously distributed across broadcast media, new media platforms, and various digital technologies to prevent being disrupted or corrupted by the authorities. Thanks to amateurs and activists, students and concerned civilians, a nugget of information can leap from local televised news broadcasts to YouTube to SMS text message to FM radio broadcasts to blog posts to international news reports--whatever it takes to go public.

It would be a mistake to conclude this paper with the impression that digital technologies and new media platforms are the exclusive preserve of educated and privileged activists and citizen journalists, used solely for information dissemination and community organizing. Indeed, some of the best uses of new media and digital technologies address highly localized issues and are emergent, ad hoc, and culturally specific. For example, the residents of Karachi occasionally create an ad hoc, networked public sphere using FM radio broadcasts, cellphones, and landline connections not only to negotiate urban violence, as they did during the Emergency, but also to navigate flash floods during the monsoon, negotiate bad traffic owing to construction, and monitor protest rallies through the city.

This shows how people empowered by creativity and a commitment to aiding their community can use old and new media technologies to make a difference, even on an ad hoc basis. The sheer pervasiveness of new media platforms and digital technologies in Pakistan is leading to a situation whereby not only the digital divide, but also the participation gap, is being narrowed in ways that are unpredictable and unfamiliar, yet highly sustainable because locally relevant.

Yusuf's conclusion suggests that the local conditions in Pakistan, especially in regard to mobile media, resulted in considerable experimentation and innovation -- born as much from desperation as from entrepreneurship -- in how new media tools can be deployed towards civic ends. One reason the Center for Future Civic Media commissioned Yusuf to prepare her report was our recognition that we might have much to learn about the deployment of networked publics in our own society through a better understanding of the techniques which have emerged in Pakistan.

The Many Lives of The Batman (Revisited): Multiplicity, Anime, and Manga

Writing in 1991, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (the co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program) used the Batman as an example of the kinds of pressures being exerted on the superhero genre at a moment when older texts were continuing to circulate (and in fact, were recirculated in response to renewed interests in the characters), newer versions operated according to very different ideological and narratalogical principles, a range of auteur creators were being allowed to experiment with the character, and the character was assuming new shapes and forms to reflect the demands of different entertainment sectors and their consumers:

Whereas broad shifts in emphasis had occurred since 1939, these changes had been, for the most part, consecutive and consensual. Now, newly created Batmen, existing simultaneously with the older Batmen of the television series and comic reprints and back issues, all struggled for recognition and a share of the market. But the contradictions amongst them may threaten both the integrity of the commodity form and the coherence of the fans' lived experience of the character necessary to the Batman's continued success.

(See The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media)

The superhero comic, they suggest, may not be able to withstand "the tension between, on the one hand, the essential maintenance of a recognizable set of key character components and, on the other hand, the increasingly necessary centrifugal dispersion of those components."

Retrospectively, we can see Pearson and Uricchio as describing a moment of transition from continuity to multiplicity as the governing logic of the superhero comics realm. Rather than fragmenting or confusing the audience, this multiplicity of Batmen helped fans learn to live in a universe where there were diverse, competing images of their favorite characters and indeed, to appreciate the pleasures of seeing familiar fictions transformed in unpredicted ways. In an article which I previewed in draft form on the blog and which recently was published in Angela Ndalianis's The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, I describe the multiplicity paradigm at play in contemporary comics:

Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchise, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of their relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth. So that in some storylines, Aunt May knows Spider-man's secret identity while in others she doesn't; in some Peter Parker is still a teen and in others, he is an adult science teacher; in some, he is married to Mary Jane and in others, they have broken up, and so forth. These different versions may be organized around their respective authors or demarked through other designations - Marvel's Ultimate or DC's All Star lines which represented attempts to reboot the continuity to allow points of entry for new readers for example.

We can see this principle of multiplicity at play in Batman: Gotham Knight, an anthology of animated short stories about the Caped Crusader, which was released last summer as a bridge between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I had a chance to watch the film during my Christmas break and given this blog's ongoing interest in transmedia storytelling, I thought I would share a few reflections.

There are clear connections between Gotham Knight and The Animatrix, which I discuss in Convergence Culture. These new animated shorts were released direct to dvd as the third in the line of DC Universe Original Animated Movies released by Warner Premiere and Warner Bros. Animation. Warner was also the distributor of the Animatrix, which was similarly released between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded as part of the Wachowski Brothers' larger transmedia strategy. The studio seems to have learned a few lessons since The Animatrix, which are suggested by two key differences between the two productions.

First, the information communicated about the franchise through The Animatrix was crucial to our understanding of the Matrix films, helping to introduce new characters (The Kid) and motivate major plot shifts (the relations between the humans and the machines). The Wachowski Brothers took transmedia principles much further than their audience was ready to go and the result was confusion and disappointment in those who had paid to see the films at the box office but hadn't engaged with the anime, comics, or games extensions.

Gotham Knight is far more conservative in the ways that it seeks to integrate these shorts into the over-all flow of the revamped Batman film franchise -- too much so in my opinion because it's hard to understand in what sense these stories fit into the narrative structure of the film series and they certainly don't add any concrete information that helps us make sense of the plot of Dark Knight. They do include an encounter with the Scarecrow, who was a featured baddie in Batman Begins, as well as with villains, such as King Croc and Deadshot, who have so far not appeared in the film series. They do give us some additional insights into Batman's psyche (through flashbacks to events which occur within the timeline of his early life introduced in Batman Begins) and glimpses into his dealings with the secondary characters (Commissioner Gordon, Lucius Fox) who figure in the Batman film franchise.

Given the way Gotham Knight was marketed, there were no doubt fan expectations that these shorts might foreshadow developments in Dark Knight or even better, give us some inside dope which might add to our experience of the feature film. I am certain this video might have frustrated anyone who bought it with those hopes. Don't get me wrong -- each of these shorts is well made, engaging, and thoughtful. A lot depends on whether we think of transmedia storytelling as a structure of information (offering bits of data which add up to constitute a larger story world) or a structure of feeling (shaping how we feel about the characters and our appreciation of what makes them tick).

My favorite of the shorts, "Have I Got A Story For You," might be read as a paean to the new era of multiplicity as a series of skater punks describe, in very different terms, each of their encounters with the Batman as he does battle with the "man in black." Each pulls the Batman into a different genre -- in one, he is a shadowy figure who appears and disappears as though by magic; in another, he is a flying monster; and in another, he is a robot or cyborg. As they try to top each other's stories, we gradually realize that each has glimpsed a single moment in a much more extended conflict which culminates in a final showdown right before their astonished eyes, in which a fourth kid sees Batman as a very human figure who requires his help to overcome the bad guy. We can read this piece as a hint of the very different ways that the Batman will be depicted -- not only stylistically but also thematically -- across the rest of the shorts, each produced by a different creative team.

In terms of franchise building, the strongest of the shorts may be "Working Through Pain," which shows us a young Bruce Wayne as he seeks a better way to cope with the traumatic aftermath of the murder of his parents. Batman Begins had shown us one part of a trip around the world as the young man sought mentors who might further his training; this one shows two other stops in that personal journey -- one to a hospital in what looks like Africa as he tries to help a medical relief effort which lacks adequate supplies for the problems it is confronting; the other, told more extensively, takes us to India where a young woman teaches him how to "work through pain" and how to operate on the fringes of the social order.

Second, as with Animatrix, Gotham Knight hired artists from the Japanese anime tradition to work with a western media property in hopes of bringing a fresh look and perspective to the material. The Wachowski brothers chose artists who already were auteurs in Japan and gave them a relatively free hand to do with his characters what he chose. DC Comics went with younger animators, many of whom had worked on cult franchises (including Giant Robo, .Hack, Tekkonkinkreet) but who had yet to create their own feature films or television series, and he paired them with distinguished talent already associated with DC either through work on Batman comics or animated series.

The result is a blending of western style character development (contemporary American comics at their very best) with the visual style we associate with anime. As a fan of American comics, I was delighted, for example, to see the "Crossfire" segment, where Greg Rucka (one of my faves) returns to characters he helped to flesh out in the Gotham Central comics he co-authored with Ed Brubaker. Crispus Allen and Anna Ramirez are two beat cops debating the relationship of the Gotham police force to the caped crusader.

The making of video suggests that DC was drawn to the anime directors because of their skills at world building and indeed, the most spectacular elements of these films have to do with fleshing out Gotham City. Each short has a slightly different perspective on the city -- which emerges as a complex, fully realized urban environment, especially when we put all of these glimpses together. The various shorts take us to Arkham Asylum, through the sewers, along the skyline, along the water front, and through the nightclubs of the rich and powerful. There is also a recurring fascination with the technology associated with the hero and his challengers -- including "Field Test" which, as the title suggests, involves the protagonist trying out a high tech gadget which he concludes provides too much protection against the forces of evil. Perhaps most pervasively, the cartoons give us a sense of Batman's vulnerability and humanity: I am pretty sure we get to see Batman and/or Bruce Wayne bleeding in pretty much every segment here and thematically, many of them struggle with how he deals with the pain or human loss he confronts as he takes on the mask to battle crime.

As with The Animatrix, the Batman shorts allow a broad array of different experiments in visual expression: The Batman looks radically different from short to short as each artist is allowed to tell his story through their own stylistic lens. It is on the visual level, far more than on the narrative level, that the film satisfies the pop cosmopolitan's search for a Japanese perspective on the characters. What comes through here, then, is a complex melding of Eastern and Western modes of storytelling, which in turn does push and pull the Batman in some new directions I hadn't seen on the screen before.

It's interesting that we get this anime-inflected version of the Dark Knight at about the same time as designer Chip Kidd has published Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, which consists primarily of reprints from low budget and long forgotten manga produced by Jiro Kuwata for Shonen King following the success of the 1960s television series. Kidd reprints what he has been able to relocate of this original manga -- lots of interesting fragments -- alongside a collection of advertisements for Batman related toys released in Japan during this same giddy period. Kuwata confesses to having a very limited knowledge of the character and very little time to work.

The result is a series of stories which draw on the iconography of Batman, at least of the television series, with very few of the genre conventions. So, for example, the first story has Batman and Robin doing battle with Clayface (False Face on the television series) whose remarkable ability to transform his identity doesn't stop at the human form but allows him to magically transform himself into a terradactyl and a range of other giant monsters. Another story centers around a character with a near endless capacity to return from the dead. However fanciful the villains were on the Batman TV series, and however many times they seemed to survive what at the time looked like fatal accidents, they were still understood as having the limitations of any other mortal being. But here, Batman exists in a magical realm where anything can and will happen. This narrative flux goes alongside the stylistic transformation which occurs when Batman and Robin are being depicted through Manga conventions. Bat-Manga is a fascinating read for anyone interested in understanding globalization.

Going "Mad": Creating Fan Fiction 140 Characters at a Time

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it's not going away. We're your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we'll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don't treat us like criminals. -- WeAreSterlingCooper

This is a pretty good statement about the contradictions many fans are experiencing

as they try to interact with media producers in what we've been promised is a

new era of "interactive media". This was written by Bud Caddell, a strategist for

a New York based digital think-tank, Undercurrent, who is also a fan of the AMC

television drama, Mad Men, and "tweets" under the name of Bud Melman, a mailroom clerk at Sterling Cooper advertising. In short, he's an industry insider who is also a fan and someone who consults in advertising who in his spare time enjoys pretending to be a mail clerk at an advertising firm in the 1960s.

Got that? Good. Don't make me repeat myself.

Seriously, the fact that Caddell can be both an industry insider and a fan simply demonstrates the degree to which those lines are blurring from all sides in our contemporary convergence culture; the fact that his fantasies have something to do with his real world identity should also not be a shock to anyone who understands the

psycho-sociology of fandom. Some have argued that Caddell is not a "true

fan" because he's also a "marketer," but that's like saying one can't be both an academic and a fan at the same time. For the record, I'd also call myself a fan of Mad Men! We're all all multitudes within ourselves.

In his 'mundane' guise as Bud Caddell, media consultant, he's posted a fascinating account of how fan fiction emerged around Mad Man through the unlikely channel of Twitter and how this fandom, like so many others, faced legal challenge from the producers of the program they were hoping to help promote.

I am sure that I will lose cool points if I confess that the joys of Twitter have largely escaped me. Anyone who reads this blog knows that brevity is a virtue I do not possess and the idea of blogging at 140 characters at a time is not a hobby I plan to embrace anytime soon. I like to tell people that I am a marathon runner, not a sprinter, but the reality is I just don't know when to stop. But I've been following this story peripherally for a while and was glad to finally get a more detailed and systematic account of what happened. Caddell's account should be required reading for all fans and aca-fen but also for all brand executives and content producers.

As Caddell explains, sometime around the start of the second season of Mad Men, fans began to use the blog platform, Tumblr.com, to post a kind of advice

column, written in the voices of the program's characters, responding to questions from fans, capturing the twisted sexual and interpersonal politics of the early 1960s. Soon, some of these same fans migrated, in character, to Twitter. With a few days after Don Drapper (the ad man protagonist of the series) began tweeting, he had some 3000 subscribers to his update, and his Twitter feed was soon joined by others written by Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling, and a dozen or so other characters -- primary and secondary -- from the series.

We can think of these tweets as fan fiction in its most spared down form -- these tweets

represented attempts to get inside the heads (or inhabit the bodies) of fictional characters and see the represented events from their perspective. Francesca Coppa has made the provocative argument that fan fiction might be understood as much as a kind of theater performance as it is a prose genre. (See her essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet). So, lets think of what was going on here as a kind of performance art.

Initially, many assumed that the tweets were a new promotional device launched

by AMC and their digital advertising agency, Deep Focus. Deep Focus CEO

Ian Schaffer, after all, runs a blog which has enlightened things to say about social media and audience engagement around brands.

Caddell says that he himself initially believed the activity was a deft example of what brand guru Faris Yacob calls "transmedia planning" (Check out this blog post

where I account how the concept of "transmedia planning" has emerged in the brand realm in response to Convergence Culture's account of "transmedia storytelling.") Caddell created his own character, Bud Melman, so he could join the fun:

As an employee in the mailroom, he could have the curse and the good fortune of being invisible, which means I could tweet about what happened before or after the scene you saw on television.

Caddell, the industry insider became an unlikely fan advocate, when Twitter suspended the accounts of nine of the primary Mad Men characters, including Draper, Olson, and Joan Holloway, in response to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act "cease and

desist" notice from AMC's lawyers. Caddell created the website, WeAreSterlingCooper.com, (and the manifesto quoted above), in order to call attention

to this conflict between the fans and the network, not to mention to aggregate the various Mad Men feeds.

As an industry insider, Caddell notes, he was deeply confused by the industry's response to these practices. Mad Men's viewership had been declining sharply during the second season and there was every reason to think that these activities, small scale though they might be, were helping to generate fan interest and buzz again. The fans involved had offered to work with the series producers and promoters, seeking to better coordinate their efforts rather than creating brand confusion. As Caddell explains:

One element of entertainment and media that consumed me at the time as a marketer was the idea of what to offer fans to consume between commercial breaks, episodes and seasons. The twitter characters could provide other fans a way to play and interact between Sundays when the show aired. From a practical perspective, each single character by themselves was a novelty, but together they could weave an intricate web of conversations and events to follow.

Some sense of this potential was realized when Melman and some other fans staged a Twitter-based short story arc involving "a meeting at the Tom Tom Club for drinks and

shenanigans" just to show what could happen if they coordinated their efforts.

(Here, they start to sound more like the kinds of Role Play Game/Fan Fiction

writing activities that occurs in LiveJournalLand.)

So far, these overtures have had a chilly reception. Mark Deuze has suggested at

least two reasons why production companies get anxious around such activities:

the creative department's desire for creative control, the legal department's concerns about controlling copyright. Here, we can add a third: the promotional department's fears about losing control over their brand message. Of the three, the last is perhaps the most absurd, since in reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking "stuck up".

As Caddell writes as a fan in the report's conclusions:

AMC saw most of us as stealing something that was theirs. When in reality, we were expressing our affinity for the characters and the show.

Shifting perspectives and writing as an industry insider, he concludes:

We shouldn't threaten fans with legal notices and we shouldn't isolate them. We should cultivate the relationships we're either lucky or gift to have and help them with their expression of their fandom. Brands should offer as much content in as many types to its audiences with the hopes that they feel to compelled to rearrange them and add novel elements to tell their own stories. We fight to insert ourselves in the conversations of real people, and that is exactly what happened with the Mad Men characters on Twitter. If we cling to this sense that we are the sole owner of creative work, we'll continue to isolate that work from the actual world and the human beings we work to affect.

Fans have consistently raced out ahead of content producers and brand executives in their understanding of the potential of "transmedia entertainment." They are testing new tools, moving into new communities, embracing new forms. Rather than seeking to silence or control them, creative agencies need to observe, document, and where-ever possible, join the game. Caddell's dual status allows him to quickly translate what he's learned as a fan into what his industry needs to learn. I just hope some of them are ready to read and take notes.

Thanks to Joshua Green for calling this report to my attention. Green, a CMS postdoc, and Madeline "Flourish" Klink, a CMS grad student, are listed as consultants on the report.

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part Two)

You describe a range of projects in the book including those involving youths and senior citizens. What generational differences, if any, did you observe in the ways they thought about their roles and responsibilities as journalists?

Young people are much more technologically adept in general. Older citizen journalists often get tangled up in the technology.

They approach issues differently. The youth have strongly held opinions and aren't afraid to express themselves, be they nationally or international in scope. The older generation tends to shy away from letting fly with their political opinions especially. They have sort of a been-there, done-that attitude in many cases. I'd love to see research on how the young, middle-aged and seniors differ in their approach to political expression, especially when it comes to writing.

Obviously subject matter differs wildly among the young and the old, who don't know Eminem from an enema.

The young tend to go at each other more, arguing and debating, sometimes getting personal, whereas the seniors have only occasional flare-ups that die down quickly. I suspect they do a lot of internalizing.

Both groups pride themselves on high ethical standards. The youth seem to be very cognizant of their audience, the fact that it is mostly other children or teenagers. No adult needs to monitor what they publish. Left to their own devices, they are quite careful.

The teen-aged editors (well, one was 12) who ran the Junior Journal seemed to think more about themes than do the seniors. Every issue would have a dozen stories on one particular theme. There would be 30 or 40 other stories as well. They were much better at outreach than the seniors who tend to do their own stories but seldom reach out to others to contribute stories or photos or artwork.

A lot of online chatter takes place among the youth as they prepare their editions, whereas the seniors do most of their communicating face-to-face. In both the Melrose and Rye groups there are still members who don't have computers. They type their stories and someone scans them, or they write their stories in longhand and someone retypes them. One woman has a computer but never looks at her email. Still, she writes regularly and knows everything going on in the town.

Can you describe your own transition from Editor of the Boston Globe to someone helping to facilitate community journalism? What did you have to unlearn as a professional in order to embrace citizen news reporting?

When I was Editor of the Globe, an online community project was started in a crime-ridden Boston neighborhood of about 5000 by an MIT grad student and his wife. They enlisted teenagers to operate the site, which was Mac-based. Users ranged in age from age 6 to 80. I was fascinated how they used the site to tell what was going on in the community, working out an arrangement with the police department whereby users of the site could easily report a street light or traffic that wasn't working. Using their website, they organized fairs and plays and other community activities that created healthy dialogue between old and young, something that hadn't been occurring. It was a private site, so the teens went door to door and got permission to provide an email link to those willing. The result was a map on the site where you could click on a particular address and get an email box to write the person who lived there. Communication was crackling throughout the community.

I was made a part of the community, so I decided I could salt the website with stories every day. Every morning I would select stories from the Globe that I thought were particularly germane to that community and feed an electronic copy into their system. Sometimes they were what I call reactive stories--happenings from City Hall or the police department or wherever. Sometimes they were how-to stories on raising children or tips on cooking for special holidays.

When I left the Globe, after almost 40 years, I stayed connected with a media group formed by the MIT Media Lab in the late 1980's called News in the Future. Most of the major newspapers were involved, along with some from other countries as well as television and radio entities. The projects the students and faculty came up with, large and small, were quite exciting. I had been chairman of the Globe's overall Planning Committee, so I knew the challenges coming down the pike. But to my amazement and frustration most of the media outlets ignored all the ideas, not the least of which was electronic paper and ink (Hearst being the exception).

Still, I thought community journalism was a plausible route to go with newpapers taking the lead to organize them and incorporate them. The only tricky part was figuring out a method of compensation. But that was a detail.

None of them seemed interested.

I didn't give up. I figured out another approach that would be a stepping stone. A lot of newspapers were part of a successful program called Newspaper in the Classroom. The held one-day training sessions with teachers on how to use newspapers as a teaching device in the classroom, then produced lesson plans and then delivered newspapers to the schools, charging a low bulk rate. So a pupil would learn math by learning about baseball box scores or stock tables, or about geography by tracking ongoing news stories, or...well, you get the idea.

Given how well that worked in developing the newspaper-reading habit, I suggested to newspapers that they publish high school newspapers on their websites. Boston.com, for instance, would have a schools subsection with all the Boston school newspapers and all the suburbs. No takers.

So I approached a newspaper sponsor from Italy and another from Brazil about ten years ago. They leaped at the idea. Three of us from MIT spent a day with 200 teachers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a while later Agencia Estado, a leading newspaper, opened its website to 100 schools in the region of Curitaba. The experiment worked well until a change of government apparently curtailed the program.

Meanwhile La Republicca in Italy advertised a similar program on kataweb.com.it. Today that one newspaper--about the size of the Boston Globe--carries 7400 school newspapers from junior high schools and high schools in 84 cities.

At about that point I gave up on US newspapers and started working with citizen groups for their sake not for the newspapers' sake.

Major adjustments for me were lack of resources and a rejection of hierarchy. The first is a continual problem. They don't need hardly anything in the way of financial resources but there aren't enough people to thoroughly cover a community, even the size Rye (5300 population). Operating as a flat organization can be time consuming at times, but I have learned to relish operating by consensus. Someone has to orchestrate the functioning of meetings. Melrose and Rye have solved that by rotating the person who chairs alphabetically.

I tend to be a stickler about conflict of interest, certain ethical concerns and style consistencies (is it 3 p.m. or 3 P.M.?; is it spring or Spring?; if nine is spelled out, why isn't twelve?, etc.). I've learned to look the other way when someone wants to write about the accomplishments of a volunteer group they belong to (although we insist they disclose their affiliation) or someone uses Photoshop to slightly alter a picture. But I am so swept up in the enthusiasm of the participants that I tend to honor the wisdom of the group over any personal journalistic prejudices I might harbor.

Americans are increasingly getting their news from national papers,

though there has also been a rise of micro-local news on the web. What happens to the middle ground between the two in this evolving informational system -- news that occurs on a state or regional level?

I am now climbing on my white horse. I am very angry with publishers and broadcast executives. And a few editors. They have abrogated their responsibilities by cutting staff to the bone (especially reporters) and by dumbing down the news (TV has been particularly guilty of this). I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but there are studies showing dramatic decreases in the numbers of reporters covering state houses. That trend started long before newspaper profit margins started narrowing.

Some fast measures need to be taken. Technology can play a role. Public legislative sessions at every level need to be televised. Techniques for searching video archives need improvement. Better reporter tools would help. And there need to be more collaborations among media outlets. It's ironic that Associated Press is apparently under siege at a time where that formula for coverage is more relevant now than ever. It's also ironic since newspaper websites from their inception have been replete with AP stories even though newspapers claimed they were devoting staff to generate web articles. It hardly every happened.

Only recently have the newspaper newsrooms and their websites begun to combine forces. Editors were reluctant to ask their reporters to write a quick web story on a breaking news story, then turn around and write a different story for the next morning's newspaper.

One answer is for citizens, whether they are journalists or not, to keep the pressure on state and regional governments to make records and meeting minutes available online in a timely fashion.

We typically think of news as valuable as a product -- the newspaper and the information it includes -- but many of your arguments about community journalism center on the value of participating in the process of identifying and generating the news. What do you see as the value of everyday people involving themselves in the process of reporting the news?

Somehow the activism of the Sixties petered out, and we became largely a nation of couch potatoes. Bowling Alone, the book by Prof. Robert Putnam captured that trend. Even now we go to local government meetings (Selectmen, Planning Boards, etc.) and no one shows up. However, average citizens are beginning to wake up to the fact that they don't know what's going on in their own hometowns. As taxes go up, they begin to take it personally. They want to know what's happening and may even want to get involved in a particular issue from time to time. Little by little they are becoming aware that their local newspapers are letting them down. They are becoming aware that their elected officials don't want them to know what's happing. Last week I received an off-the-record email from someone working in Town Hall, saying, "The only way I know what's going on is by reading your publication."

Clearly those who get involved in reporting the news learn more about "what's going on", convey what they have learned to readers and, we would hope, a better informed populace translates into better governance.

You reference James Carey's concept of news reading and writing as a ritual, suggesting "News is not information but drama." Can you elaborate on this claim? I've often argued that civic engagement is as much a structure of feeling as it is a structure of information. How does community journalism impact the ways people feel about their communities?

Everyone has his own metaphor, I suppose. Carey, who shared some of his thinking in the halls of MIT a few times, was especially thoughtful about the ritual. He used drama as his metaphor, which I thought was an improvement over my use of orchestra or orchestral arrangement when I was at the Globe. Perhaps I overdid it, because they gave me a framed baton at one point.

News has its ebbs and flows, and to some extent the readers' attention is affected by changes in patterns. Sometimes those shifts are caused by the news itself that is driven by inaugurations or Congress voting on a budget or weather or fires and shootings and the like. That's called reactive news. Then there is proactive news, where a decision is made to probe a specific area: the latest trends in education, the mobile lifestyle, how other invaders have extricated themselves from countries they occupied...

In either case--reactive coverage or proactive--the journalist, community or otherwise, is trying to read the audience; trying to inform, respond to their needs and interests, provide them with what they need to know and what they ought to know and maybe even entertain them.

Publications, online or otherwise, need to figure how to engage readers; how to draw on them. This is not done by running insipid contests: Vote yes if you think we should withdraw from Iraq by June; vote no if you think that is too early. Or, vote yes if you think actress X should have her children taken away from her, or no if you think she should keep them.

The receiving of news should not be strictly a cerebral activity. News should be tweaking the imagination, angering, frustrating, moving a person to sadness and joy. It should at the same time be molding a true depiction of the community you live in with all its flaws and all its richness. It is very much an emotional engagement.

Most of your projects are rooted in geographically local communities where people at least some of the time meet face to face and write about people they'll know. Is it possible to imagine community journalism operating on a global scale through online communities or would the process necessarily change without the face to face contact?

My experience is mostly centered on seven years working with youth between the ages of 10 and 18 from 91 countries.

Again, we come to the question of mission. Members of the Junior Journal wanted to reform the world. Not a bad mission. Plenty to work with.

The problems they addressed cut across geographic boundaries: war, environment, abuse, etc. It was fascinating to hear how these issues were handled in India and South Africa and Mexico and Russia and the United Arab Republic and China and Argentina and Australia and on and on.

What started as a group of 30 wound up with well over 300. Their only face-to-face contact was among the 30 originators for five days before they started their publication. The individual reporting aspect didn't seem to be that adversely affected. Recruiting of writers didn't seem to be a problem. But the inability to recruit and train editors proved to be the publication's downfall as little by little editors reached an age where they were too old and going off to college. If even a quarter of the group could have met for a few days once a year the Junior Journal would be humming today.

In short, even though they had no editor-in-chief and arrived at all major decisions by email consensus, the importance of a leadership group being in sync and understanding one another, even though they might argue a lot, was essential to survival.

But let me proffer another model. Perhaps we should call it a "confederacy" model. It could be all-volunteer or commercial. This would be a loosely connected set of community publishing groups with similar missions that operate independently within a state, region, country or world, but are tied together electronically. Perhaps they would use the same publishing software, although not necessarily. They would be able to use each other's stories. They would share a joint archive. Perhaps they could share a database of theme photographs and graphics. They might share a set of guidelines for issues of style, usage and publishing matters such as libel, copyright, etc. They could develop an internal, fully electronic help desk.

"Hello, desk? How do you handle photos of children under 12?"

"Waterloo: If the child is identifiable, we don't use the photo without permission of the parent or guardian.:

"Sarasota: If the photo is taken at a school, we consider permission from the headmaster as equivalent to parental permission (in loco parentis).

"Austen: We never run photos of children that show them in awkward situations."

Perhaps there could be a repository for investigative projects that other groups could use for hints on doing their own investigation. Even better, what if there were jointly reported stories?

I remember when working for United Press we often received or sent messages to all bureaus saying something like: "We are doing a story on the impact of the economic crunch on social service agencies. Please survey some of the agencies in your region for anecdotal information, making sure you touch base with small, medium and large agencies. Please send us a memo of not more than 2,000 words by next Friday."

Again, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

For more reflections on Couch Potatoes Sprout, see Ellen Hume's post about the book for the new Center for Future Civic Media blog.

John S. (Jack) Driscoll has been Editor-in-Residence at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1995. Previously he was at the Boston Globe newspaper for nearly 40 years, seven as Editor. He is the author of Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism.

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)

One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn. These events have attracted people from across the campus, from neighboring universities, and from the greater Cambridge area, many of whom have been coming regularly for a decade or more to listen to smart, citizenly discussions about democracy, new media, and public life. The Center for Future Civic Media partners regularly with the Communication Forum to host events, including ones this coming semester on Popular Culture and the Political Imagination and on Race and the 2008 Elections. I met Jack Driscoll at one or another of these events. Our paths have criss-crossed off and on through the years. And for the past year or so, he's been actively involved with our new Center for Future Civic Media, a joint CMS-Media Lab effort funded by the Knight Foundation. Jack's an amazing guy! He fully embodies the classic concept of a "gentleman of the press." He spent forty years of his life working with the Boston Globe -- that's a newspaper for those of you who only get your information on line -- and for seven of them, he was the editor. Many of his generation were confused, frustrated, even enraged by the growing competition digital media has posed to traditional forms of civic communication. But Jack was fascinated. He migrated to the MIT Media Lab where he's been working to help construct the future of what he calls "community journalism" first through the News of the Future group and now through our Civic Media center. He's been doing work on the ground with senior citizens in local communities in New Hampshire and with young people in a virtual community which spans the globe. He hasn't just built prototypes to demonstrate the potentials of new tools and technologies; he's helped to inspire and instruct, advise and mentor, and most importantly, sustain publications over extended periods of time.

Driscoll recently published a book, Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism, which shares some of his experiences and offers sage advice about how and why community journalism may become an important part of the contemporary newscape. What I love about the book is its emphasis on journalism as a practice and a process rather than simply a product, since it is clear that working on these publications is empowering to those who become involved, changing the ways they think about themselves and their communities.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to pick Jack's brain about community journalism and to be able to share his perspectives with you here. As you read this, you have to picture this ruddy faced man with gray hair, a sparkle in his eye, and a broad toothy smile. Jack represents what was best about the old style journalism and he represents a bridge to what may be most vital about the future of civic media.

You begin the book with the quotation, "now anyone with a computer is a newspaper." So this begs the question -- what is a "newspaper" and thus, what are the differences between individuals or communities publishing the news and the kind of work that has been performed by professional journalists.

The "computer-is-newspaper" analogy refers to each of them in their roles as vehicles for transmitting information to a wide audience. In the early days of the printing press there is evidence that citizens took advantage of the newspaper mechanism as a vehicle to spread their views in the form of flyers and pamphlets and then as periodicals that evolved into newspapers. When James Franklin started his weekly newspaper in 1721, he is said to have invited readers to contribute. One of those readers was his 16-year-old brother Benjamin, then a James's typesetter, who thought that was a pretty good idea, so pretty soon he started writing essays under the name of "Silence Dogood".

The flatbed press worked pretty well in those days, because the population was small and time was not of the essence. As the printing-press technology became more advanced, citizens played a lesser role, relegated to Letters to the Editor. Before email, we'd get more than 300 letters a day at the Boston Globe and print 10 or 12.

As time passed, citizens became receptacles for news and information. It was a one-way street. The computer changed all that.

Citizens have responded slowly for the most part, but we do have bloggers and we do have digital photos and video unfurled when there is a major news event, and we now have twittering.

The most lumbering form to arise is community journalism. Folks have the image of group publishing as being a really difficult process. The reason I wrote this book was to demystify the process. In short, it's not that difficult, it's rewarding and it's fun.

Without sounding like a Harvard Business School professor, "mission" is the key word in describing the difference between individual and group publishing. Bloggers come in a variety of forms: In some cases they are voicing strongly held opinions, in others they are aggregators or instructors; some are champions of causes. You like to think their mission is to elevate the level of discussion either on a broad range of topics or a specialized field. For the most part I think they are succeeding.

Community groups so far seem to be the product of a spirit of public service and frustration. The youth I worked with from around the world were bursting to have their voices heard. They were not happy with the way their world was being run, but the adults in their lives had pretty much kept a thumb on them. The Junior Journal was an outlet to let 'er rip. To their credit they didn't just pontificate. They did research and reporting. They had their own experiences to speak from. I remember one vivid story about a child soldier, age 12, who was used as a spy by his Sierra Leone unit, because he could slip in and out of enemy camps easily. When I asked how the writer could know so much detail, the editor responded, "Because he was the child soldier."

With adults there seems to be a feeling that their communities are not being covered in the media. Newspaper staff cutbacks have exacerbated the problem. It's not just the institutional news, but the stories about the fabric of the community, the personalities, the achievements of groups of individuals, the problems, the culture.

The Melrose SilverStringers have been around for 13 years but rarely write about their local government. They seem to leave that to the local weekly newspaper. Rye, N.H., on the other hand, tries to keep up with the local boards while at the same time writing about issues, trends and people. Community groups enhance the ability to cover issues, because of the variety of amateur interests in the group: the history buff, the energy enthusiast, the horticulturist, the climatologist, the expert cook, etc.

One member of the Rye group is a former operator of a small ski slope in the next state. There is absolutely no place to ski in Rye, a flat seacoast town, but he has a strong readership whether he is writing about Stowe, Vermont, or Vail, Colorado. He writes from experience, not just because of his business background but also because at age 80 he still skis. And lots of residents of Rye go skiing, too. So he has developed a following.

Community groups have found that the word "localized" refers to stories of high interest in their local community. Travel is one of those topics. An early Melrose story described a local couple's adventures traveling in the Northwest of the U.S. in an Airstream trailer. One of the highest number of hits in Rye was for a story about a trip to Quebec City. That was 18 months ago, and the story still is getting hits.

And so in community groups, if you have enough diversity, you can reflect the range of special interests of a city or town over time.

I'm deliberately sticking with the three communities featured in the book, but when we look at the spectrum of community groups now sprouting elsewhere, you see the local news/feature groups but you also see more and more communities of interest. A lot of them center around health and self-help issues. They tend to be experiential, and their stories react to the news about new treatments, new medications. Their mission is to share, hoping to improve the lives of others.

Finally, I would suggest that community groups tend to do more original reporting than bloggers. The best bloggers, like the best mainstream media columnists, tend to build their blogs around research and reporting; the good bloggers do a lot of research; then there are large numbers who simply are expressing their views with maybe a few links thrown in from time to time.

Can you explain the concept of "community journalism" as you outline it in the book? Do you see this as a specific kind of "citizen journalism"? What difference does it make that the projects you describe involve many people in a community working together as opposed to the model of the lone blogger?

The other day five of us were in the throes of publishing the January edition of Rye Reflections. It could be done by one person, but we divvy up the responsibilities and turn it into an enjoyable 60 or 90 minute exercise. That's community at work.

As we were finishing up, another member of our group wandered into the room we were working in at the Rye Public Library and was clearly excited. He wanted to tell us of an interview he had had that morning with a blind man who is well known in the town for his upbeat attitude and willingness to get out and about, with help. He shared that the man had spent a couple of hours before the 9 a.m. interview cutting wood outdoors. It was 5 degrees that day.

Someone in the group suggested he interview a longtime elected official who takes the blind man to the bank and the Post Office and the local coffee shop. Someone else suggested he talk to one of the regulars on the 10-seat van that takes seniors food shopping, because the blind man is known for entertaining the other passengers, often quoting poetry and telling stories. That's community helping to add dimensions to a story that one person might not scope out alone.

When the Junior Journal editors--of which there were 12, one for each month--planned their editions, they tried to come up with a theme each month that would resonate throughout their global community. Issues ranged from AIDs, war and peace, and protecting the environment; to children-specific issues such as child workers, child soldiers, suicide; to cultural issues such as wedding customs or celebrations of holidays. They did this as a collaboration, via email, with a certain amount of give-and-take involved as they shaped the idea and more give-and-take as they shaped individual stories with their reporters. Again, it is people working together to enhance the quality of what they are presenting.

And so in community journalism you get a collaborative effort, a sharing of wisdom and experience, that hones the final output. And, almost as a by-product, you experience a form of social networking in the process.

Then there is the critiquing process. It exhibits itself in the editing process but it tends to go beyond that as members develop trust in the group and learn to be open and honest about commenting on the works of others.

Media literacy? As community journalists they better understand the basics that go into creating a story, they become much more astute in analyzing the work of mainstream media.

In Rye we actually engage in community-building activities that have evolved rather than being imposed. At our weekly meetings we start off by going around the table and giving each person a chance to share whatever they wish. It might be about a family matter, an amusing experience, a comment on national politics. Like many periodicals, Rye Reflections prides itself on its recipes, so occasionally a writer will cook up one of her (occasionally his) creations and bring it to the meeting to share. An annual potluck dinner at the seashore has evolved with some members putting on a skit and it now looks as though there will be an annual end-of-year home gathering, because one couple in the group went to Sweden last year, raved about the glugg and invited the Rye "Surfers" to their house for a meeting followed by some goodies washed down with glugg (not too strong, I should add).

At one level you could say that community journalism proves that two minds are better than one. But there also is the diversity of minds that enriches the publication. It may show up in the form of liberal, conservative, libertarian or whatever; it may show up in knowledge about the history or ethos of a community; it may show up in the form specialities (gardening, climatology, sports, culture, etc.) or in the forms of photographic or videographic expertise...

When some of these special-interest members combine, you sometimes get fascinating results. Whoever thought that a massive email conflict among several members of the Junior Journal over Kashmir, would evolve into a marvelous article co-authored by a Pakistani girl and an Indian girl or that two writers, one an Israeli and the other Palestinian would call for cooler heads in the Middle East or that an article about a lesbian being harassed in school would be published, because a passionate online discussion over the incident resulted in a consensus that it was a story that needed to be heard.

Much of the book assumes that traditional journalism style, ethics, and

practices provide the best models for community practices. Yet, there are many other possible models for what community journalism might look like and the circumstances of producing community journalism is very different from a professional newsroom. What do you see as the advantages or disadvantages of modeling community journalism after established news practices?

I feel a little like the circus barker: "You ain't seen nuthin' yet."

Citizens haven't begun to tap the potential of community activity that will soon take on much more of an advocacy mantel, in my opinion. And, I'd guess, it'll take off in directions we haven't imagined.

The traditional approach has been adopted so far, because most average citizens prefer to walk before they run. They are tending to ape mainstream media. But the most important reason is because they seem themselves filling a vacuum that is coincident with the sudden rise of online computing. Most localized groups see themselves as supplementing traditional media, picking up the slack.

We've seen blogging take on a major role in politics, especially on the national level. Community sites won't be far behind. And not far behind that will be special-interest groups within local communities and regions.

Still, there are some advantages to the traditional model. It promotes diversity of interests and opinions. Much like academia. Participants tend to keep each other honest but at the same time learn from one another. The model will have longevity, whereas advocacy models will tend to either splinter over issues or die out as the issue becomes less cutting-edge.

The disadvantage is that checks-and-balances make story generation hard work. Stories need to reflect all sides. They need to stand up to peer review.

It's a busy world, it seems. More hectic than I remember my parents experiencing, even with ten children in the family. So there is a question as to how much time adults will be willing to spare for community journalism, whatever form it takes. (There are, of course, commercial forms appearing here and there. They, of course, tend to be traditional in approach.)

For teenagers, however, I see a lot of possibilities. I have a bias, but my experience tells me that online youth groups would function best outside of the school framework, which tends to stultify their creativity. They have a lot to offer, and the future is theirs. Libraries, girls and boys clubs, etc., would be ideal settings.

John S. (Jack) Driscoll has been Editor-in-Residence at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1995. Previously he was at the Boston Globe newspaper for nearly 40 years, seven as Editor. He is the author of Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism.

Reconsidering Family Photographs

Not so many years ago, I was visiting my parent's home in Atlanta. As we were sprawled around the living room, glancing through the Sunday papers, my mother let out a gasp, "It's like I've seen a ghost!" She passed the paper over to me and showed me a photograph, which I was pretty sure I had seen several times previously. It depicted Martin Luther King being led through the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta following one of his many arrests for civil disobedience. It was being reproduced this time in anticipation of a PBS special about King. "Yes, I've seen this picture of King before, Mom."

"No," she said, "it's Pap!" I looked more closely at the photograph, searched my memory, and realized that one of the deputies escorting King was my late grandfather. Needless to say, I was now as stunned as my mother by the discovery that my grandfather had been involved in King's arrest.

Now keep in mind that I never really knew "Pap," my mother's father, who had passed away in the late 1950s when I was a little over a year old. He was someone who lived for me primarily through old photographs -- including many that are included in my own yellowing baby book. He was the kindly looking man who had given me my first haircut, since he had spent much of his life running a barber shop in downtown Atlanta. There were pictures of him bouncing me on his knee as a newborn and there were snap shots of him receiving visitors from his hospital bed shortly before his death. There are even photographs showing the huge mound of flowers at his grave-side. Family legend is that half of the city passed through his barbershop and a goodly portion of his friends and associates had turned out for his last rites. From old family stories, I knew that he had helped to run the city's draft board during World War II and that his own oldest son had ended up in a POW camp in Germany. My father liked to tell a story about sitting in Pap's patrol car and having baby Henry reach up and pull the siren, creating a minor ruckus.

It was hard to reconcile these images and stories about my grandfather with the popular representations of King's captors and tormentors, hard to reconcile the photographs in my baby book with the all too familiar images of King's followers being knocked down by fire hoses or besieged by attack dogs. So, the new information passed over me with a wave of shock and shame. As a white southern male who grew up in the south during the civil rights era, I have always struggled with issues of liberal guilt, not sure about my ability to talk meaningfully about race, unsure how to acknowledge my own complicity in a system of white privilege. And here, suddenly, the issue was asserting itself with a new degree of urgency.

For me, this era of segregation was perhaps best summed up by two childhood memories, which suggested the transitions Atlanta underwent in the period of my childhood. When I was about five or six, my parents dropped me off at the Decatur Courthouse to attend a "Toys for Tots" performance of Peter and the Wolf. My parents were going to meet me outside after and I went in proud at being on my own for perhaps the first time in my life. After the concert, I wandered outside, eager to find them, and they were nowhere to be seen, having gotten turned around and exited the building in the wrong direction. Not particularly paniced, I must have decided that I should just try to walk home and so I headed out on my own, wandering through street after street for the better part of an hour, while my frantic parents turned the city upside down. What I remember from that day was wandering through an entire neighborhood without saying any white faces. Disoriented, I had moved into the black section of the still segregated city and for the first time, I experienced what it was like to be in a minority position. I was growing up in an almost entirely white world yet I hadn't realized it until that moment. I've always been fascinated by a Flannery O'Connor short story which described more or less the same experience -- a young child separated from his parents who finds himself encountering a world where there are no white faces.

When I was a child, my father had owned his own construction company and I spent a fair amount of time playing on building sites, collecting bottles for the deposit money. One day, I found myself playing with several other children my age who happened to be the offspring of black construction workers. What did we do? We were collecting big black blocks of tar with the stated plan of creating our own tar baby, inspired by a recent screening of Walt Disney's Song of the South. Once our parents learned of our creative project, there was a general awkwardness. Though both sets of parents had taken us to see the movie, there was an understanding, even then, that this was not an appropriate thing for little black and white children to be doing together. The Uncle Remus stories were too closely associated with a history of race and racism and the tar baby embodied sticky problems none of them knew how to talk with each other about. Even as a child I saw there was something wrong with this picture.

As I grew older, I would struggle with my identity as a white southerner. There were times in late elementary school when I would wear confederate flags on my belt buckle. Those flags were never intended as statements of racism, but rather as assertions of my own racial pride. My family had lived in Georgia for many generations. We had old photographs that showed my great-great-grandfather in his Confederate uniform. I had no "mother country" that I could trace my heritage back to and this was the source of some discomfort by the late 1960s and early 1970s when many of my classmates were proclaiming their ethnic pride. For me, the Confederacy had been that mythical past to which I could trace my roots -- not a living symbol of the current divisions between the races -- but over time, I came to realize that in embracing this symbol that I could cause a great deal of pain for others. Could I be proud of who I was and where I came from without it becoming an assertion of white supremacy?

Through the years, I've resented the ways that the south has been made into a kind of national scapegoat. As a southerner growing up when I did, I always knew I had to confront racism, one way or another, and decide where I stood. Atlanta might call itself "the city too busy to hate" but there was never any easy way to escape the burden of self reflection. Some of my friends growing up were racists and made no bones about it. Some of them have spent their lives battling the Klan or contributing to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But all of them understood that racism had something to do with who they were and how they related to the other people around them.

When I was in graduate school in the Mid-West, I was struck by the unthinking racism of many of my students. I remember that one fraternity at a big ten university held a "Martin Luther Koon" birthday party, where people had come in black face, played craps, and eating water melon and fried chicken. Some of my students went to the party, not sure what to expect, and some of them told me later that they hadn't really thought this could be hurtful to anyone. It was all a big dress up game to them, having grown up in the rural midwest and having had little exposure to actual African-Americans. They had never been forced to confront the implications of their own racism and so they imagined racism as something that happened in the south that had nothing to do with their lives. It isn't that I didn't know people growing up who would have held such a gathering but they would have known what they were doing. Being there would have been a conscious choice -- for better or not. Yet, having the image of a racist south has so often been used as a way to deflect that kind of self examination and thus to simplify the history of race in America.

And so, my first response to seeing the image of my grandfather arresting King was one of shame to see someone who was so beloved in my family history play such a controversial role in the history of the nation. I didn't want anyone to know about that connection. I didn't want to talk about it. I certainly didn't know how to talk about all of the feelings that this image brought up for me.

But, then something else occurred to me,and that was the possibility that this same photograph might be found in the family albums of King's grandchildren and that through this shared image and the history behind it, our lives were complexly intertwined.

When I had looked at the photograph before, my grandfather had been just one more faceless white southerner in the background of the photograph. Yet, now, he was pushed into the foreground in my consciousness. And the photograph became a way of thinking about the subjective experiences that at once connected and separated people of different races who came of age in the same city and in the same generation. There would always be a constant set of shifts between who was in the foreground and who was in the background depending on whose perspective was being brought to bear on this image. And indeed, I was reminded of photographs of my mother's childhood where black maids might be seen in the background of family portraits -- people who, in that classic southern formulation, were always seen as "part of the family" but who were the matriarchs of their own families with their own histories which no one in my mother's household could have told you.

We can not easily separate out these different subjective responses to these shared images. Given the degree to which black and white lives imposed on each other even in the most segregated days of the south, we would always be visible in the background of each other's photographs and always appear as shadowy, not fully understood figures in each other's narratives.

This sense of connection to this historical moment, of course, also changed the ways that I have come to read accounts of King's life and his political mission. King has always been an inspiration to me -- not the least through his capacity to imagine the possibility of social transformation and cultural change, his faith that a dark chapter of American history could give rise to something more hopeful. I have come to respect King's utopian imagination -- which comes through especially in the "I Have a Dream" speech. King used "hope" as a resource through which to frame a powerful critique of the limitations of his society. By imagining a world where white and black children could play together, he was able to embody the ways that his own society fell far short of those ideals and he and his followers were able to transform that critique into an agenda for change. He described a better way and inspired many to pursue it.

As I have read these historical accounts, I recognized that the whole politics of civil disobedience meant that King counted on white men of conscience who would be shocked into action when he provoked reaction and retaliation for his protests. The point of civil disobedience was to force the system to react and in doing so, to show its excesses and contradictions. In some cases, the white men who arrested King were cast as embodiments of racist traditions and practices whose rage was turned against them through a kind of political judo. In other cases, the goal was to provoke more thoughtful men to question the institutions and practices to which they had committed their lives by forcing them to play out the contradictions between their own sense of justice and what the system required them to do.

There were white southerners who actively supported King and his movement. King wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in 1963:

I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some-such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle---have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty n-word lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

I will never know what kind of person my grandfather was or how the experience of arresting King might have changed him. I like to imagine him as someone like Ralph McGill whose respect for basic human dignity made him question the society of which he was a part. I like to imagine that if he had lived much past that moment, he might have been part of the change which the south underwent during the early days of my childhood. I will never know what he was thinking that day, though I've studied the photograph trying to give meaning to his cryptic expressions, trying to read motives into the body language of a man whose personality is totally unknown to me, beyond the stories my mother used to tell about him. I wonder what it says that my mother never knew that her father had been one of those who had arrested King.

When Barack Obama spoke about the confusion and anguish that still surrounds the relations between white and black America in his campaign speech in response to the Wright controversy, I was touched. Here's what he said about his own grandmother:

I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I understood what he meant. I can not "disown" my grandfather. In fact, the process of struggling to make sense of this photograph has strengthened my emotional connections to him. It has made him more real as a figure in my own personal narrative. I can't excuse him for what he did, even though, of course, like so many others, he was "just doing his job." I can't hide from who my grandfather was or what he did and I can't use my guilt and anxiety as an excuse not to speak up about race in America today.And I can't allow myself to feel good about myself as if somehow I had escaped that racist past into some post-racial society where "race no longer matters" just because I voted for Obama.

I cringe every time I hear a commentator talk about how voting for Obama allowed whites to feel better about themselves, knowing that on some levels, of course, it was true that I saw my vote as one step towards undoing what my grandfather had done so many years ago. I am reminded of the work Justin Lewis and Sutt Jhally did about Cosby, which described the "enlightened racism" they found in white responses to the series. Many of them felt that seeing Cosby and his family as "people like us" meant they had escaped racism, that they were no longer accountable for any legacy of harm and discrimination, and that race no longer caused any obstacles to advancement and thus no forms of affirmative action were required.

This week, we will watch the first African-American man (well, significantly, a mixed race man) become President of the United States. Some have described Obama as part of a "Joshua generation" of African-American leaders. King had seen into the promised land, like Moses, but was not able to lead his people there. Obama, the story goes, and his contemporaries were going to be able to build the new society and thus in some small way fulfill King's dream for a more just society. I wept when Obama clinched the presidency and I am sure I will weep when he takes the Oath of Office. But this, too, is too simple a response. There is still much we need to overcome.

The "Obama moment" requires us to take risks, to ask hard questions, to venture into uncomfortable territory, and to have an honest conversation about race in America. We can't wish race away but we have to re-examine the complex ways that our lives are intertwined and have impinged upon each other. We need to be having this conversation at all scales, large and small, local and global, online and off, and through many different channels of communication. The "Obama moment" offers us all a chance for redemption and transformation but it won't come easily.

Maybe it's time for more of us to take another look at our family photographs and see what's been hiding there all the time.

Loomings 2009: What Obama Might Have Learned from Moby-Dick

The following post was written by Wyn Kelley, a Melville scholar, who is collaborating with Project NML (New Media Literacies) on our teacher's strategy guide on "Reading in a Participatory Culture." The work we've been doing on Moby-Dick would not have been possible without Wyn's passion for the topic and her commitment to teaching. More than any one else, she helped me to see that there are fans of serious literature just as there are fans of popular culture and that we have much to learn from each other about how we engage with texts that really matter to us. She recently shared with me these interesting reflections on Obama's reading preferences and what they might tell us about his vision for the country. I wanted to share them with you -- along with my own best wishes on the dawning of a new era in American history. "Loomings 2009"

by Wyn Kelley

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

After September 11, 2001, some commentators wondered if Melville's phrases in the opening of Moby-Dick prophesied a twenty-first-century war in Afghanistan. This year, as we observe a new inauguration, his words about an election for the presidency might seem strangely apt as well. Few have considered, however, whether "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL" matters to the government of the United States.

Now, apparently, it does. According to a statement on his homepage at Facebook, as well as in various interviews and profiles, incoming president Barack Obama's favorite books are Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. What does this information suggest about our new president?

Song of Solomon, the story of an African-American man searching for his identity, seems a likely inspiration for Obama's account of a (somewhat) similar quest, Dreams from My Father. But Moby-Dick? One would hardly associate Obama with Captain Ahab, a man of furious passion bent on revenge. Nor does he much resemble Ishmael. As verbally inclined as Melville's narrator, Obama nevertheless has assumed political leadership, whereas Ishmael prefers the role of observer.

Perhaps he is an island prince, like Queequeg? Yes, he comes from a distant Pacific island, but Obama has taken his place within American society as Queequeg never does. Does he, like Bulkington, have a soul that can "keep the open independence of her sea"? It may be too soon to tell.

One possible answer appears in Obama's book, Dreams from My Father. In contemplating an early failure when working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama describes himself as like "the first mate on a sinking ship" (166). Call me Starbuck?

Ishmael portrays Starbuck as a "long, earnest man." He admires his valor: "Looking into his eyes you seemed to see there the yet-lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life." Ishmael pays tribute to his "august dignity," which he associates with a "just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!"

Starbuck, however, goes down with the Pequod. Obama took the helm of what he saw as a sinking ship and steered it to Washington.

On further reflection, we might conclude that Obama is less like Melville's human characters and more like the whales, who maintain their equilibrium in widely diverse regions. "Oh, man!" says Ishmael, "model thyself after the whale! . . . Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. . . . [L]ike the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own." Perhaps our new president has the whale's "rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness" with which to endure the hazards of nature--or American politics.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Faculty at MIT and has published

extensively on Melville. Other projects include working with the New Media Literacies

group at MIT and the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

in New Bedford, MA.

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: An Interview with Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner (Part Two)

There's an emphasis throughout the book on user-generated content. One can argue that modding and other user-generated forms of content have made it easier for women to repurpose existing games to better meet their interests. Yet, one could also argue that this reliance on user-based solutions has marginalized female-interests into narrow niches rather than reshaping the design of commercial games. What do you see the gains and losses surrounding user-generated content?

CARRIE: I applaud tools to place modding and customization in the hands of more players. But these new tools will not stop advocates for girls to grow their technological comfort and expertise from wanting them to pursue the more difficult (and more powerful) advanced forms of customization through programming. Hopefully even when in-game toolsets for customization are available, it will still be possible to dig deeper and change the game even more.

JILL: The chapter I wrote with Shannon Campe describes the types of games made by 126 middle school girls, when they are given the tools and supports to design and program their own games. In fact, we found that girls' games were not highly gendered. Instead, many used humor to play with, explore, and challenge gender stereotypes. At the same time, they created games that addressed topics of great interest to them, such as fears about getting into trouble at home or school, and on moral decisions. These are topics that are relevant to many teens (male and female) but are completely absent from the most widely accessible games.

YASMIN: It's one of these unpredictable and interesting twists in the history of gaming that for once researchers interested in gender and games predated a paradigm shift in what you now call participatory culture. User-generated content carries with it the high and low: most of what is generated is not particularly compelling, if only for personal reasons, but then there are always a few examples that rise to the top. It's a gain because so many interesting developments are happening on the margins of gaming in discussion boards, machinima - this is what makes gaming an interesting experience. It's a loss if we see player-generated content as the answer to the gender issue. It's not. There is a place for professional design and production and consequently the people there need to become more cognizant about how inclusive or exclusive certain design decisions are.

All evidence suggests that adult women constitute the largest market for casual games. Has this market dominance led to any shifts in the decisions made by game designers serving this space? Does the book offer any insights into why more women play casual games than platform games?

CARRIE: Adult women tend to have less free time and the free time they have is available in shorter chunks of time. That makes games they can pick up and play in short blocks of time more possible and more appealing. Some casual games are available on platforms, but purchasing the console and getting it out and setting it up can be more than a casual commitment. Using the PC for games and the rest of life is in line with multitasking games and the rest of life.

Casual game companies are adopting approaches to acquire a sophisticated understanding of their market. Part of the beauty of online games is an ongoing connection with the player and continuous collection of play data. The game companies I am familiar with involve their most avid players and other volunteers as beta testers, and prior to beta, conduct frequent play tests before deciding the next game is ready to shift. Once a game company has a successful property, they start working with that audience to expand and improve. I don't see the market and the game company as being totally separate. Game design is becoming quite an intimate dialog.

YASMIN: This is really one of the areas deserving more attention research-wise; it just popped up when we started pulling together the book edition. To begin with the name alone 'casual' is of course a misnomer. It implies that these games are not as hardcore or serious as platform games because they don't require hundreds of hours of game play. Some however argue if you compile all the hours spend on casual games albeit distributed you end up with similar levels of involvement.

TL Taylor also made the observation that many of these word and puzzle formats found among casual games have a longstanding history of women playing them. So what we see is not the sudden emergence of the women gamer or a new genre but rather a continuation of traditional game play moving onto a new platform. It might be worthwhile to untangle all these different aspects ...

When we first edited our book, we were often asked why it mattered whether or not women played games. A decade later, what evidence has emerged which might offer a better response to this question?

CARRIE: I think games are still in the process of oozing into all walks of life. So the "one decade later" mark is not an end point but a stepping stone. There will be more change in the next ten years than there were in the last ten years. Games are sometimes and will increasingly be necessary for some jobs, and recommended for personal physical, emotional, and cognitive health. The Pew Foundation report on teens, gaming, and civic life reported that 99% of teens play games, and those who play more were more likely to be active in civic life.

I admit I am a blatant enthusiast, but games offer the curious mind a way to experience, learn, and play outside of the mundane constraints of the physical world. They are important for socialization and for maintaining and performing interpersonal relationships. They are part of participating in modern culture. Also, as games for health, games for learning, and games for social change continue to grow, playing games will be increasingly necessary.

JILL: The chapter by Elisabeth Hayes directly addresses this question. There has been a steady decline in student enrollment and graduation from computing majors in college, and a corresponding decline in the US IT workforce. Hayes argues that gaming can build IT expertise, which may potentially help to fill this gap.

YASMIN: There is one particular reason why it matters now more so than 10 years ago whether or not women and girls play games. This reason is tied to the current interest in games as promising learning and teaching tools. If we consider games effective tools and bring them into schools for that reason, then we better pay attention to their design so that everyone can learn with them. Then of course it matters what outside of school experiences you have because there is ample evidence that this impacts students' participation and success in the classroom.

The book offers some close consideration of the experiences of women working in the games industry. What factors might make this industry more challenging for women than for men to enter and maintain careers?

CARRIE: The huge barrier is programming. 95% of game programmers are male, and the proportion of females major in Computer science continues to decline. For the most part, those with a major voice in game design are the programmers and artists (also 85% male) who work on the game day after day. We either need to find ways to get more girls and young women interested in computer science, or else game development culture needs to open up roles for design consultants who don't come from the ranks of programmers and artists, but contribute in other ways.

JILL: The chapters by Mia Consalvo, and by Tracy Fullerton and her colleagues, describe how the culture of the gaming industry prevents women from entering and staying. Factors include crunch times that force employees to choose between home and work life for extended periods of time, and a devaluing of games that have social value.

The growing emphasis upon "serious games" and educational games raises new questions about gender, since it would be a tragedy if the use of games in the classroom made it that much harder for girls to learn and embrace Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math related subjects. What should educational game designers learn from the research presented in your book?

CARRIE: Part 4 of the book (changing girls, changing games) includes 3 chapters about science, math, engineering, and technology (SMET) games designed specifically for girls. The Click Urban Adventure is a mixed reality detective game in which teams of girls work together using science to solve a mystery. Kristin Hughes at Carnegie Mellon University used extensive formative research to understand some of the needs and desires of urban middle school girls in Pittsburgh. She was able to match narrative types, science tasks, tools and technologies, characters and personas to create a game very well suited to her audience. Her research showed the game was successful in generating a sense of agency and interest in SMET. Thus, games for learning do not, necessarily, exclude girls.

Caitlin Kelleher developed storytelling Alice, a tool for constructing animated stories, and for learning programming along the way. Her hunch that girls would be more interested in programming in order to build a story rather than programming to create a rudimentary game proved to be right on target. Middle school girls who used the Storytelling version of the ALICE programming software instead of the generic version learned more programming, were more delighted with the end product, and were more interested in going on to study programming.

Mary Flanagan created Rapunzel, a game in which players cooperate and compete to program dance moves. She and her team struggled to embed key activist social values within gameplay, such as sharing, cooperation, diversity, autonomy, self-esteem, and authorship.

Taken together these three projects shows that educational games certainly can be designed to appeal to girls. They reinforce the appeal of story and character and remind that games embody values whether designers intend them to or not.

The Heeter and Winn chapter reports on an experiment in which we found that rewarding speedy play interfered with girls' learning, whereas rewarding exploration slowed boys down and helped their learning but did not change girls play behavior positively or negatively. So the chapter does advise educational game designers to come up with ways to make a game "fun" other than including a time limit. As we teach in serious game design graduate classes, creating serious games is even harder than creating games. The audience is often forced to play and usually includes males and females. Learning outcomes, not just fun, must be considered. I am convinced we are all still learning how to make great games for learning. Making the experience good for all learners is part of the requirement.

A decade ago, the core question was whether we should design games specifically for girls or so-called "gender neutral" games to be played by boys and girls together. Is this still a burning question? If so, what new perspectives have emerged over the past decade?

CARRIE: That question makes me schizophrenic. In the collection of research citations on gender and gaming that I have been curating, the two most frequent tags are "gender stereotypes" and "what women want." The gender stereotype research tends to complain about girls and women are portrayed or conceptualized in stereotypical ways that ignore the wide diversity of female-ness. The what-do-women-want research reveals gendered desires and offers suggestions about how to create games to appeal to females.

From a design research perspective, Alan Cooper's proposition to "design for just one user" follows the tradition of designing products to "delight the few, please the many." That perspective implies that very best games for me would be designed for me. Some of what delights me also delights most humans. Some of what delights me would only appeal to a handful of other telecommuting, cat loving 52 year old new media professors. Even just satisfying one player would require many different Carrie-games, not just one. Each of us is more than our gender. The call for "games for girls" is a gross generalization. And yet, of course, some game designs are likely to be more appealing, overall, on average, to females and others to males. Schizophrenic. Sorry.

In her chapter, "Are Boy Games Even Necessary?", Nicole Lazzaro points out that designing for an extreme demographic reduces market size. An extreme male-typed game or an extreme female-typed game both leave out what players like most in most games. Games have changed enormously in the last decade, transitioning to become a mainstream medium and big business. With such an enlarged playing field, the answer from a business perspective is yes games for girls and games for boys and games for everyone. Gaming is large enough that it is beginning to resemble the magazine market. There can be very narrow market game franchises (paralleling the range of women's interest magazines from Vogue to Ms.) and more mainstream game franchises (paralleling Time or Newsweek).

Gender and gaming researchers tend to be more interested in empowering girls and women to engage with technology than they are with increasing game industry revenues. Betty Hayes' chapter points out that boys are more likely to engage in constructive, game-related activities such as modding, machinima, and creating fan web sites. These behaviors contribute to their IT expertise. Games for girls often do not include modding or recording, and therefore inhibit rather than facilitate tech expertise. Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, Celia Pearce, and Jackie Morie envision a "virtuous cycle" in which more women work in the game design industry, resulting in more games that appeal to girls, resulting in more girls becoming interested in becoming game designers. It doesn't matter whether the games are for girls, or gender neutral (ugh, that sounds so bland). We just want more appealing games.

My own research with colleagues Brian Magerko and Ben Medler at Georgia Tech and Brian and Jillian Winn at Michigan State University is moving in the direction of considering player type and motivation. We are working to develop and study adaptive games that express different game features depending upon what each individual player enjoys the most. Thus, instead of creating a game for girls, or a game for everyone, we create a game that can transform to become better for each individual player.

YASMIN: Can a game, or anything else for that matter, ever be 'gender-neutral'? And who decides? Game design can and should be more inclusive; one doesn't need to disrupt the narrative to offer more options for customization of characters or levels that are now common place for most games. That said, if we deal with younger players and school contexts, we need to be deliberate on what choices we offer in game designs to facilitate learning for various players.

In film studies, there has been extensive discussions of whether feminism has implications in terms of production processes and formal practices. Is there such a thing as a feminist approach to game design and if so, what would it look like?

YASMIN: A book chapter by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum suggests an approach on how designers can identify the values that impact their design decisions from the initial conceptions to prototyping and play testing. You can call this a feminist design approach, if you want, or just plain good design strategy that can help everyone design better games.

We pointed to the rise of game companies as sites of female entrepreneurship as one factor that might shift the gender content of games. Why do we still see so few games companies run by women?

CARRIE: It seems like that ought to have started to change by now. Soon, perhaps? A few years ago game industry professionals complained that innovation was stifled because the game industry giants controlled distribution channels. But the growth on online computer game and movement to open up access to consoles seem to have eased some of the roadblocks.

Also, the proportion of female programmers in the game industry was only 5% in 2005, and 13% artists. The industry retains an ethic of "you have to be there when decisions are made" and an expectation that only those who do the heavy lifting have earned a say at the game design table. I am hopeful that new roles will open up such as design consultant to permit much broader participation in game design.

Happily, the Serious Game Design MA program at my university has had close to 50-50 female/male ratio of students in the first two years we've offered it. From where I sit (in a San Francisco basement telecommuting to a Midwestern university), there is plenty of interest on the part of women, and some are intending to start companies. Hopefully this same experience is happening on a much wider scale.

Our book ended with a consideration of Female Gamers as offering an alternative perspective on the "girl's game movement." Your book includes an interview with Morgan Romine from Frag Dolls. Such groups continue to be highly controversial with both feminist supporters and detractors. How would you evaluate their contribution to the issues this book explores?

CARRIE: A writer at the Chicago Tribune called to interview me about the release of the last Lara Croft game, hoping, I think, that I would be outraged. My response was to say Angelina Jolie is really cool, and although Lara's dimensions are ridiculous I am enormously glad to have a strong albeit ridiculous female character be the basis of a game franchise. I've had fun discussion with some of my male undergrad students in a gender and games special topics course, talking about what it feels like to them to play her.

But you asked about Frag Dolls. My response is similar. I celebrate every game conference attendee they beat (male or female). What a nice counter-stereotypical impression they walk away with. I hate the violence of video games and it bothers me that anyone enjoys blowing people and things up, even in a game. I love their confidence and their energy. They are being exploited, but they are also getting paid to do something they really enjoy. It is the birthright of Frag Dolls and other young women to contradict interpret and express the next generation of feminism.

YASMIN: The Frag Dolls are also opening a whole new chapter on the professionalization of gaming that is happening in the US; it has been around in Asia for quite some time. TL Taylor, one of our book contributors, actually examines in her chapter the ramifications of this change in the gaming landscape. A group like the Frag Dolls is just the most visible signpost of this change. As gaming moves into mainstream entertainment and professions, it can and will not escape the gender issues present in other industries as well. Ten years ago, the observations in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat seemed to focus on a group on the margins of technology while in fact, they were telltale signs of things to come. The chapters in Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat discuss the complex and continuing story of women and technology now situated in the context of gaming.

A Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School

at Education, Yasmin Kafai leads research teams investigating learning opportunities in

virtual worlds, designing media-rich programming tools and communities together with

colleagues from MIT, USC and industry. In the early 90's at the Media Lab she was one

of the first researchers to engage hundred of children as game designers in schools to

learn about programming, mathematics and science. While at UCLA, she launched virtual epidemics in Whyville.net, a massive online world with millions of players age 8-16, to help teens learn about infectious disease. She also studied how urban youth create media art, games, and graphics in Scratch, a visual programming language developed together with MIT colleagues. Her research has been published in several books, among them Minds in Play" (1995), Constructionism in Practice (1996 edited with Mitchel Resnick), and the upcoming The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (edited with Kylie Peppler and Robbin Chapman). She has studied in France, Germany and the United States and holds a doctorate from Harvard University.

Carrie Heeter is a professor of serious game design in the department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. She is co-editor of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives in Gender, Gaming, and Computing and creator of Investigaming.com, an online gateway to research about gender and gaming. Heeter's innovative software designs have won more than 50 awards, including Discover Magazine's Software Innovation of the Year. She has directed software development for 32 projects. Her research looks at the experience and design of meaningful play. Current work includes design of learning and brain games which adapt to fit player mindset and motivation and persuasive games where the designer goal is to engender more informed decision-making on complex socio-scientific issues. Heeter also serves as creative director for MSU Virtual University Design and Technology. For the last 12 years she has lived in San Francisco and telecommuted to MSU.

Jill Denner is a Senior Research Associate at Education, Training, Research Associates, a non-profit organization in California. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 1995 from Teachers College, Columbia University. She studies gender equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with a focus on Latinas, in partnership with youth, schools, and community-based organizations. She edited the book Latina Girls: Voices of Adolescent Strength in the US (2006, NYU Press) and is the founder of Girls Creating Games where she conducts research on learning and technology in the context of after school programs.

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: An Interview with Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner (Part One)

In 1997, Justine Cassell (then a Media Lab faculty, now at Northwestern) and I organized a conference, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, for the MIT Women's Studies Program. It was one of the first academic conferences I'd ever organized, but I had no idea what a big deal it was going to be at the time. We brought together feminists from academia and industry to talk about the emergence of the short-lived girl game movement and in the process, we tried to explore what it would mean to expand the female market for games. A year later, Justine and I published a book based on the conference through the MIT Press, which has since become a standard in the Games Studies Field. Now, history has repeated itself: Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, seeking to understand what has changed over the past ten years, have organized a conference -- at UCLA -- and now a book for MIT Press, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, which was released late last year.

Justine and I were invited to speak at the opening of the conference and wrote an essay for the book exploring our own shifts in understanding the issues of gender and computer games since the conference. There, we express our pride -- and mild discomfort -- at seeing ourselves transformed from junior scholars to senior statesmen thanks to the publication of this new book. Frankly, I'm more flattered than anything else to see a new generation of feminist gamers, game designers, and game scholars take up this banner and release an important new body of research around the still very timely topic of women and the games industry.

The book opens with reflections from several other veterans of our original event, among them Brenda Laurel and Cronelia Brunner, and continues to have essays which talk about women's experiences working in the games industry, the growth of casual games as a market which strongly attracts female interests, the gender implications of work in the space of serious and educational games, and interviews with female game designers and with the leader of UbiSoft's Frag Dolls, a female gamer guild.

I couldn't let the release of this important book go without a shout out on this blog, so I asked the editors if they would agree to an interview about the book and about what has or has not changed about gender and computer games over the past decade.

It's been more than ten years since Justine Cassell and I published From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. What motivated you to want to update that book?

JILL: The first book had such a large impact on those of us trying to understand the role of gender in gaming and in technology more broadly. It was helpful to have a mix of academic and industry perspectives, as well as voices from different sides of the "pink" games debate. But as you know, in the last ten years, gaming has changed a lot--it has moved from the margins to the mainstream. It is one of the fastest growing industries in the US. and games are no longer simply a source of entertainment for the most tech savvy. In fact, games are driving innovation in health, business, education, and beyond. New types of gaming experiences have led to greater participation by females, and new research has revealed a greater understanding of what, how, and why females play. But even though women and girls are playing games in increasing numbers, the gaming industry is still run by men, and women seem to be the primary group expressing concern about this. Thus, we felt it was important to follow the model of the first book, with updates from the field.

YASMIN: We actually met a conference where we observed (and participated in) a very prominent event, called "the gender panel", that can be found at nearly any conference featuring female presenters with a mostly female audience. We wondered why nothing had changed in the ten years since the first edition had come out. We knew the field and the business of gaming was booming and that more girls and women were playing games. We titled the book edition for a reason Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat to open up the gaming community to the fact that gender issues are not just about equality in numbers and not just about differences in interests. The contributions in the book provide a broader perspective of what we need and can pay attention to when we study and design games for rich experiences.

Many more women play games today than they did ten years ago. Indeed, recent data released by the Pew Center for the Internet and American Culture implies that the gender gap we were discussing has significantly narrowed. What factors have encouraged more girls and women to play games?

CARRIE: At almost every age category, males spend more time playing games than females do. The magnitude of the gaming gap increases as children become young adults. My own research with Jillian Winn found in college, males have more free time than females and that free time is available in larger blocks of time. Available free time is associated with time spent gaming.

This statement of the near universality of gaming masks large variation in how much and what kinds of games teens play. The Pew report also says that boys play significantly more than girls and notes many significant gender differences by game genre. Boys play for more time and they play more and more different genres of games than girls do. The study asked whether teens played each of 14 common game genres. Boys play more action, strategy, sports, adventure, first-person shooter, fighting, role-play, survival-horror, and multiplayer games. Girls play more puzzle games. There is no significant difference in amount of play of racing, rhythm, simulation or virtual worlds games.

But your question was, what factors encourage more girls and women to play. Hardware and software technology is vastly more capable. Just look at how much computers themselves have advanced in 10 years. In 1997 Apple promoted "the blazingly fast (240MHz) PowerBook 3400." Today's 2008 a MacBook Pro runs at 1066MHz. The game industry has also grown into a multibillion-dollar marketplace. Game companies are seeking larger and new markets, and games are targeting females, either as the primary market, or more often, as part of a larger audience.

Games are getting more interesting, visually rich, more sophisticated, more diverse, more targeted and more ubiquitous. Games are a cultural medium. They are experiences to share and discuss. They are beautiful and surprising, funny and exciting.

YASMIN: The landscape of gaming in terms of genres and platforms has broadened over the last ten years. It has become socially acceptable to play games because a first generation of video game players has grown up and continues to play - all numbers indicate that indeed the gamer population is aging. In the last few years, we have seen a significant shift in who we consider a gamer: with the appearance of Wii older generations are gaming to stay fit both physically and mentally. Today, when we talk about gaming, we include all kinds of games from console games to FPS, sports, casual games, MMORPGS, and even virtual worlds that can have game components. We no longer play games only in arcades or basements but we play games everywhere. So it shouldn't come as such a big surprise that girls and women are playing games too.

Some claim that these shifts make gender a less urgent consideration in our understanding of games culture. Yet, you argue that "it is still critical to consider gender in order to understand and improve on the design, production, and play of games." Why? What issues have proven the most difficult to resolve?

CARRIE: Since we turned in the BBMK manuscript (in August, 2006), I have been developing an online gateway to research about gender and gaming. So far we have identified 362 citations dating back to 1982, including academic journals, conference presentations, books and book chapters as well as industry reports and web articles. The number of articles about gender and gaming has nearly doubled every five years since 1982. In other words, the topic is receiving more attention than ever.

Part of the reason for the fuss is the nature of the medium. We don't hear a lot about gender differences in movie going. Or books. Or web browsing. Or even toys, despite the extreme gender typing of a lot of toy advertising. I could offer excuses for each. Movies in the theater are a group activity, and Hollywood is better served by targeting as large an audience as possible. There are so many books and so many toys it is hard to worry about the overall category. Web sites tend to be functional and only a small subset target one or the other gender.

So why the continually increasing attention to gender and games? Electronic games emerged as a male medium, and typical game mechanics retain the original shooting, fighting, racing, and sports mechanics. The programmers who make electronic games are still overwhelmingly male. Somehow the medium still retains heavy traces of its origin. Lots of games still feel like they are more for boys than for girls, based on look and feel, story, and player actions. Perhaps if books had been invented by girls and only girls could write them. Might not books for boys still be a bit off target as the medium grows into its larger cultural market?

JILL: Several of the authors in our book talk about the fact that there are more similarities than differences in what, why, and how males and females play digital games. However, there seem to be great differences in how males and females experience the games they play. For example, in the chapters by Nick Yee and Holin Lin, we learn how the social context of gaming plays a significant role in a player's experience, and it appears that gender role stereotypes and discrimination are common across many settings and culture. In addition, the chapter by Elisabeth Hayes describes how different types of gaming experiences have the potential to increase IT capacity, but games that are more likely to be played by girls have fewer of the IT fluency building opportunities (e.g., modding).

YASMIN: I think in research and public media we have by far a much easier time to talk about differences in gender than about the construction or performance of gender. The story that girls don't play games in as large numbers as boys do or that they play different games is easily verifiable and accessible: who hasn't seen the difference in toy preferences and play first hand in their own family? It's much harder to sell the idea that gender is performed and thus more malleable. Theory and research-wise you have to be much more attuned to nuances and how they might play out in different situations.

Many critics of our original book assumed it would be primarily focused on the representations of women in games yet neither books spend much time dealing with games on this level. Why not?

CARRIE: Here too, a lot of the explanation goes back to the nature of the medium. Hollywood movies and TV shows are visual, linear and not interactive. Those media are all about representation. Games are so much more than representation. They involve player actions in the game, their interactions with other players, and sometimes customization of their avatar. And, as you ask in more detail later, what happens on the screen is only part of the game. The physical and social context and interpersonal dynamics with other players help define and shape the experience of playing a game.

The annoying aspects of the portrayal of women in games are not very different from all of the other mass media portrayals of women. It is not the most interesting aspect of gaming, and the portrayal emphasis on hypersexualized beautiful young bodies is so pervasive that the complaint is more about society than about games.

YASMIN: The focus on the representations of women in games and advertisements is often the most visible and thus most accessible entrance point into gender and games. I concur with Carrie that the representation in avatars is only one part of the complex equation of how gender comes into game play. But even these representations are culturally bound as for instance Mimi Ito's book chapter on gender dynamics in the Japanese media mix illustrates. In Japanese games male player characters often have features such as big eyes that would be considered part of feminized designs in Western games.

You write, "Today, in 2007, there has been a noticeable shift from pink or purple games to a more complex approach to gender as situated, constructed, and flexible." What would be some compelling examples of this more "complex approach" to gender and game design?

CARRIE: I think researchers studying and theorizing about gender and gaming are the ones who are approaching gender as situated, constructed, and flexible. Game designers are learning to think more broadly about player motivations. Nicole Lazzaro's chapter, "Are Boy Games Even Necessary," calls for moving away from demographic targeting, in which extreme preferences are targeted, in favor of more mainstream, designing for mainstream (male or female) players. My own work is moving to focus on player motivations and player types. Although some player types may turn out to be more prevalent among one gender, the emphasis is on the motivations sought, not the gender seeking those experiences.

JILL: The more complex approach can be found primarily in MMOs, or other types of games that allow players to create their own identity. Players can choose to take on distinctly feminine or masculine avatars, or an animal avatar that is not clearly male or female.

A Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School

at Education, Yasmin Kafai leads research teams investigating learning opportunities in

virtual worlds, designing media-rich programming tools and communities together with

colleagues from MIT, USC and industry. In the early 90's at the Media Lab she was one

of the first researchers to engage hundred of children as game designers in schools to

learn about programming, mathematics and science. While at UCLA, she launched virtual epidemics in Whyville.net, a massive online world with millions of players age 8-16, to help teens learn about infectious disease. She also studied how urban youth create media art, games, and graphics in Scratch, a visual programming language developed together with MIT colleagues. Her research has been published in several books, among them Minds in Play" (1995), Constructionism in Practice (1996 edited with Mitchel Resnick), and the upcoming The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (edited with Kylie Peppler and Robbin Chapman). She has studied in France, Germany and the United States and holds a doctorate from Harvard University.

Carrie Heeter is a professor of serious game design in the department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. She is co-editor of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives in Gender, Gaming, and Computing and creator of Investigaming.com, an online gateway to research about gender and gaming. Heeter's innovative software designs have won more than 50 awards, including Discover Magazine's Software Innovation of the Year. She has directed software development for 32 projects. Her research looks at the experience and design of meaningful play. Current work includes design of learning and brain games which adapt to fit player mindset and motivation and persuasive games where the designer goal is to engender more informed decision-making on complex socio-scientific issues. Heeter also serves as creative director for MSU Virtual University Design and Technology. For the last 12 years she has lived in San Francisco and telecommuted to MSU.

Jill Denner is a Senior Research Associate at Education, Training, Research

Associates, a non-profit organization in California. She earned her Ph.D. in

Developmental Psychology in 1995 from Teachers College, Columbia University.

She studies gender equity in science, technology, engineering, and

mathematics, with a focus on Latinas, in partnership with youth, schools,

and community-based organizations. She edited the book Latina Girls: Voices

of Adolescent Strength in the US (2006, NYU Press) and is the founder of

Girls Creating Games where she conducts research on learning and technology

in the context of after school programs.

That's Me All Over: Catching Up With Myself Over the Holidays

I've always loved that moment in The Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys have knocked (not to mentioned pulled) the stuffing out of the Scarecrow. His body lies like an empty sack. His head's been thrown someplace else. And the straw lies scattered on the ground. And he looks out and says, "well, that's me all over." There are many days when I know how he feels and also appreciate his self-deflating sense of humor. All of this is by way of saying that I flew too much, spoke too much, and otherwise stretched myself way too thin in 2008 and I hope that the steps I've taken at the end of the year will put me in a position to slow down a little in the coming year.

That said, today's post is intended to share with you some of the digital traces which survive from some memorable speaking gigs that I did last year. Each of these represents content I had planned to post at some point last year and never got around to sharing. I figured I'd start the new year by clearing out my inbox.

For example, the day before the election, I spoke at the University of Oregon in Eugene, sharing some of my thoughts about the role of new media and popular culture in the 2008 presidential campaign. While I was there, they got me into the studio to tape a segment of the University of Oregon Today, which recently went up on the web. I was in a particularly reflective frame of mind, talking about some core themes of my work -- especially about the shifting relations between fandom and academia, about the goals and ideals of the Comparative Media Studies Program, about convergence culture, and about politics as a transmedia practice. I will especially value this interview as recording many of the core talking points about the Comparative Media Studies Program just a few weeks before I announced my decision to leave the program. It should give you some sense of why it was so hard for me to walk away from what we had built at MIT.

Earlier in the year, I participated in a lively and spirited exchange at the Consumer Research Conference here in Boston. Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and I had been invited to represent the Convergence Culture Consortium in a mock debate with some of the key thinkers in the field of Consumer Research. We begin the debate slinging zingers at each other, but as the conversation went along, we all became so engrossed in the points of contact between the two fields of research. Consumer Research shares many core assumptions with the Cultural Studies tradition which informs my own research but it has by and large taken shape in a business school context. To be honest, few of my cultural studies colleagues have ever walked across campus to talk with their counterparts in the business school and we know very little about the research being done there, even when it explores some of the same themes or developments shaping our own research. I'm very lucky to have made contact many years ago with Robert Kozinets who has been a key thinker on the topic of "brand communities" and who has been my bridge into the Consumer Research space.Such interdisciplinary conversations should occur more often. I know that I have many readers who come from industry or Business School backgrounds and so I'm grateful that you've been open, on your part, to such dialog.

My former student, Vanessa Bertozzi, now works as a community organizer inside Etsy, an online arts and crafts community. The community had been struggling with issues of copyright and fair use as they were more and more attracting fan artists. Bertozzi, with whom I did research on Young Artists for an essay that ended up in the recent book, Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life (edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey), asked me to join her online for a real time but virtual conversation about the nature of fan art, about appropriation as a transformative and expressive practice, and about the legal and ethical implications of a world where many of us create in response to existing media texts. In many ways, this exchange brought me back to ideas I first explored in Textual Poachers almost twenty years ago.

While I was speaking at the International Communications Association in Montreal last spring, I was asked to do an interview about mobile communications, new media literacies, user-generated content, and privacy for a multimedia web project being developed by Steven James May, an MA candidate at Ryerson University. I had no idea how creative May was going to get in terms of the context for the interview. He talked to me out on one of the main streets of one of Canada's busiest cities, standing inside a phone booth, and holding an outsized early mobile telephone. People were stopping on the street to stare at the strange configuration of media and at one point, an academic associate stopped, yanked out his cellphone camera, adding one more layer of mediation and telecommunication to the mix. May's project is now up on the web and my somewhat befuddled interview now lives alongside interviews with Greg Elmer, danah boyd, Toby Miller, Jonathon Zittrain, and David Weinberger, among others.

Capturing Cosplay: The Photographs of Brian Berman (Part Two)

Editor's note: this is my last post for 2008. I will be back after the start of the new year.

Last time, I shared with you a series of photographs of Furry fans taken by Brian Berman and encouraged us to reflect a bit on what they show or fail to show us about this particular subcultural community. To me, these photographs speak to a core issue in fan studies: the question of how we position ourselves vis-a-vis the subjects of our research. Put in its broadest terms, we see different things and say different things if we are writing about a community which we are a member of than when we are dealing with that same community as an outsider.

Brian is very explicit in his artistic statement and in his bio that while he is fascinated by these fan communities, he looks at them as an outsider, a non-participant. This does not mean that his photographs are necessarily hostile to the communities being depicted, but they do, to some degree, hold these fans at a distance. This is the strength of the images in many ways, but it is also what may make them more than a little disturbing to some of us who claim a much closer set of social and emotional ties to fan communities.

By way of contrast, I thought we might look at some of the videos we've been producing about Cosplay for Project New Media Literacies's learning library project. These videos, filmed at an anime convention in Ohio, reflect a perspective much more sympathetic to the fan experience. Indeed, many of the students who worked with us on these videos were themselves anime fans and some of them had a long history of cosplay. Our goal was precisely to escape the outsider perspective of many commercial documentaries about fans, to treat cosplay as a normal and valued mode of cultural expression, and to hopefully introduce these practices to young people who may not have found their way into the cosplay community before.

These photographs were taken by Brian Berman at Onnafest, Newark Gateway Hilton, Newark, NJ 2005.

Anime Family

Chris

Mark and Holly

Rebekah as Avian Firefly

Patricia, Callie & Sonya

Brian Berman was born in New York City in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. After graduating from both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the School of Visual Arts in NYC he started shooting professionally in New York in 1996. He shoots for, and has been featured in, publications such as the New York Times, Esquire, Ojo de Pez, and Capricious Magazine. He has also been featured in shows at the Houston Photo Festival and Wallspace Gallery. The project featured here is part of larger project about how people fulfill a basic human need to fit in by creating their own subcultures. He does not watch anime or own a fursuit.

Letting the Fur Fly: The Photographs of Brian Berman (Part One)

A month or so ago, I got e-mail from Brian Berman, a photographer who often works with fannish subjects. Here's part of what Berman shared with me about the trajectory of his work:

Several years ago I was watching a television report about a group of men who get together once a year, show each other their vacuum cleaners, and then race the vacuums against each other to see who can pick up the most dirt. I was immediately riveted, for obvious reasons, and then rushed to contact the president of the club. I was convinced I had to photograph them. Two months later, while flying back from Los Angeles after having done the shoot, I knew I was on to something. Since then I have been to quite a few conventions/competitions (About fifteen or so). Some of the others include Taxidermy, Furry, Cosplay, Ventriloquism, Dog Disco etc. In the summer of 2007 I photographed at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the fall prior at Onnafest in Newark, N.J. These events are represented by the photos here. I really enjoyed these events and photographing the people that attend them.

The subculture that the participants created is extremely fascinating and something which I admire. It is as if it's their second family. It is an environment where people can create a new visions of themselves and find a place to fit in. At home they live their normal lives, and maybe they aren't happy with that, but at the furry convention they are a sexy tiger skunk or a vicious wolf. At a Cosplay convention they possess super hero powers. They can see through walls and leap over tall buildings. For the other 362 days of the year they exist anonymously on the periphery of their high school or at their jobs or within society in general. But, on that one weekend a year when the convention happens, they can be something completely different.

These photos act as a simple catalog of these unique events, the people that attend them and the worlds they have created.

Brian was willing to let me share these images with the readers of my blog.

I've struggled a lot with my own reactions to these images, which sometimes strike me as haunting, sometimes comic, sometimes highly sympathetic to the subjects and sometimes coldly distanced. I am very much reminded of the work of Diane Arbus, who similarly adopted an almost clinical gaze upon subjects who are often considered "freaks" or "outcasts." Arbus's work continues to evoke controversy because it is often hard to tell what she feels towards the people she photographs, but the very nature of being photographed by Arbus pushes these people from the fringes of society towards greater visibility. Arbus's photographs invite us to take a second look and in some cases, to see ourselves in people who otherwise would not garner that attention.

My sense is that Berman's photographs will spark debates among aca-fen and I see that debate as potentially very productive. Technically, these photographs are beautifully constructed and each one shows us a distinctive human personality underneath the costumes. Does the objective gaze of the camera necessarily leave us trapped outside or is it possible for us to see some of ourselves in these people? Do these images estrange us from these Furries (featured today) or Cosplayers (featured next time)? Or do they allow us to recognize the creativity and craftsmanship of their work, the ways that they draw together personal mythology to move beyond the more mundane aspects of their everyday lives? What do you see when you look at these images?

Today's images were taken at Anthrocon 2006 in Pittsburgh Convention Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dehner and Tank

Firehopper

Fisk Black and Shane LaFleur

Phoenix D

Smash

Zig Zag

Lucy

Lucky Dog

Moonshadow Luna

Silk Paws

Brian Berman was born in New York City in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. After graduating from both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the School of Visual Arts in NYC he started shooting professionally in New York in 1996. He shoots for, and has been featured in, publications such as the New York Times, Esquire, Ojo de Pez, and Capricious Magazine. He has also been featured in shows at the Houston Photo Festival and Wallspace Gallery. The project featured here is part of larger project about how people fulfill a basic human need to fit in by creating their own subcultures. He does not watch anime or own a fursuit.

From Neil Gaiman to J. Michael Straczynski: News on the Julius Schwartz Lecture Series

Late last spring, we held the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of Julius Schwartz Memorial Lectures at MIT. Schwartz had been a founding figure in science fiction fandom and a influential editor at DC comics who was a key influence on the so-called Silver Age of American comics and on genre entertainment more generally. When he passed away, some of his friends put together seed money for us to start a series of public talks by key figures in the space of comics, science fiction, and genre entertainment. Our first speaker, appropriately enough, was Neil Gaiman, whose work spans comics (The Sandman), fiction (American Gods), cinema (Mirrormask), television (Neverwhere), the blogosphere, and much much more. Gaiman gave a memorable opening lecture on the nature of genre and its influence on the creative process, which is best known for an extended rift on how pornography and musicals follow similar conventions. It was inspired by Linda Williams' Hard Core, but Gaiman took it in his own idiosyncratic directions. As the evening continued, we had a great conversation, which ranged across his career, talked about some of the key themes in his work, and especially dug deep into his ideas about myth, storytelling, and popular entertainment. Anyone whose ever heard Gaiman knows he's a charming and engaging speaker with lots of interesting insights into cultural history and media theory.

In this excerpt from the event, Gaiman talks about his "pulp roots" and his ongoing relationship to genre entertainment

And here, Gaiman talks about the "dark" qualities of his children's fiction:

Gaiman was consistently this witty, engaging, and intelligent for the entire evening!

Too bad you weren't there!

Well, the good news is that CMS and New England Comics are offering you the chance to order a DVD of the Neil Gaiman lecture and discussion with most of the proceeds going to help fund future events in the Julius Schwartz Lecture series. You can order your very own copy here for ONLY $19.99.

We are already making plans for the second lecture in the series to be held on May 22nd at 7pm in Kresge Auditorium. Tickets will go on sale early next year.

This year's speaker is another transmedia creator – J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski is best known for his role as the creator of the cult science fiction serial Babylon 5 and its various spin-off films and series. Straczynski wrote 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season. His television writing career spans from work on He-Man, She-Ra, and Real Ghostbusters through to The New Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote. He followed up Babylon 5 with anothe really solid science fiction series, Jerimiah. In more recent years, he's enjoyed success as a screenwriter, most recently writing the script for The Changling, Clint Eastwood's period drama, and as a comic book writer, who both works on established superhero franchises, such as Spider-Man, Supreme Powers, Fantastic Four, and Thor, and creates his own original series, such as Rising Stars, Midnight Nation, The Twelve, The Book of Lost Souls, and Dream Police. He was one of the first television producers to actively engage his fan community online and has consistently explored the interface between digital media and other storytelling platforms.

This January, CMS will be hosting a screening series some key episodes from his television work, intended to revive awareness of the extraordinary contributions Straczynski has made to the evolution of American television.

I thought I would share her a passage from my forward to Kurt Lancaster's 2001 book, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performance in a Media Universe, which spells out some of the cultural and historical significance of Straczynski's series:

Midway through Babylon 5's first season, in an episode called "And the Sky Full of Stars," Security Chief Michael Garibaldi picks up a copy of the newspaper Universe Today and the camera quickly pans over the various headlines on the cover. Some of the headlines refer to narrative issues raised on previous episodes; others introduce issues and topics that will surface more directly in subsequent episodes. What initially might seem like a throwaway detail -- a character reading a newspaper -- becomes an important turning point when we return to it for a second viewing. Of course, these headlines are only fully decipherable if you freeze-frame the image for closer scrutiny, and their full importance was made clear only through the ongoing Net and Web discussions of the series.

For me, this moment is emblematic of why Babylon 5 was such a remarkable experiment in television storytelling. First, it reminds us of the elaborate narrative planning that went into the production of the series. J. Michael Straczynski understood television as a long-form storytelling medium, and he planned and developed the basic story arc for all five seasons before the first episode was produced. His careful calculations certainly left him room to respond to shifting conditions (ranging from the loss of cast members to the perpetual threat of premature cancellation) and offered space for one-shot episodes. Such long-range planning also enabled him to build into the series elaborate foreshadowing and references to its history episode by episode. Not many television producers could have built plot details for the second season into a mid-first season episode.

Second, this moment suggests the degree of self-consciousness about media that ran through Babylon 5. The series' characters inhabit a world profoundly shaped by the flow of news and information across various channels of communication. They read about events that affect them in the newspaper or watch them unfold on television. They give interviews to reporters, and we watch as what they say is distorted to serve various agendas. They grumble over attempts to merchandise their identities as part of the ongoing propaganda and public relations warfare that shapes the complex intergalactic politics at the center of the series.

Third, the fact that these details are burried within the text, waiting to be discovered by the tacticla use of the VCR as an analytic tool and the collaborative efforts of Net discussion lists, points to the awareness and exploitation of fan competencies that transformed Babylon 5 into one of the most significant cult television programs since Star Trek. Like Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry, Straczynski understood the fans to be central to the program's success from the outset. Straczynski saw his fans as a group of opinion leaders to be courted through prebroadcast publicity and convention appearances, as a group of niche marketers and activist whose support could keep the program on the air during the rough times, and as students in an ongoing classroom where he could share his views about the production process and the aesthetics of television storytelling. Straczynski's relationship with fans was rocky. He was worshiped for his extraordinary productivity and personal vision and feared for his slashing flames in response to some fan comments. He at once sought to facilitate fan discussion and regulate fan speculations to avoid potential intellectual property issues. Yet whatever that relationship with his audience became, Straczynski sought to use digital media to directly and personally engage them, not just occasionally, but week in and week out.

Straczynski sought to validate the new styles of reading and interpretation that have been facilitated by the shifting media environment. The introduction of the videotape recorder and the Internet has significantly altered the informational economy surrounding American television. It is significant that Stephen Bochco's Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) was the first major success story of the videotape era and that David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was one fo the first new cult television series to develop an important Internet following. These series, with their ever-more-elaborate use of story arcs and program history, rewarded a viewer who carefully scrutinized the images using the freeze-frame function, who watched and rewatched the episodes on video tape, and who used the Internet as a vehicle for discussion with a larger interpretive community and the Web as a means of annotation. The succession of new media technologies since the late 1970s has encouraged the emergence of a culture based around the archiving, annotation, transformation and recirculation of media content.

Straczynski's genius was in recognizing the shape and potential of that new culture and in producing a science fiction series that rewarded these participatory impulses. He trusted his audience to ferret out information craftily hidden within the text, awaiting our discovery; he trusted the audience to make meaningful connections from episode to episode and season to season; he trusted the fans to be invested enough in the series to watch his ambitious story unfold and flexible enough in their understanding to cope with the complex shifts in character allignment. He made demands on the audience almost unprecedented in American television history, and for those of us who stuck with him over the five year run of the series, our patience and commitment were fully rewarded!

For these reasons, it is vitally important that media and cultural scholars look closely at Babylon 5, which seems, in retrospect, as rich an embodiment of what television storytelling can do in an age of media convergence as Star Trek represented the full potential of television storytelling in the network era. If you didn't watch Babylon 5, you missed something important."

Hope to see many of you at the event in May!

Tourists and Collectors Enter the World of Tomorrow: An Interview with Angela Ndalianis (Part Two)

You suggest some connections between the birth of Superman and the 1939 World's Fair with its theme, "A World of Tomorrow." Explain.

The New York World Fair of 1938-9 reflected a mindset of the times that saw utopia as becoming an achievable reality in the not too distant future. The birth of Superman was also very much a product of a culture that nurtured this mindset; Superman was a character from a science fiction reality, and the product of a technologically advanced society as represented in his home planet of Krypton. His arrival on Earth was very much presented as the arrival of a god-like being who offered humanity its own utopian potential. In the real-world context of the late 1930s, visionary futures were considered realizable as a result of advances in scientific knowledge, technological development, and urban planning. As early back as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, World Expositions and Fairs - especially in the U.S. - had explored the concern with creating idealized cities but it was the 1938-9 NY fair (and the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-1934 that preceded it) that took the first important steps in forging a relationship between science and society. But more significantly, these concerns were integrated with the visions and consumer pleasures that were offered by science fiction and entertainment. The futuristic, technologically reliant cities found typically in science fiction examples like the Buck Rogers comic strips, sf novels of Edward Bellamy and H.G.Wells, and sf magazines like Amazing Stories collided with science at the New York World Fair. In particular, living up to the Fair's motto "Designing the World of Tomorrow", the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes created his 'Futurama' exhibit - a City of the Future in 1960. Designed as a diorama, viewers sat high above this miniature city while a motorized belt moved them around the exhibit. Drawing heavily on the aesthetics of flight - both through the technological capabilities of aviation and the biological capacity of the Superman body - the omnipotent view point from above was further empowered by the sensation of flight. To cap it all off, on July 4, 1940 the fair hosted 'Superman Day' (with the actor Ray Middleton playing Superman) and a further association between Superman and the U.S. was sealed. Superman's first appearance was in Action Comics #1, in 1938, and his own series began in 1939, but 1939 also saw the publication of New York World's Fair Comics and the two issues that were released at the 1939-40 exposition featured both Superman and Batman visiting the New York Fair to solve crimes. The new figure of the superhero was clearly seen as playing an important role in envision a future, utopian America. In the 1980s, the All-Star Squadron comic book series would return to these origins by placing their superhero team in the 1940s with their headquarters based in the Trylon and Perisphere - the iconic buildings created for the fair.

To broaden outward, much of your work has centered around juxtapositions across media and across historical periods. For example, your book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, combines consideration of Baroque painting and architecture with discussions of contemporary amusement parks and special effects. What do you gain by bringing old and new together in this fashion?

What I enjoy about adopting this approach is exploring and unraveling the dynamic process that is history, and trying to understand the connections that exist across diverse media that may, on the surface, appear to be radically different to one another, but which on closer inspection share a great deal in terms of perceptual, cognitive and sensory responses they may want to extract from their audiences, despite the temporal and cultural gaps. One of the things I'm primarily interested in my research is the history and development of entertainment media. How have certain experiences remained the same, and how and why have they altered. In my (almost finished!!) book on theme parks for example, I look at the parallels that exist between the aristocratic villa gardens of C16th-C18th and theme parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios. In addition to the layouts and design of the park spaces (which have much in common with the plans for villa gardens), I love comparing the minutiae - all the smaller gadgets and media toys that make these places generate delight and pleasure.

Take the trick fountain, for example: in the gardens of Versailles, Louis XIVth and his followers were entertained by the sudden spurts of water that would spray them as they walked by a statue or seat that were rigged as trick fountains. The Alice in Wonderland labyrinth in Disneyland Paris and Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure have almost identical entertainment features that are similarly rigged to trigger gut, sensory reactions of laughter, surprise and joy from their recipients. I remember the fabulous little fountain in the Lost Continent section of the Islands of Adventure. The fountain didn't pretend to be anything other than a fountain, but this one seduces you into its world by acknowledging your presence and by clearly being able to see your actions; just when you feel comfortable with it and engage it in conversation, a spurt of water erupts from one or two of the many barely visible holes that are on its surface and sprays you in the face or body. Hysterical! Crowds of people stand around waiting to see the next victim become part of this slapstick routine. What does this tell us? Well, humans are still entertained by similar toys but with one dramatic difference. The space that's home to this fountain no longer belongs to royalty and to a select few who wield power over the masses. This is now a space that entertains the masses. But are the masses the new royalty, or is this now the role performed by the multinational corporations? Lots of questions that need untangling but which are not necessarily easy to find answers to; I think there's more to be gained from opening up and presenting more questions that complicate these relationships between the past and the present, than providing black and white answers that simplistically draw conclusions (e.g. 'the new royalty are they corporations who are the new oppressors of the people' - it would be easy to conclude this, but I think it would offer a myopic understanding of the complex relationships and conclusions that can be extracted via, in this case, a comparison of trick fountains and their function in entertainment spaces past and present).

A new research project I've just started also adopts a media historical approach. I'm looking at emerging examples of artificially sentient beings, in particular, robots like QRIO, Asimo and Zeno and artificial intelligence programs used in computer games and film effects - in other words, examples from within an entertainment context. But I'm also researching their historical precedents, the intention being to place current robot and AI technologies within the context of the diverse media, trans-temporal and cross-cultural history that they belong; it's through such an approach that a deeper awareness of the historical and cultural implications of humanity's continued fascination with artificial life will emerge. The automaton, for example, is a mechanical predecessor of the robot and harks back to medieval times but reached its peak in popularity in the C18th and C19th in Europe and Japan. While the automaton was reliant on clockwork mechanics and lacked any form of sentience, it shared something crucial with the contemporary examples: a product of technological and scientific invention was presented as entertainment. Like Sony's QRIO, entertainment was the vehicle that delivered the automaton's performance as technological display of the possibilities of new science and technology. To date, no study has asked why? Why entertainment? I guess, I want to ask 'why'?

You have written extensively through the years about the amusement park and location-based entertainment more generally, a topic which has received only limited scholarly attention given its cultural and economic importance. What do you think the study of amusement parks contributes to our understanding of media convergence?

The amusement park and, especially the theme park, is the example of media convergence par excellence. In some respects, it serves a similar role to the earlier World Expositions and Fairs. It's in the theme parks that the latest in entertainment technology is trialed and first exposed to the public. The most cutting edge examples of film technology, for example, has first been experienced in the theme park - the Omnimax experience offered by the Back to the Future ride in the 1980s, or the 3D Imax extravaganzas of the Terminator 3D and Spiderman rides at Universal studios more recently. But these weren't only film experiences. The theme park, and its ride technologies, bargain on engaging the audience on intense and immediate multiple sensory levels and the way this is most effectively achieved is through media convergence. Let's take the Spiderman ride: it's a truly multimedia experience that immerses the participant in cartoons on television, sculptured and architectural environments that reproduce the spaces of the Daily Bugle and New York, filmed environments in 3D on IMAX screens, and amusement park roller coaster technology that flies us seamlessly through all these different media. Add to this the fact that Spiderman originated in comics, then became a series of animated cartoons and tv shows as well as a series of highly successful blockbuster films and a phenomenal theme park attraction and you have the ultimate in media convergence. The thing with the theme parks, though, is that the convergence is more literal and in your face.

You are just about to start an extensive project focused on the impact of new media on collector culture. Can you give us a preview of some of the key themes you plan to explore there? How might comics collecting fit within the book's core arguments?

Yes, I'm co-writing a book with Jim Collins from the University of Notre Dame, which is tentatively (and possibly permanently) titled Curatorial Culture. What we're interested in is the radical transformations that have occurred in collecting culture in light of the central role that entertainment media conglomerates and digital technologies are playing in global culture. New delivery systems are redefining what going to a movie or watching TV means at the beginning of the C21st, just as they have also transformed the "display" of images at art museums throughout the world, and the accessibility and portability of digital information has given rise to a curatorial culture in which seemingly anyone can assemble their own music, film, television and art libraries. I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who owns every Superman comic book ever published - and it's stored on his/her hard drive. I mean, that's phenomenal! Do you know how much physical space you'd need to house (let alone actually find copies of) every Superman comic every written? Our book asks how the omnipresence of the personalized digital archive has altered our understanding of what acquiring culture means, whether it be in the form of an iPod playlist, a media home library, or a public art museum.

We're looking at the relationship between private and public archives as a shifting continuum that depends increasingly on the convergence of media space and museum space, and we're investigating this continuum by concentrating on five distinct sites of convergence-personal media technology, the private home, the public art museum, the retail store, and the urban landscape. So in addition to looking at ipod culture and p2p downloading and collecting, we're also interested in the fluid exchange between high culture and pop culture aesthetics - what Jim calls High Pop. Retail centers like those owned by Nike, Apple, Sony and Prada hire 'star' architects like Koolhaas, Hadid, and Gehry who have designed destination museum sites to design their retail spaces as unique consumer experiences, while also displaying their consumer products as if they're original artworks on display in a gallery. Or, to give you a couple of examples from the city of Las Vegas.... The new CityCenter residential-retail-entertainment complex being built on the Strip (and owned by MGM Mirage) will include a $40 million public Fine Art program that will distribute contemporary masterpieces throughout CityCenter's public spaces - the gaming areas, hotel and residential towers, and the retail and entertainment districts will now all serve the role of public gallery. Las Vegas represents--in intensified form--the ways in which our urban environments and leisure experiences are transforming into a collecting and display culture that has collapsed traditional boundaries that demarcated spaces of art display and those of consumerism and mass pleasures. In very real ways, the city of Las Vegas does precisely this: it visualizes global, conglomerate culture at its most intense point and, in the process, transforms itself into a living museum. In the Bellagio Casino Hotel, for example, traditionally cultural opposites collide: a visitor can tempt fate by feeding slot machines, and then walk out of the gambling hall and into the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery that's situated down the corridor to view the works of Picasso, Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh (who were on display when I visited). Even more bizarrely, in the Bellagio's Picasso restaurant it's possible to taste and smell the delights conjured by the "legendary" Spanish chef Julian Serrano, while being surrounded by the paintings and drawings of that other legendary Spaniard, which decorate the walls of the restaurant. Picasso's name now serves a dual function: Picasso the artist who created masterpiece artworks, and Picasso the restaurant that now promises to feed its customers with masterpiece food creations. What Vegas is lacking is a Superheroes casino and entertainment complex. When that happens, I'll be packing my bags and moving to the city of lights.

Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins.

She can be contacted on angelan@unimelb.edu.au