The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Three)

This is the third and final segment of my response to David Bordwell's thoughtful analysis of some of the pitfalls and challenges associated with transmedia storytelling. Thanks to David for sparking what has been a fascinating exchange, one which has forced me to sharpen my thinking about certain key issues that I am working through for my class.

Bordwell writes:

Another drawback to shifting a story among platforms: art works gain strength by having firm boundaries. A movie's opening deserves to be treated as a distinct portal, a privileged point of access, a punctual moment at which we can take a breath and plunge into the story world. Likewise, the closing ought to be palpable, even if it's a diminuendo or an unresolved chord. The special thrill of beginning and ending can be vitiated if we come to see the first shots as just continuations of the webisode, and closing images as something to be stitched to more stuff unfolding online. There's a reason that pictures have frames.

Again, I'd argue that Bordwell is describing a specific kind of filmmaking, one that may gain very little from transmedia expansion. Yet, as I said earlier, the aesthetic properties of texts that lend themselves to transmedia experience are world-building (as we've been discussing) and seriality. By definition, a serial text is not self-contained. It resolves one chapter and immediately plants the book that will draw us into the next. It is, as Angela Ndalianis stresses in Neo-Baroque, a work which pushes beyond its frame. Now, to be clear, the cliffhangers which have shaped many classic serial forms do depend on an understanding of where one text stops and another begins. But we can see this as an art of chunking rather than framing. They know how to break the story down into meaningful chunks which are compelling emotionally within themselves but which gain greater urgency when read in relation to the other installments of the story. We still have a lot to learn about how to create meaningful chunks and link them together across media platforms. As such, I am watching more and more vintage serials to see how they balance between self-containment and openness.

This may be why transmedia seems so far to work best in relation to television, which is increasingly relying on seriality (and back story) to create a particular kind of aesthetic experience, and where it is applied to film, it seems to work best for franchises which will have a series of increasingly preplanned sequels. No one would take away the aesthetic pleasures of closure and containment, but there are also aesthetic pleasures in seriality, openness, and especially, for me, a pleasure in suddenly understanding how a bit of information consumed in one medium fits into the puzzle being laid out for us in a totally different platform.

So far, transmedia texts have been most compelling while they are mid-process and have tended to disappoint when they reached their conclusion. This phenomenon may tell us something about the degree to which they rely on open-ended and serialized structures rather than the kinds of closure which is the pleasure of a different kind of fiction. The anxious fan wants to know that the producers of Lost isn't making it up as they go along, though of course, on one level, every storyteller is making it up as they go along. The hope though is for a certain level of integrity and continuity between the pieces which allows us to find the coherent whole from which the many parts must have once broken adrift.

For me, though, I am also intrigued by the moment when the story is rich with possibilities, when fan speculations span out in many different directions, and when each of us has taken the parts as resources for constructing our own fictional world. I wrote about this almost 20 years ago in response to Twin Peaks: I was much more interested in the hundreds of complex theories about who killed Laura Palmer that invested fans constructed individually and collectively than I was in the official version which David Lynch and Mark Frost were forced to add under pressure from the networks.

Bordwell writes:

In between opening and closing, the order in which we get story information is crucial to our experience of the story world. Suspense, curiosity, surprise, and concern for characters--all are created by the sequencing of story action programmed into the movie. It's significant, I think, that proponents of hardcore multiplatform storytelling don't tend to describe the ups and downs of that experience across the narrative. The meanderings of multimedia browsing can't be described with the confidence we can ascribe to a film's developing organization. Facing multiple points of access, no two consumers are likely to encounter story information in the same order. If I start a novel at chapter one, and you start it at chapter ten, we simply haven't experienced the art work the same way.

Transmedia storytellers are becoming increasingly skilled at deciding when extensions should be rolled out in relation to the franchise's "mother ship." Some plot developments do require careful sequencing. There's a pleasure to be had in watching Robert Rodriquez's Shorts in making fun of a schoolboy who claims that sharks ate his homework in an early scene and then looping back in time to discover that he is telling the truth. Even though the plot of the film shifts around the story information so we see events out of sequence, there is still a larger rationale determining why we experience these events in a particular order.

The same may be said for the difference between materials released to the web before we encounter the film or television series, which often are designed to help us manage the complexity of an unfamiliar world or an ensemble-centered narrative, and those which come later in the unfolding of the franchise. Enter the Matrix comes at a particular juncture in the film series, while the multiplayer game based on The Matrix comes only after the film series was completed and the Wachowskis wanted to cede greater creative control back to the consumers to take the world in new directions. The Battlestar Galactica webisodes , "Face of the Enemy," which came on the eve of the final season went back in time to refocus us on the character of Felix Gaeta, who had been a secondary figure for most of the run, showing us the events from his point of view and revealing previously unknown aspects of his motivation, just in time to set us up for the character to play a much more central role in the series's final year. This is why transmedia "chunks" often tell us explicitly where they fit into the larger time line and why many of us prefer to read those chunks within a narrative sequence.

So, we may simply be over-stating the degree to which the dispersal of information is open-ended. Certainly, once the information moves beyond the borders of a single text, there's no control over what order the spectator encounters it. And it may not matter in which order we encounter certain aspects of the world building. But it may still be the case that the release and roll out of transmedia content is carefully timed and structured to construct a preferred reading sequence. Geoff Long has called for navigational tools that help viewers to find relevant content and to identify at what point it fits into the unfolding of the larger transmedia story. Given this, I believe that it would be possible to do a formalist reading of a transmedia narrative which mapped the functions of different bits of information and for me, that would go beyond simply a list of joints and citations. It would simply be a task of enormous complexity. Much as Roland Barthes could apply his methods to only a small segment of a Balzac story, Geoff Long has been able to apply the narrative analysis to only a short segment of Jim Henson's transmedia texts.

Bordwell writes:

Gap-filling isn't the only rationale for spreading the story across platforms, of course. Parallel worlds can be built, secondary characters can be promoted, the story can be presented through a minor character's eyes. If these ancillary stories become not parasitic but symbiotic, we expect them to engage us on their own terms, and this requires creativity of an extraordinarily high order.

Well, yes, and these are the functions of transmedia extensions which interest me the most -- and for that matter, the ones which spark the most excitement in the industry types who seem to grasp the concepts the best. It isn't simply about the narrative; it isn't simply about filling in gaps in the plot. "Gap-filling" seems to be a special case: the parlor trick that The Matrix franchises plays with the delivery of information from the doomed Osyrus which unfolds across three different media platforms. More often, transmedia is about back story which shifts our identifications and investments in characters and thus helps us to rewatch the scenes again with different emotional resonance. More often, it is about picking up on a detail seeded in the original film and using it as a point of entry into a different story or a portal into exploring another aspect of the world. And yes, to do this well is creativity of an extraordinarily high order, which is why most transmedia extensions disappoint; they fail to achieve their full potential. Transmedia is appealing to artists of a certain ambition who nevertheless want to work on popular genre entertainment rather than developing avant garde movies or art films. It appeals to intellectually engaged viewers who are more at home with popular culture than with gallery installations.

I'm curious to hear what other transmedia critics and creators are thinking about this exchange.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Two)

Today, I continue to share my responses to David Bordwell's recent blog post on transmedia storytelling. It is worth stressing that these are still early days in the evolution of transmedia narrative practices and even earlier in terms of our theoretical understanding of those practices. Exchanges like this one have the potential to help both critics and practitioners think more deeply about these developments. Every time I step in front of my transmedia class at USC, I feel like I am playing without a net and that's what makes the classroom experience so exciting. We are really thinking through a relatively new phenomenon together. And each set of questions which get posed will push all of us to dig a little deeper. Bordwell wrote:

For one thing, most Hollywood and indie films aren't particularly good. Perhaps it's best to let most storyworlds molder away. Does every horror movie need a zigzag trail of web pages? Do you want a diary of Daredevil's down time? Do you want to look at the Flickr page of the family in Little Miss Sunshine? Do you want to receive Tweets from Juno? Pursued to the max, transmedia storytelling could be as alternately dull and maddening as your own life.

There aren't that many films/franchises that generate profoundly devoted fans on a large scale: The Matrix, Twilight, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, maybe The Prisoner. These items are a tiny portion of the total number of films and TV series produced. It's hard to imagine an ordinary feature, let alone an independent film, being able to motivate people to track down all these tributary narratives. There could be a lot of expensive flops if people tried to promote such things.

Well, actually, my bet is that Diablo Cody's penchant for snarky one-liners might have been better served if Juno had unfolded via Twitter rather than on the screen, there are many excellent comic book stories which center around the "downtime" of superheroes and thus focus on their alter egos, but I catch David's drift. I don't think that every fictional work should become a transmedia franchise, though I think the approach lends itself to a broader array of genres than simply the fantasy and science fiction franchises that have been its primary home to date.

For me, the core aesthetic impulses behind good transmedia works are world building and seriality. For this reason, the transmedia approach enhances certain kinds of works that have been udged harshly by traditional aesthetic criteria because they are less concentrated on plot or even character than more classically constructed narratives. It's long been a charge directed against science fiction works that they are more interested in mapping complex environments than in telling compelling stories. Many of my favorite SF novels -- Snow Crash for example -- break down into near incoherence by the end, yet they offer us richly realized worlds which I would love to be able to explore in greater detail than any one narrative allows. I might make the same argument about Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York: Marty got so invested in the historical background of his film that it sometimes swamps his characters and as a history buff, I kept wanting to stop the film and chase background figures down the street so that I could learn more about who they are and what they are doing. In some scenes, I was more interested in the extras than the protagonists.

I recently read an outstanding dissertation written by a recent UW-Madison graduate, Derick Johnson, who talks about "overdesign" as a principle driving contemporary media franchises: his example is Battlestar Galactica, which he suggests overflows with throwaway details which convince us that the depicted vents are unfolding in a world as rich and complex as our own. Speaking at last year's 5D event, I argued that the art director takes on new importance in transmedia franchises, becoming almost as central as the screenwriter or the director, in terms of adding to our understanding of the fictional world. We could go back to Syd Mead's contributions to Bladerunner for an example where much of our appreciation of the film stems from a complex and well considered rendering of a plausible future society. So, we can see many of the extensions around transmedia narratives as examples of this "overdesign," adding greater "texture" (to use a concept Johnson draws from Ron Moore) to our over-all experience. Such extensions may or may not add something key to the unfolding of the narrative, but they nevertheless impact our overall aesthetic experience.

All of this is to say that not every work should become transmedia, but we may not yet know enough to prejudge which works can be meaningfully enhanced through such an approach.

Bordwell writes:

film viewing is already an active, participatory experience. It requires attention, a degree of concentration, memory, anticipation, and a host of story-understanding skills. Even the simplest story gears up our minds. We may not notice this happening because our skills are so well-practiced; but skills they are. More complicated stories demand that we play a sort of mental game with the film. Trying to guess Hitchcock or Buñuel's next twist can engross you deeply. And the very genre of puzzle films trades on brain strain, demanding that the film be watched many times (buy the DVD) for its narrational stratagems to be exposed.

Here, I can only agree. Indeed, Bordwell's teaching shaped my own investment in the cognitive and social/cultural activities of film consumers, giving me a theoretical vocabulary to make sense of some of the things I'd experienced in and through fandom. I don't buy the "Lean back"/"Sit Forward" distinction offered by many transmedia advocates. That said, I do think that there is an increased awareness of audience activity driving the push towards transmedia storytelling.

Bordwell and others in the formalist tradition make a distinction between story and plot. The plot of the film is the sequence in which we encounter specific bits of information, while the story of the film is our mental construct which rearranges that information into a coherent sequence. So, a mystery may begin with the discovery of the body and work backwards (to show us the events which motivated the death) and forward (to show us how the detective put together the clues.) If we take this distinction between the sequencing and structuring of information, transmedia storytelling simply expands the scope of the process, allowing us to continue to collect and assemble clues once the specific unfolding of the film is completed.

Yet, in a networked culture, this ongoing process of information gathering, hypothesis testing, and interpetation/evaluation takes on a more profoundly social dimension. It is no longer something that occurs in a single mind during the two hours the film is unfolding; it is something which we do together, pooling resources, and comparing notes. Mimi Ito describes this as the "hypersocial" logic underlying Japanese media mix. Clearly this process is most vividly suggested by the Alternate Reality Game, where the information scavenger hunt becomes the driving force of the entertainment experience, but we can understand the dispersion of videos about the world of District 9 as also setting a similar process in motion.

Bordwell writes:

No narrative is absolutely complete; the whole of any tale is never told. At the least, some intervals of time go missing, characters drift in and out of our ken, and things happen offscreen. Henry Jenkins suggests that gaps in the core text can be filled by the ancillary texts generated by fan fiction or the creators. But many films thrive by virtue of their gaps. In Psycho, just when did Marion decide to steal the bank's money? There are the open endings, which leave the story action suspended. There are the uncertainties about motivation.....Many art works exploit that impulse by letting us play with alternative hypotheses about causes and outcomes. We don't need the creators to close those hypotheses down.

Geoff Long, a CMS graduate, has long advocated the use of the concept of "negative capability" to understand how gaps in the fiction incite certain forms of aesthetically pleasing speculations and anticipations. There is of course a complex dance between gaps and excesses where we are talking about narrative information. Johnson's "overdesign" may seem to provide "too much information" about the story world, yet for every new bit of information given, there are new spaces for speculation opened. We become like nagging five year olds who follow every explanation with a new question.

That said, most good transmedia artists know that there are certain gaps which should not be filled if they want to maintain interest in the series as a whole. There are certainly reasons to create ambiguities and uncertanties. We may offer more clues through other media, but we certainly don't want to destroy the mystery which makes such characters and worlds compelling in the first place. Fans resent the addition of information simply to close down avenues for speculation -- take, for example, the closing chapter of the last Harry Potter novel which amounted to J.K. Rowling spraying her territory telling us who married who and what they named their children even though most of that information had limited narrative impact and simply felt like she was trying to foreclose certain strands of fan expansion. In some cases, authors are better off allowing fans to create their own narratives, since the community will generate multiple explanations, much as critics will offer multiple accounts of what motivates Hamlet or Travis Bickle to do what they do.

Bordwell writes:

Storytelling is crucially all about control. It sometimes obliges the viewer to take adventures she could not imagine. Storytelling is artistic tyranny, and not always benevolent.

To me, the key word here is "sometimes." Bordwell is describing a particular kind of storytelling. It's no accident that critics of transmedia and interactivity almost always fall back on Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate their point. Hitchcock's works are certainly about control, shaping not only the sequencing of events and unfolding of information, but also playing around with the hierarchy of knowledge between the characters and the shaping of the point of view shots through which we see each moment of the film. Hitchcock famously slept on the set because he had thought all of this through before the cameras roll. So, yes, let's give Bordwell Hitchcock.

But, then give me Tim Burton, whose films are often sprawling messes, because he is so much more interested in art direction and world building than storytelling. I have limited interest in the plot of his version of Planet of the Apes, say, but I never cease to be amazed at the complex thinking which went into every aspect of the Ape cultures -- a classic example of Johnson's "overdesign" and "textures" in action. The human characters amount to cursers we deploy to navigate the fictional space and in that case, I would be quite happy to be free to explore this world on my own, digging deeper into details that don't happen to be required for the unfolding of a particular story but which deepen my experience of this imaginary culture. We can call Tim Burton a bad filmmaker because he doesn't need to exert this kind of "tryanical control" over the unfolding of information, but then how do you explain the pleasurable anticipation I have for his version of Alice in Wonderland, even though I know he will once again disappoint me as a storyteller.

So maybe Planet of the Apes is not a film I would go to the mat for. But if we shift media, I would argue that works like War and Peace or Moby-Dick or Dante's Inferno are much more invested in world-building than story-telling and that their authors seemed content to stop their novels dead in their tracks for pages on end as we wander through their fictionalized geography, trying to map its contours or understand the connections between scattered events. In both cases, what frustrates high school students who want them to get on with their stories is what has made them of lasting interest to critics who want to better understand the realms they are depicting. (It's no accident, I think, that some enterprising producer out there is trying to adopt the Divine Comedy into a transmedia franchise. Surely, that was Dante's plan all along.)

Clearly the author always exerts a certain degree of control over the unfolding of story information, but there are some authors who seek to create a more open text and others who seek to close down varying interpretations. I would say that so far transmedia storytelling has appealed to storytellers who want to open up greater freedom of interpretation rather than those who want to totally shape the reception of their work.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part One)

David Bordwell, my graduate school mentor and one of the leading figures in academic film studies, joined the conversation about transmedia storytelling the other week with a typically thoughtful and engaging entry that explored the strengths and limits of transmedia as an expansion of the cinematic experience. Personally, I read Bordwell's analysis as a friendly amendment and generous "shout out" to the work I've been doing on this topic, not to mention a timely one since it arrived on the eve of the start of my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at USC. His greatest contribution here is to raise a series of constructive objections and challenging questions any filmmaker would need to think through before moving their film -- mainstream or independent -- in a transmedia direction. To keep the conversation on these topics flowing, I thought I would respond to some of Bordwell's arguments. Bordwell writes:

Transmedia storytelling is very, very old. The Bible, the Homeric epics, the Bhagvad-gita, and many other classic stories have been rendered in plays and the visual arts across centuries. There are paintings portraying episodes in mythology and Shakespeare plays. More recently, film, radio, and television have created their own versions of literary or dramatic or operatic works. The whole area of what we now call adaptation is a matter of stories passed among media....

What makes this traditional idea sexy? ... Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven't tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it.

I can follow Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories well without seeing The Seven Percent Solution or The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. These pastiches/continuations are clearly side excursions, enjoyable or not in themselves and perhaps illuminating some aspects of the original tales. But according to Henry, we can't appreciate the Matrix trilogy unless we understand that key story events have taken place in the videogame, the comic books, and the short films gathered in The Animatrix.

I would certainly agree with Bordwell that transmedia storytelling does not begin with The Matrix. When Jeff Gomez (Starlight Runner) spoke to my students last week, he repeatedly used the phrase, "mythology," to describe the structure of transmedia narratives and others adopt a long-standing industry term, "Story Bible," to describe the documentation that organizes the continuity. Both metaphors pay tribute to earlier forms of branching or encyclopedic narrative. In Gomez's case, we might trace the concept of "mythology" backwards from the D&D games he played as a young man into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien who clearly conceived of Lord of the Rings as modeled on structures found in folklore and mythology. I'd also argue that C.S. Lewis's writings on stories contain a lot of great insights onto the value of telling details in fleshing out fictional worlds, suggesting that modern transmedia fans might have enjoyed a rich exchange if they were able to sit down in the faculty room at Oxford in the early part of the last century.

If I was having an imaginary conversation about the origins of this concept, I'd also want to include L. Frank Baum, who unfolded the world of Oz across a range of media platforms. What we now might read as a series of novels that fleshed out the Land of Oz began life as short films produced by Baum's studios, Broadway musicals, and comic strips. (See the recent republished edition of The Marvelous Land of Oz which collects the comic strip elaborations of his "mythology.") Indeed, you could argue that the shifts across media give the book series a kind of wacky incoherence, involving radical shifts in tone or theme, inconsistent conceptions of characters, and so forth.

I might also want to invite Cordwainer Smith, a science fiction writer who I've long been convinced was a time traveller, since his works prefigure many of the key themes and motifs of cyberpunk. Smith developed a complex and interlocking "mythology" which links together dozens of short stories published across a range of different magazines, and he specifically depicted many of his stories as "versions" or "installments" of a narrative the reader is already presumed to understand from encountering it across a range of previous media incarnations. Smith himself wrote only prose narratives, but in his fictions, he imagines explicitly how his tales would take shape on stage or television.

I would argue that the contemporary moment of transmedia has heightened our awareness of these earlier moments of authors unfolding stories across media, much as the rise of digital media more generally has led to a revitalization of the study of "old media when they were new" or the history of the book. We certainly want to understand what is new about our current push for transmedia entertainment, which to me has to do with the particular configuration of media systems and the push towards a more participatory culture.

Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, and Smith all sought to model contemporary fictions on the dispersed, episodic, yet interlocking structures of classic mythology -- creating a folklore for a post-folkloric society. And so, yes, there are going to be many resemblances to be drawn between transmedia stories, informed by these creative figures, and traditional religious or mythological works.

That said, many of Bordwell's examples above are simply adaptations of works produced in one medium for performance in another platform. And for many of us, a simple adaptation may be "transmedia" but it is not "transmedia storytelling" because it is simply re-presenting an existing story rather than expanding and annotating the fictional world. Of course, this distinction assumes a pretty straight forward adaptation. Every adaption makes additions -- minor or otherwise -- and reinterpretations of the original which in theory expands our understanding of the core story. These changes can be read as "infidelities" by purists but they may also represent what I describe in CC as "additive comprehension" -- they may significantly reshape our understanding of what's happening in the original work. Still, I think there is a distinction to be made between "extensions" to the core narrative or the fictional universe and adaptations which simply move content from one medium to another.

Bordwell continues:

The "immersive" ancillaries seem on the whole designed less to complete or complicate the film than to cement loyalty to the property, and even recruit fans to participate in marketing. It's enhanced synergy, upgraded brand loyalty.

For the most part Hollywood is thinking pragmatically, adopting Lucas' strategy of spinning off ancillaries in ways that respect the hardcore fans' appreciation of the esoterica in the property. Caranicas quotes Jeff Gomez, an entrepreneur in transmedia storytelling, saying that for most of his clients "we make sure the universe of the film maintains its integrity as it's expanded and implemented across multiple platforms." It would seem to be a strategy of expanding and enriching fan following, and consequent purchases.

As best I can tell, then, in borrowing this academic idea, the industry is taking the radical edge off. But is that surprising?

I've long ago given up trying to separate the creative and commercial motivations of transmedia entertainment, but then, all popular culture, no, all art depends on a complex balance between the two. From the start, most transmedia has been funded through the promotional budget rather than being understood as part of the creative costs of a particular franchise, even where it has been understood as performing key world building or story expanding functions. This was a central issue in the Writer's Strike a few years ago. Indeed, in so far as Hollywood has grasped transmedia, it has been in the context of a growing awareness of the urgency of creating "consumer engagement" that has been a buzz word across the entertainment industry in recent years. This is why the transmedia chapter in CC follows so closely after the discussion of "affective economics" and American Idol.

Yet, as I suggested in my recent discussion of District 9, one man's promotion is another man's exposition. Increasingly, transmedia extensions are released in advance of the launch of major franchises and do some of the basic work of orientating us to the characters, their world, and their goals, allowing the film or television series to plunge quickly into the core action. Yet, even at this level, they can do other things -- creating a more layered experience by introducing us to conflicting points of view on the action (as when we learn more about alien rights protesters through the District 9 promotional materials). Most of the people in the industry who take transmedia seriously are open about the fact that they are highjacking parts of the promotional budget to experiment with something that they think has the potential to refresh genre entertainment as well as reward viewer investments.

On another level, I'd say we are still at a moment of transition where transmedia practices are concern. Each new experiment -- even the failed ones -- teach us things about how to shape a compelling transmedia experience or what kinds of tools are needed to allow consumers to manage information as it is dispersed across multiple platforms. In some ways, the transmedia stories may need to be conservative on other levels -- adopting relatively familiar genre formulas -- so that the reader learns how to put together the pieces into a meaningful whole, much as the first jigsaw puzzles we are given as children take shape into familiar characters and do not have the challenges found in those designed for hardcore puzzlers.

(Two More Installments To Come)

Hightlights from My Conversation With J. Michael Straczynski

Late last spring, I moderated a public lecture and interview with J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the writer and producer known for his contributions to television (Babylon 5), comics (Thor, The Twelve), and film (The Changeling). Straczynski was speaking as part of the Julius Schwartz Lecture Series which MIT hosts in tribute to a long-time editor at DC Comics who spent his lifetime supporting genre entertainment. Straczynski was, as always, engaging in addressing questions posed by me or by members of the MIT audience and the discussion ranged across his career and addressed everything from his experiences interacting with fans online to the challenges of sustaining continuity across the full run of a complex science fiction series and explored everything from his early work for animated series such as He-Man and Ghost Busters and what he learned from Rod Serling and Norman Corwin to his forthcoming work on Ninja Assassian and Lensman.

The Comparative Media Studies program recently posted videos of the full event on line. They are broken down into three parts -- the first features Straczynski's opening remarks to the audience which center on the importance of being willing to risk failure in order to achieve creative rewards; the second features my one on one interview with Straczynski and the third features the question and answer period with the audience.

Altogether, the original program ran for 2 1/2 hours, thanks the persistence of the audience and the endurance of the speaker. The webcast version offers more extensive highlights from the significant longer exchange.

Today, I thought I would share some highlights from the exchange with you. In this first segment from the audience question/answer period, JMS speaks about how his ability as a showrunner to preserve continuity on Babylon 5 have been core to his personality since childhood, although he has not always been awarded for this obsessive attention to detail.

Here, JMS offers his predictions about what serialized television drama will be like five years from now and it sounds very much like what many of us are calling transmedia entertainment -- a form which breaks down the barriers between platforms and taps into the desire of audiences to more actively participate in the life of the franchise.

Here, I asked him about the persistence of themes of religion across his writing for Babylon 5, Jeremiah, and Twilight Zone. He describes it in terms of playing fair with his characters and his audiences.

JMS speaks about the "breakthroughs" Babylon 5 made in its representations of alien cultures on American science fiction television.

JMS explores how the innovations of Babylon 5 reflected his own tastes and interests as a fan of British television SF series such as Doctor Who, Blake's 7, and The Prisoner.

These segments do not begin to scratch the surface. There's a lot more to learn from this gifted creative artist who has done substantive work across multiple media and genres.

Henry's [Comic] Book Club: My Personal Rec List of Graphic Novels

Look, if Oprah can have a Book Club, I figure I can have a Comic Book Club. One of my wife's friends has recently been smitten by Scott McCloud's Zot!. As someone who read through the recent collection of Zot! in almost a single sitting (albeit in a hospital bed), I was highly sympathetic with her plight. I offered to draw up a list of recommendations for some other graphic novels she might enjoy, using Zot! as the starting point for calibrating her tastes. Having put in enough time to develop such a list, I figured it was worth passing along to my readers here. So, keep in mind that this was never intended as an all purpose set of comic recs. My bet, however, is that even many of you who have been known to pick up a comic from time to time will find some works here you didn't already know that you will find worth reading. This list consists of Anglo-American graphic novels which for one reason or another have emerged as personal favorites. Eurocomics and Manga would require whole separate listings, another project for another day.

If you like stories of everyday life, then the following might be your cup of tea:

Blankets - Craig Thompson - charming autobiographical comic of first love among conservative Christians, conveyed with idiosyncratic and expressive visual style. Warm, affectionate, charming.

FunHouse - Alison Bechdel, Another autobiographical comic - this one dealing with the shifting relationship between an eccentric father (a closeted gay man) and his daughter (who is in the process of coming out as a dyke). Full of personal quirks and literary allusions.

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi - published in two volumes -autobiographical comic focused on the experiences of an Iranian woman from childhood in Tehran through time spent in Europe and America, a child's eye view on the events that have shaped Iranian politics over the past three decades.

Bottomless Belly Button - Dash Shaw - Shaw was last year's big discovery - a semi-autobiographical account of a family reunion in what may be one of the world's most dysfunctional families, reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie (like The Royal Tanenbaums)

It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken - Seth - personal narrative about a man who becomes obsessed with a cartoonist who published in popular magazines in the 50s and 60s and his efforts to track him down - done in a retro style.

Alice in Sunderland - Bryan Talbot - nonfictional comic albeit very idiosyncratic and more than a little obsessive - one man's attempt to trace the local history of Sunderland (a British city) and its relationship to Alice in Wonderland. Of the comics in this category, it is the most out there formally. If you like it, you should also check out Talbot's Tale of One Bad Rat, which is about a runaway and his relationship to the fairy tales of Beatrix Potter.

Chiggers -- Hope Larsen -- nostalgic, bitter-sweet story of two young women who become summer camp friends.

If you like superheroes with a more mature twist, then check out the following (I am assuming that you either know your way around DC/Marvel or have decided this is not to your taste):

Concrete - Paul Chadwick - A political speech writer finds his brain transplanted into a massive concrete hulk and tries to figure out what he's going to do with his life. One part love story, one part superhero fantasy, one part political drama.

The Works of Alan Moore - the key ones are Watchmen (the basis for the recent film), League of Extraordinary Gentleman (literary figures like the Invisible Man and Dr. Jeckel function as 19th century superheroes), V for Vendetta (Anarchist tries to bring down a totalitarian regime), Top Ten (Hill Street Blues in a superhero universe).

Astro City - Kurt Busiek - A veteran superhero author, best friends with Scott McCloud, explores the stories that can't be told through traditional superhero comics - themes about work, love, labor. Busiek also did Marvels which is about a photographer living in a world dominated by Marvel Superheroes.

Demo - Brian Woods - a much more alternative character-driven take on the superhero -- with the genre functioning more as a metaphor than as a story structure. Woods tends to do more realist comics often with a dark or depressing undertow.

Ex Machina - Brian K. Vaughn - a superhero ends up stopping 9/11 and gets elected mayor of New York City - much more West Wing than Superman.

Ultra - Luna Brothers - how the gossip mags would deal with a world where superheroes are the primary celebrities. The Luna Brothers have a cringe-worthy tendency towards Cheese-cake but underneath the glossy exteriors are complex characters and a barbed perspective on contemporary life.

Alias - Brian Bendis - a private eye story set in the world of Marvel Superheroes with a troubled female protagonist - owes as much to Sarah Paretsky as to Spider-Man. If you like Bendis, there's lots of good stuff out there, but this is a good introduction. You can enjoy it if you don't know Marvel universe, but it helps if you do.

Noble Causes -- Jay Faerber -- a soap opera about the conflicts, loves, scandals, and triumphs of the country's leading superhero family -- in this case, the model is probably the Kennedy family.

MadMan -- Mike Allred -- the superhero genre as a "fish out of water" comedy full of snarky injoke references to contemporary popular culture.

If you like science fiction, fantasy or Horror, then here's where to start:

Transmetropolitan - Warren Ellis - Hunter S. Thompson in a cyberpunk universe - dark, raunchy, acerbic. If you do like Ellis, also check out Global Frequency (about a volunteer army in the future which confronts all forms of science run amok.)

The Middleman - Javier Grillo-Marxuach - The Avengers (the British tv show) meets Men in Black - campy, zany. Basis of a good but largely neglected television series.

The Sandman - Neil Gaiman - an exploration of the power of stories and myth - the protagonist is the god of dreams and his family of immortals, though we get to know some richly drawn human characters along the way.

Fables - Bill Willingham - Characters from classic fairy tales and rhymes live a very real and mature life on the edges of human civilization

Y the Last Man - Brian K. Vaughn - Some traumatic event has destroyed the male population of the planet, one male survivor is trying to figure out why he survived and make his way to Australia to reunite with his girl friend, while struggling with various political factions he encounters along the way.

Black Hole - Charles Burns - a macabre story, very much a tribute to 1950s horror comics, about teens dealing with a sexually transmitted disease which causes them to mutate.

The Walking Dead - Robert Kirkman - only if you have a pretty high tolerance for gore - a story about humans surviving in a world increasingly dominated by Zombies, much more about the social and emotional consequences of global trauma than about monsters per se.

Age of Bronze - Eric Shanower - historically accurate, detailed account of the Trojan War. Shanower has also done a lovingly detailed series of original Oz books which are worth reading if you like L. Frank Baum.

White Out - Greg Rucka - a female officer working in Antarctica deals with murder and sabotage, taunt story for people who like mysteries set in odd places.

Sandman Mystery Theater - Matt Wagner - Not to be confused with The Sandman, series about a pulp detective (in the same mode as The Shadow) solving crimes in 1930s New York. If you enjoy sword and sorcery, check out Wagner's Mage series.

Bayou -- This is the most recent book to make it on my list -- just finished reading it a few days ago and my head is still spinning. Bayou takes us into the dark, haunting world of a young black girl growing up in the segregated south who goes on an adventure in search of a missing white girl. It manages to combine southern folklore with a blistering depiction of race in America -- it's a comic where images of lynching and Brier Rabbit may appear side by side.

These don't fit comfortably in any category I can think of but they'd be high up on my list:

Maus - Art Spigelman - The story of how Spigelman's parents endure and survive the holocaust as represented through Mice, Cats, and Pigs.

Jimmy Corrigan - Chris Ware - formally dazzling, bleak and lonely story about a grown man who doesn't know where to go next and how he lost his way.

Love and Rockets - The Hernandez Brothers - you will either love it or hate it and odds are you will know which before you are more than a few pages into it - Really two separate sets of stories, one set south of the border in a small Mexican village, the other set amongst hipsters living in contemporary Los Angeles.

Alias the Cat - Kim Deitch - Deitch shares most of my own obsessions with early 20th century popular culture - this story moves from contemporary eBey and collector's culture to silent serials, early comics, and side show freaks. Again, you will either love it or hate it. If you love it, there's much more where this comes from.

Ghost World - Daniel Clowes - charming coming of age story about two snarky hipster adolescent girls - made into a good movie.

Strangers in Paradise - Terry Moore - This one took a wrong turn about half way through, but the first few graphic novels are funny and engaging in their depiction of the ups and downs in the friendship between two outspoken women.

Amelia Rules -- Jimmy Gownley -- Wonderful comic about a middle school girl and her colorful group of friends, very playful in its use of the vocabulary of cartooning -- especially strongly recommended as a point of entry for younger readers into graphic storytelling.

I'd love to get some new recommendations from readers. What books do you think others should be reading?

Youtube in the Amazon: Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet

The following account will appear later this month in an issue of In Media Res, the newsletter of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. It was written by Audubon Dogherty, one of the graduate students I am working with this year. She is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media, which is funded by the Knight Foundation. Youtube in the Amazon: Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet

by Audubon Dogherty

We arrived in Cajamarca in northern Peru just in time for an information and communications technology (ICT) training session for local internet entrepreneurs from rural villages across the country. The training site was picturesque - a large house surrounded by cows, streams, mountains, dirt. The minister of technology was in attendance, as was the project manager from FITEL - a public fund distributing subsidies to national telecommunications companies to set up wireless internet in thousands of villages - as well as representatives from various NGOs. I had come to film some of the trainings and try to get a sense of how technology for development was being implemented.

All this was part of a documentary I was making on the use of new wireless internet in extremely rural areas of the Peruvian Andes and Amazon, a project funded in part by the Carroll Wilson Award via MIT's Entrepreneurship Center. An old friend of mine had become the chief project manager for Rural Telecom, a Peruvian company based in Lima. The company had won a government subsidy to provide internet and basic tech and business management training to people in 2,000 rural villages, locals who volunteered to become entrepreneurs and start their own internet "cabinas" or cabins.

The idea was that cabina proprietors would independently finance the purchase of a few computers (often by selling cattle or taking out bank loans), and Rural Telecom would build a wireless tower to provide internet access and sometimes public pay phones, then conduct an initial training with end users in the community. Entrepreneurs would charge a small hourly fee for local internet users, often young people, which they would use to pay monthly connection fees (about $40 USD) to the telecom.

The project, dubbed Banda Ancha Rural, began in 2007, and I had come to assess its progress and the impact the internet was having on communities. Due to safety and language concerns, I hired Maurice, a bilingual Peruvian photographer and videographer, to accompany me on the trip and help conduct interviews in Spanish with entrepreneurs. He was an invaluable asset, but neither of us really understood what we were getting into.

Over the course of six weeks, we spent endless hours on buses, planes, taxis, four-by-fours and hiking on foot to visit communities in Andean regions (Cajamarca, Huancayo), rural areas outside Lima (Cañete, Huaral) and tribal areas in the Central Amazon (Satipo, Pangoa). I had expected to find mixed reactions by villagers: perhaps the adults are wary of the internet and computers, I thought. Perhaps they don't feel it's valuable for agricultural societies. Perhaps some entrepreneurs have gained advanced skills from the technology trainings and are now using the internet to sell their goods online and improve their local economy. Perhaps they've learned to blog but don't want to write about their village because they're not interested in encouraging tourism.

I was wrong about all that.

What we did find were communities that had embraced internet implementation, understood its value and its potential for education and business development, but who had not received enough training to fully utilize internet services and most often had huge problems with the wireless connection. We visited over 40 villages, more than half of which had slow or broken connections.

But telecom representatives had no idea there were problems because the government subsidy they received was not sufficient to cover further technical assessments or in-person trainings for every internet cabina, especially since these communities were often difficult or impossible to access by public transportation. And the communities that did have working internet still needed help promoting its use since their financial intake was usually barely enough to break even after paying for electricity and internet.

To counter this, Rural Telecom has endeavored to forge private contracts with NGOs, universities and technology corporations interested in supplementing funds for the project. They also hold ICT trainings a few times a year for groups of internet entrepreneurs who have the time and money to attend. Presently they are beginning a pilot project to provide online trainings (via the open source platform Moodle) to 120 entrepreneurs with reliable internet connections.

'Critical Hub' for Learning

What struck me was how internet proprietors see themselves: sure, they are entrepreneurs running a business, but they also see themselves as contributing to the cultural and technological development of their community. A majority of cabina owners define themselves as educators, responsible for training children and young adults in media literacy. Most villages have one local school, usually without internet, and no library; the internet cabina therefore becomes a critical hub for learning.

Cabina proprietors help kids with their homework online, teach them how to search for information and make sure they don't visit questionable websites. Although many adults lack the time or literacy level to use computers, some farmers come to research agricultural prices; mining areas often receive business from engineers and other professionals who rely on the internet for communication; and some local adults learn to use email and chat for communicating with family members in other areas.

It was striking to see how important computers became for cabina proprietors whose standard of living was otherwise extremely low. In one village outside of Cajamarca, we visited a cabina that was part of the entrepreneur's house. It had dirt floors, thatched roofs, chickens everywhere and an outhouse several meters away. But for the proprietor, keeping the computers in his home was a top priority. This man had studied computer science and was also an elementary schoolteacher; local kids saw him as a resource, and began to rely on the internet cabina as a place they could go to get help online with math or history lessons.

The proprietor's six-year-old son worked quietly at one computer as we interviewed his father. When the interview was finished, I asked the child what he was doing on the internet. "I'm looking for my favorite video," he told me in Spanish, inputting the word "dinosaur" (in English) into YouTube's search field. "This is it," he said, clicking on an animation about dinosaurs and hooking up external audio speakers into the hard drive so he could hear the narration. A few minutes later, he was searching for juegos, online games, from an educational gaming site in Spanish.

Although the proprietor joked with me about his son's technological prowess, it spoke to a crucial need for ICT projects in rural communities: sustainability. Many entrepreneurs start internet businesses but then leave the area to pursue job opportunities elsewhere; conversely, older cabina owners rely on their children to run the business, only to be left without managerial or technical skills once their kids go elsewhere for college or to find employment. Training the younger generation is essential, the proprietor told me, not just for their own education but for the continuation of the business itself, and to enable villagers to communicate with the outside world.

A few hours away was another teacher who doubled as an internet entrepreneur. She complained about the inconsistent internet connection and the competition from cheaper internet cafés in the nearby city of Cajamarca but explained that young customers from the village still preferred to come to her cabina because of the personal assistance they received. She envisioned turning her small cabina into a library of sorts, not with books but with online references and one-to-one teaching. She wanted to learn VoIP applications like Skype to allow users to make free calls online, as well as upload news and information about her community to a website. Although Rural Telecom offers a section of their website for entrepreneurs to upload information about their village (contactorural.com.pe), many proprietors don't receive enough training on the web interface or don't fully understand citizen journalism and the incentive for publicizing their village.

Paying for Access

The downside of garnering a loyal clientele is that internet users become upset when the connection goes down. We met young users, now used to relying on the internet for information and communication, who will commute to the nearest city to find an internet café - a trip that is often long and unsafe. A few proprietors we met have begun to supplement internet services with offline gaming consoles, such as Playstation, so that thy can stay open and make a little money even when the internet connection breaks. One woman used the revenue from gaming to pay her electricity bill, which had gone up with the installation of new computers.

Some entrepreneurs we met were also artisans, hoping to sell their stone carvings or painted crafts online, although still without the tech knowledge to do so. Alejandro Cipriano lives in a mountainous area outside Huancayo and runs a family business making traditional painted gourds (mates burilados). He became an internet entrepreneur after a friend in Lima started taking orders for his crafts via email, which came in from as far away as Japan. Although his internet connection has been down for months, he still hopes to eventually have his own website and sell his goods directly to international consumers online.

We also heard about a nearby Andean village that had transformed their economy through online self-education. A governmental ICT manager told us how the community made money from selling fresh river trout but could only sell the fish to local buyers. With the arrival of the internet, they found online resources outlining the process for canning trout. This revitalized their industry, allowing them to sell preserved river trout as far away as Lima.

The Peruvian jungle presented a completely different context. Native tribes still live throughout the Amazon, and despite tribal protests over land disputes that blocked roadways for weeks, we were able to visit two native villages where internet had been set up. Although leaders from both villages were wary of tourism and wanted to preserve their traditional way of life, culture and language, they saw technology as a critical means through which to develop their community - to further education for children, to stay informed about the latest prices for agricultural products, and to communicate with people in other areas.

We spoke to a teacher in one native community who emphasized the need for more governmental support for technology education, including more computers and lower rates for internet connections. "I would also like my school to have a video camera like yours," he told me, "so the students would be able to put footage from this village online."

Perhaps if I embarked on this project five years from now, I would be able to focus on the innovative uses of internet and communication technology in areas previously cut off from all forms of communication. But the rural internet project is still in development. Until the government or private telecoms can increase funding to secure stable, affordable wireless connections and expand training for entrepreneurs, there is little progress.

While pressing needs for basic services in extremely rural areas remain - for better education, phone lines, improved roads - there still exists a great desire by rural Peruvians to develop their communities through technology. Cell phones, for instance, have become the primary means of communication in remote areas. Perhaps the next time I visit Peru, internet will be in wider use through mobile devices, and I can make an entirely new documentary - from my phone.

Audubon Dougherty is a filmmaker and digital activist interested in the role of media in international development. She studied writing at Emerson College before transferring to Smith College to complete a degree in anthropology with a focus on visual culture. This led her to the field of human rights, where she traveled to Southeast Asia in 2006 as a blogger and photographer to assess disaster relief projects assisting tsunami survivors. She returned to Thailand the following year to provide multimedia training for an organization serving Burmese migrants and undocumented workers. As a communications specialist for a labor union, she helped develop a new media program which utilized e-communication, streaming video and mobile messaging to help organize 22,000 home care workers in Massachusetts. Outside of work, Dougherty formed her own video production collective, producing and directing films for exhibition at festivals and on the web.

District 9 (Part Two): Out of Afrofuturism?

Last time, I focused on District 9 as adopting and expanding some core strategies of transmedia branding, linking it to True Blood, Cloverfield, and the granddaddy of them all, The Blair Witch Project. I should note that about the same time that post went live, friend and Convergence Culture Consortium consultant Grant McCracken posted an interesting provocation about what's behind the success of this season of True Blood. I also should point you to the early "Save the Date" Announcement for this year's Futures of Entertainment conference which went live yesterday: an entire day of the event will be focused around issues of transmedia entertainment. This is an event you will not want to miss.

Today, I am coming at District 9 from a somewhat different angle, suggesting that it might best be understood as borrowing from and contributing to a larger tradition of Afrofuturist science fiction. You could understand the last installment without confronting any spoilers. This time I need to deal with the larger story structure of the film so there are spoilers galore. So read at your own risk if you have not seen District 9.

Over the past decade or so, there has been an emerging body of criticism and theory around the concept of "Afrofuturism." For a good introduction to this concept, check out the Afrofuturism website or watch John Akomfrah's 1996 documentary, Last Angel of History, which traces the emergence of Afrofuturist concepts through science fiction and popular music of a much earlier vintage. For other good discussions of Afrofuturism, check out the special issue of Social Text which Alondra Nelson edited in 2001. Here's a decent short definition of Afrofuturism, taken from the Afrofuturism home page:

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, music writers and cultural critics like Mark Dery, Greg Tate, Mark Sinker and Tricia Rose brought science fiction themes in the works of important and innovative cultural producers to our attention. They claimed that these works simultaneously referenced a past of abduction, displacement and alien-nation, and inspired technical and creative innovations in the work of such artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra. Science fiction was a recurring motif in the music of these artists, they argued, because it was an apt metaphor for black life and history.

Now a new generation of AfroFuturists are exploring these themes in a variety of genres: DJs Spooky and Singe in music and digital culture, Fatimah Tuggar and Keith Piper in the visual arts, Kodwo Eshun in music criticism, McLean Greaves in cyberspace, and Nalo Hopkinson in speculative fiction.

Are recurring futurist themes in these different genres just coincidences? Are they aesthetic a/effects of our millennial moment? Or have futurism and science fiction become the most effective way to talk about black experiences? How do these themes refer to the history of the African diaspora, yet imagine possible futures, futures that enable a broad range of cultural expression and an ever-widening definition of "blackness?"

Afrofuturism offers us a fascinating way of thinking about how the themes of science fiction emerge across a range of different arts, including music, rather than remaining in the space of literary, filmic, and television science fiction which have traditionally been dominated by us white guys. And as the images of science fiction circulated through those channels, they took on new shapes and meanings, becoming a set of metaphors for thinking about issues such as slavery and cultural oppression. In many cases, the alien became the vehicle through which oppressed people represent that have protected and enforced the values of the status qou. As these images took shape, they drew new artists to science fiction -- including a growing number of artists of color -- who brought these themes back into science fiction literature. A smaller number of films -- most famously Brother From Another Planet -- consciously contribute to Afro-Futurism.

It is an open question whether District 9 can be called, in the strictest sense, an "Afrofuturist" work. One way of understanding Afrofuturism would be race-neutral, refering to the deployment of a set of metaphors drawn from the realm of science fiction to understand the history and future of race relations (or conversely the borrowing of concepts from the history of race relations to envision how we would deal with other forms of difference and diversity). Many of the works most often cited as Afrofuturist texts fall into this category, including often-cited parallels to District 9 such as Alien Nation and the Planet of the Apes cycle.

Yet, in so far as the Afrofuturism movement has also functioned to call attention to the future of blackness or the responses of black artists to new tehcnology, then we might say that District 9 appropriates an Afrocentric movement and repackages it for a "mainstream" (i.e. majority-dominated) marketplace.

Clearly, as a South African born artist, Blomkamp has much to contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of apartheid and how its structures and ideologies might return should we confront alien visitors. Blomkamp has been explicit about the links between District 9 and his experiences growing up in South Africa:

It all had a huge impact on me: the white government and the paramilitary police -- the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment. Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go.Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.(LA Times)

District 9 is clearly intended to shock us out of our preconceptions about South Africa (and for that matter, about what kind of society might be central to a science fiction drama). Blumkamp wants to get past some of the defense mechanisms that have emerged through previous discussion of the conditions of segregation and poverty that have shaped the recent history of his country by telling that story through a different lens. Blomkamp displaces discussions of race onto aliens much as Art Spigelman's Maus displaced discussions of the death camps onto mice, cats, and pigs Blomkamp has every right to make such a film. Yet, it would have been nice if he had also connected his work to this larger conversation about the intersection of race and technology. Discussions of the film have rarely acknowledged the larger Afrofuturist tradition, though again Hollywood in general has rarely acknowledged its borrowings from literary science fiction.

District 9 seeks to construct a science fiction narrative which isn't about the global powers that dominate most work in the genre. It purposefully doesn't deal with what the Americans, the Brits, the Japanese, the Russians, or the Chinese are doing while aliens are visiting South Africa. True enough, Multinational United is a global organization but we see MNU embodied in the film through characters who come from South Africa. There's something really powerful about making the peripheral central, about dewesternizing science fiction. Again, a growing body of science fiction literature has made this move along time ago imagining the future from the perspectives of Eastern Europe, India, Brazil, African countries, the Arab World, Jamaica, and so forth. I picked up a recent catalog of science fiction books and was blown away by how many of them were set in the developing world as people seek ways to acknowledge a future which will not be simply an expansion of Americanism across the universe. For an excellent sampler that explores the relations between science fiction and postcolonialism, you might pick up a copy of Naola Hopkinson's So Long Been Dreaming:

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasyis an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color.

Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre "speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves."It's an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology.

The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the "third world."It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the "developing"nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into.

The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures.

Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhou

So far, film and television has lagged behind print science fiction in embracing this more global perspective -- reflecting a fear that western viewers won't be interested in a film set primarily in the developing world. So District 9 does important work in bringing this perspective to the screen.

Yet, this exclusion of first and second world powers in the film also poses questions about power relationships. It is hard to imagine, given what we learn in District 9 about the ways that the international arms industry wants to acquire access to the alien weapons, that the Americans and the other super-powers would simply step aside and let the Africans exert this level of self determination.

That said, we also have to note that District 9 falls into several of the traps critics have noted in other representations of the future of race relations in mainstream science fiction films. First, there is an over-arching logic of the film: we move from alienation from to identification with the "prawns" . The disturbing opening scenes really make them seem sub-human. The design of the aliens make them look like insects and crustaceans, neither of which typically engender compassionate or sympathetic responses. And their actions are beastial as they gnaw into meet or clammer through trash heaps. Only their eyes hint at something more soulful underneath their shells.

As the film goes forward, though, we are moved to critique the human population's treatment of the aliens. So far, so good. But in order for this to happen, two things have to occur: we have to stress the "inhuman" qualities of the human characters (through depictions of their baser motives) and we have to reveal the "human" characteristics of the nonhuman characters -- for example through the film's representation of the "Prawn" protagonist as a caring father and a loyal friend. In short, the emotional power of the film depends on a logic of assimilation: we can care about the aliens because they are more like us than we initially thought. And it depends on a logic of liberal guilt - we should care about the aliens because after all, we are treating them much as we've treated other underclasses in the past.

For me, the most disturbing moment in the film comes when Wikus, our central human character uses a flame thrower to exterminate a nest of alien eggs, laughing and bragging that they explode like "popcorn" when exposed to heat. Given what we learn later about their family attachments, it is hard to redeem the character who was responsible for this genocidal act. There is no moment of self recognition where Wikus fully acknowledges what he has done. He mostly pursues his own self interests and has only a few moments where he recognizes the stakes for the "Prawn" and aids their cause.

You can read the main "Prawn" character as the alien version of the "magic negro" found in so many contemporary Hollywood films. Hollywood believes we can tell the story of oppressed people only through the lens of more sympathetic members of the dominant group. And often, this means that the oppressed people become sympathetic to us through their mentoring and assistance to the white protagonists. District 9 is more complicated than this largely because its human protagonist doesn't ever really develop full consciousness and by the end, we understand the alien character more than he does. We start to value the alien's motivates and needs above his in the process. This is no Dances With Wolves where the white man becomes a better Indian than the "redskins" and takes over leadership of the tribe. By the end of the film, Wikus is still totally outside the alien community, but has just had a glimmer of what it's plight might look like.

The second trap, such films often to portray people of color as part of the system of oppression. So, here, we see how the Nigerians exploit the "Prawns", we see black Africans in the man on the street segments justifying the segregation or deportation of the aliens, and we see black authority figures who are part of the state apparatus working to contain and relocate the "prawn." All of this suggests that blacks would have behaved no differently than whites did if they were in a position of authority in Apartheid South Africa. It makes oppression a basic element of human nature and thus erases some of the moral culpability of previous generations for their racism. Here, again, though, the film does hint at the unequal status of whites and blacks within MNU through, for example, a scene suggesting that a black recruit is not being given the same body armor as the whites in the same expedition party.

Here's hoping these observations spark greater discussion. I suspect many of you will disagree with my criticisms of the film. I fully expect to be called "politically correct" which is the language we use to deflect honest discussions about the impact of race and racism upon culture.. District 9's cultural importance is that it provides us with new resources through which to reflect on the history and future of race relations in our world. I am not asking that the film be "politically correct": for me, it is enough that it provokes reflections, encourages conversations, and forces us to think more deeply about the world around us. Part of that discussion should resolve around lingering racial assumptions even in works which are otherwise progressive in their goals. Let me return to what I said in my opening of this two part series: District 9 is a very important film, perhaps the best released so far this year, and will make a lasting contribution to how we think about science fiction in screen-based media. But it did not "come out of nowhere" and we will understand it better if we situate it in a larger historical context.

District 9 (Part One): Can a Bench Be a Transmedia Extension?

"In a good summer, there's usually a movie that will come out of nowhere and completely wow us. This is a good summer, and that movie is District 9." -- Betsey Sharkey, Film Critic, LA Times.

Sharkey's review of District 9 is typical of those that were published in newspapers around the country. Many film critics were taken almost totally by surprise by the commercial success of this low budget film, produced in South Africa, by a first time feature film director.

Make no mistake about it -- District 9 is almost certainly the most impressive film released this summer and one of the best science fiction films to be released in recent years. It raises a high bar for Avatar, The Surrogates, and some of the other SF films which we are anticipating for Fall release.

Yet the film did not come out of "nowhere" either in the sense that those of us who follow the genre closely didn't know it was coming or in the sense that it is a totally "original" work which shatters all of our expectations about what science fiction is. Some of the mainstream critics sound almost shocked that science fiction can be deployed as a genre for exploring serious and timely social issues, for example, overlooking more than a hundred years of such exploration in literary SF. As someone who has taught science fiction courses off and on for the past 20 years, I wanted to situate District 9 over the next two installments in two important conversations -- one about transmedia branding and the other about race and science fiction.

The reason why the film wouldn't have caught many who followed science fiction by surprise is that it has been the focus of a transmedia marketing campaign for well over a year in advance of the film's release. Signs prohibiting nonhuman use of restrooms surfaced at Comic-Con a year ago. By the start of the summer, such signs were appearing on park benches, the sides of buses, and in a variety of other contexts around major cities. Here, the producers and promoters no doubt took some inspiration from the campaign which Campfire Media developed for the launch of True Blood last summer.

If you want to learn more about that campaign, check out Greg Hale's presentation at Futures of Entertainment 3 at MIT last year. Hale shared a stunning video which traced the evolution of that promotion. You can see it here starting at 8:40. Hale, who worked on the campaign, was a veteran of the Blair Witch Project, the release that really has set the model for most subsequent efforts to use transmedia to expand cult audience awareness of forthcoming small budget films. (See Convergence Culture) Another example of this process would be the work that Lance Weiller did around his film, Head Trauma. Lance was also featured on this same session at Futures of Entertainment. (By the way, there will be a Futures of Entertainment conference this November and I will be sharing some details pretty soon. It is always the weekend before thanksgiving.)

Meanwhile, pseudo-documentary segments were surfacing on YouTube and across the web. Here are a few examples.

These films, and others like it, serve important expositional functionss. They situate the context of the film and establish some of its core premises. But they also suggest the debates sparked by the events of the film, showing us different sides of the story than are depicted on the screen. District 9, for example, constructed a site for supporters of the Prawn, MNU Spreads Lies. We see alien rights activists in the background in the feature film but here we get a better sense of what motivates them and how they are critiquing the MNU. We learn things about alien biology -- including about the "Prawn"'s sexual reproduction -- which put the film's depiction of parenthood in a different context. (I particularly love the way that the MNU Spreads Lies site repurposes a documentary from MNU on its blog, constructing its own alternative counter-reading, and thus creating space for ambiguity about how reliable the information it contains may be about the "Prawns.")

This amateur video sought to stitch together some of the scattered pieces, drawing explicit analogy to Cloverfield, another film which "snuck" into the theaters, thanks to saavy deployment of transmedia branding and promotion strategies.

Of course, it makes sense that this film and filmmaker would embrace digital platforms as a means of expanding the fictional world given that District 9 was based on Neill Blomkamp's short, Alive in Joberg, which has been widely available on YouTube for some time. It's worth watching to see how the ideas and images in the current film took shape and how much he was able to achieve with a microscopic budget some of the same emotional impact that people have commented upon in District 9.

District 9 adopts a hyper-mediated style, framing the opening segments as a series of news reports, though it becomes harder as the film progresses to have a rational explanation for who is holding the shakey camera which follows the protagonist around the rubble of an increasingly militarized refuge compound. And the use of these various videos, depicted as coming from different sources, contributes to that aesthetic.

Given the filmmaker's goal to blur the boundaries between our real world and the fictional world it depicts, creating a science fiction film that requires surprisingly little suspension of disbelief, it seems right that the film's world would extend physically into our reality even before we step into the cinema.

The information value of the park bench is limited: it evokes a powerful history of racial segregation in this country and extends it into our understanding of the relations between humans and alien visitors. Yet, the shock value of seeing what amount to "Jim Crow" signs in contemporary Los Angeles reminds us that the story could indeed take place in our world and that we may be poorly prepared to deal with interplanetary diversity given how badly we have dealt with the very human diversity in our own midst.

So, can a park bench be a transmedia extension? I would vote yes -- at least in this case. It may be a small piece of a larger system of information about the film but it moves beyond simple branding and already situates us emotionally and intellectually inside the fiction.

The Message of Twitter: "Here It Is" and "Here I Am"

Last week, the following conversation unfolded via my Twitter account about, well, my use of Twitter as a technology:

>aramique@henryjenkins mr professor... you theorize on participatory models over spectatorial but i've noticed your whole twitter feed is monologue12:32 PM Aug 19th from web in reply to henryjenkins

aramique@henryjenkins p.s i am a fan...just wondering why you are using twitter to simply broadcast instead of sparking dialogue12:34 PM Aug 19th from web in reply to henryjenkins

henry jenkins @aramique it is the curse of having 4.5k followers! Feels odd to do 1 to 1 conversations @that scale!2:39 PM Aug 19th from TwitterFon in reply to aramique

aramique@henryjenkins so then what would you say to a brand or entertainment property with millions of fans?2:54 PM Aug 19th from web in reply to henryjenkins

mikemonello@henryjenkins Twitter conversations aren't 1 to 1, they are open to all. (re: @aramique)

henry jenkins @armique, @mikemonello, yr questions get Twt's strengths, limits. but answer won't fit in character limits. Watch for blog post soon.

I will admit that there is a certain irony about having to refer people to my blog for an exchange that started on Twitter but couldn't really be played out within the character limits of that platform. But then, note that armique's very first post had to be broken into two tweets just to convey the emotional nuances he needed. And that's part of my point.

From the start, I've questioned whether Twitter was the right medium for me to do my work. I've always said that as a writer, I am a marathon runner and not a sprinter. I am scarcely blogging here by traditional standards given the average length of my posts. Yet I believe this blog has experimented with how academics might better interface with a broader public and how we can expand who has access to ideas that surface through our teaching and research.

For a long time, I held off joining Twitter because I was not sure how it might expand meaningfully on the work I am already doing here. My friend, danah boyd, the queen of social networks, more or less threatened to do me bodily harm if I did not join Twitter and she personally set up an account for me to use. Now, I am really glad that she did because there is so much I've learned by experimenting with this platform which has been expanding in visibility and influence over the past handful of months.

My first impressions were correct that Twitter is no substitute for Blogs or Live Journal. And in so far as people are using it to take on functions once played on blogs, there is a serious loss to digital culture.

Someone recently asked me, "If McCluhan is right and the medium is the message, what is the message of Twitter?" My response: "Here It Is and Here I Am."

Here It Is

Let's break that down:"Here it is" represents Twitter as a means of sharing links and pointers to other places on the web.

I've been reasonably selective about which Twitter streams I follow -- and that selectivity has to do with both my respect for the person writing the account and my desire to get access to a broad range of communities. Different people give me a point of entry into conversations taking place around advertising, transmedia entertainment, journalism, civic media, intellectual property, fandom, and a range of other topics which run through my work.

I see each of those Twitterers as the only truly intelligent agents -- human beings -- and Twitter as a whole as a kind of knowledge community. None of us can spot everything in our field and collectively pooling our knowledge is of enormous value. For me, that's been my primary use of Twitter both as a consumer and as a contributor. I also love to monitor how my contributions circulate -- being able to read who has retweet me and watching the stats on Bit.ly as to how many people have followed my links gives me greater insights than ever before about my readership and the impact of different posts.

Unfortunately, there has also been some losses. Three years ago, when I started this blog, if people wanted to direct attention to one of my blog posts, they would write about it in their blog and often feel compelled to spell out more fully why they found it a valuable resource. I got a deeper insight into their thinking and often the posts would spark larger debate. As the function of link sharing has moved into Twitter, much of this additional commentary has dropped off. Most often, the retweets simply condense and pass along my original Tweet. At best, I get a few additional words on the level of "Awesome" or "Inspiring" or "Interesting." So, in so far as Twitter replaces blogs, we are impoverishing the discourse which occurs on line.

I have been especially amused and dismayed by the way Twitter removes or distorts context as it moves across cyberspace. People take notes at lectures, pulling out a sentence here or there. It is fascinating data to me to see which of my points stuck. But then often the sentence doesn't capture the specificity of the idea and it rapidly takes different meanings as it travels. I am particularly dismayed by shifts in attribution. So, I quoted Ethan Zuckerman as having said that any technology sufficiently powerful to support the distribution of cute cat pictures can bring down a government and in my talk there is attribution. But the shortening needed for Twitter removes the attribution and before long, I am seeing this quote ascribed to me far and wide. Yes, I said it as in that the words came out of my mouth, but I did not write it, in the sense that the words are mine. I was equally dismayed when I qouted Shakespeare's Hamlet for "Brevity is the Soul of Wit" and connected it to Twitter only to have readers assume I originated the phrase.

Early on, I proposed a Twitter game -- Twik or Tweet. You throw out a quotation without attribution. And the Twitter community has to guess if it is an authentic tweet or a literary allusion.

If we see Twitter as part of a larger informational economy, it does very important work. It spreads my messages out to larger networks which might not even know my blog exists but who may be drawn to a post that s of particular interest to their memberships. Like many people out there, I was fascinated by some of the Twitter posts coming out of Iran in the wake of their contested election and Twitter expanded the information I had available to me. I sat in on a discussion at Annenberg last week with the program's incoming journalism students and a key theme was how reporters could deploy the platform to tap into larger currents in the society or identify unknown sources for their stories. This is spreadable media at work.

Here I Am

Even among the intellectuals and thought leaders whose Twitter flows I chose to follow, there is an awful lot of relatively trivial and personal chatter intended to strengthen our social and emotional ties to other members of our community. The information value of someone telling me what s/he had for breakfast is relatively low and I tend to scan pretty quickly past these tweets in search of the links that are my primary interests. And if the signal to noise ration is too low, I start to ponder how much of a social gaff I would commit if i unsubscribed from someone's account.

But even in my grumpier moments I find that I gain some loose emotional or social value out of feeling more connected to others in my circle. I feel closer to people I didn't know very well before through following their tweets. The fact that I hear from them every day means they remain more active in my thoughts. And when we connect again, we can dig deeper in our exchanges, at least in so far as the feelings are mutual, moving past the small talk into other topics.

Here we come closest to McLuhan's core idea -- "Here it is" is a function of Twitter; "Here I Am" may be its core "message" in so far as McLuhan saw the message as something that might not be articulated on any kind of conscious level but emerges from the ways that the medium impacts our experience of time and space.

This effect even extends to tweets which have greater informational value. The power of the tweets from Iran was not simply that they got out messages which the mainstream media could not have delivered to us because of the limits on how they operate under that repressive regime, but it was also that we felt a sense of immediacy because we were receiving those messages from average citizens, like ourselves, who were seeing things happen directly, on the ground. (and no doubt a fair number of fake messages fabricated for propaganda purposes, but that's another matter). As many of us turned our icons green as a show of solidarity, we saw the emergence of a larger community that felt linked to these developments.

"Here it is" became "Here I am" and more importantly "Here we are."

Broadcast? Not Really

Twitter works on a number of different scales. For some users, most I'd assume, Twitter represents a relatively narrow cast medium, a kind of social network which allows them to communicate with people they already know. For others, the scale of contact expands and the people who link to them might more appropriately be called "Followers." In my case, I currently have something approaching 4.5 thousand followers on Twitter, of whom I probably recognize by name only a few hundred. These are people who heard me speak, who saw my blog, and increasingly have picked me up because some one else retweeted one of my messages Thanks for Follow Friday shoutouts. This situation creates an asymetrical scale -- many of these people feel much closer to me because I am one of a small number of Twitter Streams they follow while I feel no closer to them because they are not sending me their "Here I am" messages back.

armique's initial question to me then asks why I am deploying Twitter as a broadcast medium.

The short answer is because the scale of communications, for me, is too great to allow for meaningful dialogue. A better answer would be because as an academic, I need a broadcast channel if I am going to get my ideas into broader circulation. I don't have access to the airwaves or to a printed publication which might bring what I write to a much broader readership. I don't have an advertising budget with which to put my ideas onto billboards. Twitter, as a platform, alters the scale of my communication by allowing me to expand my readership.

For others, companies for example, it may do the opposite, helping them to move from communications at an impossibly large scale, to something much closer to the ground. They can start to see their consumers as individuals or at least as a community of people who have a broad range of responses to what they are producing. They can sample public response to their products. They can discover groups of users they didn't know existed.

Once again, they are combining the "Here It Is" and "Here I am" functions of Twitter to both collect data and feel greater closeness to their consumers.

In return, almost without regard to the content of their message, the consumer feels greater connection to the companies -- the company ceases to be an anonymous entity and develops a face or at least a voice of its own. To me, this relationship -- even at a large scale -- is very different from broadcasting because of the ways that it creates a greater sense of intimacy and connectivity between both parties involved. When I watch a corporate message on television, I have no sense that the company can or would want to see my response.

But a smart company goes further. We are hearing stories of companies that scanTwitter looking for references to their products and reaching out to consumers to respond to their concerns. In some cases, consumers get quicker and fuller responses to their problems because they posted these problems on Twitter than they get calling the customer service department. And this is where the "Here I Am" message is especially strong -- this company cares enough about me to actively seek out people with problems and make sure they get fixed, rather than hoping nobody complains. A really smart company hires people full time just to respond to Twitter: they can respond to many more people and they can get their responses out in real time, neither of which is really possible to me given that my day job involves many more activities than just dealing with Twitter.

Now, here we get to the interesting part: does the company do this through direct messaging or through a general post to the community? There are trade-offs in both case. Twitter certainly can through its Direct Messaging function allow for private one to one conversation.

But in many cases, there is a performative dimension for both parties. The customer did not simply want to get the attention of the company; they exploit the potential of Twitter to spread the word about their complaint, to identify others who share their concerns, and to exert collective rather than personal pressure on the company, thus potentially increasing their influence. The companies are responding more quickly to Twitter based complaints because they feel exposed or at risk as what was once a personal matter transmitted through the telephone as a one-to-one channel now because a public issue and if they don't respond quickly, they may lose control.

On the other hand, because of this public complaint, the company wants to perform its concern not just to the individual customer but to the larger brand community. They don't want to simply fix the problem; they want to show they care. And if there is an answer or response, they want to send it out to everyone who might have the same concern, thus expanding the impact that any given customer service call might have on their buying public.

Now, that's the delimma I face as an academic confronting this much larger scale community. The 4 thousand plus followers I have amassed is larger than the audiences I draw at any speaking gig -- even large hall events at South by Southwest.

We can imagine the exchanges there on two levels: in some cases, the queries I get feel very much like the questions I would get during a Q & A period after a talk and it feels totally natural to respond to them through the main Twitter feed in front of the large audience. Yet, it is challenging for people to link my response to the original question. If I was speaking some place and most people couldn't hear the question, then I would feel compelled to repeat the question into the microphone. Yet in Twitter, by the time I did that, there wouldn't be any characters left to answer it with. And in any case, the question is apt to be much more concise than any meaningful answer I could provide. So you can ask questions on Twitter that are impossible to answer on Twitter -- present case a great illustration -- and so you then have to use the "Here It Is" function to direct people to another space for the response.

Other questions feel much more intimate and personal, more like the kinds that I get when people crowd around the table after the talk, and it feels weird to share such intimate exchanges in front of the larger population that reads my blog. And in some cases, I get very personal messages which don't belong in a public arena at all, that function more like texting, and it is clear that the direct message function is much more useful. I am still trying to sort out the different levels of address here and how they might shape my relationship to my readers.

I have seen a few Twitterers who are aware of this one-to-many aspect of Twitter and use it to create a kind of call and response or crowd sourcing relationship with their readers. Neil Gaiman seems to be a real master at this use of Twitter. I've seen him ask his readers for advice about specific language in a script he is crafting, almost like polling the audience on Who Wants to Be the Millionaire, and then make decisions based on the response. This is much like the company which performs its concern for the consumer and is designed to strengthen the sense of ownership and attachment his fans have to his work. If I was less over-extended, I would be playing with this community aspect of Twitter, and I suspect this may be what shaped aramique's question in the first place.

All I can say is that I am still experimenting with the medium and have not yet achieved its full potential for my work. I hope to respond to this larger challenge in the weeks ahead.

So there you have it.

UCLA Faculty Rally to Support Endangered Arts Library

Some 20 years ago, I spent a month in Los Angeles doing research for my dissertation on early sound comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic. I have vivid memories of time spent in some of the great libraries and archives in the Los Angeles area and one of the many things which appealed to me about moving to the west coast was the thought that I might be able to dig deeper into the collections housed at USC, UCLA, the Academy, and the American Film Institute, among many others, in this great city. I was much distressed earlier this week when Janet Bergstrom, a film colleague at UCLA, contacted me with the news that as a result of a budget crunch, her university was taking steps to close down the UCLA Arts Library, which houses many collections central to the fields of film and television studies. Bergstrom solicited my help in spreading the word about this tragic decision and about the efforts of UCLA faculty members to rally support behind the Arts Library.

She shared with me this description of the situation:

The Film, TV and Digital Media section of UCLA's Arts Library (that entire library is now on the chopping block) is one of the finest and largest research libraries of its kind anywhere - books, periodicals, microfilm going back to the pre-history of the cinema, with deep international holdings. (The library holds some 160,000 volumes.) The reference room provides a place for students and researchers to consult print resources that are not on-line, and often held nowhere else in LA. The library is geared to integrating web-based research with traditional library research and special collections. Just take a look at this portal, put together by our Film/TV/DM librarian Diana King.

Unique, primary materials are housed in Arts-Special Collections (in an earlier move, the two units were separated). People come from all over the world to use the RKO papers, the Fox Studio Files, Republic, the collections of Walter Lanz, Jean Renoir, William Wyler, Preston Sturges, to name a few, enormous strengths in TV (and after), scripts, photographs, and onward. See here for a partial list These collection are likewise without a place to go, and are likely to remain in boxes for who knows how long.

Our library collections, in coordination with the UCLA Film and TV Archive, have been an area of great strengh and pride to UCLA as a research university and needless to say, crucial to the Dept. of Film, TV and Digital Media. The sudden announcement that the Arts Library would be dismantled, with no other facility on campus large enough to accommodate the collections, was made indirectly (it turned up in the librarians' internal blog, and was their first notice of the decision), with no regard for standard UCLA procedures such as consultation with faculty, staff and UCLA's Academic Senate about the impact it would have on our teaching and research mission. Please help by signing the petition put together by our colleagues in Art History, who are similarly impacted.

I would normally not get involved in the internal discussions of a university of which I am not a faculty but let's face it -- this decision will impact media researchers all over the world, who have come for many years to use these collections. I should I have wanted to expand on my early film comedy project by returning to the papers of Carol Burnett, Caesar's Hour, Jackie Cooper, MGM Studios, Milton Berle Show, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures, Smothers Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, not to mention a score of television and film scriptwriters who helped to shape the movement of vaudeville performers into other media. And if I wanted to pursue my research into science fiction on film and television, I might have been able to Irwin Allen, Harve Bennett, Dan Curtis George Pal, or Gene Roddenberry.And I might just dream up a new project if it meant getting to thumb through the archived collections of Dorothy Arzner or William Wyler! If you study film, television, or radio, take a look at the list of UCLA's collections and then contemplate what the consequences for your research would be if UCLA blocked or limited access to these materials.

It is a painful cliche that when budgets get slashed, the arts are the first to go. But it is disappointing to see a place like UCLA which has always been a leader in supporting film and media studies make a decision which can have such a dramatic and lasting impact.

The passion which many have for this great collection is suggested by this powerful comment from filmmaker Stanton Kaye:

This is an atrocious violation of the filmic trust of the students, the teachers, and the Filmic greats who have left this legacy of history and dreams.... How can I remember a Kindle the way I remember Edward Craig's book on the Ubermarionette?or his son's .Edward Carrick's on the Art of the Scenic Filmmaker? What substitutes for reading the collected works of Henrik Ibsen --Book by Book? or Strindberg;etc....Who will ever know the annotated copies of Capra's films or Joseph Von Sternberg's?...Or Preston Sturges's unpublished screen plays? or the history of Victor Saville's greatest productions......or Jean Renoir's Toni?...and it's influence on GW Pabst or viceversa..or on De Sica....???/ Many of these men taught here..Ann carefully built it up as a worthy collection for the guys who hung out at the food wagon near the old army bungalows May you fear to go outside forever knowing the Film Giants might throw a reel or two down at your heads for shutting out the filmic light and history the students need so desperately.

UCLA faculty, staff, students, alums, and friends are organizing a public outcry against the potential shutting of this great resource. According to an announcement sent out yesterday, they have already collected 1,250 members to their Facebook community and 1,500 signatures on a petition they have drafted.

For more information, check out the Save the UCLA Arts Library Facebook page.

"The Pickford Paradox": Between Silent Film and New Media

For some years, I've used clips from silent films in getting students to think about the visual vocabulary of contemporary video games. Silent films construct situations posing many of the same creative problems that level designers face and do so in a language which is primarily pictorial. For example, consider the classic sequence from Harold Lloyd's film, Safety Last, which might be described as a vertical scroller -- as Lloyd has to make his way up the side of the building, past a range of different obstacles. In teaching games, we often talk about "verbing," based on the remarks of Shigeru Miyamoto that he likes to add a new verb to the vocabulary of games with each new title he releases. So, the question to ask the students is what verbs, what capacities for action, would be required in order to enable game designers to capture the essence of this scene. In the discussion, I may also get students to reflect on why it is difficult for games to produce laughter as compared to the rich comic experiences offered by silent film comedies. And from there, I also get them to think about what difference it makes that this scene is played by a live actor rather than a virtual character in terms of how we react to the risks depicted here.

Here's another clip I've often used in classroom discussions -- this time from D.W. Griffith's Way Down East. The highly codified emotional language of early 20th century melodrama would be relatively easy to capture in the pre-programmed behavior of game characters and the situation here -- trying to navigate across ice floes before reaching a waterfall -- has strong resemblances, again, to the kinds of situations encountered in classic scrolling games like Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. Generally students find it much easier to imagine converting this sequence to a game than adapting the Lloyd sequence, but again, part of the power of the scenes comes from seeing real people in real spaces.

The point of the activity is not to bash games for not being able to achieve what cinema can do but rather to get students to think about the nature of the different media, the language that media makers draw on in producing their emotional effects, and the unrealized potentials which emerge when we look comparatively across media.

I was reminded of this classroom exercise when I heard last week from Manuel Garin Boronat, a researcher in Spain, who has produced a series of remarkable videos which juxtapose sequences from early films and early video games. I asked him to share with you the impulses behind this project and several of the short pieces he has produced. You can see more examples of his work at his website, GamePlayGag. These videos encourage us to look backwards and forwards in time, making comparisons across media, in ways that I find both liberating and illuminating.

Between silent film and new media

by Manuel Garin Boronat

Once upon a time, in the west, Mary Pickford said: "It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around". In this direct statement, an early Hollywood actress -not a director, not a critic- touched an essential aesthetic problem that not only relates to a specific process of film history but also opens a potential path to question media evolution. Would it be possible to look backwards, to silent visual forms, as a privileged platform for comparative media analysis? Isn't the study of early film, through its intense and varied visuality, a powerful resource to better understand today's changes in videogame and new media languages?

By picking the word "logical" Pickford throws us into the limits of a paradox. Beneath her phrase lies the possibility of conceiving silent cinema as a door towards abstraction, given its concentration on visuals that escape the restrictions of dialogue-centered narration... Pickford envisions silent films as a reaction against the constraints of sound cinema, as an attempt to open more space for visual imagination (silence, motion, tempo) and less for the impression of realism. But what if we applied the "Pickford Paradox" to think about the evolution of new media, looking backwards to move forward in terms of developing an expressive language for games.

Nowadays, realistic graphics, dense dramatized plots and constant dialogue seem to be the self-imposed goal for the videogame industry (or for a big part of it). In a way, the visual freedom of the first computer games and arcades, which opened the possibility of a certain abstract-motion expression -concerned with gameplay visuality and not necessarily sacrificed to verbal storytelling-, is being constrained by a high-tech race towards anthropocentric realism. The so-called "cinematic sequences" inserted throughout the narration, as well as a number of allegedly film-realistic procedures, make games look more and more like talkies (but not necessarily like films). Is history repeating itself? Could Mary Pickford's claim be adapted to contemporary videogame design? Of course better and worse games will always be made independently from its talkie/silent orientation, but are we simply facing a matter of technological and programming improvements or could we affirm that a certain aesthetic possibility is at stake?

Perhaps engaging a true comparison between silent film forms and early interactive games, through concrete sequences and examples, may be a good way to put into crisis our personal notion of media evolution. With a bit of luck, looking back to the origins of film history might help us to value the amazing discoveries and possible creative paths -yet to be developed- of early videogames and new media. Under that perspective, Mary Pickford's husband may be resurrected as the ultimate silent version of Megaman, and the sight gags of Buster Keaton could maybe teach us a trick or two about Super Mario's love affair with gravity... Perhaps it all boils down to jump, chase and pie-in-the-face.

Keaton Mario Scroll

Among the masters of slapstick, from Chaplin and Lloyd to Semon and Chase, Buster Keaton was probably the one who brought his obsession with motion, interfaces and Goldberg machines to a higher degree of visual lucidity. Sight gags, based on the creation, repetition and variation of a kinetic pattern (as in a three time musical structure), unveiled a world of infinite gameplay. As in the Super Mario games, the trace of the character's action -jump, chase, pie in the face- and its physical developments -platform, rotor, slide, cliff, pendulum, pulley, seesaw, zip-line, lever...- define a screen trajectory while opening the question of gameplay laughter. Maybe, as Gilles Deleuze instinctively prophesized, Buster was secretly developing the first videogame (avant-garde) machine: "...the dream of Keaton, to take the biggest machine in the world and make it work with tiny little elements, transforming it into something that anyone can use, to make from it a thing for everyone".

Fairbanks action arcade

As Will Rogers showed with his parodies of Douglas Fairbanks' action routines, the Jump can constitute a mode of narration by itself. The silent cinematic hero, although being engaged in certain love requirements, was essentially a proteic pixel running, jumping and fighting across the screen. As in early arcade and action-platform games, the power of physics, motion and timing thrilled the audiences in a constant push "beyond what's possible". Prince of Persia, who now seems to be re-shooting the marvelous visuals of Raoul Walsh's masterpiece The Thief of Bagdad.

Pathé magic puzzle

Visually enclosed by what Noel Burch called the "autarchy of tableau," silent fantasy reels shared with early games an aesthetic awareness of the frame. Within that determined, magical space, a path was open for visually stunning effects and changes in shape, form and motion. In this segment, humans become geometrical figures, game pieces, whose movements and combinations resemble the legendary gameplay of Tetris, helping us to see in this classic video game traces of the cinema attraction.

Chomón arcade

Early mischief gags and pickpocket reels soon started to work around chases, jumps and visual transformations. As in certain arcade and scroll games, the relation between the main character, his antagonists and the surrounding space constructs a system of vertical and horizontal relations inside the frame. Stairs, connecting floors, holes, diagonals and magic bikes engaged a certain development in early film montage, much as these same devices became key motifs in early video games. The secret of Pathe silent films was a fascination with transformation which invites the viewer to play along with the characters.

Manuel Garin Boronat is a graduate in Humanities and Audiovisual Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He works as a research scholar at the Department of Communication in the same university, and teaches as assistant lecturer in the Area of Ideation and Script. In 2008 he defended, within the Ph.D. Programme in Film Theory, Analysis and Documentation, the first part of his doctoral thesis: The visual gag: form, character, game-play. He is currently finishing his thesis on the relations between audiovisual language and game forms, after a research stay in Tokyo University of The Arts (Graduate School of Film and New Media). His main research interests focus on media hermeneutics, sound analysis, videogame theory and forms of serial fiction.

Get Ready to Participate: Crowdsourcing and Governance

A year or so ago, Mark Deuze (Media Work) and I edited a special issue of the journal, Convergence, which explored some of the issues around "Convergence Culture." One of the best essays we received in our open paper call came from Daren C. Brabham, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Utah, who was doing his dissertation on "crowdsourcing." I've remained in touch with Brabham ever since and recently encouraged him to share some of his own recent thinking about how the crowdsource model can and is being adapted from the commercial arena to address issues of social welfare and public policy. I am happy to share Brabham's insights with the readers of this blog. Crowdsourcing and Governance

by Daren C. Brabham

It's been three years since Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" in his Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing." The term, which describes an online, distributed problem solving and production model, is most famously represented in the business operations of companies like Threadless and InnoCentive and in contests like the Goldcorp Challenge and the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest.

In each of these cases, the company has a problem it needs solved or a product it needs designed. The company broadcasts this challenge on its Web site to an online community--a crowd--and the crowd submits designs and solutions in response. Next--and this is a key component of crowdsourcing--the crowd vets the submissions of its peers, critiquing and ranking submissions until winners emerge. Though winners are often rewarded for their ideas, prizes are often small relative to industry standards for the same kind of professional work and rewards sometimes only consist of public recognition.

Crowdsourcing is a killer business model, effectively stitching the market research process into the very design of products, minimizing overhead costs, and speeding up the creative phase of problem solving and design. Theories of collective intelligence and crowd wisdom help to explain why crowdsourcing works: broadcasting a challenge online taps far-flung genius in the network and aggregating that talent can, for some types of problems, be just as effective as solving the problem in-house.

What I have argued for a few years now, and what I am trying to make clear in my dissertation, is that crowdsourcing has the potential to work outside of for-profit settings. In fact, it may be a suitable model for solving government problems, supplementing traditional forms of public participation to help government make better decisions with more citizen input.

Though you'd be hard pressed to see them ever use the word "crowdsourcing," one such example of crowdsourcing in governance is Peer-to-Patent. Begun in June 2007, Peer-to-Patent is a project developed by New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The pilot project engages an online community in the examination of pending patent applications, tasking the crowd with identifying prior art and annotating applications to be forwarded on to the USPTO. The project helps to streamline the typical patent review process, adding many more sets of eyes to a typical examination process.

Another attempt to use crowdsourcing in public decision-making is Next Stop Design, a project with which I am involved that asks the crowd to design a bus stop for Salt Lake City, Utah. With Thomas W. Sanchez and a team of researchers from the University of Utah, we're working in cooperation with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) and funded by a grant from the U.S. Federal Transit Administration. On the Next Stop Design Web site, you can register for free, submit your own bus stop designs and ideas, and rate and comment on the designs of others. Launched on June 5, 2009, the project runs through September 25, 2009, and the highest rated designs will be considered for actual construction at a major bus transfer stop in Salt Lake City. Winning designs will be publicly acknowledged and included on a plaque affixed to the built bus stop.

Traditional public participation methods, such as town hall meetings and design charrettes, often involve relatively few voices in the decision-making process. The goal with Next Stop Design--as with all crowdsourced governing projects--is to draw in more voices by taking the process online. And though the realities of the so-called "digital divide" persist with any online process, crowdsourcing may still bring in a more diverse set of viewpoints than typically exists at town hall meetings. Finally, broadcasting the process online may attract innovative ideas from everyday Web users that might not have ever appeared in local face-to-face processes or among even large panels of experts.

There is much potential for crowdsourcing in government, certainly as one of an array of social media methods quickly being embraced by all levels of government. President Obama has made his intentions with technology and transparency in government clear. His appointment of Beth Noveck, the New York Law School professor who launched Peer-to-Patent, as Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, makes his intentions very clear. I predict over the next two years we'll see in the U.S. a rapid proliferation of government by the crowd, for the crowd. Get ready to participate.

Daren C. Brabham is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate teaching fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. His article, "Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving," appearing in a special issue of Convergence edited by Mark Deuze and Henry Jenkins, was among the first research articles published on the crowdsourcing model. Directed by Professor Joy Pierce, his dissertation makes the case for crowdsourcing in public problem solving contexts.

The Struggle Over Local Media: An Interview With Eric Klinenberg (Part One)

Earlier this summer, I moderated a panel on "News, Nerds and Nabes': How Will Future Generations of Americans Learn About the Local" as part of a conference which the MIT Center for Future Civic Media hosted for the Knight Foundation. My panelists were Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University and author of Fighting for Air:The Battle to Control America's Media. Our topic of discussion was the crisis in American local media -- particularly the decline in local newspapers. In this exchange, I tried to take panelists through core assumptions about the value of local media, the current threats it confronts, and possible scenarios through which citizens could play a more active role in reshaping the flow of information in their communities.

Following from conversations we had at the conference, Klinenberg agreed to be interviewed for this blog. His book, Fighting for Air, emerged prior to the increased public visibility which has surrounded these issues and so it may not be fully on the radar of many invested in rethinking the infrastructure for civic media. I'd gotten to know Eric through our mutual participation in a series of conversations hosted by the Aspen Institute on media policy and was delighted to have the chance to share his perspective with the readers of this blog. In the conversation that follows, we not only discuss issues surrounding local media but also talk a little bit about the cultural politics of media reform.

You published Fighting For Air almost two years ago. How would you evaluate the state of local media now as opposed to then?

Let's start counter-intuitively, with some good news: There's actually strong demand for local news and information. We all know that paying subscribers of print newspapers are an endangered species, that fewer of us watch local news on TV, and that, except for a few public stations, local news and music on the radio died in the 1990s. But local content is flourishing online. For instance, no matter where you're reading this, odds are that the overall readership for your local paper is higher than it has been in years. The problem is that fewer of us are willing to pay for journalism, and now, as a consequence, stories that you may want or need to know are beginning to disappear.

Some have faith that the supply of local reporters who do primary journalism will be replenished by new players in the emerging media eco-system. Today they can point to any number of innovative local news websites, from Crosscut to Voice of San Diego, which offer a glimpse of the world after newspapers. Others go further, arguing that the next generation of news outlets will be better than the one that is now dying off. After all, how many of us were satisfied with our local news options before the current media crisis?

I'm not persuaded. At the very least, it would be hard to argue that bloggers and citizen journalists have already replaced the beat reporters who, not long ago, were the best watchdogs we had at the Statehouse, City Hall, the school system, the local business scene, and the like. And what a time to lose them! The federal government is spending trillions of dollars on an economic bailout and stimulus package, and much of this money will go directly to states, municipalities, or the private sector. Does anyone trust them to police themselves, especially now that so few reporters are covering them?

I agree with David Simon (creator of The Wire), who recently told Congress that there's never been a better time to be a corrupt politician.

Right now, the focus is on the closing or threatened closing of a number of local newspapers around the country. Yet, Fighting for Air situates this decline in local newspapers in a larger context where the consolidation of media ownership has also impacted local radio and television. To what extent is the current concern about newspapers linked to that larger set of trends?

Directly. First of all, key elements of the journalism crisis pre-date the broader economic crisis. Take the loss of reporters. The layoffs started when big chains - Gannett is the classic example - began buying up papers throughout the country, driving out their smaller competitors (sometimes by violating antitrust law, as Fighting for Air reports), and then slashing their own editorial staffs to raise revenue. As monopolies, newspapers were fantastically lucrative, earning annual profit margins of 20, 30, or 40 percent, while the typical Fortune 500 company was getting a margin of 5 or 6 percent. The most entrepreneurial companies - Gannett, Tribune, and Knight Ridder, to name a few - went on feeding frenzies. They borrowed heavily to finance acquisitions of new papers, television stations, and all kinds of entertainment enterprises. They wanted to become giants, but to do so they had to load up with enormous debts.

As we now know, many of the properties they acquired turned out to be losers. Today newspapers have plenty of competitors for revenue. They've lost most of their classifieds. Their advertisers are cutting back, or posting ads online at a fraction of the price they used to pay to be in print. Their audience is refusing to subscribe if they can get content for free. The local TV stations they purchased are also in trouble. And the industry's technological fantasy, that they could merge print, TV, and Internet reporters into efficient and more profitable multimedia operations, just hasn't panned out.

The challenges of transforming newspaper companies for the digital age are formidable. The current economic climate is brutal, especially because the most reliable sources of newspaper ad dollars - car dealers, real estate developers, and department stores, to name a few - are all on life support. But what's driving newspaper companies over the edge is that they cannot just deal with these crises. They also have to service their crippling debts, and some just can't pull it off.

Look at what's happened to the great newspaper chains: Knight Ridder is out of business. Tribune is bankrupt. Gannett may well follow. Even the New York Times is teetering. When we autopsy these great corporations, the rise of the Internet or the recession may well look like the primary causes of death. Less visible, but equally lethal, is the self-inflicted damage done by their own executives. They weren't satisfied to run newspapers. They wanted to run conglomerates. And now we are all paying the price.

Throughout your book, you keep returning to the question of how local communities respond to disasters -- from storms to chemical leaks. Can you use that problem as an example to walk through some scenarios for how local communities may receive information in the future?

Disasters have always shaped U.S. media policy. Miscommunication on the airwaves after the Titanic went down helped to inspire the nation's first broadcast regulations, and (as the opening of Fighting for Air reports a dramatic failure of communication after a toxic spill in Minot, North Dakota triggered the most important development in recent media policy history: the emergence of millions of media activists, who collectively helped block a radical de-regulatory push from President Bush's appointees on the FCC.

Since the Cold War, the core public service responsibility of American broadcasters has involved issuing alerts during emergencies (who doesn't remember those radio announcements saying, "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. It is only a test"?), and then reporting on the aftermath. But that system has broken down, in part because of technological failures, and in part because digital voice tracking systems have replaced so many of the live human beings who once worked as radio reporters and DJs. Given our tempestuous climate, today all of us should know where we would turn for information if disaster strikes. But if the power goes out and your Internet service shuts down, what are you going to do?

In theory, mobile communications technologies are ideal for circulating emergency alerts (with, say, a reverse 911 program) and urgent news items. In practice, however, they haven't worked because our communications infrastructure is so shoddy. If you were in New Orleans during Katrina or New York City on 9/11, you were much better served by a battery operated radio than by a cell phone. There are many lessons from these events, and one of them is that "securing the homeland" (as our federal officials like to say) is going to require a far greater investment in building an information infrastructure than we are currently making.

Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology at New York University. His first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, won six scholarly and literary prizes (as well as a Favorite Book section from the Chicago Tribune). A theatrical adaptation of Heat Wave premiered in Chicago in 2008, and a feature documentary based on the book is currently in production.

Klinenberg's second book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, was called "politically passionate and intellectually serious," (Columbia Journalism Review). Since its publication, he has testified before the Federal Communications Commission and briefed the U.S. Congress on his findings.

Klinenberg is currently working on two new projects. One, a study of the problem of urban security, examines the rise of disaster expertise, the range of policy responses to emerging concerns about urban risk and vulnerability, and the challenge of cultivating a culture of preparedness. The other project is a multi-year study of the extraordinary rise in living alone. He reported on parts of this research in a recent story for NPR's This American Life, and is now working on a book, Alone in America, which will be published by The Penguin Press.

In addition to his books and scholarly articles, Klinenberg runs the NYU Urban Studies seminar, and writes for popular publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Slate.

And to Think That I Saw It At Comic-Con

Last time, I shared some textual impressions of this year's San Diego Comic-Con. My son, Henry Jenkins IV, took his camera and has agreed to allow me to share with you some of the images he captured of the festivities. The first two try to capture the experience of the dealer's room at the convention -- the congestion of the floor and the spectacle of the displays (in this case, Mattel was showcasing the continued cultural value of He-Man, Masters of the Universe with this Castle Greyskull replica).

Much of the pleasure of wandering the floor is the chance encounter with costumed fans dressed up as characters from across the full spectrum of popular culture -- in this case, we see the rabbit from Donnie Darko and the Riddler.

If you ever want a precise illustration of the differences between geeks and fan boys, you might want to listen to this exchange between Peter Jackson (fan boy supreme) and James Cameron (the geek's geek) as they talk about their approaches to the filmmaking process. Jackson's fascination is with the rich details of fictional worlds, many of them remembered from childhood viewings and readings, while Cameron is someone who wants to always push to the outer limits of existing cinematographic technologies. When we look at them on stage, we recognize parts of ourselves reflected back. (Alas, I missed a chance to see Tim Burton, another filmmaker, whose work I consistently admire.)

I didn't go to many Hall H style panels but I did wait in a long line to get a chance to see the Lost cast and producers talk about the final season of the series. They made it worth our while with a very lively presentation, including cast members emerging from the audience, and the sharing of year's worth of fan-produced content.

The other time I waited hours in line was to see David Tennant and Russell T. Davies talk about Doctor Who. It's hard to get a non-blurry photograph of Tennant who is full of gawkish energy. But this was as good as my son's camera could get, stretched to the limits of its focal lengths.

My Wild and Wonderful Comic-Con Experiences

The first thing about San Diego Comic-Con which hits you (sometimes literally) is the throng of attendees. A decade ago, the con attracted 45,000 people. This year, it attracted something like 125,000 fans. Most of the growth has been since the dawn of the 21st century, with the population expanding at something like 20,000 new guests each year. It's hard to think what other kind of event attracts such a large number of people and holds them together over a four day period. At any given moment, about a third of them is probably in the dealer's room and another quarter is spread across the two main halls -- Hall H and Hall 20 -- which is where the most star studded events occur. For those who want to attend Hall H events, it is not unusual for people to start lining up in the wee hours of the morning. We got there at 6:30 am for a 10 A.M. session on Doctor Who, for example. And the lines will wrap for several city blocks. In the midst of this chaos, though, the crowds are surprisingly well behaved. Every few feet there will be someone in a costume striking poses and photographers taking pictures and the crowd simply swerves around them so as not to disrupt the picture taking. A friend joked though that if you pause too long in this madness, a line will start to form behind you with people not quite sure what they are waiting for. The costumes by the way lead to some interesting rumors: Peter Jackson was rumored to have dressed up in a storm trooper costume so that he can navigate the floor of the dealer's room without being mobbed. My wife suggested that if Johnny Depp wanted to do the same, his best strategy would be to dress as Jack Sparrow, given the large number of great Jack Sparrow imitators wandering through the masses. At the end of the day, you will feel overwhelmed from the sheer intensity of trying to navigate around all of those people all day long. There are basically two strategies for dealing with the crowds at Comic-Con:

a)camp out all morning, get into Hall H or 20, and stay there as long as you can. Most of the high profile events are in those rooms and people will camp out through panels they have no interest in to be able to stitch together those events which are most important to them. This can be an advantage to smaller productions which get sandwiched between the core events. A film like Kick Ass or District 8 may gain much greater visibility because it grabs the interest of people who otherwise would not be motivated to attend. It can create enormous frustration, though, as when the Twilight fans arrived early in the day, took over the auditorium, and blocked others from attending panels they wanted to see (especially the sessions with Tim Burton and, as it turned out, Johnny Depp), when their session wasn't until much later in the day. Twilight fans, in particular, have a reputation for very focused interests, as opposed to the broad generic interests which might draw science fiction or comic fans to the event. (Of course, the conflict with the Twilight fans has as much to do with generational and to some degree, gender differences as anything else). My son and I ended up sitting through a really tedious session on the current state of the Star Wars franchise in order to be able to see James Cameron and Peter Jackson. It says something about how much Star Wars has fallen from grace that even so, that panel was only about a third full. It also says something about the limited knowledge of many reporters sent to Comic-Con that a USA Today reporter tried to make the disputes between old school and newer Star Wars fans a major story coming out of the event.

b) Attend smaller scale panels and avoid the main events as much as possible. Ironically, you can almost always get good seats on the comics-related panels at Comic-Con, given what a high percentage of the newer attendees come because of the media circus Comic-Con has become. Last year, I spent most of my time in Hall H or 20 and left disappointed that I had missed a chance to see some of my favorite genre writers and comics creators. This year, I tended to reverse the strategy, though I did manage to see, among other things, Sigourney Weaver and other "Wonder Women," The Cameron-Jackson exchange, and the Doctor Who, The Prisoner and Lost sessions. Because of my choices this year, I have a chance to share with you some of the stories the mainstream media didn't cover, assuming that you've read a lot already about the 20 minutes of footage from Avatar that Cameron showed. I wasn't able to get into that session, so I don't know anything you haven't already read.

Sneak Peaks

Warner Brothers offered sneak previews of three of its new television series: Human Target, V, and The Vampire Diaries. We arrived a few minutes into Human Target and missed the set up. All three of them suffer from some of the classic problems of pilots and have not yet achieved their full potentials. I will give Human Target and V second looks. Vampire Diaries, not a chance!

Human Target, based on long-running DC comics series, deals with a body guard who puts himself in harm's way to protect his clients and the support network he's built around him. The lead, Mark Valley, is engaging and good looking but a little flat, especially when compared to much more colorful performances by Chi McBride playing more or less the same cranky private eye character he did so well on Pushing Daisies and Jackie Earle Haley as a character with a dubious past who knows how to get the information needed just in time by hook or by crook. The pilot dealt with a murder attempt on board a high speed train connecting LA and San Francisco. It delivered the goods with some really spectacular action sequences. Personally, I still prefer Leverage which hits many of the same genre buttons. I fear that I may not have enough room on my Tivo for both.

V is of course the remake of the 1980s alien invassion series. Even a quick glance suggests that the producers have framed it as a neoconservative critique of the Obama era: with the Visitors making hopeful promises starting with a reform of the health care system, offering charismatic spokespeople who seem to be able to play upon the idealism of the young and the ambitions of the mainstream media. Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet on Lost) plays a single mom, a federal investigator, who by the close of the first episode, is finding himself immersed in an underground resistance movement which promises to uncover and publicize the hidden truths of the alien conspiracy. This one was the strongest of the three and will certainly demand a second look, though I wasn't totally hooked after the first episode.

The Vampire Diaries sucked -- and not just in the ways you expect or want a vampire series to suck. Producer Kevin Williamson has been telling the press that Vampire Diaries is not Twilight the television series and after watching the pilot episode, which deals with a high school girl who seems on the path to falling in love with the new kid in the neighborhood who happens to be a vampire, I understand why. True enough, Twilight is the most successful of a broader range of "my boyfriend is a vampire" stories. You can love or hate Twilight but it does speak with its own voice. Vampire Diaries is what happens when you put Twilight, Gossip Girl, TruBlood, and Dawson's Creek into a blender. On a first viewing, I had trouble finding anything there that had not been done before and much better.

A personal highlight of the con for me was the session of The Middleman, which I wrote enthusiastically about here after hearing the pilot episode last summer, and remained totally hooked into till the bitter end. The Middleman came and went on ABC Family without getting any real attention from the mainstream media so odds are you've never heard of it. Picture something with the playful campy tone of the old Batman series, coupled with the chemistry of the old Avengers series, and the imaginative plots of the Men in Black movies. For me, all of the pieces worked; the cast was great and the dialogue was some of the best I've seen on television in the past few years with the possible exception of Pushing Daisies. If you haven't seen it, you must get the DVD boxed set which came out this month. Like many short lived series, The Middleman left many unresolved plot points in its wake, so it was wonderful news that the cast of the series would be reuniting at Comic-Con for a live table read of the script of a never produced final episode which promised to answer all of the remaining mysteries. (The same script has also been adopted into a graphic novel). I can't tell you how much fun it was to see the entire cast, in person, performing the script. Each cast member got wild applause on first entrance. Given the tongue-twister style dialogue, there were bursts of applause when an actor managed to pull off a particular convoluted section of the script. It meant so much that the producers, writers, and cast were willing to go this far in creating a sense of closure on the series -- as disappointed as we all were to see it come and go so quickly.

In terms of advanced footage, the best stuff I saw were some segments from the remake of The Prisoner, scheduled to run later this fall on American Movie Classics. I've long loved the original British series; the new producers are putting their own distinctive spin of that series's themes and concepts. A highlight will be the recurring role of 2 which will be played by Ian McLelland who chews scenery here with the same enthusiasm as he has done in the Lord of the Rings and X-Men movies. The new series is set in the middle of the African dessert rather than in a Welsh resort town but there are still giant white balls that chase down people who try to escape. This one will be high on my viewing schedule come fall.

Yes, They Still Talk About Comics

I was able to attend sessions focusing on three of my very favorite comics creators, Mike Allred, Seth, and Bryan Talbot.

Allred, often working in collaboration with his wife, Laura Allred, has produced some really wild romps through popular culture over the past several decades. He is best known for his work on MadMan, though I have also very much enjoyed his contributions to X-Force and X-Static (where Marvel's X-Man franchise parodies itself) and The Atomics. Allred's current run on Madman has been especially open to formal experimentation with one issue drawn in a range of styles as a series of visual shout outs to key influences on his work, constituting a mini-history of the comic arts, and another was designed so that the entire issue can be read as one continuous panel. The closest comparisons to the tone of his work might be Zot! or Concrete, that is, superhero comics with a strong sense of characterization and with an eye towards critiquing aspects of the culture around them.

Seth, by contrast, is drawn towards an entirely different set of cultural influences -- more inspired by old New Yorker comics than by the superhero tradition. He's a Canadian based indie comics creator, whose works speak to our shared obsession with residual media. It's A Good Life if You Never Weaken is a semi-autobiographical piece about his search for a long-forgotten cartoonist. Wimbledon Green is a larger than life story about the world's greatest comic collector (think Richie Rich if Richie Rich collected comics rather than cash). Clyde's Fans, still a work in progress, and his most recent graphic novel, George Sprott, are character studies of old men reflecting back on the past -- in the first case, the protagonist, among other things, collects postcards, while in the second Sprott was an adventurer, filmmaker, lecturer, and television host. There's so much to love about Seth's work -- a very humane and caring tone, a great attention to detail (especially the artifacts of our cultural past), solid characters, and a visual style which is at once retro and surprisingly fresh. Seth's public persona captures so much of what I love about his work: he is a very quirky guy who dresses in a timeless though vaguely retro style and speaks in a low key voice that fits his work perfectly. He read a series of short autobiographical bits which spoke to key influences on his work, how he thinks about stories and images, and what he did and did not learn in art school, all of which honestly helped me to understand his work more fully.

Bryan Talbot is a British cartoonist who has been credited with producing some of the first Steampunk comics in the English language, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Many of his works draw inspiration for late 19th and early 20th century British children's literature. The Tale of One Bad Rat includes long ruminations on Peter Rabbit and other Beautrix Potter characters. His more recent Alice in Sunderland is a long, rambling look at the creation of Alice in Wonderland which manages to convey large chunks of British regional history; the visual look of Alice is complex, scrapbook like, created through the juxtaposition of drawings and photographs, and is a powerful illustration of how graphic storytelling can be used for the purposes of cultural criticism and literary history. Here, he was speaking on the anthropromorphic tradition in British comics -- basically funny animal strips in the newspaper and magazines -- and how they have inspired his latest creation, Grandville, which is scheduled for release later this fall.

I also attended a lively session on contemporary art direction hosted by John Muto (Home Alone, Terminator 2 3D), who I have gotten to know through our mutual involvement with the 5D conference, and another session focusing on the life and work of Harvey Kurtzman, best known for his contributions to Mad, his war comics for E.C., and his Little Annie Fanny series for Playboy.

Henry Takes the Stage

This was the first year that I was speaking at Comic-Con. I was invited to join two panels, the first centering around the launch of the Institute for Comic Studies, and the second focusing on the current state of Harry Potter fandom. The Institute for Comic Studies is headed by Peter Coogan, who is the author of Superhero: Secret Origin of a Genre. I have agreed to be on the board of advisors for the organization which is designed to provide a central clearing house for initiatives supporting the teaching and research of comics, primarily on the college level. As someone who is doing more and more writing at comics myself, it is a thrill to see Comics Studies really start to take off as an academic field, albeit one which straddles a range of different disciplines and interests. Panels which the Institute organized at Comic-Con ranged from discussion of the forgotten erotic comics of Superman's co-creater Jerry Schuster to discussions of the mental health of the Joker to considerations of whether it would be possible for any mortal human to acquire the skills and tools that Batman displays in the comics. Some of the work is still very much in the range of fan boy speculation, though good fan boy speculation, while others is informed by historical, anthropological, art history, or cultural studies perspectives.

I told the group that we should learn from other fields which have sought to tackle materials beloved at Comic-Con: the teaching of film studies at the university level has broadened the public's background and tastes, especially around independent films, foreign films, and documentaries and thus expanded the market for kinds of films which don't play at the local multiplex; Game Studies has helped to rally a defense of the medium against censorship, with scholars being able to add credibility to industry participants concerned about freedom of expression issues. Both of these represent directions that Comic Studies could take. On the other hand, I fear that science fiction has been badly served by being folded into Literature programs with many college courses emphasizing only those works which are already in the canon but which can claim some association with SF, rather than dealing with the popular and pulp roots of the genre and the ways they influenced a much broader range of cultural materials. I worry that comics scholarship may emphasize indie and alternative comics at the expense of the popular roots of the medium, taking a "no capes, no flight" philosophy which again only accepts those works which can be most easily embraced by the literary and art worlds.

The panel on Harry Potter fandom was organized by Eric Bowling and included many of the key players in the fandom: Leslie Combemale from ArtInsights Gallery; Melissa Anetelli, webmistress for the Leaky Cauldron and author of the best-selling Harry: A History, Gwendolyn Grace of the HP Educational Fanon, Time Magazine critic Lev Grossman, and Heidi Tandy, a founder of the Fiction Alley website. I had gotten to know many of these great people through my participation the previous week at Azkatraz, a Harry Potter fan gathering in San Francisco. Here, there was lots of concern raised about Warner Brother's lack of Harry Potter promotion at Comic-Con and whether the fans still exert any meaningful influence over what happens next with this franchise. It was astonishing to me to see the number of people waiting in line for this session, which was standing room only and turned many away. A few came no doubt expecting to see cast-members, but most came to "represent" for their fandom.

There's so much more to tell but I am hoping this will give you some taste of the pleasures of this year's Comic-Con.

How "Dumbledore's Army" Is Transforming Our World: An Interview with the HP Alliance's Andrew Slack (Part Two)

So you're using a language of play, of fantasy, of humor to talk about political change? Much of the time, political leaders deploy a much more serious minded, policy-wonky language. What do you think are the implications of changing the myths and metaphors we use to talk about political change?

I think it's so freaking important to break things down for people in a way that they can understand. We get into this wonky-talk. There are so many organizations doing amazing things, and they mobilize their membership really well - but it doesn't connect to young people. Young people, by and large, care about issues like genocide. They care about issues like poverty, discrimination, environment. They want to be engaged in these things, but the people who are going to be inviting them to engage, have to be thinking about "how do I authentically talk from my heart to this young person in a way that's authentic to their experience and to our shared experience?" One of the reasons why I was successful in beginning the Harry Potter Alliance is because I'm such a hardcore Harry Potter fan. Had I not been such a passionate Harry Potter fan, had I not been caring about this myth so much myself, I wouldn't have been able to translate the message as well.

And so it's important, I think, when talking with people to find out what you have in common, what you're both passionate about, and then to translate that into the real world in a way that makes sense. Activism should be fun. Activism is fun, but of course, the issues can get so heavy. We can get paralyzed by a sense of guilt of not wanting to even look at the problems because they seem so big. And if I look at them, we often ask, "how can I go on with my life?" This is similar in Harry Potter to people saying, ' I can't say Voldemort's name. I'm too scared to even say his name, so I say, you-know-who.' In our world we think, "I can't say AIDS. I can't say poverty. I can't say genocide because if I open my eyes, I'll never be able to look away, and it will ruin my life." And that's not a helpful attitude for anybody. We have to learn how to say the name Voldemort in stride, and how to say these words - genocide, etc. - in stride, and not get caught in this idea that we have to fix it all. We can be part of a larger community playing our part. And that experience can be empowering and fun.

We had a meeting a couple days ago - a conference call. It was for something called Stand Fast. We're working with this amazing organization called STAND, which refers to itself as the student arm of the anti-genocide movement, and they are building a constituency across the world of students who are standing up against genocide in Darfur and now against ethnic cleansing in Eastern Burma. They are funding a civilian protection program in Darfur, where $3.00 protects one woman from being raped for a whole week, and $5.00 protects a whole family in Eastern Burma by providing them with radios. And this is such an empowering concept because you can say to a young person, 'instead of going to a Starbucks and getting a latte, instead of going to a movie, on this particular date, we're going together not go to a movie or give up some sort of luxury item, and $10.00 will fund the protection of one woman in Darfur for a week and a whole family in Eastern Burma - just $10.' A young person can understand that, can grasp that, and can also understand that this is not just about charity - it's not just about your money. It's a political statement when 15 year olds are protecting the lives of people in Darfur and Eastern Burma because their governments have been unable to do it regardless of how many resources they have. That is a political statement, and so we talk about that. But here's how we did it - we got the leaders of the Harry Potter fan community, the biggest names in the Harry Potter fan community of the Websites that - the Leaky Cauldron, Mugglenet, the biggest wizard rock bands - we got them all together to make an announcement that we are going to have a live conference call where you can all come. We had over 200 people come on the conference call under short notice to talk about this one day where we'd all be donating, December 3rd, it just happened. And people can still do this at theHPAlliance.org/civilianprotection. But, and here's where part of the fantasy comes in: we didn't just call it a conference call. We called it a meeting of Dumbledore's Army. We're going to have a Dumbledore's Army meeting - that we're going into a Room of Requirement, where you're given a code to get in. You press pound, and you're in the room of requirement. We talk about, we're in the Room of Requirement now, and just like Harry got up and taught people how to do this, we're going to talk to you about the issues. And everybody was briefed, all the speakers on what to say, and how to talk about this issue - but they did it from their own place and what they're passionate about. And it was just incredible. The response we've had from the people on the call was unbelievable. People giving up smoking. People giving up coffee. People saying, "I'm taking half the money I would have spent on Christmas, and giving it to this. And I'm going to tell all my family that the reason I'm not giving them as much this year is because I gave it to people who need it in Darfur and Burma, and I'm sure they'll be proud of me. And I feel so proud of myself right now."

It was an amazing experience, but it was done through fantasy. We didn't just say we're like Harry. We actually pretended that we are in a Room of Requirement. We are Dumbledore's Army, and we're doing it. And it was really empowering last year when J. K. Rowling said that this is truly an organization that is fighting for the same kinds of values that Dumbledore's Army fought for in the books, and to everyone involved in this organization, the world needs more people like you. And it was a real boost for our morale, and it was an incredible thing to get a message like that from one of our favorite authors.

You've already started down this path - so why don't you say a little more about how the fan community provides part of the infrastructure for something like the HP Alliance?

Yeah, it couldn't happen without the fan community. When we started, I was blogging about these ideas - about the parallels between discrimination in Harry Potter and discrimination based on race or sexuality in our world. Or about political prisoners in Harry Potter and political prisoners in our world. About ignoring Voldemort's return, and ignoring the genocide in Darfur in our world. So I was blogging about this, but no one was reading my blog. You know that wasn't really taking off too fast. Then I met Paul and Joe deGeorge of the wizard rock band Harry and the Potters. These are two guys that started a band where they sang from the perspective of Harry Potter. They still do. They loved the idea of a Dumbledore's Army for the real world, and soon enough we began brainstorming ideas - and I took my blogs, where I provided action alerts for how people can be like Harry and the members of Dumbledore's Army, and they reposted it on their Myspace page. Their Myspace at the time was going out to about 40 or 50,000 profiles. Now it's going out to about 90,000 Myspace profiles. Soon other musicians began to form bands that were wizard rock - bands based off of other characters in the book. Draco and the Malfoys were the bad guy band. The Whomping Willows based off of a tree at Hogwart's . The Moaning Myrtles - there's so many of these bands, and they all began to repost together, collectively, the messages that I was writing. Soon, through these wizard rock bands, we were communicating with over 100,000 Myspace profiles, and then the biggest Harry Potter fan sites wanted to be a part of it as well because this is a community that is just so incredibly enthusiastic, idealistic - believes in the values that are in Harry Potter about love and social change and the values in Amnesty, and they began to post what we were doing.

And they put up our first podcast right before Deathly Hallows, the last book, came out. Thanks to their putting it on their podcast feed at the time, at the peak of Harry Potter's popularity - that podcast was downloaded over 110,000 times, and STAND, one of our partner organizations, saw a huge spike in involvement that month thanks to our efforts. They saw a 40% increase in high school chapter sign ups compared to a normal two week period in July, and over a 50% increase in calls to their hotline - 1-800-GENOCIDE in a two week period compared to a regular two week period in July. This year the wizard rock bands and Mugglenet posted this special project that we were doing with a group in the UK, called Aegis Trust. Aegis Trust works on all sorts of genocide remembrance issues around the Holocaust, around Rwanda, but they had a special project where they were sending letters to the United Nations, asking the Security Council to do something about war criminals that were being given protection, impunity in Sudan, and they ended up sending 10,000 letters to the UN Security Council. Of those 10,000 letters, over three-quarters of them came from the Harry Potter Alliance. We weren't members of government. They were getting a lot of members of governments to write. We got young people. We brought Dumbledore's Army. The Harry Potter Alliance - we have about 3500 people on our e-mail list. We have about 50 chapters. We have about 12,000 Myspace members - about 1500 Facebook members, but we could not have done that without this larger network of wizard rock bands sending it out and of fan sites posting - here's what Dumbledore's Army is doing now. Here's what Harry Potter Alliance are doing now. We're all part of this alliance. Let's all step up to the plate, and even though we reach sometimes about 100,000 people, getting about 8,000 signatures, that's almost 1 in 10 of who we're reaching, and that's a lot as far as action goes because different people are engaged in different ways through our organization.

So that's just one example. In the last year, we've raised well over $15,000 from small donations to fund the protection of thousands of women in Darfur and villagers in Eastern Burma.

In the process we educate young people through podcast interviews with survivors of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, with policy experts, as well as with partnerships with groups like the Genocide Intervention Network and it's student arm STAND, the ENOUGH Project, Amnesty International, Aegis Trust and several other human rights organizations.

And now we are building these chapters and we want them to exist in schools and after school programs. And we want to help shape curriculum on how Social Studies and English are taught, if schools would be open to it.

At the same time, you've been able to build an alliance with some very traditional political organizations and governmental leaders. Could you say a little bit of how they've responded to the Harry Potter Alliance approach?

When I first started calling traditional organizations letting them know that I wanted to help them, I was very afraid that they were going to hang up when I told them the name of the organization is the Harry Potter Alliance. And if I said, HP Alliance, they would think it was The Hewlett Packard Alliance. In fact, one of our board members has been getting mail to the Hewlett Packard Alliance. We've never referred to ourselves as the Hewlett Packard Alliance, but people see HP, and they think Hewlett Packard. (laughter) And that's an alliance I don't want to be part of. So (laughter) when I tell the organizations at first who we are, there's this initial insecurity that I have on how they're going to react, and at first that insecurity proved to be warranted because they didn't know what to do with a group that is named after a fictitious book for young adults and plus, we had no track record. Though despite some challenges here and there, I must say that I was actually impressed with how open minded some people were. I think the best example of this is the Co-Founder of the ENOUGH Project John Prendergast. John is a policy expert on issues of international crisis and truly is a celebrated activist. But John actively looks for outside of the box ideas. When I met him in 2005 and told him about our new organization, my heart was pounding with nerves and he looked at me very intensely and basically said, "Dude. Comic books turned me into an activist. The least I can do is mention this in the book I'm writing with Cheadle." And that's Don Cheadle who starred in Hotel Rwanda. And this was crazy to me. And we are in that book, which was a New York Times best seller. It's called Not On Our Watch: the Mission To End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond and it's an excellent book.

But now when I call up organizations to form coalitions and partnerships I can tell them that we can get you thousands of people to see what they're doing. This strategy is very important to us: connecting Harry Potter fans to NGO's that are doing impressive work. We see they need more people, and we provide them with the people. We tell them, 'look, you know Harry Potter, and you know there's a lot of enthusiasm here. We can channel some of that enthusiasm to this noble work that you're doing by just using examples from the books and this incredible community of people, and we've been in Time magazine - and we've been in The Los Angeles Times.' So you know that sort of helps them take us more seriously now. Now, they want the Harry Potter Alliance to be involved, and then sometimes I'm thinking, I have to kind of pinch myself that now they're coming to us - and there's been a couple examples of them paying us as consultants to help them with recruiting young people to become part of their movement. The best example of that has been with our efforts to get young people educated on the issue of media reform.

We've worked with an organization called Free Press which can be found at freepress.net - Free Press leads a group called the Stop Big Media coalition. And we have a whole campaign where we compare things in Harry Potter that involve media consolidation to media consolidation in our world. Most people don't know much about media consolidation, but when you begin looking at how minorities are not represented fairly in the media, ethnic and racial minorities make up about a third of the US population, and they own I believe less than 3% of commercial TV. Women and minorities make up about 66% of this country, and yet are on television news about 12% of the time. What we see on TV, what we are shown visually, what is defined as "normal" in our culture are white men. The problem here is that the Federal Communications Commission has stacked the deck in the favor a handful of conglomerates to own most media in any given city. And this wipes out independent local media. And we want the FCC to change that, because it affect our outlook on race, it affects our outlook on our own communities, it even affects how foreign news like the genocide in Darfur is covered. The big conglomerates have cut foreign news by around 80% since the 1980's and replaced that with celebrity gossip -which would explain why Brittney Spears is covered more than a genocide that would be stopped if the political will was there.

This issue has gotten our membership really fired up, and we say what media reform activists always say: "whatever your number one issue is, media reform should be your number two issue because your issue can't be communicated if the media is not free." It's been really exciting - but yeah, so these traditional organizations, whether it's the Save Darfur coalition and the ENOUGH Project, STAND and the Genocide Intervention Network and Aegis Trust, all issues - all organizations that work on genocide related things - or Free Press or the No on Proposition 8 campaign, which we worked on. We recently did something called Wizard Rock the Vote, where we registered close to 900 people. I think they were almost all new voters at wizard rock concerts across the country and online, and that was in partnership with the organization Rock the Vote. They loved us, and it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun for them, too, because these organizations have staff members that are Harry Potter fans. And I personally have put out a couple of videos satirizing Wal-Mart, and because of this fan base, we were able to get two of the videos over 2 million views on YouTube. It just sped out of control, and I mean it's incredible. I call it cultural acupuncture, when you can take something where there's a lot of energy, and then translate it to something else. A lot psychic energy you - psychological energy being placed on something, and you move to make it healthier. It's a remarkable thing to see what we can do, and for teachers and youth workers, I think it's really important to think about what are your students interested in?

I think one of the biggest problems with our education system - I mean I can't stand No Child Left Behind, not just because it hasn't gotten proper funding, but because I wasn't very good at standardized tests in school - and I think they are generally about regurgitating information. I call it, Leave No Imagination Recognized. When engaging young people to become civically minded, find out what they care about. If you're working at an after-school program with inner-city youth, find something that's going to speak to inner-city youth. Are they interested in a specific kind of music? A lot of the kids that I've worked with from inner-city environments have been interested in hip-hop, so can you find yourself a teacher who knows about hip-hop, and gets the people to be part of a contest that's hip-hop oriented - but that involves research to say that the greatest hip-hop music out there, not the kind you hear in clubs per se, but the greatest hip-hop artists have reflected what's been going on in their communities and how things can change. That's the real hip-hop, and to you really work on that - and do some sort of hip-hop activism through organizations like the League of Young Voters, who often times refer to themselves as the League of Pissed Off Voters - that gets young people engaged. Show them episodes of The Wire, the HBO series, and then talk about the issues of crime, poverty, and drugs that are depicted in that series. And then right after that discussion, begin working on a project together. My idea for The Wire is show one episode that's an hour, then the next hour, discuss the issues that are in that episode, and how that reflects your own personal life - and in a third hour, start a project that addresses those issues.

So it should start with a piece of art that provokes the discussion, then have the discussion, and then after the discussion, don't leave it there, turn it into action. And that's one way to engage a specific population of young people, but that same method can be replicated for any group of young people, especially if you have access to video equipment. If you had access to video equipment, if the kids know how to write, you can show them how they can produce videos that will be seen by a lot of people, and how there's more to their world than just where they are - that they really now more than ever - we don't need to be paying lip service to young people that they can change the world. They can do it today, they can do it right now. If they care about something, they can do it, and they will be better at coming up with a video than the teachers. Find writing teachers. Find acting teachers to help them refine their jokes - make their videos funny or emotionally powerful. Have them interview people in their communities on what they care about. Get that stuff up on YouTube - where ever a young person's voice can be heard by the world. Tom Friedman has a great quote that the only competition that now exists is the one between us and our own imaginations. And now it's purely a matter of getting young people the access to these resources to do it, and then getting them to learn how to most effectively make those ideas and things viral. All you got to do is get them to care about something, and then they'll take care of it from there.

We've talked about a number of new media platforms in all of this-- blogs, podcasts, social network sites, YouTube. How important is that infrastructure of new media to enabling the kind of work that you guys are doing?

Without new media, I don't know what we would be doing. I don't think we would exist. We would be like students at Hogwarts without wands. We would be a club at one or two high schools, which would be fine. It's great to be a club at a high school. But we probably would have a hard time being an organization that has 50 clubs that are really active, which we have right now as far as chapters go, and a message that gets out to 100,000 young people in Japan and in places...just all over. We've got kids in Japan that are working on media reform issues in the United States. New media has provided us with an opportunity where you know we always say to young people that they have a voice, that their voice matters. The Harry Potter Alliance communicates with over 100,000 young people across the world. We've gotten to old media, Time magazine, front cover of The Chicago Tribune "Business" section - The Los Angeles Times, etc. None of this could've happened without new media platforms.

Andrew Slack is the founder and executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance where he works on innovative ways to mobilize tens of thousands of Harry Potter fans through a vibrant online community. Andrew has also co-written, acted in, and produced online videos that have been viewed more than 7 million times. He has taught theater workshops and served as a youth worker for children and adolescents throughout the US and Northern Ireland. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University, Andrew is dedicated to learning and extrapolating how modern myth and new media can transform our lives both personally and collectively.

I am looking for other compelling stories of how fans are becoming activists. If your fandom is doing something to make the world a better place, drop me a note. I will try to feature other projects through my blog in the future.

Changing Coasts

Hiya, gang. I'm back!

The past few months have been intense -- emotionally and physically -- as I've pulled up roots after spending 20 years at MIT, 14 of it in the Senior House dormitory, and moved to a loft in downtown Los Angeles to start my new job this fall at the University of Southern California. I have had less time than I would have liked to focus on the blog and as a result, have grown frustrated by my inability to respond adequately to a range of developments in areas which I try to follow closely. I am hoping to change that in the weeks ahead, though for now, while I am going to try to get back on a regular schedule of posting, you may expect some disruptions in my typical three day a week schedule.

Today, I wanted to share with you some images and thoughts about my final days at MIT and my first impressions of lives in Los Angeles. This blog really tries to focus on my intellectual life more than my personal life but I've gotten so many questions from readers and the two are pretty closely intertwined.

This first photograph (above) was taken by a longtime visiting scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program,Jaroslav Svelch, who has been doing work through the GAMBIT games lab. It was taken right after I had participated in my last graduation as an MIT faculty member. I had gone through this process many times before but as I sat there, watching the most recent class of CMS graduate and undergraduate students parade by, I realized that in a very real sense that this was my graduation too. I found myself engaged in the bitter-sweet process of reflecting backwards over good times and bad at MIT and forward to the new life which awaited me on the opposite side of the country. Tears welled up as we rose to sing the school anthem and as I found myself walking down the aisle. The band was playing the theme song from the Simpsons as the faculty recessed -- an apt choice under the circumstances. A few minutes later, my wife wanted to take some pictures of me in my robe and I ended up mimicing a classic graduation pose -- trying to capture that sense of liberation one feels when it is all over. And at that moment, I looked up to see J. across the way taking my photograph also capturing this moment of frivolity.

I was honored with several farewell parties in my final days at MIT. The first of these events was a gathering of the staff, students, and faculty whom I had worked with so closely over the past decade. It was an evening of laughs and nostalgic tears as people rose to tell stories about the ways my work had impacted their lives. At times, it felt like I was Huck Finn who got to sneak in the back of the church and listen to what people said at his final rites. There were moments I wanted to shout out "Not dead yet!" in my best Monty Python voice. But at the same time, I was deeply touched to hear such words of tribute from people who had also transformed my life in such powerful ways. These photographs from the event were snapped by Ilya Vedrashko, an alum from our masters program, who is now a "thought leader" or "guru" at Hill, Hollday Advertising across the River in Boston. This first one shows my wife and I sitting and listening to the wonderful comments from my CMS community.

This next one is a reunion of sorts of most of the folks who have been active researchers through our Convergence Culture Consortium over the past few years. As you can see, many of our student alums had returned for the event. We are planning a major reunion of all ten classes that graduated from the Comparative Media Studies Program under my watch next spring.

Many of you who have contacted me in recent years have had a chance to interact with my assistant, Amanda Ford. Amanda now lives in New York City with her husband, Sam Ford, who was also a graduate student in our program, but both of them came down for the going away party. I wanted to share this image as a way of saying thanks to Amanda for all that she has done to support my work over the past few years. Amanda is also going to continue to be facilitating my research and scheduling at USC though she will continue to live and work in New York City. Amanda's a new mother and we've discovered that we work well in a distributed manner. Even when we were working on the opposite sides of my office door, we ended up corresponding via e-mail or speaking on the phone most often given my crazy travel schedule.

I also very much appreciated a gathering in my honor hosted by folks working in the games industry around Boston. Long time friends and collaborators Alex Chisholm, Scot Osterweill, and Philip Tan stood up and "roasted" me. Given how central games have been to my time at MIT, this was a fitting exchange between academia and industry.

Steer Roast is an event held each May by the students and alumni of Senior House, the oldest dorm on the MIT Campus. For the past fourteen years, my wife, Cynthia, and I have been housemasters, living in the dorm and interacting with its other residents. A housemaster in the MIT system is something like a community organizer, or at least that's the way I see the job. Every housemaster establishes a different relationship to their dorm population. But for me, the job is one of community building. We tried to help the community define their own goals and figure out the best way to achieve them. We were there in the middle of the night when a student in distress knocks on our dorm. We were there helping the student prepare for disciplinary hearings or work through academic issues. We were there to hold house elections and to advise student leaders. We were there trying to offer ways that students can work with an MIT administration which doesn't always understand who they are or where they are coming from. And most of all, we tried to make the dorm feel like a home, sometimes for young people who say they have no other home to come back to.

Steer Roast is the community's celebration of its traditions, its social ties, its creativity, and its diversity. It is said to be one of the largest alumni events which MIT hosts each year: many of our students come back year after year, bringing their families, connecting with decades-old friends, and offering their support to the people currently living in the dorm. It's a massive task to organize for Roast -- not the least because of all of the bureaucratic organizations we need to navigate through. Roast is a come as you are (or perhaps come as you imagine yourself to be) party so students dress up, dress down, and dress all around, the more outlandish the better. You will get a taste of the atmosphere of Roast from these photographs taken by Harvard Student Dharmista Rood. She has posted them as creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share alike

This first image gives you a taste of the pit-lighting ceremony. As you can see, it's a come as you are party. Well, actually, it's come as you want to be party which reflects the range of identities and lifestyles that co-exist in a dorm where being called strange is a compliment.

Every year for the past decade Cynthia and I have launched the mud wrestling at Roast. Students had joked for years about trying to get the housemasters into the mud. One year an administrator expressed concern about the event -- some concerns about student safety, some, I think, about morality, though it's often hard to separate the two once admins start fretting. We responded by saying that it was perfectly safe -- just clean fun -- indeed, we did it ourselves. So that year, we were obligated to put on a show for the admins and for the students. And the students showed such delighted, we continued the tradition year after year. One year, we scripted and choreographed a WWF style performance, complete with faked injuries, ring-side coaches, and a dastardly ambush. Most years, we played it more or less straight. We hammed it up but we left it to fate. And almost every year, my wife beat me. I'd be slow to get knocked off my feet but once I did, it was pretty much all over. I have excuses -- I can't see without my glasses. But the reality is that she's just more competitive than I am and in better shape all around. We found that once we've done our bout, the students respected us if we needed to get them to cut out some activity that wasn't by the book, and it made us much more part of the community we were there to support.

For several decades, the dorm has proclaimed its identity through a banner which depicts a red white and blue skull, an image taken from the cover of one of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing books, and the motto, "Sport Death." In the skull's teeth are the words, "Only Life Can Kill You." For the students, the image and slogan embodies an ethos of creative risk-taking. Without risks, there is no life. And from risks comes innovation and imagination. The image frightens some parents and more administrators (and that pleases many of the students very much) but at the end of the day, the "Sport Death" spirit is one which is very much in tone with the claims that MIT itself makes as the place where creative people are working together on the outer limits of their fields of research. We have a closet full of "Sport Death" shirts from various Roasts -- "Spork Death," "Spore Death," "Sport Robot," and so forth. But I was delighted this year to discover that the dorm had selected a design which was their tribute to our time as housemasters. The "Sport Jenkins" shirt was designed by a CMS undergraduate alum Jaimie Jones. In its mouth are the words, "Only Admins can kill you." It's either a sentiment you get or you don't and doesn't require much comment here. During the feast this year, we were greeted by a prolonged standing ovation from a courtyard full of students, many of whom were wearing Sport Jenkins shirts. It really took my breath away.

On July 1, we got on a plane and flew to California, leaving much of this behind. For those of you who haven't been following the plot, I am accepting a post as the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. I am thrilled to have a chance to work with many here who have been long time friends and colleagues and many more who I am meeting for the first time. There's something really extraordinary happening at USC right now -- starting with the fact that the Provost created a series of positions which are designed to straddle between schools and support multidisciplinary research. Having never been terribly disciplined even on good days, it is amazing to have a job title which tries to capture the full range of my interests. I know great things are going to happen to me here.

July 4 turned out to be an essential "new to LA" experience. When we were living in the dorm, we essentially had the country's most famous fireworks display going off in our front lawn. The dorm was position in front of the Charles River, across from the Boston Esplanade, and just a little ways down from the barge from which the fireworks were fired. We just had to sit in lawn chairs and watch the spectacle unfold. This year, we had no clue where you go in LA to see fireworks, and of course, in our minds was the same idea of a centralized civic ritual. So, we ended up staying in our hotel. Around 8:30 or so, we started hearing fireworks going off and so we went to the window figuring we'd learn the answer to our newcomer's questions. And we saw localized fireworks displays going off from neighborhoods as far as the eye could see. Being on the 10th floor we could sit Los Angeles unfold all around us and everywhere we looked there were bright lights exploding in the air. At the peak, we saw maybe 20 different displays occuring simultaneously in different neighborhoods, making it as clear as I've even seen the truth of the claim that LA is not a city but a cluster of different neighborhoods.

We moved into an amazing Art Deco building, the Eastern Columbia building, which is in the heart of the newly revitalized downtown area. The Eastern Columbia building was built as a department store in 1930 and it has been a local landmark ever since. I'm told that our loft was where the freight elevator used to be. I had been hoping we were moving to the lingerie department, but oh well. The building was the center of a running joke on the old Jack Benny radio show and has been featured in many Hollywood productions, including the pilot episode of Moonlighting and the final sequence of the first Transformers movie. Our most famous current resident is Johnny Depp, though, before anyone asks, I haven't seen the guy yet. I'm told this is simply one of his residents and he isn't here much. (after seeing the pictures of him as The Mad Hatter, I keep having fantasies about asking him down for a tea party.)

The building itself looks like what would happen if the giant clock from Safety Last was redesigned by the best architects from the Land of Oz. Indeed, it so defines the Art Deco movement in Los Angeles that it is one of the illustrations of the Wikipedia entry on Art Deco. We live on Broadway which is an old theater district. Across the street from us is the Orpheum theater, one of a bunch of old movie palaces on our street. The Orpheum was the setting for the tryouts from So You Think You Can Dance, one of my favorite summer series.

So, all told this is the perfect place for us to live. After living in Boston for 20 years without a car, we did buy ourselves a Prius -- a pretty red one! -- but we are still determined to walk as much as possible. There's public transportation from our neighborhood to the USC campus so this is well within the range of possibility.

Our move was delayed by a day because the moving company was paniced over what might happen on the morning of the Michael Jackson funeral. We are just a few blocks from the Staple Center. As it happens, things were really quiet. Indeed, the neighborhood was a ghost town as many people didn't come into work trying to avoid the mob. I wandered down to get some groceries, saw one guy trying to hawk t-shirts, a few kids wearing only one glove, and a family wearing Michael Jackson shirts, and that was it. It is amazing so many people could gather in Los Angeles to pay tribute to the King of Pop and have so little disruption in the surrounding area.

So, we have arrived in Los Angeles. We are still trying to unpack our books and media. But the loft is already starting to feel like home. We are heading off in a day or so for San Diego for Comic-Con.

Leaving on a Jet Plane...

...Never Coming Back Again. Well, not quite. Right now, I am in the midst of my big move from Boston to Los Angeles. As you are reading this, my house is being over-run by movers who are packing up all of my best loved things -- my comics collection, my big screen tv, my books, my DVD library, and all of the other things which make for a well lived life -- and are loading them onto a truck. On July 1, my wife and I will get on an airplane and fly out to the west coast to begin our new life there. We've found a cool new loft in downtown Los Angeles in a classic art deco building and are ready for a total change in orientation and life style. Everyone who used to be far away will now be close.

By September, I will be fully immersed in my new position as Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art. I will be teaching two classes, a graduate course on New Media Literacies and an undergraduate class on Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment. I will be flying back and forth for the next year to make sure my current students at MIT are able to complete their thesis and to finish off some of the research projects we have been running through the Comparative Media Studies Program.

I've done my best to keep the blog entries flowing through this past year of dramatic transitions. I am going to take a few weeks now to focus on the move but expect to be back before July is over. I've got lots of interesting interviews, a backlog of ideas to spell out, and some other big plans for the blog in the months ahead. So don't go away. I just need some time to make my big move.

MIT 1989-2009 IHTFP

Documenting the Digital Generation

The George Lucas Educational Foundation recently launched an exciting new website -- Digital Generation -- which offers a wealth of videos which will be relevant to anyone who wants to better understand the new media literacies, participatory culture, and young people's online lives, themes which recur here with great frequency. I have been looking the site over closely as I am getting ready to teach a graduate seminar on new media literacy at USC this fall. I certainly will be using the materials on this site as a resource for sparking classroom discussions and giving my students a more immediate experience of some of the writers we will be reading. First, the site brings together substantive conversations with what they are calling "Big Thinkers." These include some key participants from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiatives, including Katie Salen talking about learning with and through games, Howard Gardner talking about ethics and education, Sasha Barab talking about virtual worlds and participatory culture, John Palfrey talking about "Born Digital" youth, James Paul Gee on assessment and games, and yours truly speaking to parents and educators about our changing media landscape. Here's Mimi Ito from the Digital Youth Project talking about what her ethnographic research has shown about the ecology of informal learning.

Second, the website offers some vivid and engaging portraits of typical American teens and their relationship to new media technologies and practices. There's so much that I find commendable about these videos -- starting from the fact that they define new media in terms of its opportunities rather than starting from the conflict and controversy approach which defined for example PBS's Growing Up Online documentary last year. Key to this is the centrality of the young participant's own voice in describing what these new tools and communities mean to them, coupled with supportive comments from teachers, parents, and other adults who remain part of their lives. The picture that emerges acknowledges that there are sometimes generational conflicts around the deployment of these media but also models strategies for working through those disagreements in ways that allow everyone to tap into the opportunities and route around the risks posed by the online world. Young people's lives are shown to be conducted across and through a range of different media platforms, rather than, say, identifying one kid as a gamer or another as a social networker. The technologies are shown as supporting a range of different social roles and relationships rather than necessarily directing young people to develop in predetermined directions. There are great examples here of gifted teachers who embrace the informal learning which is taking place in and around participatory culture and linking it in meaningful ways to the school curriculum. These stories allow us to see new media practices as an expansion of rather than distraction from traditional forms of learning. These are the kinds of stories I wish we could see more of in mainstream media rather than sensationalized newsreports which are designed to provoke moral panic over the topic of the week. Right now, that topic seems to be sexting.

This video about Sam is one of my personal favorites. Sam is a young drama queen -- in all of the best senses of the word -- and it's clear that she is deploying a range of new media tools to produce, critique, edit, and restage her own persona (as well as to direct her friends in their own identity play activities).

And this portrait of Luis shows a young man as he uses new media tools to juggle a range of social responsabilities. Part of what I love here is the ways that his mastery over these technologies allows him to be a dutiful son, a caring brother, an active citizen, and a mentor to other youth.

And surrounding each of the youth portraits are samples of their own media productions and links to sites which are meaningfully part of their own lives. These young people are allowed to share their own insights and experiences through the site, alongside the credentialized experts (and "Big Thinkers") and this is clearly as it should be, given how much each of them has to say about digital culture.

Finally, the site offers videos which provide portraits of significant youth-focused organizations and the work they are doing to promote the new media literacies. These groups include several with whom Project NML has been collaborating, including New York City's Global Kids and Chicago's Digital Youth Network. This video, for example, shows a workshop on digital storytelling and talks about the Remix World project. I've had the chance to get to know Nichole Pinkard and Akili Lee, visit their school, and see their students in action. What they are doing is, in the words of one of the young people featured here, "totally sick."

These samples only scratch the surface. You should allow yourself the time to explore this rich new resource for media literacy education.

Boy and Girl Wonders: An Interview with Mary Borsellino (Part Two)

You describe a number of recent texts which have drawn implicitly and explicitly on the figure of Robin. I wanted to get you to comment on a few of these. I was surprised for example to see that Dexter had made such significant references to Robin. What do you think is going on there?

Heaven knows! The references to Robin in the Dexter books and TV series are one of the most interesting recent uses of the Robin figure, simply because they're so removed from our ordinary understanding of Robin as a pop figure. Out of all the fantasy figures a serial killer could potentially imagine himself as, why does he return again and again to Robin imagery? It may partly be because Dexter's vigilante training by his adoptive father is such a crucial element in who he is: without that education, he wouldn't be able to thrive in the world, just as Robin is defined by Batman's influence.

It may also relate to the fact that Dexter's origin story is a dark mirror to Robin's: both are orphaned as children and taken in by a crime fighter. Comics to this day experiment with 'what if' scenarios: what if baby Kal-El's capsule had crashed in Russia, things like that. The Dexter novels are almost a what-if of what could happen if Robin's childhood trauma created a sociopath rather than a child hell-bent on stopping bad guys.

What aspects of Robin did Eminem evoke in his "Without Me" music video?

Primarily the daredevil-trickster-troublemaker aspects; he's made a career out of being the village fool who's not scared of saying that the emperor has no clothes. Eminem most obviously borrows Robin's costume and some of the 60s TV show's set pieces -- walking up walls and things like that -- but on a deeper level, Eminem borrows Robin's eternal boyhood, and the freedom that youth brings with it. I think it's really interesting that three of the current musicians whom I cite as drawing most heavily on what Robin represents and offers -- Eminem, Pete Wentz, and Gerard Way -- are all in their thirties, and yet all three are still seen very much of being the voice of a generation that's only just over half that age. Eminem's got a teenage daughter and yet he's not yet percieved as a 'grown up' himself. How does he manage that? I think the answer lies partially in the way he employs tropes like Robin in his persona. He's a boy who never grows up.

Given your analysis of the character, which writer do you think has offered us the richest, most nuanced depiction of Robin and why?

This is a tough one to answer, because the nuances of Robin come about because of the opportunity later writers have to build on what earlier writers laid down as foundations. So I could rattle off an answer and say Devin Grayson's Nightwing/Huntress series was an excellent depiction of the way Robin's sexuality might develop when he reaches adulthood, and what

qualities he ends up attracted to in a partner or Andersen Gabrych's grasp of what qualities Batman is drawn to in Robins, and why those are exactly the worst qualities for a Gotham vigilante to have, is the stuff of epic gothic tragedy -- but Grayson and Gabrych's especial genius in their work isn't simply telling great stories; it's taking the disparate pieces of such a disjointed history and melding them into a coherent, nuanced whole.

There have been, of course, many attempts to depict Robin outside his/her relationship to Batman -- as a member of the Teen Titans or as an adult figure on his own right. What impact have these efforts had on the public perception of this figure?

I'm not sure that Robin's able to remain Robin all that well once the relationship with Batman is pushed to the back. I love the whole Teen Titans concept, but it and 'Robin' as a role seem to inevitably become mutually exclusive: it was in Teen Titans that Dick Grayson quit being Robin and instead became Nightwing. The Robin of the Teen Titans cartoon became Nightwing, as well, in a storyline set in the future, and there's a strong narrative thread throughout the cartoon of Slade acting almost as a surrogate Batman for Robin to clash with.

Robin with Batman is the protege, the squire, the ward: the student, essentially. Robin with the Teen Titans is no older than Robin with Batman, but with the Teen Titans he's the leader, rather than the student. There's too much cognitive dissonance between the two roles, and so time and time again it breaks down: either Robin quits the Teen Titans, or quits being Robin. Both outcomes have happened numerous times in the comics.

Mary Borsellino is a freelance writer in Melbourne, Australia. She has published essays about subjects such as the shifting portrayals of Batman's childhood family, a feminist critique of the TV show Supernatural, and gender in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. She is currently working on a series of YA novels which will begin release later this year and which have been described as 'Twilight for punks'. Mary is the Assistant Editor of the journal Australian Philanthropy.

You can download her book, Boy and Girl Wonders: Robin in Cultural Context here.