Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Alex Juhasz, Jay Bushman, and Derek Johnson (Part Two)

On August 9th, strewn across three time zones, Jay Bushman, Alex Juhasz, and Derek Kompare picked up where their previous segment ended, and pondered the implications of the concept of fandom via Skype chat. Derek Kompare (10:04 am):

My point at the end of our last conversation was to come in on this idea that there's more (much more) to the equation than "producers" and "fans." You and Jay were explicating some of these complex roles.

Alex Juhasz (10:07 am):

Where do you see yourself and your work along this spectrum?

Derek Kompare (10:09 am):

I came into this career via fandom (literally, as a fan of SF media, alternative music, etc.), but I see myself now as studying the broader formations of culture. That is, what larger structures and forces produce the entire concept of "media," "media consumption," and (yes) "fandom."

Alex Juhasz (10:10 am):

As a fan whose moved on, up, out, deeper, over (which word or is there another?) how did you find the tone and content of our earlier conversation, given that neither Jay nor I identify as either fan or acafan?

Derek Kompare (10:14 am):

I wouldn't say I've moved so much in any direction (I'm wary of discourses of transcendence; we're all already "dirty"!), but just have a more ambivalent relationship to it all. I still love being a fan, and the idea of fandom, but I'm more critical of the PRACTICES of fandom (and the relationships they entail). You and Jay hit on this massive blind spot in a lot of acafan discourse: what about people and forms that DON'T immediately identify with these terms? What does acafan do for them? I'd argue, not much! And thus we need a more useful concept.

Alex Juhasz (10:18 am):

I think that Jay and I agreed that: a situated, engaged practice (as makers or scholars) within a community of which one is a member or player that is facilitated by technology and is interested in a subjective, affective analysis of these activities links us both to acafandom even though the objects and feelings we both engage with might differ from those stereotypically connected to this sub-field.

Also, we both used the word "play" a lot, as Henry noted in his comments to us on our first exchange. "Play" helped me to name the life-affirming, community-producing, self-empowerment that can come from collective, situated, cultural production (including analysis). Of course this is also "serious"--when I am engaging with others in these lived and felt practice against, say, an illicit war or a deadly virus; or when my methods include the use of "theory" or perhaps the production of avant-garde and thus "hi-brow" texts.

Derek Kompare (10:29 am):

Is "life-affirming, community-producing, self-empowerment" always "play"? Is emotional affect always reducible to "fandom"? While I can certainly see the appeal and rationality of this conception on several planes (politically, emotionally, even physically), I worry that it risks cleaving away things that are NOT "play" and affect that is NOT "fandom."

To put on the curmudgeonly pol econ hat (which I hate wearing, but it's still in my closet): these terms also merge quite nicely with 21st century capitalism, in which consumption and pleasure are symbiotic. As much as I hate to go there, these discourses (including the ever-controversial "gamification") give me pause.

What about "citizenship"? What about "love"? What about following a particular religious faith? These things could be described as "fandom," but to me that's selling them way short, and reducing their possibilities to mere market transactions.

Alex Juhasz (10:39 am):

Given that I am not a fan, I heartily agree. I suppose I was trying to generous (to you, and other acafans in this dialogue). I study and make alternative culture in some (probably already regulated and predictable) defiance to corporate capitalism. Hence, I want to make from scratch, and using different vocabularies and systems, the culture I want to see given that I can't leave the one I am in and the languages and products it uses are often familiar and therefore useful. And when I do this with others against a war or about AIDS, mourning, and death, I do start from anger, or love, or a highly-educated analysis but in the activity itself we all live outside corporate capitalism's will to mollify us with its stuff. That's why I'm curious about how you make sense of your own fandom of corporate things.

Derek Kompare (10:47 am):

The genius of corporate culture is that its output can be so, so attractive and compelling. I don't just mean "seductive" in a conspiratorial way: I mean genuinely intriguing. The people who make the culture that comes out under corporate labels (e.g., DC Comics writers, JJ Abrams, Lady Gaga, the Dallas Mavericks) are artists in the broad sense of the word: talented people creating engaging material. I see that creative work, per se (i.e., the actual creative labor, regardless of content), as no different than any other cultural work, including oppositional work such as what Alex is involved with. So my fandom starts from the recognition of this talent.

However, since it is corporate culture, it gets complicated very quickly, and can never be totally separate from that. Of course what we all do (including the scholarly life) can never be completely separate from corporate culture anyway...

Alex Juhasz (10:50 am):

Understood. But without the means behind whatever talent we do or do not have, alternative producers and fans make objects which somehow pale, therefore putting the focus on process rather than product.

And of course, alternative production is entirely situated within capitalism, we simply try to find crevices where we can name different rules of engagement and different values (as is true for academia as well).

[Jay jumped in when he could due to his schedule]

Jay Bushman (10:53 am):

At the risk of a tangent, I liked the mention of religion above. My parents like to say that my religion growing up was "Jedi," so immersed was I in Star Wars fandom. On a functional level, it's not that ridiculous -- I'd guess that more people of my age group in the US had their morals and ethics shaped by the idea of the Force than the idea of the Holy Ghost. We joke sometimes that the Bible was the original piece of transmedia.

Alex Juhasz (10:54 am):

I just used the word "values." No tangent.

Derek Kompare (10:56 am):

The Jedi example is a great one of the complexity of corporate culture. Many people might find it blasphemous to link the Bible and Star Wars, but the affect is clearly there. Again, "fandom" risks bracketing it all off into a kind of happy/fun, harmless space, when there's always more to it (not only in terms of, say, corporate capitalism, but also, in this example, spiritual investment).

Alex Juhasz (10:59 am):

How does Henry's suggestion of the word "serious" help here?

Jay Bushman (11:00 am):

The corporate culture question is also at the root of the whole transmedia terminology debate. Lurking behind all the questions about marketing vs. storytelling vs. franchising is the split between large corporate entities and small indie producers. The example of The Matrix that Henry is fond of using to describe transmedia is far away from anything transmedia that I've been involved with.

I've always found "serious" an odd and unsatisfying term -- as if something cannot be fun and engaging and also be important at the same time.

Alex Juhasz (11:03 am):

Because you make smaller, indie things, yes? Do they also need to make money?

Jay Bushman (11:04 am):

Up until 6 months ago, I was a completely indie producer, and my projects were intentionally designed to not have a revenue generating requirement. I'm swimming in different waters now, and it has been an educational process.

Derek Kompare (11:05 am):

Agreed on "serious." We're limited by language here, which puts "serious" and "fun" on a binary, rather than on a scale, or (better) a wide plane.

Jay Bushman (11:05 am):

Re: Serious -- I view Moby-Dick as a comedy. But hey, what do I know?

Alex Juhasz (11:06 am):

I've never made anything that needs to make money because I am a Professor and am supported in this way, or I get grants or donations or I make things for super cheap. But there's no outside capitalism: just quickly evaporating places within it (like Academia).

Derek Kompare (11:09 am):

The things we make are still commodities, though, at least in part. They may not make money directly, but they are broadly "marketable" (i.e., as lines in a vita or resume, works to build up our name recognition, etc.). Kind of a tangent, but even art and academia are part of the whole system, as it's always been.

Jay Bushman (11:09 am):

I worked corporate jobs for years to support myself, while making my projects on the side. But there's a limit to the scope and scale that can be produced that way.

Alex Juhasz (11:10 am):

And aca's get paid by the University while fans do the same work (play?) and do not.

Derek Kompare (11:11 am):

Those "limits" are certainly fascinating, though. Every medium has those places, which often result in really interesting stuff (as well as a lot of crap!). As SF writer Paul Cornell said, there's no shame in producing work that only a handful of people understand or appreciate.

Great point about support systems, Alex. Again, another very valid reason to have reservations about "acafan."

Alex Juhasz (11:12 am):

Virality goes against most of what I believe in, and yet its pull is a religion of its own.

I want to start a new religion of anti-virality, non-spreadability, and local joy, but who am I kidding!

Derek Kompare (11:13 am):

"Non-spreadability"! I love it!

Alex Juhasz (11:14 am):

It was fun and serious too. Nice meeting you both.

Jay Bushman (11:14 am):

Nice to meet you too, Alex!

Derek Kompare (11:14 am):

Great to meet both of you as well!

Jay Bushman is a transmedia story designer. Writing under the name "The Loose-Fish Project," he's produced a series of Twitter-based interactive story events around subjects including Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft and famous ghosts. Jay is also the author of The Good Captain, a Twitter-based adaptation of Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," and Spoon River Metblog, a modernization of "Spoon River Anthology" in the form of a group blog. His essay "Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A.I. Game" appeared in Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning from ETC Press. Jay is currently a writer/designer at Fourth Wall Studios and the co-coordinator of Transmedia Los Angeles.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), and Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics, She has published extensively on documentary film and video. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She recently completed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), and Dear Gabe (2003) as well as Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998) and the shorts, RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about YouTube: www.aljean.wordpress.com. Her born-digital on-line "video-book" about YouTube, Learning from YouTube, is available from MIT Press (Winter 2011).

An annual attendee of both the SCMS conference and the San Diego Comic-Con, Derek Kompare is an Associate Professor in the Division of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University. His research and writing is primarily focused on how media forms develop, and can be found in the books Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (2005) and CSI (2010), several anthology and journal articles, and online at Antenna, Flow, In Media Res and (occasionally) his own blog.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Four, Part Two (Drew Davidson, Corvus Elrod, and Nick Fortugno)

Drew: I enjoyed reading both your responses to the provocation questions, and it seems like we have agreement for the most part around a lot of the issues involved with acafandom.

Corvus: I think I'd like to explore Nick's definition of fan though to start our conversation. I'm not sure it applies as much today as it once did. I think fandom has evolved considerably and the "fanatic" connotations are being lost.

Nick: How so? I might be pointing to an extreme case in my initial thoughts, but I still see people defending Attack of the Clones.

Drew: And Comic-Con always reminds me that the relationship of fan and fanatic.

Corvus: Maybe it's that I live in Portland, or that I self-select to not interact with the most maladjusted members of the many communities I participate in, but I think fandom has evolved a lot in the last 20 years.

Drew:

I think this brings up an interesting point in terms of pop culture. I have a general impression that Portland as a city/community has a vibe of being laid back and that fans are almost like friends. Whereas NYC is where you would find your elite connoisseurs.

Nick:

Well, what is a fan if not a person passionate about a piece of content? And being from NYC, I'm comfortable with the notion of being elitist. I wear that hand-designed, custom-made badge proudly. I don't think the important part of the fanaticism is thinking your love is superior to other loves. I think it's that you are rooting for your love. Which is an inherently not critical position.

Corvus:

Fair enough. It seems like everyone in Portland is very into their own thing, but very open to everyone else's thing being different. I guess then it's important to make a distinction between fan culture and enthusiast culture?

Drew:

I like this notion, particularly in the context of sports. You're a fan, you root for your team regardless. Although you can be (highly) critical of how your team performs.

Nick:

Right, so is that an acafan position? The guy who thinks that Knicks are making a huge mistake by doing such and such rather than such and such.

Corvus:

I think a potentially severe problem of fandom is myopia, and lacking a broader perspective. Do you think that this is what the "aca" portion of acafan is meant to offset?

Drew:

I think so, although Nick brings up a great point about how acafan could possibly be a "nicer" way to be elitist.

Corvus:

Sure, but isn't it also about objectively exploring your own subjective enjoyment? For instance, I learn a lot from my enjoyment of objectively bad media.

Nick:

Are you a fan of that bad media though?

Corvus:

Some of it I am! Star Trek is, on many levels, objectively terrible, but I consider myself a fan.

Drew:

This gets to the heart of it for me, I think acafan includes a more self-reflex look at what you're doing. Like Nick notes (in referencing Derrida) it could collapse into a mess of relativity where everything is cool (which isn't cool). And then you have the other end of the spectrum which is elitists who dictate canon

Corvus:

Right. I didn't mention him by name, but I hope it was clear that I was talking about Ebert in my opening statement in regards to the elevation of subjective taste as objective assessment. I think he really helped establish this as a school of criticism, while the other movie critics at the time he began his career weren't so blatant about it.

Nick:

He's by no means alone in doing that. But to return to sports for a second, I think that sports is the border case that's telling. If I'm a serious fan of baseball, and I love the Mets, I can objectively say that the Mets suck this year, for reasons objective to sports, and still love the Mets. So, is the educated sports fan the ideal acafan?

Drew:

I like this tact, and even thinking beyond sports (in how to be critical (and still feel the love) this is where aesthetics (in a classic sense) come into play for me. It's how I work through my impressions and ideas to articulate my "judgment" of an experience. For example, take a movie like, The 5th element. Referencing Arnold Isenberg, to make an aesthetic judgment, you make a verdict, give a reason and cite a norm. So, to make a verdict (aesthetically) is to look at the movie in terms of the expression of its form and function. And the reason would be a detailed articulation of the experience how that related to the verdict. And finally, citing a norm would be placing it in the spectrum of movies in general or in specific (e.g. it's a scifi action flick). Thinking this through helps me then make the claim that I appreciated The 5th Element (even though it had a rather rote plot) because of it's art direction, set design and sense of fashion. (or something like that).

Nick:

That makes sense as a methodology, but it sounds a lot (no offense) like elitist fandom.

Drew:

Well what's problematic (for me at least) is how negative the concept of "elite" has become. You "earn" an expertise by being well read (or well played even).

Nick:

Oh, I agree 100% about that. I'm not ashamed at all about being snobby about good work. Why should I like crap?

Corvus:

Well when you combine these two loaded pejorative terms (elitist fanatic) do they cancel each other out?

Nick:

No, they resonate into something even more powerful.

Corvus:

I'm going to immediately change my self-descriptor on all my social networks. But seriously, those are both the problematic ends of a spectrum of consumption, right? So to embrace both ends is to stretch yourself to cover the entire spectrum, and that has to be a good thing. For example, "I only eat the best" and "I only eat this one thing."

Drew:

From sports to food, talk about some great territory for this discussion. "Let me tell you about the best place to get a burger in the world," can start a heated deep conversation.

Nick:

I think where we've been evolving is to say this - Academic thinking has some claim to an objective standard. Or at least an intersubjective standard that's formed from rigorous exposure to a history of a medium. And fandom is support for a particular entrant in the medium. And to your earlier point Corvus, that is different from the enthusiast, who just likes the medium. If the above definitions apply, there is nothing mutually exclusive between fandom and academic approaches to work. And you can certainly be fanatic about that. Only eat whole-grains or non-pasteurized cheese. Only read Martin when you read fantasy. Only play RTS by Blizzard.

Corvus:

Right, and now I want to Venn diagram this!

Drew:

http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/elitism

Drew:

Running with the idea of foodies. Again, it becomes a way to discuss something you have a passion for (so much so that you get it a lot (say dark chocolate) and to better understand and express your appreciation, you do get "elitist" in that you learn and develop a specific language (for instance, to describe why this chocolate's "snap" is better than that one's., and it lingers on the palate so pleasingly).

Nick:

That's where I end up too. Insofar as academia in part a refinement of taste from exposure and a particular heuristic, then it's elitist by direct result.

Corvus:

Whereas a fan would only eat one specific dark chocolate because "it's the best" while offering no justification necessarily.

Drew:

In some ways for me, acafan is a way to try and better express your appreciation in more general terms so that people outside of your field of expertise can understand what you're saying.

Nick:

We can also fall right into radical relativism here (Look, I hate radical relativism. I'm just trying to be thorough). Why does an academic approach merit more respect than a fan's? I think that's where we have a desire to have academic mean objective.

Drew:

Well on a cultural level, there's a general sense that "academic" as a term connotes consideration, rigor, thoughtful. And "fan" connotes passion, " all in", excitement.

Nick:

Do we accept those definitions?

Corvus:

If someone can recognize their own subjective experience and objectively discuss it, it gives greater weight (in my opinion) to their opinions, because I have to do less filtration myself.

Drew:

Interestingly, I think this ties into why Henry invited us to join this conversation. He thought the Well Played books were "acafan" and that video game criticism seemed to inherently be acafan (since the play experience is so individualized).

Nick:

Transient art is hard to critique. You can't have a truly Apollonian relationship to it if you're making it exist and a part of it.

Corvus:

I tend to agree there. Not only is the emotive experience radically different from one play to the next, but the structural experience can be as well. And because it's easier to grasp that notion, it's easier to accept the reality of the differing emotional and intellectual experiences as well.

Nick:

Sure. That's the whole point of having agency.

Drew:

And that's why I like to try and describe and define my "agency" in relation to the play experience (how much I played the game, did I reference GameFAQS, etc.)

Nick:

I agree about that aspect of agency, Drew Davidson. Very Baudrillard. So, Well Played is about applying rigor to evaluating gameplay. That's the "aca" side. Is that fair?

Drew:

Seems so to me. And the fan side comes from that ephemeral play experience that we each have. Also, that the essays, while critical, are appreciative.

Nick:

Ok. I like that. You still cite flaws in the work, even while being appreciative.

Drew:

Plus appreciative in the sense that games are worth considering. 5-10 years ago that wasn't the case, but now it feels more like a norm (so i think we don't have to say it as much (or as loud)

Nick:

Yeah, true. I guess we still have to say that.

Corvus:

Now we add it to the conversation for clarification, rather than leading with it as our point. That's progress

Drew:

In fact, when I started thinking about "well played" as an idea, I went with the assumption that it was.

Drew:

To wrap up, it's been thought-provoking to write and read our response to the provocations. And I really appreciate working together to articulate our ideas around the concept of acafandom. And while we needed the text for this post, I think it would have been an even better as a conversation (I've been doing some video interviews on another project, and it makes me think that could be a great way to capture the back and forth discussion around this topic, but I think we had some good ideas here.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center - Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.

Corvus Elrod is a Semionaut and Narrative Designer. He is the co-founder of Zakelro! Story Studio and creator of The HoneyComb Engine, an upcoming open and extensible tabletop RPG framework. He has been designing participatory experiences for the better part of two decades, beginning with his exploration of improvisational theater. As he incorporated more and more game mechanics into his performances, he turned his attention to how video game mechanics communicate meaning and began formalizing a semiotic theory of game design. He has contracted for a broad spectrum of clients, from major game studios and publishers to installation artists, and has worked on several small game projects in collaboration with independent developers and artists.

Nick Fortugno is a game designer and entrepreneur of digital and real-world games based in New York City, and a founder of Playmatics, a NYC game development company. Playmatics has created a variety of games including the CableFAX award winning Breaking Bad: The Interrogation and the New York Public Library's centennial game Find the Future with Jane McGonigal. For the past ten years, Fortugno has been a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, and served as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam since 2006, and co-creator of the Big Urban Game for Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2003. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and has participated in the construction of the school's game design curriculum. Nick's most recent writing about games can be found in the anthology Well-Played 1.0: Video Game, Value, and Meaning, published by ETC-Press.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Four, Part One (Drew Davidson, Corvus Elrod, and Nick Fortugno)

Drew Davidson:

Not being deeply familiar with fan studies, my initial response to these provocations comes from my perspective on how to best do constructive criticism, which I believe resonates with the concept of acafan that Henry champions. I like to approach experiences as a fan, in that I want to like what I'm about to experience, and I'm looking forward to it. So whether it's a movie, a show, a video game, etc, I hope I'm going to have a positive experience. Not to go into too much detail here, but I find it most useful to consider these experiences from an aesthetic perspective in order to best formulate an analysis and criticism of that experience. And to be as constructive as possible, I always start with what works well in an experience, and then follow with what could make it even better. This helps articulate how I think about the concept of acafan. It's a way to do critical analysis that acknowledges appreciation as well. For me, it's less about combining two different identities (that of academic and that of a fan) and more about the best way to be academic (having a passion for what one is studying). And I find that every experience we have is subjective and it's best to address this in your criticism. Also, I believe that it is through stories that we make sense of the experiences we have, which lends itself to dialogic discussions as we perform critical conversations. This has become a guiding principle for the Well Played series of books (and nascent journal) in which academics, journalists, developers and players do close in-depth readings of the experience of playing video games. Throughout, the contributors share the stories of their gameplaying experiences in order to best analyze what makes a game work well, and what could make it even better. Editing these books and working with all the contributors has only helped illustrate for me that the act of critically sharing the stories of our experiences is an effective (and affective) method to do constructive criticism, and possibly the best way to be an acafan.

Corvus Elrod

As someone who isn't steeped in academic tradition, I must confess that I initially felt overwhelmed by the prospect of addressing these provocations. Yet they sparked a flood of passionate responses that, once I sifted through them, were very informative about my own process of consuming and discussing media, but my impression of academia and acafandamia.

I have come to believe that the academic pursuit of objective truth regarding intangibles like human culture is a mug's game. It's certainly a noble pursuit, and ultimately very instructive about our own nature, but the goal of true objectivity cannot be obtained. This is true of when we study dead cultures and it's even more true when we study a living culture of which we're an active participant. Any views we may have on the role of media in our culture are inherently subjective and to imagine that we can somehow transcend a lifetime of cultural immersion and take some lofty objection position is hogwashhubris.

However, on the other side of the coin we have fandom, which often embraces highly subjective views as absolute objective reality. This is hardly a constructive approach to life--and the distinction between life and fandom is often blurred for fans--emotionally or intellectually, serving to accentuate the social discomfort and feelings of isolation and false superiority. This approach has been propped up by commercial media critics, who strive to lock in ratings--and therefore corporate sponsorships--by passing their subjective taste off as academically objective truth.

So if this is the problem, what is the solution? I'd suggest that a middle ground is imperative. We must strive to acknowledge, embrace, and account for our own subjective experience while both taking a long view and accepting the validity of others' subjective experiences. This, from what exposure I've had to it, is the foundation of acafandom--a bridge between two fundamentally flawed approaches to understanding media, culture, and ourselves.

The benefits of drawing upon the strengths of academia and fandom while, hopefully, minimizing their weaknesses is considerable. The primary benefit, as I see it, is the impact a more open-handed interaction has had on the fandom community has been stabilizing and elevating. For example, the even-tempered public discourse around video games and the social issues inherent in their portrayal of violence and sexuality has become far more prevalent over the last five years. Part of this is due, no doubt, to the maturation of the fan base, but a large part of it is due to the accessibility of critical theory in the fields of race, gender, and media. This serves to make the benefits of academic rigour immediately accessible to the culture it studies. And if academia doesn't serve to elevate all aspects of our culture, it will continue to lose relevance as our increasingly-accelerating culture overtakes its intellectual market share.

Nick Fortugno

Following on Drew's impulse, I guess the issue of subjectivity in academic pursuit has always been suspicious to me. I grew up as an academic in Literature studying Derrida and not taking it that seriously. Are we really supposed to ignore the magic of the texts we read? Why did we start reading them in the first place? Similarly, I think every academic field starts with a genuine passion for the practitioner for that field, and trying to eliminate that love would be tantamount to removing all motivation from research and teaching.

That said, it's not fandom. Fandom is passion for a particular instantiation of a medium or narrative. Fandom is about loving Harry Potter, not loving reading, and that leads to a different consumption pattern. I don't think there's any more subjectivity in fandom at least in terms of the choice of object of passion, but I do think there's a lack of critical perspective. "Fankids" are most extreme version of this flaw -- people who slavishly watch everything labelled Star Wars despite widely varying quality or people who argue that Wheel of Time is just as good at the end as it is at the beginning have lost an ability to see the work they are looking at and evaluate it either for merit, or more critically to this conversation, for its meaning or position in the medium.

It leads me to wonder is acafandom is oxymoronic, or whether (more likely)acafandom is an elitist position. It seems like taking a critical perspective on work and judging it on "objective" standards of the medium as a whole means that an acafan would only consider objects that have a requisite level of depth or quality as worthy of consumption. Is an acafan just a fan whose rarefied taste precludes certain work from consideration? Is it just a reconstitution of the high art debate for a new medium? As an academic of a former life, I have no problem with canons and gates on inferior work, but that makes it no less elitist.

And if the opening sentence here isn't true, what does that mean? Do we have some masochistic desire to consume work we think is trashy or flawed? Are we doomed to be Doug complaining about how Scratchy's rib plays two different notes?

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center - Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.

Corvus Elrod is a Semionaut and Narrative Designer. He is the co-founder of Zakelro! Story Studio and creator of The HoneyComb Engine, an upcoming open and extensible tabletop RPG framework. He has been designing participatory experiences for the better part of two decades, beginning with his exploration of improvisational theater. As he incorporated more and more game mechanics into his performances, he turned his attention to how video game mechanics communicate meaning and began formalizing a semiotic theory of game design. He has contracted for a broad spectrum of clients, from major game studios and publishers to installation artists, and has worked on several small game projects in collaboration with independent developers and artists.

Nick Fortugno is a game designer and entrepreneur of digital and real-world games based in New York City, and a founder of Playmatics, a NYC game development company. Playmatics has created a variety of games including the CableFAX award winning Breaking Bad: The Interrogation and the New York Public Library's centennial game Find the Future with Jane McGonigal. For the past ten years, Fortugno has been a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, and served as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam since 2006, and co-creator of the Big Urban Game for Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2003. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and has participated in the construction of the school's game design curriculum. Nick's most recent writing about games can be found in the anthology Well-Played 1.0: Video Game, Value, and Meaning, published by ETC-Press.

"Deep Media," Transmedia, What's the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part Two)

You draw a range of comparisons here to older, even pre-20th century forms of storytelling -- from Daniel Dafoe to Charles Dickens. What continuities and changes do you see between deep media and older forms of serialized fictions?

That's a question I became increasingly intrigued with as I worked on the book. Collective entertainment may be new, but there's nothing new about entertainment that's participatory and immersive. In fact, every new medium from the printing press on has been considered dangerously immersive at first. TV, movies, books--Don Quixote went tilting at windmills because he'd lost his mind from reading too much. And in order to gain acceptance, each new medium has tried to pass itself off at first as something familiar. In his preface to Robinson Crusoe, which is generally considered the first novel in the English language, Defoe declared the entire story to be fact. Fiction was considered an inferior branch of history that had the glaring defect of not being true, so when Robinson Crusoe came out in 1719, it had to be passed off as autobiography. Nearly a hundred years passed before the novel became a generally accepted literary form in England. And then when Dickens came along in the 1830s and his publishers started putting out his novels in monthly installments, critics decried that as dangerously immersive. Bad enough that people were reading novels when they could have been engaged in social pursuits, like conversation or backgammon--but now they were going to be losing themselves in a fictional world for months on end.

But the really remarkable thing about Dickens was the way he communed with his readers. That was something serial publication made possible--and serial publication was purely a product of technology. Better printing presses, cheaper paper, trains that could deliver things reliably, rapidly growing cities with a lot more people who could read. Few of these people could afford to purchase entire books, but they could pay for short installments. An unanticipated result of this was that when books were published over a period of 19 or 20 months, readers had a chance to have their say with the author while the novel was still being written. And Dickens relished this. He took note of their comments and suggestions, and he loved interacting with them on the lecture circuit as well. One of his biographers described it as "a sense of immediate audience participation."

But seeing new media as a threat--that's a pattern we fall into again and again. Now it's video games and the Internet. Before that it was TV, and before that it was the movies, and a couple hundred years ago it was serial fiction and people like Dickens. The only constant is that whatever is new is threatening. And usually it's considered threatening because it's too immersive--you could get lost in it. But that's exactly what fiction is. If it's good enough, people are going to want to inhabit it.

You argue that the digital world has created an "authorship crisis." What do you mean? How are audiences and producers responding to this crisis?

With a certain amount of confusion, I think. It's certainly understandable. We've spent the last hundred-plus years with a strict delineation between author and audience--you read a book, you watch a movie, and that's it. You're a consumer. We came to think of this as the natural order of things, but in fact it was just a function of the limitations of our technology. Mass media, which is the only media we've ever known until now, had no mechanism for participation and only very limited, after-the-fact mechanisms for feedback. But there was nothing natural about that. That's why you had stuff like fan fiction springing up in the shadows, mostly out of sight of the legal operatives whose job was to enforce this regime.

Before culture became a consumable, it was something people shared. The problem is, that was so long ago we've forgotten how to do it. So when I talk about participatory storytelling, a lot of people think I mean choose-your-own-ending or something like that. Actually, that's not what I mean at all. I see branching storylines as a really primitive mechanism. Giving people a say in the story isn't as simplistic as letting them decide what happens next--A, B, or C.

But what does it mean, exactly? That's what everybody's trying to figure out. Technology has finally created a mechanism for people to have a voice, but authors are still working out how to deal with it.

I had a really interesting exchange about this with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the guys who ran Lost. The fans want a say in the story, Lindelof said, but they also want to be reassured that the producers know where the story is going--and those two impulses seem mutually exclusive. Except they're not, really. Lindelof and Cuse demonstrated that themselves with Nikki and Paulo, the slimy lowlifes who turned up out of nowhere in season 3. Viewers hated them. So 11 episodes later, they got killed off in spectacular fashion--buried alive by the other survivors after being bitten by a fictional species of spider whose venom brings on a paralysis so complete it makes you look dead. So Lost took the whole idea of authorship-sharing back to where Dickens got it 170 years ago--which is progress. But it's still a long way from there to the narrative version of an open-world game, where the author creates a world and sets the parameters for the player to live out a story.

You cite Jon Landau as describing Avatar as "not just a movie. It's a world." and arguing that the film industry "has not created an original universe since Star Wars." What do you see as the implications of these two statements for our understanding of deep media?

That's from an interview I did with Landau and James Cameron in Montreal in 2006, when Cameron had Avatar in development but Fox hadn't yet agreed to take the plunge. It's the same exchange in which Cameron talks about the best science fiction as a "fractal experience" that can be enjoyed at any level of depth--anybody can enjoy the movie, but if you want to you can go in an order of magnitude deeper and see a whole new set of patterns, and an order of magnitude deeper after that, and so on. That's how the idea of deep media originated for me, though it was two years later before I began to see that it was part of a larger pattern.

The thing about fantasy worlds--Avatar, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings--is that they give us license to imagine ourselves in entirely novel circumstances. Watching The Social Network we can imagine ourselves at Harvard--nice place, but populated entirely by humans. We know it already. There's an allure to something utterly unknown, with its own geography and its own flora and fauna and unique experiences to be had. At the same time, it's comforting in a way to see the basics--gravity, humanoid appearance, stuff to eat and drink--remain unchanged. The guy at the cantina on Tatooine might be four feet tall and have a head like a beat-up football, but he still likes a nice, cold beer.

This is one of the many places where Star Wars crops up as a reference point in the book. It does seem to be the ur text for many of the trends you describe. What do contemporary artists take from this now classic franchise?

I think above all it's the possibility of engagement at so many different levels of depth. Star Wars predated the Internet, of course, but it made use of all the different kinds of media that the Internet now delivers to us. It wasn't just the movies, though the vast majority of viewers stopped there. If you were a true fan--and a lot of people in Hollywood were, from Cameron to Lindelof to JJ Abrams--there were all sorts of other experiences to be had. Comics. Action figures. And what made all this work is what George Lucas calls "immaculate reality"--a level of verisimilitude that made the fantastic seem real. It's all very fractal.

To what degree do you think deep media represents the global circulation of the idea of "media mix" which first took shape in Japan around anime, manga, and games?

I think it's largely unconscious--I don't know anybody in the US or Europe who says "media mix" to mean storytelling across different media, and it's not just because we use different terms here. Star Wars certainly owes something to Kurosawa, but there's no evidence Lucas was influenced by Japanese media-mix business strategies. Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner was aware of it because he grew up in Hawaii, but I think he's the exception. But it's an important precursor to what we're seeing now, a sort of proof of concept that was adopted by Japanese manga and anime producers way before the Internet. Ideas take hold when people are ready for them, and in Japan people were ready early.

You cite a Madison Avenue type who says, "Advertising used to interupt life's programming. Now advertising is the programming. And if you're actually being marketed to successfully, you have no idea." So many of the works you and I like to talk about were funded as promotion yet consumed as part of the story/world of the fiction. How do we reconcile those two different experiences/goals? Are fans manipulated when they invest value into things which are purely promotional or has deep media/transmedia turned promotion into an art form?

It's all part of the blur. It isn't just stories and games that are blurring together, it's author and audience, fiction and nonfiction, advertising and entertainment. Because the Internet is so relentless about dissolving boundaries, this is pretty much inevitable.

Marketing is all about manipulation--that's the whole point of it. But people today, young people in particular, are so much more media savvy than people 20 years ago, not to mention 40 or 50. I was struck by how commentators in Advertising Age would talk about "blatant" product placements on a show like Chuck at the same time that Chuck fans were using the same advertiser in a social media campaign to pressure the network to renew the show. So who, exactly, is manipulating whom?

What's happening I think is that like other forms of storytelling, advertising is breaking its bounds. It used to be that commercials were in a neat little box 30 seconds long and there was a clear distinction between them and the show. And that was reassuring--it meant we could compartmentalize our entertainment away from the advertising that paid for it, even though the commercial breaks eventually swallowed up eight minutes out of 30.

Now things are getting homogenized. Alternate reality games like Flynn Lives and Why So Serious? are obviously promotional events for Tron: Legacy and The Dark Knight, but nobody objects because they also add depth and personal resonance to the story. People think Nike+ was developed by Nike and Apple, but they forget that R/GA, one of Nike's ad agencies, was instrumental in making it happen as well. Nike+ is a runner's tool that's also a marketing platform. And if people register that at all, they're mostly okay with it. The fact is, we live in a commercial culture. Let's acknowledge it. I don't think hypocrisy is ever healthy.

You talk about games as relying upon our "foraging instincts." What do you mean by that? How conscious do you think designers are of how they expect audiences to behave?

This may be the most unexpected thing I came across while I was working on the book. I got very interested in how games and stories work on the brain, and it quickly became apparent that games work by stimulating the dopamine system, which is key to our sense of reward. This makes sense--games are all about rewarding your achievements, and dopamine release is stimulated by the anticipation of reward. But if we get rewarded all the time, the dopamine release goes down and we begin to lose interest. And if we never get a reward for what we're doing, we get frustrated and lose interest even faster. The most effective reward pattern, it turns out, is one that has a certain amount of randomness built into it. Slot-machine operators have known this for decades, but it was a neuroscientist at Washington State named Jaak Panksepp who connected it to the behavior he calls "seeking."

Seeking, or foraging, is one of the most basic survival instincts in the animal world. It keeps us focused on whatever jackpot it is we're seeking--food and sex, originally, but also other kinds of payoffs--points, social recognition, whatever. I think game designers are very conscious of this, but so are people who are porting game mechanics to other areas of existence. Foursquare gives you points for walking out the door. This is a remarkably effective means of manipulating people. Because it's so powerful, there's a pretty high potential for abuse. On the other hand, all entertainment is about being manipulated at some level. If you're not being manipulated properly, you're not going to have a very good time. Nobody wants to go to a movie where you laugh at the wrong places.

Several times in the book, you refer to that moment just before 9/11 when several key experiments in deep media were first being launched -- Majestic, The Beast, The Runner. In some ways, you are suggesting, we are just now getting back to that moment. What took us so long? What can we do now that was not on the drawing board back then? What have been the consequences of that delay?

It's kind of tantalizing, isn't it? Like a lost moment that could have happened but didn't. I think people just weren't ready. The Web browser was only a few years old. Broadband hadn't taken hold yet, so online video was painful at best. Blogging was just beginning to take off. Social media hadn't happened yet--Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter. The Web was dominated by new media publishers like Yahoo and AOL that were basically just like old media, except the people running them didn't wear suits. And the dotcom bust had a lot of people convinced that the whole Internet thing was just a fad anyway--the CB radio of the '90s.

What's happened in the meantime is that we've had ten years to figure out what the Net is really about. It's not about publishing, it's about participating. It's about immersiveness. It's about redefining our relationship to entertainment and marketing and each other. People need time to absorb that. Stuff is coming at us at amazing speed, but that doesn't make us any faster at knowing what to make of it. We think we're living on Internet time, but the Internet is in no hurry to reveal its secrets.

Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention: An Interview with Linda Stone (Part One)

Many of you know the white paper I and a team of MIT-based researchers wrote for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative identifying some of the core skills which young people need to acquire if they are going to be able to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape. Perhaps the most controversial skill we included on our list was "multitasking." We knew that many regard multitasking as a form of distraction which fragments the attention of young people, but we also felt it needed to be seriously considered as a mechanism which allows us to cope with the intense information flow which constitutes our contemporary environment. Our point was that students need to be able to manage their attention, shifting it as needed between modes which involve scanning their environment for meaningful inputs (like a hunter) and focusing closely on a specific domain (like a farmer). I've since written on this blog discussing patterns of multitasking I've seen from students in my classroom while I was at MIT, further elaborating on my own thinking about multitasking. Today, I am happy to share with you the thoughts of Linda Stone, who has spent a great deal of time over the past decade reflecting on strategies for managing attention and about the educational consequences of what she has called "continuous partial attention." I met Stone years ago through the PopTech! conference in Camden, Maine, a great event, and we've stayed in touch off and on. In recent times, she's written some provocative pieces for the Huffington Post about what's she's been calling "conscious computing." Stone has been a top level executive at Apple and has led research at Microsoft on Virtual Worlds. She's now spending much of her time trying to understand the impact of new media on attention. As she writes on her blog, "Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool."

Let's start with a basic statement. You write, "Personal technologies today are prosthetics for our minds." In what sense?

For most of us, when we sit at the computer or use a cell phone, our mind is engaged and our body is "hanging out." Have you ever noticed someone sitting at a computer, body increasingly slumped and computer increasingly animated? Have you found yourself holding your breath or breathing shallowly while you work at the computer. I call that email apnea, temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing while doing email (or texting). We use the computer to extend our minds, while often, unintentionally, our bodies are being compromised in some way (posture, breathing, even just waiting to use the bathroom until we get yet another email done or another document completed).

You coined the term, "continuous partial attention," to describe a particular way we interact with each other in a world of mobile technologies. Can you explain this concept? How did your interest in attention emerge from the work you were doing with Microsoft on online communities?

In 1997, I coined the phrase Continuous Partial Attention (Harvard Business Review, January 2007) to describe what I observed in the world around me, at Microsoft where I was a researcher and later a Vice President, with customers, and at NYU where I was adjunct faculty in a graduate program. We all seemed to be paying partial attention - continuously. NYU students had their screens tiled to display multiple instant messaging windows, email, WORD documents, and more. My colleagues in high technology did their best to give the appearance of paying attention to a conversation, all the while, also attending to caller I.D., Tetris and BrickOut on their cell phones, and other people in range. Every stray input was a firefly. And every firefly was examined to determine if it burned more brightly than the one in hand.

As I watched the graduate students at NYU, it occurred to me that they were doing something very different from what I called multi-tasking. These students were hyper alert, ready to respond to any input coming in from any direction. They participated in four I.M. conversations while talking on the phone, responding to email, and noticing who was passing by. In those days, back at the Microsoft campus, many of us worked on two monitors - one monitor displayed email, the other displayed code or a Word document or a spreadsheet. It was no surprise to me when Microsoft's earliest version of Instant Messenger (I.M.) took up a full screen. An assumption had been made that if a user was I.M.'ing, they wouldn't choose to browse the net or answer email or prepare a document simultaneously. Digital immigrant thinking.

Digital immigrants at technology companies founded prior to 1990, were beginning to encounter digital natives. Digital immigrants had embraced technology to enhance productivity and personal creativity - PC's and Macs, word processing and spreadsheets, desktop publishing and paint programs empowered and enabled us. Digital natives took it all a step further. Technology wasn't just about tasks and productivity. New technologies enabled new types of communication, relationships and personal networks.

I mutli-tasked because I believed it made me more productive. I ate a sandwich while I filed papers. I had an eye on email coming in while I prepared a document. To answer email, I turned my attention to the monitor displaying it and set my document aside, momentarily. I moved between tasks, in rapid sequence, or, if I was doing more than one thing, one of those activities was automatic - like eating a sandwich - it didn't take much thinking, and one of those activities required some thinking - like answering an email.

My NYU students were hyper alert. They were asking their brains to do something different - they were asking their brains to attend to four I.M. conversations, a partially completed paper, a news website, a text message coming in on the cell phone and a conversation with the person sitting next to them. This blew me away. I wanted to give it a name that more accurately described it. I called it Continuous Partial Attention (cpa).

These students were ahead of the curve. As anywhere, anytime, any place technologies like cell phones, Blackberries, and wi-fi, proliferated, we came to expect immediate responses to email and phone calls, and all began to use cpa as an attention strategy. It was possible to work 24/7 and we did. We took time management classes and refined our ability to create schedules and lists. Untethered technology gives us the freedom to do anything, anywhere, anytime. It also enslaves us. We feel compelled to use it where ever it is.

At Microsoft, when I moved from Microsoft Research to work for Steve Ballmer, I believed I could do everything - both proactive and reactive, and I just made my days longer to accommodate demands.

My colleagues and I struggled with the workload in an effort to stay on top of everything. Mobile devices in hand, we were now all using cpa as our primary attention strategy. And we had even amped that up - often we were continuously paying Continuous Partial Attention (continuous cpa). There was no break in the pace. 24/7, anywhere, anytime, any place.

Widely recognized as a visionary thinker and thought leader, Linda Stone is a writer, speaker and consultant focused on trends and their strategic and consumer implications. Articles on her work have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review, and hundreds of blogs.

Previously, she spent close to twenty years as an executive in high technology. In 1986, she was persuaded to join Apple Computer to help "change the world." In her 7 years at Apple, she had the opportunity to do pioneering work in multimedia hardware, software and publishing. In her last year at Apple, Stone worked for Chairman and CEO John Sculley on special projects. In 1993, Stone joined Microsoft Research under Nathan Myhrvold and Rick Rashid. She co-founded and directed the Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group, researching online social life and virtual communities. During this time, she also taught as adjunct faculty in NYU's prestigious Interactive Telecommunications Program. In 2000, CEO Steve Ballmer tapped Stone to take on a VP role, reporting to him, to help improve industry relationships and contribute to a constructive evolution of the corporate culture. She retired from Microsoft in 2002. She is an advisor for the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) and is on the Advisory Board of the RIT Lab for Social Computing.

What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part Two)

A central goal of the book is to help teachers to understand how DIY practices might inform their engagement with their students. This DIY media production has historically been something young people do on their own, outside of school, so what do you see as the value of bringing it into the classroom?

The first point to make here is that becoming a bit familiar with DIY media practices can help inform teachers' teaching and learning interactions with students without the practices necessarily having to come into the classrooms. There are two aspects we would like to touch on here before looking at what the value might be of bringing such activity into classrooms.

Many years ago--in the mid-1990s--we were doing research in a Grade 7 classroom in which there were migrant students who were having to learn English while trying to navigate the content of the curriculum. The teacher remarked how difficult it was having English language learners mainstreamed into "regular" classrooms where there was no accompanying specialist support. She referred to one student, Tony, who had produced during the class' regularly scheduled independent writing time what appeared to be a 20-page manuscript. He'd been working on it for about a month before showing it to his teacher for feedback. His teacher dropped the tome onto the desk with an exasperated sigh and declared that she "didn't know what to do with it" because none of it made any sense, and she simply didn't have time to help him fix his sentences. The length of Tony's narrative and his dedication to writing it piqued our interest, so we took a copy home. The teacher was right in that the text had a fair number of grammatical and spelling glitches, but we'd actually seen worse in the writing of some of his English-only peers. What seemed to be the biggest problem for the teacher, then, was the narrative itself. At first glance, it was very dialogue driven and set in some medieval-like set of kingdoms, with events and characters suddenly appearing and then disappearing, wars suddenly erupting and being just as quickly resolved, and so on. What we soon realized as we began to read Tony's story was that he'd actually produced a really rich and complex narrative that drew on a wide range of popular culture storylines. These included characters, settings and events from video games such as Doom, Mortal Kombat, Dungeon Keeper II, and The Ultimate Evil, and a range of novels from the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series (e.g., The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Caverns of the Snow Witch). He'd produced, in other words, a really engaging and epic fanfic. It included all the things teachers want in students' creative writing: a strong plot line, interesting narrative structure, dialogue, characters with depth, descriptive language, and the like. But none of it "made sense" to or was valued by his teacher because she was unfamiliar with the practice of fan fiction writing, and most likely unfamiliar with the original popular culture resources on which he'd drawn to craft his story. If she'd been able to recognize the text for what it was, her construction of Tony as a student and as an English-language user would've been entirely revised.

The second point has to do with what we think of as cultures of learning. When students enter formal education they enter a new and very strange "model" of learning, compared to what they have experienced in their pre-institutional learning lives. For a start, they move from a learning world in which what they come to know and master is acquired in concrete contexts - is grounded in authentic relationships, purposes and situations - to a learning world in which what they are supposed to come to know and master is to be got from largely abstract and decontextualised "learning opportunities". There is a discrepancy for all young people - this is a dimension of the distinctions James Paul Gee makes between people's primary and secondary discourses, and between acquisition and learning - but the discrepancies are much greater for learners coming from some social groupings than it is for those who come from other social groupings (so, for example, students who are familiar with question-response-evaluation patterns of interaction between an adult and child--where the adult already knows the child knows the answer before posing the question--will find this same pattern at school very familiar and understandable). Often, the discrepancies are so great that young people just can't get onto the school learning wavelength at all: they just don't get it; which means that they can't "get" the curriculum as well as those students for whom the gap is less extreme. One of the things educational researchers who draw on sociocultural lines of theory often say is that the more teachers can understand and make connections to learners' pre-school ways of getting to know things, and the things they get to know about, the better the chances are that teachers can help get learners "onto the school learning wavelength".

What we are now finding is that learners who have already been at school for some time are getting a double dose of discrepancy. This is coming from their experiences of learning within what you and others, Henry, call participatory culture: involving "affinity spaces", low barriers to joining in, peer-to-peer interactions of sharing expertise, and where participants do not think in terms of failure (among many other features). So, they spend large amounts of time outside of formal education learning very effectively, with much passion, with a sense of personal purpose, where there is usually effective guidance close to hand, and so on. Then they turn up to class the next day and are thrown into something completely different. Even those who can handle "classroom ways" increasingly experience considerable disaffection.

In our work within teacher education we constantly are amazed by the extent to which the teachers and teacher education students we encounter have little or no familiarity with the kinds of learning cultures young people with DIY or DIO media learning experiences encounter on a regular (daily, hourly) basis. As we'll go on to mention a little later, we are speaking here of young people who are learning how to do media work through peer-based interactions with others, whether these are fan-based practices or more like hobbies and interests that are not necessarily built upon specific fanships. The thing is that young people nowadays have built up a "modus operandi" for learning that is different both from what they get before school and with what they typically get in school. It is, for very many aficionados of DIY/DIO media practices, a way of learning that they find very effective and pleasurable. Moreover, it is a way of learning that can easily be drawn upon to augment the limited forms of peer-teaching/learning buddies arrangements used in classrooms. The thing is to be aware of this way of learning and to get familiar with it and, hopefully, comfortable with it, as a teacher involved in learning and doing outside the classroom. The more familiar and comfortable it becomes, the easier it will be to find productive and seamless ways to integrate it into classroom routines in ways that are effective, and not just some kind of add on. To be able to make this kind of connection means getting to know the modus operandi in the first instance.

In many ways, for us, this is what the book is mostly about, rather than bringing the actual DIY/DIO media practices themselves into classrooms. It is about taking the time to experience the kinds of learning interactions and "ways" that have become second nature to so many young (and older) people, because by such means we can begin to generate all sorts of creative means for counteracting the "double dose of discrepancy" so that we can actually augment curriculum learning.

Having said all that, like you, we do also see a lot of potential value to be had from integrating DIY/DIO media practices into formal educational activity. To talk about this we have to take a bit of a detour into some work we have done with various colleagues over the past 15 years or so. This involves questions to do with what formal education is about and what it is (or should be) for: some kind of philosophy of education.

At a time when so much of formal education seems to be dominated by standardised testing of standardised curriculum content there seems to be little space for seriously raising and addressing questions about what kind and quality of learning formal education should be concerned with - especially when jobs get scarce and qualifications seem to count more than ever. But these questions are crucial and we get lazy about them at our peril and, especially, at the peril of those who have to endure 10 and more years of compulsory schooling. Working with Jim Gee and Glynda Hull in the mid '90s on the theme of the new work order, we got a new angle on the importance of education being connected to the larger enterprise of living well within the contexts of our times and worlds. We focused on the idea that education is not about children learning in schools but, rather, that education should respond to the needs of human beings who are living lives that can best be seen as trajectories. Every person is born into some milieu in which they will live and, by means of a more or less diverse range of social practices, within a range of social institutions. Education should be about enabling people to do that, and yet we all know that much of what we learn in school simply does not connect well to our lives beyond and after school. Instead, students get inducted into "school versions" of knowledge and social practices. Instead of learning to think and interpret like, say, an historian does, learners get to memorise dates and names and to write essays that weld these dates and names into standardised kinds of five-paragraph essays, and rarely get anywhere near to the kind of "raw data" that historians deal with. We learn history as bits and pieces of content, and as "essay writing". We don't get an introduction to "being, or becoming, an historian", or to "thinking historically". The same holds for pretty much every subject slot on the curriculum or timetable in most schools.

By contrast, as argued in The New Work Order, if we want formal educational learning to be "efficacious" we should be trying to ensure as educators that what someone - whether a child or an adult - does right now in their learning is connected in meaningful and motivating ways with "mature" or "insider" versions of the larger social practices in the world beyond school to which the current learning is supposedly related. In other words, if you're going to learn something in science right now, it should be conceptualised and approached in such a way that the present learning task is a step - to be followed by further steps rather than random bits and pieces of content or ideas - on the way to becoming the kind of person who addresses the world scientifically. Otherwise, what's the point? Today, decades after learning the periodic table, we both can recite by rote the first 10 elements in that table, but haven't got a clue what to do with them. They are inert baggage; wasted synapses. Their only potential use - which is statistically close to impossible - would be if we were on a game show staring at a million dollars and were asked what the 8th element in the period table is (but it would be game over for us if they asked us about the 11th or 12th element!).

Now, from this perspective, one of the major virtues of DIY/DIO media practices is that they exemplify the possibilities for efficacious learning. Participants in these practices are wanting to emulate good practitioners. They are wanting to become like the cultural producers they look up to. When they post a work in progress to get some feedback, or go online to get some "just in time" assistance, or closely examine someone else's work to see how they did what they did, they are taking an active step on a trajectory. When someone takes the time to feed back to others, or to give assistance or to make a suggestion, or to make a resource available, they are making a move in the enactment of being an insider to their social practice. They are learning how to do it, or are refining their learning, or are becoming more of an accomplished participant within a media cultural domain. They are learning to become more of a particular kind of identifiable person in the process of living a good, interesting human life. If education should be about anything, it should surely be about that. Educators, then, can learn much of value for effective pedagogy by experiencing ways of learning with which their students are often much more familiar than they are.

This is not to say, however, that if we integrate DIY media practices into classroom work it should just be for the sake of learning how to make a music video, say, or creating a space for young people to "do fan stuff". Clearly, there is already abundant space outside of school for that to go on. Rather, we think there are larger and deeper educational goals that can be realized by leveraging DIY media interests and proficiencies within school settings. One way of approaching this is via the concept of Knowledge Producing Schools, which we encountered in the course of working with Leonie Rowan and Chris Bigum prior to leaving Australia in the late 1990s.

This is the idea that schools can harness the relationship potential of digital technologies to move away from being based mainly on consuming knowledge and information within subject-based learning, and move in part to becoming involved in producing knowledge that is useful for their communities, and that will be used, valued, and acted on as appropriate by the community because it is good quality knowledge. Under this model learners have to learn how to produce expert-like knowledge, since if it is not good quality and expert-like it will not be valued by the wider community and the relationship will break down. The knowledge production must be efficacious and, therefore, the learning involved in that knowledge production will likewise be efficacious. Typical examples include students learning mathematical operations by tracking and then analysing vehicle speeds through a school zone using professional equipment in the company of transport officials and recommending changes to the speed limits to enhance students' safety, producing a public service video on bullying and how to best respond to bullies, and producing a research-based documentary on the history of a beef sales yard to help the city council promote the town's annual Beef Expo (the latter had actually gone out for public tender, and the students won the bid over other applicants).

The scope for media work within such an approach is enormous, and could project students' informal media production and expertise into the knowledge mastery role of schools in such ways as presenting knowledge via podcasting, videos, games-based movie making, image archiving and curating, audio archiving, and so on. Depending on the kind of knowledge being produced, DIY media proficiencies can enter the process at different points: such as for archiving data, interpreting and representing findings within the process of producing the knowledge, and/or in the process of disseminating or reporting knowledge outcomes.

Of course, ideas like building at least some curriculum work around ideals of efficacious learning and knowledge production will remain pie in the sky if teachers and teacher educators and caregivers and community leaders and other constituents don't put up some effective resistance to the dominance of standardised curriculum and testing. We believe, however, that it will be easier for educators to find spaces for productive take up of media production and sharing within bona fide knowledge work if they become "culturally fluent" with some DIY/DIO media activity.

Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.

Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.

Star Trek, Darkover, Thunderbirds, and Fan Fiction: An Interview With Joan Marie Verba (Part One)

When Joan Marie Verba's book, Boldly Writting: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987, first appeared, I wrote the following blurb:

This book pulls together an incredible amount of information about the history of fandom and does a major service for anyone who either wants to relive those exciting years or to better understand how Star Trek emerged as such a national and international phenomenon. I'll give you a clue. If Star Trek lives, it is because of what early fans like Verba made of it. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in fandom (which increasingly means anyone interested in popular culture).

Verba is one of the foremothers of modern media fandom, helping to model a new identity -- the fans as archivist and chronicler. We've seen other such fan projects emerge in more recent years, especially on the web, but because Star Trek was in some ways the ur-fandom, the template from which other fandoms have been modeled, this book continues to hold a special place on my bookshelf -- and indeed, I see it on the shelves of many aca-fen around the world.

Like many fans before her, Verba has found ways to transform her passions into her profession, increasingly publishing as a science writer and now, as the author of a series of professional novels focused around Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. Today, I am offering an interview with Verba. In today's installment, she discusses her early involvement in Star Trek and Darkover fandom. Next time, we will get into her more recent work helping to sustain fan interest in Thunderbirds, another series of the 1960s that refuses to die.

Your book, Boldly Writing, has become an irreplaceable chronicle of the early history of Star Trek fan fiction writing. Can you give us some sense of your own involvement with fandom in those early years?

I have watched Star Trek since it premiered in 1966. I learned about Star Trek fandom when I was a junior in high school, at a district-wide speech competition. During one of the breaks, one of the other participants, Anthony Tollin, was talking about the World Science Fiction Convention, which got my attention. He also spoke about Star Trek, and told me that a local fan, Ruth Berman, published a Star Trek fanzine. He gave me her phone number, and I called for information. That's how I got started. Her fanzine had notices about other fanzines. I ordered them, and they had notices for still more fanzines. I ordered them. And so on.

In 1972, when I was in college, I went to my first convention, the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett were there. (I encountered them alone in an elevator and got their autographs.) In 1973, I joined the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, and Helen Young invited me to join the Star Trek Welcommittee. (I remained in STW until it disbanded in the mid-1990s.) I went to my first World Science Fiction Convention in 1975, and joined the Mythopoeic Society in that year, as well.

My primary activities in fandom were centered around fanzines and fan publications. In the age before the Internet, those were our primary means of communication. I was a frequent letter-writer to fan newsletters and letterzines, as well as a regular contributor to Minneapa. I read and commented on fan fiction on a regular basis.

My first fanzine short story (it was a science fiction story, not a Star Trek story) was published in Masiform D. It was a while before my first Star Trek fan fiction story was published, not because I wasn't writing any, but because I sent them to fanzines whose editors had professional-level writing and editing skills (as opposed to fanzines that would publish anything). Because, looking back, my stories then weren't very good, my first fan fiction stories were rejected, but with comments that allowed me to slowly improve until my stories were accepted. Eventually, I published my own fanzines and newsletters, but not until the 1980s, when I felt I knew enough about fanzine writing and production to issue a quality publication.

What relationship existed between the rise of Star Trek fanzines and the longer history of zine publishing in science fiction fandom?

With one or two exceptions, the vast majority of early Star Trek fanzines were published by science fiction fans who had read and/or published science fiction fanzines. (Though by the time Star Trek came along, very few science fiction fanzines published fiction, since there were sufficient professional science fiction magazines for short story writers to submit to. For Star Trek fiction writers, there was little or no opportunity for publication except for fanzines for the large supply of and demand for stories.)

Once Star Trek fanzines had been established, readers with no knowledge of science fiction fanzines read Star Trek fanzines and got the idea to publish their own Star Trek fanzines as well.

What connections can we draw between the publishing of fanzines and the fan letter writing campaign intended to keep the series on the air?

I know of only a handful of Star Trek fanzines and newsletters that had been published at the time John and Bjo Trimble were rallying fans to write letters to Paramount to demand a third season of Star Trek (or to protest the cancellation at the end of the third season). Those that were in existence, did, of course, encourage fans to contribute to those letter-writing campaigns.

Star Trek fanzines and newsletters, however, were essential to the letter-writing campaigns to bring back Star Trek, first as an animated series, and then as a movie. The short-lived but influential Star Trek Association for Revival put a lot of effort into a letter-writing campaign. The Star Trek Welcommittee was always promoting revival, until the movies came and became self-perpetuating. In addition, many fanzines and fan newsletters published before Star Trek: The Motion Picture encouraged their readers to write Paramount.

You were involved with Darkover fan fiction as well as Star Trek. What comparison would you draw between the relations of fans and official producers in both cases?

Gene Roddenberry was supportive of fanzines and fan newsletters, and the support went both ways. He and his assistants would give out information to fanzine editors and publishers and directly to fans at conventions (he had an annual call-in to the August Party convention for several years). In particular, the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation was thoroughly documented in fan newsletters through information from Gene Roddenberry and his assistants. (Fans did influence that development. For instance, initially there were no Klingons in ST:TNG; after fans wrote him about it, he added Worf.) After becoming connected with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Harve Bennett regularly communicated with fans, through fan newsletters such as Interstat as well as through convention appearances. He did listen and respond to fan feedback on his productions, and he seemed to keep in mind fan preferences in making the Star Trek movies he produced, though for every movie, there were fans who were satisfied and dissatisfied with the results.

Marion Zimmer Bradley actively communicated with Darkover fans. She had an official newsletter that she and her assistants produced and published, as well as an official fanzine. She edited and published Darkover stories contributed by fans, including my stories. When DAW Books published their official Darkover anthologies, Marion asked me and other contributors to her official fanzine to contribute to those anthologies as well. My Darkover stories appeared in every anthology except one.

GR and HB both knew about fan fiction and occasionally read it. (Interestingly, I discovered two Star Trek fan fiction stories written by MZB in Star Trek fanzines.) MZB actively read Darkover fan fiction sent to her, and published it. (She graciously published my Lady Bruna story, saying she found it interesting even though she said upfront that it was different from her own official Lady Bruna story. I enjoyed her Lady Bruna story; she enjoyed mine.) There was a lot of mutual admiration; when MZB's health began to deteriorate, she enlisted Darkover fans and anthology writers to continue the Darkover series of novels professionally.

Has the influence of fan fiction been largely felt within fandom -- as in some ways the prototype for many subsequent fandoms -- or has it also been felt on the commercial production and popular production of Star Trek?

As I mentioned earlier, the production crew of Star Trek has generally been aware of fan fiction and fan opinion, and there definitely has been influence.

A story was told to me that in Deep Space Nine, the reason that Bashir had such a brief romance with Leeta, and the reason Bashir didn't get Dax until the very last episode, was that the production staff was aware that there were a lot of ladies in love with the Bashir character, and they didn't want to get Bashir permanently attached during the series because of that. As the editor and publisher of the official newsletter of the Bashir fan club at the time, I know that the production crew of DS9, even if they didn't read fan fiction, were well aware of fan opinion of the various characters (nearly every character in DS9 had an official fan club), and occasionally that opinion did influence what showed up on the screen. I know that some of the actors read DS9 fan fiction, however, and wouldn't be surprised if some of the production crew knew about it, as well.

You end your account in the late 1980s just before the internet started to have an impact on fan fiction publishing. What do you see as the biggest changes in fan fiction -- Star Trek or otherwise -- since the end of your account?

As it happens, I have only rarely read fan fiction since the 1990s. I have been concentrating on my own professional writing and publishing, and haven't had the extra time to follow the current Internet fan fiction culture. (When I was heavily involved with fan fiction, I often thought that the time I spent on it was equivalent to a full-time job.)

From what little I do know, the Internet has changed the process significantly. When fan fiction was on the page, writers sent stories to the editor of a fanzine, and maybe had a couple of friends read it in addition, before publication. Once it was published, a fan fiction writer sometimes received feedback, and sometimes didn't. A lot of fan writers before the Internet complained about a lack of response. Of course, the readership base was a lot smaller---limited to the number of fanzines published, which often was in the hundreds at the most. Now a story on the Internet is instantly available for feedback, doesn't usually go through an editor (though I understand there's a "beta reader" system), and is potentially available to thousands, if not millions, of readers at a time and extensive commentary is not only possible, but common.

Joan Marie Verba earned a bachelor of physics degree from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology and attended the graduate school of astronomy at Indiana University, where she was an associate instructor of astronomy for one year. She has worked as a computer programmer, editor, publisher, and health/weight loss coach. An experienced writer, she is the author of the nonfiction books Voyager: Exploring the Outer Planets, Boldly Writing, and Weight Loss Success, as well as the novels Countdown to Action, Action Alert, and Deadly Danger, plus numerous short stories and articles. She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She has served on the board of directors of both the Minnesota Science Fiction Society and the Mythopoeic Society.

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

Early enthusiasts of digital culture celebrated an escape from the local, connecting the local with parochialism and governmental constraint. Despite such claims that we have escaped the local, we are in fact still deeply rooted in the communities where we live, work, and vote. What do you see as the continued value of the local in an increasingly global information system?

Fundamentally, its value is that it's where we are. All of us need to escape, of course, and you're right that digital culture makes getting away easy, entertaining, and often enriching, too. But most of us live profoundly local lives. Our schools, hospitals, parks, and roads play a big role in determining our quality of life, as do our cultural institutions (sorry, but it's not much fun to watch live theater or music on the Net), and the local agencies who set standards for things like air and water pollution.

This year, we're getting a crash course in how much local government matters. California is issuing IOUs to its creditors because it's out of money. New York is jacking up the price for public transportation just when its citizens can least afford it. School systems are terminating their summer programs and cutting back on teaching training. Social services for the elderly and the poor are being slashed. You might not be affected by any of this, but it's likely that someone you love is. And if you want to do something about it, isn't your local community the best place to begin?

According to a recent poll from the Pew Internet Center, fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community "a lot." Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available. Less than a quarter of those younger than 40 (23%) say they would miss the local newspaper they read most often a lot if it were to go out of business or shut down. That compares with 33% of those ages 40 to 64 and 55% of those 65 and older. What are

the implications of this finding for those concerned about the viability of local information media?

Clearly newspapers have had a hard time proving their value to younger consumers. But I think the responses to these questions would be different if Pew had asked them differently. For instance, young people may not miss reading the local newspaper, but they would be very concerned if they could no longer get reliable local journalism online because the paper had fired so many reporters or even closed. They would notice if their favorite bloggers suddenly had less material to comment on or extend, or if their local TV news got even dumber because there was so little reporting to repackage.

If the media is an eco-system, newspaper reporting remains its sun, even in a digital age. When it diminishes, so does everything else.

Often, discussions of local media center around issues of news and information, yet your book also persistently raises questions about the impact of these trends on local and regional cultures. How might a de-emphasis on local media impact the diversity of American popular entertainment?

We've already seen the damage that media consolidation did to local music scenes. Or, rather, we've heard it, because for a decade now it has been next to impossible to find local music on the radio. Broadcasters no longer give DJs much discretion to play new sounds that aren't already established as commercially viable. For music fans, that means we can no longer use radio to expand our tastes, or to learn about innovative performers who are playing nearby. There are some new technologies that are trying to meet the constant demand for new sounds. I'm a big fan of Pandora, for instance, but it essentially gives me variations on what I already know I like. And it doesn't help me find a scene of other people who share my tastes, or let me know if a band I love has a gig where I live.

That said, I think the Net will ultimately facilitate a renaissance of local and hyper-local cultural reporting. There are already countless sites that help users find local theater, art, and music that would otherwise be difficult to identify. This kind of content is relatively inexpensive to produce, and demand for it will grow as the newspaper crisis cuts down the size of Alt Weeklies like the Chicago Reader¸ the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Village Voice.

One reason that I wrote Fighting for Air is that I think we can learn from our disastrous experiment with consolidation. Once we see what happens when a Clear Channel dominates radio or Gannett monopolizes newspaper markets, we can make sure that we don't make the same mistakes again. Of course, the new battle for control of media ownership has to do with telecommunications infrastructure, and issues like Net Neutrality, broadband access, and exclusivity arrangements for "smart phones" like the iPhone.

In discussions of local media, there is a tendency to act as if serving the local would necessarily serve the needs of all of the citizens. Yet, historically, local newspapers have neglected many segments of their communities and there are dispersed populations who are under-represented in any given local community who have gained greater clout by being able to connect together online. As we think about responding to the crisis in local media, how do we create institutions and practices which are more responsive to these populations?

You're right to point out the historic failings of local media organizations. They have often acted as boosters for big business and cheerleaders for local developers. Many (maybe even most) of the most celebrated outlets have long record of ignoring the poor and people of color - unless they are being presented as the source of some social problem. This is why so many entrepreneurs started "ethnic newspapers" in cities across the country. And it's why some enthusiasts for new media don't mind seeing newspapers disappear.

Most media companies do a better job diversifying their coverage than they did twenty-five years ago, at least, especially when it comes to gender, race, and ethnicity. They could still do a lot better, and they are hopeless on serving the poor because they don't see the market in it.

You ask how "we" create new institutions and practices that are more responsive, and I guess my answer hinges on who that "we" is. At the Knight conference, I argued that foundations could play a greater role in supporting grassroots initiatives by communities that are not well-served by mainstream media organizations. They do some of this already, but there are some extraordinary organizations doing innovative new media projects for their communities, and they could use a boost. For teachers, the challenge is to teach media criticism and media production skills to people, young and old, in communities that don't otherwise have resources for arts education.

At the Knight conference, you advocated governmental funding as part of the solution for supporting American journalism. Can you explain your proposal? How would you respond to critics who fear that any governmental funding of news production would lead to greater restrictions on free and independent journalism?

For the past few months I've been calling for a MediaCorps program, modeled on and perhaps integrated with the popular AmericaCorps program. The motivation is simple: During the past few years we have lost hundreds of reporters who covered Statehouses and City Halls, and you'd be hard pressed to find bloggers or citizen journalists who have moved into their bureaus. The Fourth Estate is being eviscerated, at the very moment when we need it to be robust. My proposal is that we invest some public money to replenish the supply of local political reporters. After all, how expensive would be to put two reporters in every Statehouse and two more in every major metropolitan area? Not nearly as expensive as it will be to not have them, I would argue, since the disappearance of local watchdogs gives corrupt local officials the opportunity of a lifetime.

I'm open to different ideas about how to staff the positions. MediaCorps could partner with community organizations, universities, or media companies, to provide digital media training for a new generation of political reporters. It could work as a jobs program for professional reporters who recently lost their positions, or for recent graduates of journalism schools who are looking for work.

I know that some Americans are uncomfortable with public journalism. But I think MediaCorps could easily be designed so that the reporters are independent and professional, as are the journalists who work for the Public Broadcasting Service. Given the popularity of National Public Radio, and the reporters who work for its many local affiliates, I'd think that, if it's done well, MediaCorps could have wide appeal.

And, let's face it, today we have a real market failure for local political journalism. We have a strong public interest in aggressive local journalism, but the models that historically sustained local media businesses no longer work. Using public funds to subsidize journalism may not be in line with the tradition of American media. But neither is using public funds to subsidize auto manufacturers and banks.

The fight for net neutrality has been in many ways a turning point for media reform in this country. What tactics have emerged to deal with this policy debate? How do they mark the impact of a new generation of media reformers?

The fight for Net Neutrality is a turning point because it expands the battle field of media politics. Now it's not just about content providers like News Corporation or Viacom. It's also about infrastructure and delivery systems, so Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon (among others) are key players.

It's also a turning point because it has brought new constituencies into the media policy field: Internet enthusiasts, techies, and legal scholars (such as Larry Lessig, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Zittrain). These groups have brought terrific creative energy to what was already a dynamic social movement. They have technical expertise in law and engineering, but they also have a sense of humor, and you can see that in the Net Neutrality campaigns.

I should add that these folks are now at the center of the media reform movement. Tim Wu, who coined the term Net Neutrality, recently replaced Robert McChesney as Chairman of the Board at Free Press, and Larry Lessig keynoted the last national media reform conference, where he delivered one of his multimedia masterpiece performances. Even before these folks came on board, Free Press helped engineer the SavetheInternet campaign, a collaborative effort that involved the clever use of Web videos, political humor, a petition, and some old fashioned policy advocacy on the Hill. It was an incredible effort, and it actually changed the outcome of the telecommunications industry's first major push to win the right to discriminate against consumers and competitors. The fight is hardly over, of course, but it's remarkable how well it started.

The media reform movement has sometimes aligned itself with cultural conservatives who raise concerns about "decency" in media, concerns which are often directed at increased government regulation of media content. What do you see as the implications of that alignment? Is it possible to reconcile the goal of a diverse and independent media with the push towards government regulation of media content?

You chose the right word here. The relationship between media activists on the left and the right is usually hostile, but when they agree - as they did on issues of local control and on the critique of consolidation - they tend to form alignments and not deep bonds. They don't strategize together, or at least not often. They don't participate in each other's conferences. They don't try to reconcile their philosophical differences. And that's probably good, because they would be impossible to work out. But they do forge temporary coalitions, and these coalitions can be powerful during specific battles.

In the campaign to fight against more media consolidation, for instance, the religious right got attention for complaining about content: Janet Jackson's nipple, Howard Stern's tongue, etc. But they were also motivated by the declining independence of local broadcasters, who lost their ability to preempt network programming for local shows (often religious or athletic events) after the networks got the upper hand in negotiations; and by the anti-choice policies of cable operators who forced consumers to purchase large bundles of channels, which inevitably include several that no one wants, rather than individual stations on an a la carte basis.

The left had its own concerns about content. At the FCC's cross-national localism hearings, citizens from big cities and small towns alike spoke out against radio DJs who made lewd comments or laughed about violence against women or ethnic minorities, warned against the dangers of excessive commercialism in entertainment culture, and demanded that Big Media companies give more air time to progressive voices. They, too, linked these complaints to a critique of media ownership patterns. But in their case, the villains were Clear Channel, the News Corporation, General Electric, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, not the so-called "cultural elites" in New York City and Hollywood.

In my view, media reformers acted responsibly in the coalition. They agreed to work with the NRA and the Parents Television Council, but only in the debate about ownership. I don't know of any media reformers who supported the FCC's policy of arbitrarily fining broadcasters for indecency. In fact, I don't know any savvy media reformers who support reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine. Content regulation just isn't a viable response to the 21st century media system. But I don't have a problem with forging provisional coalitions with those who think it is.

In some recent writings, I've been exploring whether those of us who come from cultural studies and have been interested in issues of agency and participatory culture might find ways to align with the interests of those who come from political economy or media policy and stress the structural constraints around media ownership. Both seem to agree that we are at a key turning point in the media ecology. Do you see points of contact between the two perspectives and agendas?

By all means! And since the media ecology clearly is at a key turning point, there's never been a better time for these groups to come together. Truth is, they're already fighting on the same side. Consider the remarkable fact that Robert McChesney (the leading scholar of media political economy) created an organization that has been wildly successful at promoting participation and enabling agency in all kinds of media debates. Or that innovative cultural producers, from the zany pirate broadcasters at the Prometheus Radio Project to the leaders of the Future of Music Coalition, have forged tight working relationships with wonky policy advocates like the Media Access Project.

One of my goals in Fighting for Air was to illustrate how creative, spirited, fun, and even funny the media policy movement has become, while also showing how smart, politically savvy, and intellectually serious communities of cultural producers have been in battles of all kinds. If the people involved in making media and media policy have been able to recognize their shared interests (and fate), shouldn't those of us who study them, too?

Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies

Liz Losh, a friend of Project NML, attended our recent conference which showcased, among other things, a Teacher's Strategy Guide we've been developing around "Reading in a Participatory Culture." I've written about the project here before. Though the activities are designed to be adaptable to a much wider range of books, the guide uses as its starting point Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and its appropriation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, an African-American playwrite and director, who has staged a contemporary, multiracial version of the classic novel. At the conference, we were able to bring together some of the teachers who have been field testing the guide this year through school and after-school programs, share some of the war stories, and lay out some of the premises guiding this research. Losh wrote a thoughtful piece in her blog about her perceptions of the opening presentations at the conference, which included some reservations she had about how our approach would play out in a multicultural classroom. Jenna McWilliams, who was a key collaborator in developing the Teacher's Strategy Guide, has responded to many of Losh's core concerns. In the spirit of healthy debate, I wanted to focus on what Losh says about our deployment of the concept of appropriation and in the process, share with you some of the ways that our work does factor in issues of multiculturalism.

First here are the two key issues Losh raises:

I find myself overcoming my hesitation to ask if certain kinds of remixing, recontextualizing, and mash-up might be problematic for multicultural classrooms, based on what I heard from the group's introductory overview for the day. For example, quoting Henry Jenkins' line that "by being conservative in content, we can be radical in approach" could be read as a defense of the conservative canon that has excluded many from literary recognition and their place in the historical record. This impression might be further supported by the group's assertion that they were emphasizing "multidisciplinarity" rather than "muliculturalism."

My comment about "conservative in content" is taken a bit literally here: what I meant was that given our belief that the new media literacies represent a paradigm shift in how we teach the entire curriculum rather than an added on subject, we were going to start by modeling new ways to approach subject matter already in the curriculum. If we teach these traditional subjects differently in a participatory culture, then it will help people to understand the changes which are taking place in our media environment. Approaching these topics also makes it easier for these materials to get into schools and provides some cover for teachers who are fighting the good fights in the trenches, trying to change schools from within.

As Jenna notes, this last statement is a misinterpretation of a single sentence on one of McWilliam's slides during the opening presentation. In fact, while I think we need to reframe what we mean by "multiculturalism," I see multiculturalism as an absolutely central concept to the work we are doing around "Reading in a Participatory Culture," though as you will see, I see it not as a static concept but rather one which is also undergoing some significant changes at the present moment.

Furthermore, although appropriation may be celebrated in remix culture, there may be some forms of appropriation that represent and potentially reify the exploitation of people of color and the repression of their calls for social justice. After all, even the most racist minstrel shows claimed to be appropriating aspects of black culture that white performers had observed. When Elvis and other white singers popularized material from the "colored" entertainment spectrum, the lack of compensation to the original creators of that music stung many black musicians badly.

In fact, both of these issues were ones that concerned us deeply as we developed this project. While I understand why Liz read Jenna's comments the way that she did, the selection of Moby-Dick was not simply a product of my belief that we could push further methodologically if we started with materials which are already part of the traditional curriculum. Indeed, if that were the case, we probably would not have started with Moby-Dick, which because of its length and complexity, has been systematically pushed out of the high school classroom.

Rather, the decision was inspired by the growing body of scholarship which looks at Moby-Dick as a representation of the whaling ship as a multicultural society where sea men of many different ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds came together and worked towards a common goal. As Wyn Kelly, my collaborator, points out in our guide, Melville does not depict a world without conflict but he is honest to the multiracial composition of 19th century American culture.

The focus was also inspired by the imaginative and transformative interpretation of the book constructed by our creative collaborator, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and his passionate belief that Moby-Dick and some of the other classics taught through schools have something to say to current generations of readers and offer resources through which minority students can make sense of their current experience. Certainly there is an ongoing debate about which novels should be taught in schools, but the result of that debate should not simply be the replacement of Melville by Morrison. Ideally, both would be taught in dialogue with each other so that we have a richer understanding of how debates about race run through the American literary tradition and ideally, multiculturalism doesn't just shape which books we teach but also how we teach them. Someone like Pitts-Wiley can teach us to read Moby-Dick through new eyes and in doing so, help us to better understand what it means to live in a multicultural society.

While Losh picks up on our use of M.C. Lars's "Ahab" video in one of our activities, she seemingly misses the fact that the central example of appropriation in this guide is Pitts-Wiley's own remixing and rethinking of Moby-Dick. Early in the guide, we share with educators some of Pitts-Wiley's own concerns about the history of white appropriation of minority culture and his sage advice to educators about the politics and ethics of remixing. What he has to say is worth sharing at length here:

When I came in contact with the new media literacies, many of the concepts were new to me, like the fascinating concept of remixing and appropriation. That's an incredible choice of words to use in this new field: appropriation. I have spent much of my creative life trying not to appropriate things.

I write a lot about African-ness -- African culture and black people and this country's relationship to Africa. I've never been to Africa, but I have a sense of its culture and its people from things I've read and seen. I believe in spiritual villages, villages of connection. If you write a poem it's a key to the village of poets. It'll let you in. Once you're in, all the poets are there. It doesn't mean that you are going to be heralded and recognized as great or anything like that. All it means is you have a key to the village. I've always felt I've had a key to the village of African culture. But I was very determined to never, for instance, write a play in which I said, "I am a product of the Mandinka people," or, "the Zulu people," or I'm going to use their language as if I truly understand it. No, I don't. But I had a sense of the humanity and the cultural connection, and I had to go to the village of the elders and say, "I have this word and I think it means this. What do you think?" Sometimes in that spiritual place the elders would say, "It's a good word, you may use it." Sometimes they would say, "It's not a good word, it has no value."

So when I came across the word "appropriation" in the new media literacies I thought to myself, I'm a product of a black culture where so much of what we've created has been appropriated and not necessarily for our benefit. The great jazz artists were not necessarily making money off of jazz. The record companies were making money. Our dance forms, our music, our lingo, all of those things have been appropriated many, many times and not necessarily in a way in which we profited. So when I saw the term used I had a lot of concern about it. I still have a lot of concern about it, because does that mean that everything is fair game whether or not you understand its value? Can you just use whatever you want because it's out there? Before you take something and use it, understand it. What does it mean to the people? Where was it born? It doesn't mean that it's not there to be used. It's like music in the air: it's there for everyone to hear it. But don't just assume because you have a computer and I can download a Polynesian rhythm and an African rhythm and a Norwegian rhythm that I don't have a responsibility to understand from whence they came; if I'm going to use gospel music I have a responsibility to understand that it's born of a people and a condition that must be acknowledged.

Of course, in writing my adaptation of Moby-Dick it became very important that I didn't appropriate anything that wasn't in the novel from the beginning. People ask me, "Why Moby-Dick?" Because everybody was there, so I didn't have to invent any people. It would have been different if I had to invent a whole race of people where I would make a decision that I'm going to set it in South Africa in 1700. I don't necessarily understand South African culture so I wouldn't have done that. On the other hand, I had a real concern about appropriating hip-hop culture and putting it into what we were doing because I'm not a product of the hip-hop generation. I'm very much an admirer of it. There I really had to go the source and ask the young people, "This is what I'm thinking. Is it appropriate? Is it real? Is it based in any kind of truth, in any kind of reality? What are your thoughts on this?"

If I could make any contribution to the new media literacies, it would have been to say to the appropriators, "Find the truth. Find the people. Go ask. Go talk to somebody. Do not count on a non-human experience in order to make a complete creation of anything." So in remixing I was concerned also with who had access to appropriate things. If you're media savvy, if you're on the whichever side, left or right side, of the digital divide, you have access to unlimited knowledge. But does that mean that you know how to use that knowledge and you are respectful of its source?...

The first step in remixing novels is to stay honest to the original text. Put a value on that, understand it, appreciate it, and then start the remixing process. Edit down to the big questions. Why? What? Why is it important now? And then take the reins off, take the leash off, take the bit out of the mouth and let imaginations run wild, and be careful not to censor too harshly. I think censorship for respect, not necessarily of the original text, but censorship for respect of the reader so you don't write in a vacuum. You write for things to be read, and I read things, "Well you didn't care about anybody but yourself." That's not the purpose. This novel that we are working from was written to be read by others.

Somehow you have to create, not for yourself, but for others, and allow the students to find their own honesty. Encourage them to always go back to the original text, keep going back to the original text. That's where the message is, that's where there's a certain amount of the truth. Otherwise all you've done is written your own story. You haven't studied; you haven't learned necessarily; you've just written your own text, and there's a place for that, too. That's important, to keep going back to the original text. There's great stuff in the original text. In Frankenstein, Moby-Dick, Invisible Man, you keep going back and you'll find that those people really had an idea about what they wanted to write about. Don't copy them.

This video is one of a number we've produced which explore Ricardo's own creative repurposing of Melville's original novel. Here, the emphasis is both on the need to respect the integrity of the original work as well as on the creative and expressive use of language which Ricardo discovers through his interactions with his young multiracial castmembers.

At every step along the way, we were shaped by Ricardo's ethical concerns, using Moby-Dick as a way of asking about how what we mean by multi-culturalism has changed over time, seeking to create a context where teachers can discuss remix culture with their students with a sensitivity to the historical contexts from which the appropriated materials emerged and with an awareness of the obligations that we owe to creative artists who came before us. Our activities call attention not simply to Melville's representations of race, but also to the gender politics of the book: Ricardo's stage production featured an Asian-American woman as Ahab's contemporary counterpart.

That's why I was troubled by what I see as Liz Losh's misperceptions of our project, which rest on too easy assumptions that Moby-Dick can be dismissed as a dead text by a "dead white male" or that remix necessarily involves the exploitation of minority culture by white artists. My hope is that just as we are rethinking how and why we teach Moby-Dick, we may also rethink what multicultural education means in contemporary culture, rather than simply inheriting our categories from older identity politics movements. Here's part of what I wrote about multiculturalism in the "Expert Voices" section of the guide:

The concept of "multiculuralism" emerges from an era of identity politics: In the 1960s and 1970s, each ethnic and racial group within a multi-racial nation began to recognize and insist upon the value of its own cultural traditions, began to push aside decades of racism and assert the dignity which came from being a member of a particular cultural community. As a result of these shifts in racial politics, schools increasingly broadened the range of literary texts being taught so that each member of the class would have a chance to encounter something which reflected her own heritage and background, could read about "someone like themselves," and could see herself as someone who might make a valuable cultural contribution. This notion of multiculturalism, however, often starts from essentialism, assuming each of us belongs to one and only one group and that this historic identity should predetermine how we position ourselves in contemporary society.

Yet, a growing percentage of Americans come from mixed race, mixed religion, and/or bilingual families; they grow up within multiple cultural traditions, sometimes moving back and forth between them, sometimes creating their own mixed sets of cultural practices to reflect their "hybrid" identities. Recent cultural and political figures, from Tiger Woods to Barack Obama, have put a new face on race in America. Such figures invite us to move from a conception of multiculturalism within society towards multiculturalism as part of each individual's construction of identity; rather than negotiating between groups, we are increasingly negotiating amongst competing, sometimes conflicting identities within ourselves.

As Frank H. Wu notes in his book, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, race is increasingly situational: "Race is meaningless in the abstract; it acquires its meanings as it operates on its surroundings....The same words can take on different meanings depending on the speaker, the audience, the tone, the intention, and the usage." Sometimes, racial differences matter greatly; sometimes they matter very little, depending on the context. Sometimes, Wu notes, he is perceived as Chinese-American, sometimes Asian-American, sometimes simply Non-White. And the same will be true for many students in the class. In that sense, race is continually being negotiated moment by moment through interactions with other people.

As Ricardo Pitts-Wiley explains, part of what drew him to Moby-Dick was the fact that "everybody was already on the boat." As Wyn Kelley comments, Melville depicts the Pequod Crew in particular and the whaling community more generally as multi-cultural on a social level. Each of the harpooners represents a different racial and cultural background: Queequeg, the South Seas islander; Daggoo, the African; Tashtego, the native American; and Fedallah, the Asian. Certain moments in the novel -- especially the opening scenes where Ishmael finds himself in bed with Queequeg -- heighten our awareness of racial difference, even as Moby-Dick suggests the ways that inter-racial taboos may be overcome through the bonding between men at sea.

There is a lot we can see about the history of race in America by studying how different illustrators have depicted these characters: sometimes exaggerating their differences, falling into crude stereotypes, and accenting the shock of an encounter between the "primitives" and the westerners. Sometimes they have been depicted with greater dignity or with an anthropological attention to the markings of their cultural backgrounds. An interesting exercise would be to bring in multiple editions of the book from the school library and to look at the ways these figures are depicted in the illustrations. You can encourage your students to ask questions about how the illustrators dealt with cultural and racial differences in the book and how they depicted the attitudes of the white characters towards their minority crewmates. You want to look for those moments where race matters most in the images and where, if ever, race seems to recede. Given that our dominant understandings of race are based on what people look like (that is, on recognizable visual differences), illustration is a place where it is difficult to escape from a consciousness about racial difference. A novelist can accent our awareness of racial difference or make us forget it for a period of time, much as one's race may matter or not in the digital world depending on the consciousness of the people participating in a particular exchange.

On stage, race is also always visible, yet choices in casting may make race more or less central to our understanding of a particular character. So, for example, we might imagine a minority performer confronting a particular set of racial stereotypes. The actor might challenge those stereotypes either by working against them, portraying a character very different from our prevailing assumptions, or may create tension and discomfort by playing into the stereotype, exaggerating the cliches so that we become more aware of their implications, or the actor may accept the stereotype as the basis for the character and try to give it as much dignity as possible.

One could argue that race functions differently in the two stories being told in Moby-Dick: Then and Now: the adult version accents racial differences. The performance marks off each minority character as embodying a distinctive cultural tradition through the costuming, music, and other aspects of the characterization. The youth version defines its characters more through their relationship to each other than through their racial and cultural differences. In both cases, the crews are racially diverse, yet there is a different level of consciousness about racial difference in the two stories. Queequeg is defined by his race in ways that Que is not. This is not something that emerges from the script of the play, but it is very much what we experience in watching this particular performance...

All of this points towards the importance of negotiation as a social skill and cultural competency young people need to acquire if they are going to successfully operate in this modern context: they need to be increasingly aware of the nuances of their interactions within and across a range of different groups; they need to become more reflective about the identities that they embody and perform in their daily lives and about the social dynamics that emerge as they interact across cultural differences.

This is only a small part of what our materials have to say about multiculturalism and the racial politics of appropriation. It is not a question we ignore in working with these materials. We are trying to bring these issues front and center in the language arts classroom, just as we are trying to get teachers to engage with new forms of creative expression -- including remix in hip hop and techno -- that build upon materials borrowed, snatched, stolen from the culture and put to new uses. We see these ethical concerns as central to our definition of appropriation which stresses "meaningful remixing" of existing cultural materials, just as we are also introducing issues around fair use, copyright, and creative commons. I am proud of the work our team has done in this area. It's certainly not above friendly fire and constructive criticism. And if our presentations of these materials don't do justice to the nuance and care with which we treated these issues, then we have some more work to do.

Editor's note: for some further reflections and responses to this question, see http://tinyurl.com/nf6eoa and http://tinyurl.com/mcjtxa.

Sweet Valley Twins: Reading to Understand Contemporary Social Networks

This is the second in a series of essays produced for my graduate prosem on Media Theory and Methods last term. The essays are intended to fuse autobiographical and theoretical writing to address an issue of central interest to the student. Sweet Valley Twins:

Reading to understand contemporary social networks

by Dharmishta Rood

I spent most of my youth surrounded by the pages of books. I read a lot of things, Babysitters Club, Anastasia, books about children and teens that loved animals. I tried to get caught up in the boxcar children, but I found it too old fashioned--I couldn't identify with anything that was going on. I tried reading Tolkien, but became bored, not because I didn't understand the text, but because of my boredom with an archetypal male power struggle through the singularity of objects and power derived from them, though I wouldn't have articulated it that way then. After dabbling in other genres I returned to a world that was so wholly my own, yet so alien--the social life of young girls. I grew up reading Sweet Valley Twins books.

These books encompassed much of my life and youth. I would read while walking (much like Belle in Beauty And The Beast, but with awful glasses and braces). I would sneak pages in math class when the teacher would turn around to write on the board. I still to this day can imagine when I laughed aloud in math class at a hilarious passage confusing woks and walks. I still get a smile on my face thinking of the incident (though my math teacher was less than pleased).

I began reading these books at a time in my life where I was hungry to understand social interaction, yet at the same time seeking to hide from it. I was confused and unsure, wanting to learn by watching others yet shield myself from any hurt by covering my face from the world with a book and wrapping myself in the safety of pre-resolved existing plots, the way one finds comfort in familiar foods.

I actually have almost no recollection of doing homework (although I did well in school) but remember very vividly how I would come home and finish reading a book on the stairs directly inside the front door. Social life played a large role in my childhood, as a source of stress, but also as a main interest of mine.

The central draw of the popular clique at my elementary school, of which I was never a part, was their central sense of presence--by standing in a room and saying nothing, they could announce themselves as interesting. Perhaps this was my glorified understanding of their social presence but regardless, whatever they were doing was definitely working. Their popularity was self-affirming and generative.

I hungered for these interactions and the sense of presence that came with them and my need to understand these interactions was satisfied by these books, which had conclusive endings and allowed me as the reader to see into the social interactions, take them apart and live them, without having to actively create interactions myself. Had I been able read on social networks instead of Sweet Valley Twins books would I have been petrified or liberated? Would Elizabeth, the sweet shy romantic have been torn apart by them or Jessica the social butterfly have thrived in the midst of all the action? Whose narrative would I have chosen?

For Turkle, media have become a way for creating inquiries of the self, as both a mirror in as much as a window out (1984, 1995). "The computer creates new occasions for thinking through the fundamental questions to which childhood must give a response, among them the questions 'What is life?'"(ibid, 1984, 16) Media can then be seen as objects that help us think about ourselves, and reflect what it is to be a thinking human being. Sweet Valley Twins books, like anything that signals meaning, have contained within them their own set of meanings and social structures and like anything mediated, they can be something to hide behind, something with which to escape from the "real."

I read about a book each day during the school year, and read them all in order (minus, of course, the numbers missing from the public library), I read in free minutes, by the hour, filling weeks, then days and months with stacks of 20 books at a time, the limit from the library. It never occurred to me that I could have purchased the books with my allowance or put them on a birthday wish list. They were too disposable to me; by the time I would have gotten one it would have been one day old almost immediately. Perhaps this set the stage for me to create consumable media to be disposed when it becomes a day old, with my current identity as a blogger and journalist.

I remember how the books smelled and the way they felt; the way I could lie down on the couch and read one, and after a while the words melted away and there were only pictures. I was both identifying as the twins yet also watching them, finally at peace with social interactions I couldn't seem to figure out at school, while negotiating the confusion between the side of me that could talk all day to strangers and the side that can barley leave the house.

The twins in the series came to be a representation of myself, although

I wouldn't have articulated it that way then. Elizabeth was introverted, shy, romantic and thoughtful. Jessica was outgoing, social and bold. I often struggle to meld these two aspects of my personality into one person that can interact with the world. How can one be simultaneously sensitive yet bold? Shy and outgoing? The twins in the book seem to balance each other out, causing equilibrium of blonde purpose articulated through action and control.

People use virtual worlds to do these same things--social networks become many faceted representations of ourselves. danah boyd articulates this as a linearity from concepts of self and identity--one's internal identity and one's social identity. Within this social identity, identity management and impression management surface at the forefront of these social issues, in portraying many facets of one's identity one must be careful not to expose too much of oneself (boyd, 21-30, 2002).

Users even use social networks to hold deceptive identities--posing as those that they are not, for reasons from benign to harmful. (boyd, Donath 2004) In a lot of my own personal social network research I've come across people that will say "this is a very not me experience." When they are browsing photographs or profiles they are constructing a space, a universe external to themselves. One could describe this as traversing from fictional universes, such as the twins, to "networked publics." In reading I got to experiment with fictional identities without an audience. Though online networks have "invisible audiences" (boyd, 2002), that allow for social network users to feel anonymity and perhaps even privacy, they are not truly alone. Social networks have identity performance, and identity performance was everything I was trying to understand, and everything I was trying to avoid.

boyd stresses the importance of impression management, something that is socially learned, signaling intentions, desires and actions (2004).

It never occurred to me to seek out other readers of these books and interact with them: these books were my own personal refuge and it would have been counterintuitive to share this private world with anyone. It was an escape more than a community. I was learning from the young girls in the book. When I was reading, I was no longer myself, I was Elizabeth or Jessica, interchangeably.

I used the books to discover and explore what creates the fabric of a social relationship, binding us next to each other and allowing us to return again to the same place in a relationship. I learned this page by page and was allowed to again return to what I had built in this (novel's) community and the(se character's) friendships I had formed.

Social organization and also interaction can be part of this self-regulating behavior. The books functioned in the same way that gossip does--as an extension of observational learning for learning rules and both teaching and affirming social norms behaviors. "On the surface, gossip consists of stories and anecdotes about particular other people, perhaps especially ones that reflect negatively on the target. We readily concede that some of the appeal of gossip is simply learning about other people. However, we think that a second, less obvious function of gossip is to convey information about social norms and other guidelines for behavior" (Baumeister and Zhang, 2004, 13).

Though the books differ from social networks in that there is no two-way interaction, the same social paradigms still exist and social norms are (re- and de-) constructed through the text. My fascination with social networks is similar to reading these books. The social interactions are visible and can be learned from, without having to say anything back. My social network use perhaps mirrors the way that I was able to stick with the series, meeting their lives at the intersection of my own. In online social networks, instead of furthering my relationship with Jessica or Elizabeth, and thus their social connections, I'm able to analyze my own and indulge in social learning without any of the anxiety that comes with it in real space.

In education, situated cognition is the "theory that learning is influenced by context. Cognition exists in the relations among people. Learning and knowing do not exist independently but are structured by interpersonal interactions and attempts to solve real-life problems in everyday settings" (Collins and O'Brien, 2003, 324). What I was experiencing through these books was learning about social interaction. They functioned as a safe reality to understand sociability. I was learning from these girls both to augment and also to replace relationships in my life.

At the end of the day I'm left with a few questions: how can social network "reading" be framed by my understanding of myself from reading Sweet Valley Twins books? What differences and similarities exist between the networked reading that are allowed in social network spaces

My current interest in social networks could be seen as directly related to my reading of these books. I'm interested less in the possibility of participation online and more in the fact that these are real people with real-life relationships. , Their networked relations within these social networks do not require interaction as a prerequisite for the consumption of social information.

Social networks differ from my Sweet Valley Twins books because they allow the possibility for feedback. Social networks are thus a more active space for social learning, yet still not completely social in the way that having a one-on-one conversation or going to a crowded social gathering shapes a social understanding in terms of social feedback mechanisms for situated cognition. They both sit in between realities and fiction, as a safe space to learn sociability without needing to know exactly how yet to interact. Before social networks, the Sweet Valley Twins series was a similar type of safety net, and the relations that were formed and explored throughout the series were, for better or for worse, my training ground for social interactions to this day.

References

Baumeister, R. F., Zhang, L., & Vohs, K. D. (2004). Gossip as Cultural Learning. Review of General Psychology, 8(2), 111-121.

boyd, danah. (2008)."Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life." Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. David Buckingham. (Ed.). The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 119-142.

Donath, J., & Boyd, D. (2004). Public Displays of Connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 71-82.

Collins, J. W., & O'Brien, N. P. (Eds.). (2003). The Greenwood dictionary of education (p. 431). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Gunawardena, C. N., Hermans, M. B., Sanchez, D., Richmond, C., Bohley, M., & Tuttle, R. (2009). A theoretical framework for building online communities of practice with social networking tools. Educational Media International, 46(1), 3.

Turkle, Shery. (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Turkle, Sheery. (1984). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Dharmishta Rood is receiving her Masters from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard this June, where she has been examining the cultural impact of networked environments and investigating how this affects learning and how the new technologies have changed the way people use and process information. Continuing her focus and

exploration related to online cooperation facilitates the generation of user-generated content, Dharmishta is a research assistant for Yochai Benkler at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She is co-founder of Populous, a Knight Foundation funded open source software project that allows newspapers to publish online, integrating social features and existing networks into news reading. She is also a Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media. Currently she is particularly interested in the way that the option of participation in an online space changes readers' interpretations of information, and

she is currently defining the notion of "networked reading" around this concept. Dharmishta holds a B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA, and previously worked as Photo Editor at UCLA's Daily Bruin and blogs at http://dharmishta.com.

What Is Learning in a Participatory Culture? (Part One)

The "Learning in a Participatory Culture" conference last weekend was hosted by Project New Media Literacies in part to showcase the work we've been doing over the past year with teachers who were field testing our curricular materials and in part to publicly launch our Learning Library. The Learning Library is intended as a multimedia activity center where people can come to learn more about the new media literacies, acquiring skills and testing them through challenges, and ultimately, producing and sharing content with other users. Much as the Media Lab's Scratch project has enabled hundreds of thousands of young people around the world to learn about coding by building, sharing, and remixing projects with each other, we hope that the Learning Library will provide young people and educators alike a chance to remix the materials of their culture in order to learn what they need to do to become full participants in the contemporary media landscape.

The library started with short documentary segments we produced on topics such as cosplay, wikipedia, graffiti, dj culture, and animation, but it was increasingly clear that if we were to put our theories into practice we needed to create a more robust system for active participation in the learning process. The result was the current learning library where the materials we produced -- and countless other sites of cultural production and participation which are already in the web -- become resources for challenges which require a mixture of exploration, experimentation, self reflection, and communication. We are now moving to work with existing organizations -- from the Organization for Transformative Works which produced segments on fan vidding to the Center for Social Media which has done segments on interviews and citizen journalism -- to produce their own materials which can form the basis for future challenges.

We are encouraging teachers to build challenges as class projects -- as I have already been doing through some of my classes this year. And we hope to see international content which can be shared with schools around the world -- we've been working to get some challenges not simply translated into Spanish but also rethought for a Latin American context. We are finding that teachers are using these challenges in a range of different ways: some are using the challenges themselves in order to get a better grasp on the new media literacy concepts and practices; some are taking the challenges directly into their classrooms; but many more are adapting them to different curricular contexts, taking their core principles to develop their own challenges, and in short, appropriating and remixing them for their own ends.

The challenges are designed to be modular -- to be able to fit into classroom and after school learning contexts or to be embraced by home schoolers and others for self learning. The challenges are designed to be flexible so they can be used in a range of disciplines with young people at different stages in development. Many of them are designed to have low-tech variants for those classrooms where there is no laptop per child since our emphasis is on the skills and mental models as much as on the tools and techniques of new media. I will be sharing more about the learning library in the weeks ahead and I am very much looking forward to hearing your reactions to this new center of media literarcy resources. So far, we've built more than 30 challenges and have produced almost a hundred videos which can serve the basis for future challenges. Check them out.

Below, I am sharing the beginning of an essay written about the library for Threshold magazine by Project NML's research director Erin Reilly. You may recall an interview with Reilly which I ran on this blog at the beginning of the process of developing the learning library. Check out the online edition of the special Threshold issue on Project New Media Literacies for other discussions of the challenges and opportunities for learning in a participatory culture.

What is Learning in a Participatory Culture?

by Erin Reilly

Educators are learning how to engage today's digital kids to share

and distribute knowledge within learning communities.

Today, we have endless possibilities for taking media into our own hands to connect with others in meaningful ways. We have new ways of working together to develop knowledge, and new ways to use media to shape how we present ourselves to others and learn from them. To connect and collaborate with each other to produce and circulate information in this new participatory culture, we have developed new tools such as game engines and new institutions such as YouTube and Facebook.

In the white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," the Project New Media Literacies (Project NML) team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology addressed the need to engage learners in today's participatory culture. Young people are actively creating and circulating media content within social networks that extend from their circle of friends to those in the virtual world community. However, the team believes that young people also must learn to reflect upon their new media creations in ways that encourage the important learning skills of teamwork, leadership, problem solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity.

Our education system also is in the midst of this paradigm shift, where new methods, environments, and assessment models need to be acquired to keep pace with our increasingly networked culture. As the conversation about the digital divide shifts from questions of technological access to ones concerning participation, educators must work to ensure that every young person has access to the tools, skills, and experiences needed to join in this new participatory culture. Educators also have a chance to give students the cultural competencies and social skills they need in their future roles as 21st-century citizens and workers.

Formal schools have been slow to react to the emergence of the participatory culture, however, due to an exaggerated interpretation of the perils of social media and to a lack of understanding of the promises and affordances of a networked society. In their stead, after-school programs and informal learning communities are stepping in with programs and activities that demonstrate the learning potentials of participatory culture accelerated through social media. To help educators and learners become more proficient in adapting to today's rich media landscape, the white paper identified 11 social skills that we all must acquire if we are to be active participants in our own life-long learning. And since then, Project NML has expanded the original list to also include the skill of visualization. These social skills and cultural competencies--the new media literacies--shift the focus of traditional literacy, for example, from individual expression to also encompass community involvement. The new media literacies then can be understood as offering ways of thinking (mindsets--for example, "collective intelligence") and ways of doing (skill sets--for example, "transmedia navigation") that recruit the traditional literacies of reading and writing into new kinds of literacy practices.

Learning in Zoey's Room

The Digital Youth Project, a grantee of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, recently completed a three-year study of the learning and innovation that accompany young people's everyday engagements with new media. The goal of the study was to understand the ways youth use new media, focusing on how they play, communicate, and create, and how these interactions affect their friendships as well as their aspirations, interests, and passions. In its final report, the project team, led by anthropologist Mimi Ito, explained that children use digital tools and broadband media to "hang out" with friends, "mess around" with programs, and "geek out" as they dig deeper into subjects they love, from rock stars to rocket science. Beyond what they are learning in school, they are connecting socially and are being influenced by each other's knowledge. These informal mentors have effectively taken their place among the many sources influencing children's processes of knowledg-building and identity-forming.

I began to understand this new way of learning in 2001 when I co-created an online community for middle school girls called Zoey's Room. Armed with the knowledge that 93 percent of tweens and teens are using the Internet and that girls are the power users of social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube, we launched Zoey's Room as an interactive technology club for girls in Maine. The project quickly expanded into a national mentoring community that creatively engages girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities through peer-to-peer learning and mentoring by female employees at companies such as National Semiconductor and Microsoft who volunteer their STEM expertise.

Today, Zoey's Room is a social network and blended learning environment in which teens learn STEM subjects via online interaction and through offline practical applications of science and math challenges in after-school programs run by organizations like the YWCA. The collaborative environment allows girls to feel safe to explore and tinker, fail and try again, and rely on a group of peers and mentors who will circulate STEM material, support their learning, and build ongoing relationships. Learning occurs as girls move between the online community and their extended community of peers and mentors, who validate the results of their experiments. In short, Zoey's Room allows young women to "geek out" on their love for girlhood and STEM projects.

Zoey's Room's blend of the social aspects with a positive learning environment has demonstrated that access to a participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum. In a sampling of 100 Zoey's Room members in 2007, 46 percent participated via an after-school club and 54 percent participated on their own at home--showing that school is just one of the nodes in these students' learning eco-system. When these 100 girls answered very specific science, technology, engineering, and math questions we put to them in the survey, the majority of girls got 12 out of 13 of the answers right--proving that they actually learned terms, concepts, and principles of certain STEM topics by doing the various activities in the program.

•••

Erin Reilly is a recognized expert in the design and development of educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications. As research director of MIT's Project New Media Literacies, Reilly helps conceptualize the vision of the program and develop a strategy for its implementation. Before joining MIT, Reilly co-created Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10- to 14-year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering, and math. In 2007, Reilly received a Cable's Leaders in Learning Award for her innovative approach to learning and was selected as one of the National School Boards Association's "20 to Watch" educators.

Tickets Now Available for Spring Julius Schwartz Lecture: J Michael Straczynski

Last year, I hosted the first in a series of lectures by key creative artists working in the fields of science fiction, comics, and popular culture, which was created to honor long-time DC comics editor Julius Schwartz. Last year's event with Neil Gaiman has been published as a DVD which you can purchase through New England Comics for ONLY $19.99. This year's speaker is another transmedia creator - J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski is best known for his role as the creator of the cult science fiction serial Babylon 5 and its various spin-off films and series. Straczynski wrote 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season. His television writing career spans from work on He-Man, She-Ra, and Real Ghostbusters through to The New Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote. He followed up Babylon 5 with another really solid science fiction series, Jeremiah. In more recent years, he's enjoyed success as a screenwriter, most recently writing the script for The Changling, Clint Eastwood's period drama, and as a comic book writer, who both works on established superhero franchises, such as Spider-Man, Supreme Powers, Fantastic Four, and Thor, and creates his own original series, such as Rising Stars, Midnight Nation, The Twelve, The Book of Lost Souls, and Dream Police. He was one of the first television producers to actively engage his fan community online and has consistently explored the interface between digital media and other storytelling platforms.

When: May 22nd, 7pm

Where: Building 10, Room 250, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The event is open to the public and all interested parties are welcomed to attend.

Seating is typically limited and all tickets are general admission, so it is advised that attendees arrive to the event early.

We are planning to have video screens erected onstage that will be showing the lecturers, and a sound system in place that will enable the lecture to be heard from the rear of the auditorium, so even attendees arriving close to the start of the lecture should be able to enjoy it.

Tickets went on sale on campus last friday and are now also available off-campus at Hub Comics in Somerville and Comicopia in Boston's Kenmore Square. Both dealers say they can handle orders from people not currently able to make it to their locations.

Tickets will also be sold on campus in Lobby 10 on Wednesday the 22nd from noon to

3pm.

If you live in or near Boston, come on down for what promises to be a great conversation.

History and Fan Studies: Barbara Ryan and Daniel Cavicchi (Part Two)

DC: We've really been focusing on method, here, haven't we? I wonder if we might turn a bit toward the subject of fan history and what we might say about its timeline and function in American culture, something that you raised at the beginning of this discussion. I'm obviously focusing on fandom around music and you are focusing on fandom around literature --are we talking about the same thing? I am most interested in whether the changing practices of and discourses around music audiences somehow correspond (in terms of chronology or sequence or content) with histories of audiencing other realms of culture: literature, theater sports, and film. What kind of "narrative arc" might you suggest for a history of fans in the U.S. and how do your letter-writers fit into that?

For me, the music loving points to the commodification of leisure in 19th century cities and people's attempts to figure out exactly how to consume musical experience and the powerful emotions such consumption sustained. One common move was to borrow practices and ideas from the "adjacent" cultural world of organized religion. Otherwise, there was an intense measurement of music's psychological effects and, socially, a vying for control over definitions of acceptable cultural participation. This origin history challenges the idea that music fandom appeared around the time of the phonograph and radio in the early 20th century (espoused by Fred & Judy Vermoral, for example) and were an outgrowth of diffuse and private consumption practices afforded by mass media. I can work this out in greater detail for you, of course, but it suggests, for me, new possibilities for understanding fandom as a wider cultural phenomenon.

BR: A study of one fan - interesting idea. It makes me think of Lynne Pearce's book on her most avid reading experiences; in it, she makes explicit comparison to her football fandom. It would be very worthwhile to head back a few more generations and see what historical sources could reveal about just one fan. This could reveal a lot about social permissions and pressures, as well as media new and newfangled at a given time.

It's in these areas I would probably expect to see correspondences between different sorts of fandoms, as broad forces of, say, enthusiasm, emerged and were "handled" in ways that might well fall into discernible patterns. We should talk more about this in 12 months or so!

Regarding mediation, I'm interested as a student of fan mail in how the U.S. post had developed in ways not seen in other countries, at that time. But I'm intrigued too by the possibility that the phonograph had impact on novel-reading insofar as it opened up new imaginative space relevant to the kind of reading that's so engrossing people speak of being "lost in a book." I'm thinking as well about media of the day such as magic-lantern shows, panoramas and tableaux vivants.

I have to add, though, that the issue of representation is really fraught in my project insofar as the focus of the debate around Ben-Hur, when it was new, was appropriate address of the Bible understood as God's perfect and sufficient Word. This specificity makes religion not an adjacent cultural world, for my fans and their detractors; instead, it's a huge and vital part of the Ben-Hur event. At the same time, this makes Ben-Hur a rich source of controversy about art understood as what an anti-Romantic called "spilt religion."

The issue, for those who haven't read Ben-Hur, is that the heftiest slice of its shock-value, back in the day, wasn't the chariot-race or the male-male love-turned-to-hate relationship implied by the Gore Vidal script for the Charlton Heston film. Rather it was that Jesus of Nazareth shows up as a character in a romance, that being the gaudiest and least esteemed of "serious" prose genres, at that time. This character only gets a few walk-ons. But some said he was the real hero of Ben-Hur because he's shown preaching, healing and finally being crucified, and those activities collude to save the titular hero from a bad end.

Who decides what sort of end is good or bad, what you want to say about Judah Ben-Hur's bloody revenge before he turns to Jesus's creed . . . struggles over these things are still ongoing. Summatively, fiction that can be misprised as a Bible supplement carries a heavy load.

How does this relate to your questions? The first point I'm making is that religious precepts, more than religious rhetoric or permissions, are right in there, integral to every judgment (and quip) about Ben-Hur. Does this make it tricky to work with fans' effusions? You bet. But it points up the merits of Colin Campbell's account of how Puritan fervor evolved over two centuries into self-congratulatory consumerism. That's not too far from commodifications of leisure. But with Campbell as a guide, I'd start my narrative arc at the Protestant push for universal vernacular literacy.

The second point I'm making is that in the Western world, at least, there's never been a piece of music that carried the cultural weight of the Bible. Lots of religious music, obviously, and some that's held sacred. But people who engage music can't hold up any one piece of music, or music in general, as the perfect and sufficient revealed music of God.

Here again, therefore, I would say we're working on different things, though now I believe the issue is different valences I'm too close to my research, and approach, to be sure how its valences might carry over, or be inherited from elsewhere. But talking to you has brought my attention more firmly to the music critic John Dwight as one of the first non-ministerial pundits, on the U.S. scene, to try to attain arts authority. I like this term better than "cultural authority" because it's more precise but also because when one works in the arts, or their histories, it can feel near-impossible to figure out what "culture" means, in a given sentence. Having mentioned Dwight, I'll add that Adam Max Tuchinsky's article on Transcendentalism made that group more coherent to me than they ever were before; his emphasis on jousting for power is relevant to the taste-shapers I study later in the 19th century and perhaps to your project, too.

Power-jousts structured my sense of my project, at the start. But a lot of that has given way to medial interests that foreground the citizen audience. This phrase really sings for me; it's got me gearing up to argue, for instance, that in a civic register, Ben-Hur has claims on the tag, Great American Novel. This idea circles me back, though, to wonder if Hermes is vaguely pluralist; for instance, with all she says about citizenship, she doesn't articulate a theory of the state. The reason I worry about vague pluralism is that that was the move of the critics who denied any political efficacy to their emphasis on good taste. These critics were later tagged "genteel." But that's only half the story because for scholars like Ian Hunter and Toby Miller, they were the "temperers" of the well-tempered self who structured citizenship via subjectivity.

Through, again, talking with you, I've been wondering if one of those critics' main initiatives was an aggregation of things that had been disparate under a new catch-word, fan. What was aggregated? Top of my head: avidities that went under names like bibliomania, dog (or horse) fancier, Bovarisme and quixotry, a person thought "mad" for certain sports or entertainments, fop and dandy, the wheeling craze, curio hunters, maybe even card sharks and bluestockings. These are, generally, labels that highlight engagement run amok. Not necessarily the same thing as aberrant audiencing, but intriguingly close, I'd say.

Not so incidentally, religious terms crop up in here so that along with gambling "hells" and speed "demons," we hear of autograph "fiends." I'm surmising that the reason the word fan was pasted onto all this ca. 1900 is that the genteel critics helped put a premium on the tempered citizen-subject as a subject for capitalist purposes of production, consumption and what Richard Ohmann calls the professional-managerial class. If so, that's additional reason to study quite critically what Fredric Jameson called "Reader's Digest culture" in terms of its capacity to aggregate groups big enough to raise the spectre of mobs, hordes and throngs.

The "tempering" project gets underway, as I see it, right after the Civil War, with help from people like John Dwight's one-time boss, George Ripley. Having said that, though, I revive my stand that media plays a role in fandoms, offering two reasons. First, books and newspapers had unmatched capacity to at least try to "mark" consumer/receiver positions as wholesome or wrongheaded, respectworthy or perilous. Second, efforts to mark in that way provided repeated stimuli as, of course, did reports of a concert or a race, a boxing match or a new book by a well-liked poet.

I think repeated stimulus is a central part of fandom, as I understand it. Stimulus can come from realms other than media if, say, a fan starts losing interest in her home-team until they hire a new forward and her enthusiasm revives. Media works quite hard, though, to stimulate new or ongoing interest, and so, I hold, to foster fandom. I don't want to bear down on this too hard because I can think of pre-media enthusiasms I'd be unwilling to characterize as fandoms: medieval bear-baiting, maybe.

The theoretical issue is whether fandom is possible in isolation: if it's a learned behavior or something intrinsically human. You see nudges in the second direction in some of the psychoanalytical analyses of fandom. By emphasizing media, I head away from them on the rule-of-thumb that many people don't become fans. I think this also helps me talk about how fandom is not the same as love, though they can share attributes. You've said you see less in media. But speaking of "marking," have you worked it back into your schema? Or maybe not; do tell; I need a rest!

DC: While we are both working on historical fandom, I think you are correct in saying that we do have different "valences," which I take to mean different clusters of cohering ideas. (I'm a little rusty in some of my critical theory terms and never really got a hold of this one!). You're circling a particular work, while I'm looking at the development of a behavior; you're interested in the dynamics of power and citizenship, while I'm more focused on the traces of specific individuals' experiential realities. [My generalizations may be off, here, I know--let me know!] At least in terms of fan history, however, I think you touch on a number of important overlapping areas of inquiry, even if we come at them in different ways. All have to do with the identifying some of the key forces involved in the emergence of "fandom" in the changing contexts of the American 19th century.

First, religion. I understand now how religion operates differently among the readership of Ben-Hur than with antebellum music lovers. While I've been thinking about religion as a separate but important source for discourse about music loving, your readers are wrestling directly with the religious implications of Ben-Hur. In talking to you, I have realized how much I have relied on my previous parsing of the religious and the non-religious among Springsteen fans in order to make sense of the world of antebellum music lovers, something that I need to seriously question. Overall, I think I still need to come to grips with the role of religion in everyday life in the 19th century, especially among the specific audience members I've been investigating.

I've done a lot of thinking and exploring of the ways in which the behaviors of Protestant church-going directly intersected and shaped people's concert-going, building on work like Jean Kilde's When Church Become Theater. But I've only begun to explore the relationship between the "self" and the development of capitalism through works like Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and R. Laurence Moore's Selling God. A recent book review essay in American Quarterly, by Paul Pfister, about several books on "emotional capitalism," was one of the most exciting things I've read in a long time, simply because it has pointed me in fruitful directions for making better sense of how selfhood, religion, music, and consumption formed a new ecology of musicking in the 1850s.

Second, "jousting for power" and the role of "taste-shapers." You have thought far more deeply about this than I have. I've only wrestled in a limited way with the classic accounts of "the sacralization of culture" in Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow and John Kasson's Rudeness and Civility. In this project, I've been sympathetic to some of the critiques of their histories, by scholars like Nancy Newman, who wrote in a Ph.D. dissertation that asserted that his timeline of class separation was accurate for theater but not music; or William Weber, who wrote in Music and the Middle Class that "histories of Victorian society have taken the moralists of the time a great deal too seriously, simply because they were so vocal and articulate;" or Ralph P. Locke, who questioned Levine's dismissive attitude toward figures like John S. Dwight and marginalization of the role of amateur women patrons.

A lot of the discussion of power-jousts around music audiences actually revolves around the issue of silence, which is most interesting (especially with regard to religion) and whose meanings, I think, are sometimes a bit over-simplified as refined/not refined. At any rate, while interpretations about the "disciplining of spectatorship" accurately outline a significant shift in the social discourse of music listening in the nineteenth century, I would argue that important experiential details are lost in characterizing the shift as primarily from social heterogeneity to homogeneity, or from active to passive appreciation. It's a delicate argument to make, but again, it's one that makes sense from my "experience-near" perspective.

The last force we are both exploring is "the media" and its role in fandom. I very much like your characterization of the "new imaginative space" created by the phonograph and other media. However, I am hesitant to move in the direction of technology-determining-behavior. I'm not sure why, and I'm hoping it's not just knee-jerk humanism. I have to admit that much of my work on fandom has worked against the notion of "media manipulation," which I've always seen as a bit too reductive, both on the positive side (opening up new ways of doing things) and the negative side (forcing people to act or think in prescribed ways). Jonathan Sterne wrote a marvelous book in 2003 called The Audible Past in which he explored the various ways in which shifts in ideology and behavior in the 19th century made the invention of the phonograph (and recording in general) possible in the first place.

You cite the ways in which books and newspapers marked audience positions as desirable or not desirable, which I think is true. But I think they were tools not necessarily sources. Likewise, I'm less inclined to see the media as a source for the repeated stimulation found in fandom and more as an enhancement, or fulfillment, of people's already existing need for repeated stimulation. I'm coming from a different body of evidence, of course: In some of the early diaries I've read (1840-1850), the writers, having just had an intense experience of music, yearn to repeat that one-time event to the extent that they re-create events in their own words so that they can re-live them and linger over them again and again through reading. That is a form of mediation, I suppose. But it happens before the impact of commercial, mass media in the music world.

This is not to dismiss the role of, say, newspapers: very quickly, by the 1860s, music magazines and newspapers start to cover concerts and profile "star" performers, and scrap-booking takes over. Commercial sheet music, too, which was initially linked to specific concert events and given out by performers to audiences as souvenirs, come to serve the desire for repetition. At any rate, while the media provided new, convenient opportunities for repetition, there are desires and needs at work that makes those opportunities possible in the first place. I'm not sure that downplaying the primacy of media necessarily makes fandom intrinsically human or a kind of psychological universal, however--it may be instead that fandom is a mode of engagement and understanding that develops in response to a host of equally-important social and ideological shifts in the "enlightened," capitalistic, modern world: growing markets, ideologies of consumption, urban anonymity and the rise of individualism, etc.

In the end, I wonder if part of the problem of trying to come up with a comparative history of fandom is that "fandom" may not be a coherent historical phenomenon. As you suggest, fandom may indeed emerge in the genteel aggregation of diverse avidities in the second-half of the 19th century. If so, the legitimacy of the study of "fandom" as a single phenomenon is something to think long and hard about. The upshot may be that a history of fandom may not be about identifying homologous practices of "audiencing" but rather about the social and political processes that constructed that homology. Perhaps, though, there is room for both lines of inquiry. I am interested less in ideological apparatuses and power-jousts than in what might be called a "phenomenology of avidity." I'm guessing you may have different interests. Yet, here we are, conversing!

.

BR: Yes, exactly: conversing is possible and, happily, it's proved most edifying to me. I hope anyone who reads through our back-and-forth has been edified, too. But at the very least, I've learned a lot from your input.

First and foremost, our converse has helped me sharpen my focus. Too, it's increased my sense of the analytical premises I've been relying on, and given me a sense of their research limits. Third, I'm persuaded that we're working in proximate but not overlapping areas that probably reflect training as much as interests, and of course tool-sets.

What you've just said, for instance, reveals to me certain "lit" antecedents that I want to both honor and struggle against. One of the ways I do that is, actually, to try to hear silences. But I think from what you've said that I will want to think again and more about media and mediation. I share your concern about techno-determinist pitfalls. That's kind of vexed, though, in terms of media's fully and necessarily human origins . . . about which I also need to think more. Which leaves me semi-certain that together we've sketched about 10 more years of work in which projects like ours will supply bricks and straw, from which others build narratives about the social and political processes embedded in homologies we've begun to uncover. Though maybe I should just speak for myself there!

On that note, I'm ready to head back to writing. It's been much fun, and very fruitful, conversing with you. Thanks for recommending several books I will now go read and for prodding me to take up positions on a few key gnarls. Would you like to sign us off with a final word?

DC: "Likewise" about sums it up for me, Barbara! It's been an immense pleasure learning about your research, thinking with you about our respective approaches, and, as you said, exploring our analytical premises.

I really enjoy dialogue like this. Study in the humanities too often emphasizes individual ownership of ideas ("What is the topic of your research?"), since that's really the only meaningful capital people have in hiring and promotion. You can see this emphasis clearly in the form of published writing that has the most weight and recognition for tenure committees: the single-authored essay or book.

I know we're not going to change the world, here, but I'm glad that we've had the opportunity to do something a little different. Wouldn't it be great if we could develop, more fully and meaningfully, new forms of dialogic narrative in academic research and writing? Perhaps the internet gives us a new tool for doing so. At any rate, I would like to thank Henry for generously providing a space for our conversation.

BR: Me, too: Henry, thank you so much.

Home-Made Hollywood: An Interview With Clive Young (Part One)

In the past few weeks, I've been struck again at the ways fandoms now often precede rather than follow the release of a major motion picture. (See my discussion in Convergence Culture of how a fan community grew up around Global Frequency -- a television pilot which never reached the air.) Fan filmmakers may immediately begin responding to, remixing, critiquing, and spoofing a film largely on the basis of its trailer. This is especially true when the film is based on a text which already has a cult following in another medium. Consider these two examples of fan films produced in reaction to Watchmen, which I ended up sharing with students in my Film Experience class this past week.

Or consider this example, produced in response to the trailer for J.J. Abrams's forthcoming Star Trek film which I ran across doing some spadework for a forthcoming talk looking at the evolution of Star Trek fan culture since the 1960s.

I devoted a chapter to Star Wars fan filmmakers in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. A while ago, I got contacted by Clive Young about doing an interview for a book he was doing on fan cinema. Late last year, his book, Home-Made Hollywood, appeared, offering a fascinating account which spans from a 1930s vintage amateur version of Our Gang through landmarks such as Hardware Wars and George Lucas in Love down to the present era when all kinds of fan films are surfacing on YouTube. The writing is lively; the storytelling engaging; and he's done spade work which, in some cases, urgently needed to be done if these chapters of the history of participatory culture were going to be preserved for future generations. As someone who has been researching fan culture off and on for more than twenty years, I learned something on almost every page. Young's blog continues to monitor new fan film productions as well as share other forgotten chapters of grassroots media making.

In the interview that follows, Young talks about the history of fan cinema, the politics of copyright regulation, and how fan film experiences shaped the development of a number of media industry professionals. Next time, he will dig deeper into the issue of why more fan parodies are made by men and how fan cinema relates to vidding, which he sees as a distinctive and separate tradition of fan media-making.

You begin the book with an acknowledgment of Hardware Wars, which you write "helped to inspire fans and non-pros to pick up a camera and pay tribute to their favorite movies." How significant do you think its influence was in terms of paving the way for contemporary fan cinema?

I think it's hard to overestimate the influence that Hardware Wars had in 1977, because it made a mark on so many different levels, introducing many of its impressionable, young Generation X viewers (the core Star Wars fanbase) to filmmaking, the possibility of exploring one's own creativity, and much like Mad Magazine a generation earlier, the concept of parody.

Key to its influence is the fact that it had widespread distribution. While to this day it is perceived as an underground phenomenon, Hardware Wars has been seen by millions of people in theaters, on home video, cable TV and through the internet, and is the highest-grossing short film of all-time.

Since the film was made by professionals for profit, it is not actually a fan film, but it is often mistaken for an amateur effort because it had a very homemade look by design. While that cheap aesthetic was a huge part of the flick's humor, in a time before "behind-the-scenes" DVD extras, it demystified filmmaking for its audience to some extent, because it focused on everyday objects, like a hubcap that was supposed to be the Death Star. These were things that anyone could find, and the filmmakers used them unapologetically, as if to say, 'Look, we all know this Imperial Destroyer is a steam iron--deal with it.'

By aggressively refusing to live up to Hollywood production values, Hardware Wars demonstrated that an amateur fan creator didn't need money to get an idea across, and that's a pretty subversive--and empowering--concept to imbue in a 10-year-old. That levels the playing field. The fact that the movie reveled in its low-tech juices was inspiring by example, giving amateurs permission to fail, because it illustrated that 'failure' on one level could be intriguing on another level.

In terms of parody, I think it was also rather instructive for its young audience, and I talk about that a bit in the book, because Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon was just getting started and there wasn't much in the way of a critical backlash to the original 1977 film--especially in the media aimed at young Generation X at the time. As a result, Hardware Wars' sly commentary on how the audience had swallowed George Lucas' creation whole was pretty radical. The short film's narrator mocks the stuff on-screen, but his lines poke at the fans, too: "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss three bucks goodbye! Get in line now!" That challenges--perhaps forces--the fan to step back and assess his/her place in the big picture surrounding Star Wars, and cast a more subjective eye towards the film, fandom, and the economic machinery around both.

With all that in mind, its influence can be seen today, as there are more fan films about Star Wars than any other franchise, most fan films tend to be comedies, and most amateur Star Wars send-ups take a few shots at Lucas and his business style, even if they're loving tributes. Additionally, one of the most popular forms of fan film is "the pseudo-trailer," which Hardware Wars also pioneered--even though it's a 12-minute film. When the fan film boom of the late Nineties came along, the number of fan productions that were parodies or pseudo-trailers (or both) was staggering. By that point, Generation X was in its 20s with some disposable income and that newfangled Internet on hand; the result was that Star Wars fan films were some of the first examples of viral videos.

As you note, amateurs have been making films for as long as there has been

cinema. So, what is different about our current moment of participatory

culture?

The basic staples of amateur film production--home movie cameras and enough pizza to get your friends to be in your flick--have been in plentiful supply since the 1950s; what's different these days is the availability of low-cost, widespread distribution in the form of the internet, public access cable, DVD-Rs and so forth. Clearly the main conduit is the web, and the advent of sites like YouTube is fostering a growing mainstream awareness of amateur visual media among people who otherwise would never have been exposed to such material. Similar growth is occurring in other forms of participatory culture.

As more people discover amateur media, it's fair to expect that increasing numbers of people will at least dabble in expressing themselves through amateur-level creativity, regardless of whether it's written, aural or visual. Whether the resulting projects are any good is largely besides the point; the end result is that by aping professional productions, "regular" people become more media literate with a deeper understanding (perhaps not consciously but it's still there) of how and why certain forms work.

This in turn raises the bar for professional creators, because even if they deliberately aim for the lowest common denominator in their work, even that audience's level of sophistication will rise over time. This is not a bad thing.

You document, for example, an amateur film based on Our Gang which got some visibility in the 1920s. What does this story tell us about the potentials and

limits of amateur film production in the early history of Hollywood?

Amateur film production back then was largely a hobby of the rich, because cameras were rare and prohibitively expensive. Seeing one "in the wild" was unusual, so the anonymous creators of Anderson 'Our Gang,' the Our Gang film, were likely itinerant filmmakers working for the newsreel companies, who saw a financial opportunity to con a small town into believing they were making a real Our Gang flick. Home movie cameras didn't start making inroads into average households until the 1930s, and whatever momentum they gained was stopped cold by the outbreak of World War II. As a result, home movies didn't truly take root until the 1950s as suburban America settled in.

While the Our Gang film doesn't offer much information on the limits of amateur film production at the time, it's a great example of why fan films are valuable for film and cultural studies.

When we watch the official Our Gang movies--or James Bond, Star Trek or any long-running franchise--we see them through the eyes of people living in 2009. Our modern-day values and beliefs color how we experience and perceive those films, When you see a period fan film though, you're not simply watching a story; you're also getting insight into how people experienced the official movies back then.

For instance, when we think of the official Our Gang movies, it's typically, "Oh, cute kids getting into mischief," but Anderson 'Our Gang,' made in the deep South in 1926, was actually extremely racist and demonstrative against the disabled as well. The ways the filmmakers try to imitate the series reveals how they perceived the original and illustrates what aspects resonated with them, for better or worse.

There has been a certain degree of media attention of late on the death of

Forrest K. Ackerman. What role did he play in helping to support the production

of amateur horror films?

The 1950s and 60s saw the development of "Monster Kid" culture--a male, pre-teen slice of the population that was enamored with the movie monsters of the 1930 and 40s, due to the films regularly playing on afternoon and weekend TV. Ackerman, a life-long sci-fi and horror movie buff, edited a popular magazine for those kids at the time, called Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Many of his young readers were interested in making their own homemade monster fan films (although the genre didn't have the "fan film" appellation at the time), but information on special effects, makeup and so forth was hard to come by back then. Ackerman, however, wrote extensively in his magazine how readers could create their own explosions, models, masks and makeup effects. Additionally, if readers wrote in about their productions, he often ran photos and blurbs about them, providing a national platform of recognition for young filmmakers whose sphere of influence pretty much ended at their bedroom door. Some of the professional filmmakers today who credit Ackerman and his magazine as an important influence include Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, John Landis and Dennis Murren, among many others.

You identify a range of significant public figures, such as Hugh Hefner, who produced amateur fan films in their youth. How important were such activities in shaping their later development as media makers?

While making fan films is not strictly a youthful hobby, it's true that many of its participants try it out at a young age, often while they're at the 'gee, what do I want to do with my life?' stage. While all of them want to make their movies, I suspect that the underlying drive--especially at that time in life--stems from something deeper: A need to be heard.

Some discover that filmmaking is the perfect form for their vein of self-expression and they continue to pursue it--case in point? Eli Roth, the writer/director behind the Hostel "torture porn" movies that were box-office hits a few years ago. He started out filming homemade remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pieces in his basement as a teenager, and clearly the experience must have resonated with him.

Hugh Hefner, too, made a horror film in his basement at age 16--a Frankenstein/vampire amalgam called Return From The Dead. While filmmaking struck a chord with him--years later, he became an executive producer of various films in the 1970s--I suspect he found that films weren't the right vehicle for communicating his ideas, and thus he went on to try his hand at other forms before founding Playboy 11 years later.

In both cases, however, amateur film production once again provides an opportunity to expand one's understanding of how media fits together; concepts of structural flow, editing, timing and so forth learned in a creative medium like film are often transferable to other media, such as writing or music.

Clive Young is an author/lecturer covering the crossroads between high tech and popular culture. He is the author of the first book about fan films, Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera (Continuum, 2008). He is also senior editor for Pro Sound News and has written for MTV, VH1.com, American Songwriter and numerous other outlets; additionally, he is the author of Crank It Up, an exploration into the world of rock concert roadies. Young has lectured extensively on film and music at many universities, libraries and conventions, and lives in New York with his wife and daughter. Visit his website,

www.cliveyoung.com, and his daily fan film blog, www.fancinematoday.com

Locating Fair Use in the Space Between Fandom and the Art World (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you the story of Stacia Yeapanis, an artist whose videos deploy appropriated footage from television programs. She recently received a cease and desist notice when she posted her works on YouTube. More and more of us are receiving such notices for content which we might have believed fell under fair use. Such notices have a "chilling effect" on this emerging platform for participatory culture. Trying to understand these issues more fully I contacted some friends who are doing cutting edge work around fair use and user-generated content. Each of them shares their reactions to Stacia's story below.

Peter Jaszi:

Let me start by saying that I think that Ms. Yeapanis' fanvid "We Have a Right to Be Angry" has a lot going for it where copyright fair use is concerned. It creates "new meaning by juxtaposition," to borrow language from our "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use on Online Video" (p,9). And it also can be understood as "commenting on ... copyrighted material (p.5). The hardest aspect to defend would be the use of "Invincible" in its entirety, but even there the argument is pretty strong: the clips illustrate the song in ways that "help us to hear in a new way." And, in any event, the take-down notice to Youtube came from Fox, not Sony (or Pat Benatar).

But, that, of course, isn't the end of story. Ms. Yeapanis is right that were she to formally request a put-back, Fox might begin a lawsuit against her -- if it actually were inclined to press its claim. That's because Section 512(g) of the Copyright Act says that if a suit hasn't been filed within 10 business days of the so-called "counter notice," YouTube can put the video back up without losing its qualified immunity from liability for infringement.

Would Fox choose this course of action? It's hard to know, but there's reason to think that if she (and YouTube) were to stand up, Fox might sit down. Large, well-counseled copyright owners generally don't pursue claims that they might lose -- especially when the loss might be a adverse legal precedent. on an issue as volatile as fair use. And the law isn't as far behind the practice of remix culture as the post suggests. Jeff Koons may have lost his case back in 1990-91, but in 2006 he won a big fair use victory in the Second Circuit Court of appeals, in Blanch v. Koons. The case involved use of a cropped advertising photo in a collage, and the court decided that the case turned on whether the artist "had a genuine creative rationale for borrowing Blanch's image, rather than merely using it merely 'to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working something fresh up.'" In other words, they decided it was a "transformative" use.

Legal developments notwithstanding, we all can sympathize with Ms. Yeapanis' concern about the potential expense and incidental stress of becoming a fair use "test case" -- in the (perhaps unlikely) event that it ever came to that. Of course, were YouTube to restore the vid, and were Fox actually to sue, she'd still have the (admittedly somewhat humiliating) option of cooperating in yet another take-down to settle the matter. But, perhaps, in the meantime, she'd have been able to find a lawyer to take her case pro bono. There already are resources out there: the Fair Use Project at Stanford, volunteer lawyers for the arts organizations in many cities, EFF's lawyer referral service, a network of law school-based IP clinics around the country, and more. But if we take fair use seriously -- and we should -- we need to find more and better ways to support the risk-takers among us!

Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law at American University. He was co-editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (1994). Through the Center for Social Media, he has been helping to develop "best practices for fair use" for documentary filmmakers, DIY video producers, and media literacy educators.

Rebecca Tushnet:

I think the artist does a great job of articulating the issues and the connections between the art world and nontraditional communities making their own art, which also has a context that can take outsiders a while to grasp. One of the challenges we face is persuading intermediaries like YouTube to stand up for fair use more aggressively. The really interesting thing to me about this round of takedowns is that they often stem from automated searches by YT itself, not copyright owner complaints. YT is adopting screening technology to show its good faith in combating copyright infringement, but automated systems inherently risk catching what EFF calls fair use "dolphins" among the infringing "tuna." And because these aren't copyright-owner-initiated, the part of the DMCA that allows videomakers to file a counternotification and get the videos put back doesn't apply; YT has the discretion to simply say, we disagree with your fair use claim and we're keeping the video off.

The big lesson, I think, is this: Fair use is no longer predominantly a conversation with courts and occasional legislators. It is instead part of the structure of the internet; it has to be part of private institutions' design as well as formal law, or the formal law will become irrelevant.

Rebecca Tushnet is a law professor at Georgetown who specializes in intellectual property and a member of the board of the Organization for Transformative Works.

Kevin Driscoll:

When YouTube Product Manager David King announced the beta release of "content identification" tools on the Google blog in 2007, he reminded readers that submitting copyright infringement claims would remain as easy as "the click of a mouse." In the intervening year, the contributions of thousands upon thousands of users have been disabled on behalf of just a few industry stakeholders. When it comes to the application of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a process that impacts citizens' ability to own and author their media environment, how easy is too easy?

Fanvidders were among the first communities to respond to YouTube's commitment to go "above and beyond" its legal obligations to copyright claimants. Faced with videos silenced and disabled for their transformative use of popular music, vidders like zcatz recorded glum farewell notes for their subscribers and set sail for friendlier sites like imeem and Vimeo.

Numerous other creative communities relying on YouTube's video sharing service have faced a similar decision: should they weather the uncertainty of life at YouTube or retreat to a niche service in the hope that there is security in (relative) obscurity.

Pauliewanna demonstrating "Limelight" by Rush

Unlike the vidders, the Living Room Rock Gods (LRRG) have stuck with YouTube and channeled their frustration into the loose-knit resistance movement Tribute is not Theft. LRRG members like Pauliewanna recorded impassioned video blogs addressing the recording artists they idolize. They stress the role of learning and respect for intellectual property that pervades their community, confounding the stereotype of anti-copyright radicals flaunting the law.

Paulie, the drummer featured above speaks directly to Rush's Neil Peart,

"We're just trying to do what we love. [To] listen to your music, play it, share it with others, show them how it's done, see how they do it, compare notes. [...] Our primary reason is to share with other drummers. We just want you [...] to know that this is happening."

The Rock Gods' experience reveals an imbalance in YouTube's community support. While a handful of major stakeholders are provided special tools to automate identification and facilitate the pursuit of copyright infringement claims, the remaining majority of YouTube users are left confused and frustrated.

Kutiman - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords

The diversity of material presented by YouTube's users presents a thrilling challenge to conventional understandings of ownership, authorship, and originality. Unfortunately, YouTube's existing architecture leaves little room for human intellect to confront and interrogate these delicious details. When I filed a counter-claim for one of my own disabled videos, I learned that YouTube no longer evaluates the accuracy of copyright claims made by its Content ID system:

[S]ince the identification of the claimed content was automated, we are unable to accept your counter-notification at this time.

In other words, YouTube's current policy denies my opportunity to file a counter-claim (as described in S.512(g)(3) of the DMCA) and privileges the judgement of software over that of a human observer.

YouTube is wise to be proactive in defense of copyright. Antagonizing extent media industries does little to resolve persistent tensions in digital culture. But if its effort to please the handful of major stakeholders fails to consider the fair use rights of informal media practitioners, YouTube will sacrifice the vibrant creative communities that made it worth visiting in the first place.

Kevin Driscoll is a masters student in the Comparative Media Studies Program working on a thesis dealing with hip hop culture, technology, and pedagogy. Kevin is a frequent collaborator with internet-based artist Claire Chanel and a hip-hop dj responsible for Gold Chain and Todo Mundo events.

Mapping Maps

This weekend, Project New Media Literacies will host an event which brings together educators and new media specialists to brainstorm about ways we can integrate new media technologies -- especially Google Earth, Google Maps, mobile phones and handhelds -- and new media literacies into the teaching of maps and cultural geography. As we get ready for this "ideation" workshop, I thought it was a good time to share an essay written last year by Colleen Kaman, one of the CMS graduate students, on the role which maps play in shaping her intellectual development. Kaman is now writing a thesis about new media and the human rights struggle in China. She is a researcher at the Center for Future Civic Media, where she is helping to draft a white paper outlining what we mean by "civic media" and where she blogs for the Center's website. Maps and National Geographic: of Stories Untold

by Colleen Kaman

One of my earliest memories of the world was the globe that my father brought home. It was almost certainly something he had come to own in exchange for dental work because he often accepted payment this way. I was six or seven and found it magnificent. It stood on a smooth wooden base, tall enough so that I could peer at eye-level while studying the shapes and colors and lines, trying to imagine what might exist in the faraway dots. I remember spinning the orb, glimpsing the spot my dad and I had marked to locate our hometown near Lake Michigan from the blur of countries and oceans. I loved to trace my finger along the horizontal Mercator lines and imagined that they were paths from here to there, wherever that might be. The blank spots on the map, bounded by the intersections between latitude and longitude but otherwise vacant of any suggestion of what might exist there, worried me a bit. I figured the lines might be a kind of rail that I might slip along, allowing me to circumnavigate the world without sliding off into the unknown. Those blank spaces were also a constant source of fascination - and the conflicting desire to understand what I was looking at and to be surprised by it.

Sometimes I spun the globe as hard as I could, waiting in anticipation for the foreign-sounding place my pointed finger would land when it finally came to a stop. I would find places with names like Helsinki, Zinder, Christchurch, or Tashkent. I studied the names, but the words meant very little since I hadn't even seen a picture of these places. So instead I would imagine what I might find there. Part of the excitement of looking at a map was staring for hours at the continents while letting my mind wander. After all the very nature of exploration was "an assertive action in the face of uncertain assumptions, often involving false starts, missteps, and surprises"(Turchi, p12). Perhaps it was this desire to explore that lead me to increasingly wonder what happened in all that empty space on the map? What stories weren't revealed?

By the time the globe disappeared from our house, almost certainly the victim of my mother 's harsh discouragement of my father's tendency to barter by eventually banning many of the items that arrived this way, I had discovered National Geographic magazines. They were the perfect combination of detachable foldout maps between the glossy images and fabulous stories of faraway people and places sparked my imagination. My parents enjoyed sharing visions of the future (for example, assuming we survived a Soviet attack, we might one day get all of our food in pill form) rather than tell stories about the family's history. Maybe this is why I became obsessed with finding places where history existed in the present. I found it in the pages of National Geographic. I thrilled at the images and texts about women in brightly colored dresses, men riding elephants down the streets of Bangkok, young boys racing water buffalo, and a tiger amid lush foliage, and a gaucho riding along the pampas of Argentina was like peering into a jumble of a world rich in narratives and histories. I saw the maps as the common language that we all spoke; it would take a few years and another experience for me to realize that maps could mean different things to different people.

I remember watching the 1984 Olympic games held in Sarajevo, at that time part of Yugoslavia, on television. I was eleven years old. I loved the gymnastics and skating the best but would watch all the events I could when I got home from school. I cheered for the U.S. athletes, especially against the Soviet or German teams. Still, I found the footage of this Socialist country enticing, and resolved that this would be the first foreign nation I would visit when I could. I took great pleasure in finding the places on the map where the Olympic athletes lived. I could better imagine their stories once I'd rooted national identity to place (Malkki, 1992) and touched the name of an athlete's hometown on the map with my fingers, seen how the words might nestle within the topography, see how far it was from the sea and from other borders. Sometimes a country stood on its own, geometric and stoutly sure of itself the way the state of Nebraska or Kansas looked. But usually they leaned or draped across one another in some fashion. In either case, the global map reflected a world of absolutes. There were no vague spaces or what Trinh Minh Ha has called 'bleeding boundaries' but rather as nations fixed in space and on a map "as a discrete spatial partitioning of territory ... in the fashion of the multicolored school atlas"(Malkki, 1992).

But increasingly, these borders seemed arbitrary. As I watched the East and West German athletes compete, I considered how the straightest, firmest lines of the national borders never seemed to hold the way the crooked lines of the rivers and arched topographies of mountain ranges did. I had seen old maps of the Roman, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires as well as depictions of the borders during the Second World War. I knew from school that the USSR had swallowed up numerous countries, including my father's ancestral home of Lithuania. I tried to imagine its faint outline on maps at the time and hoped for freedom for them. I'd been taught in school that the thick borderlines on the global map would tend to change only in favor of creating modern, post-ethnic democracies around the world. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution that same year only confirmed this worldview. What I never considered was that the clear lines of nationhood might fracture in other places, and the future might hold the dissolution of nation-states.

When I heard about the intense ethnic rivalries between numerous groups, including Bosnian Serbs and Croats Yugoslavia in late 1980s, I studied the world map in search of any fault lines that might explain how the country that had been a symbol of the late-twentieth century's hard fought willingness to overcome the ethnic divisions that had wrought such destruction during the first and second World Wars. I knew that in the past and as a place called the Balkans it had been prone to terrible ethnic divides, but on my map the nation called 'Yugoslavia' looked hale and whole. By 1989, National Geographic magazine published a map, the first that I remember seeing, that suggested the depth of the ethnic problems . This map's multiple colors clearly illustrates what Edward Tufte has called the "struggle between (the) maintenance of context and enforcement of comparison"(76). It represents the numerous fractures between different ethnic groups while continuing to imagine Yugoslav 'nationhood', this time in the lack of continuity within the national boundaries. Identity is still territorialized, now seen in terms of various colors (to label as well as for aesthetic reasons)(Tufte, 81) but now also as a cultural construct (although apparently one that doesn't extend beyond the borders). Malkki, quoting Akhil Gupta (1988), offers insight into this conceptualization of people and space in general as 'images of break, rupture, and disjunction. The recognition of cultures, societies, nations, all in the plural, is unproblematic exactly because there appears an unquestionable division, an intrinsic discontinuity, between cultures, between societies, etc.' At the risk of sounding callous or naive, one of the most personally heartbreaking moments of the war for me occurred with the destruction of the famed Mostar bridge (built1566) in 1993. It was the first time I really grasped that that the world was far more complex than the one I saw on my map - that it might look different to somebody else, or that the geo-political nature of a map might obscure culture, identity, and ideology.

I had a boyfriend in college who covered his room with photos from National Geographic magazine. For the most part, he used images of remote places around the world that had been pulled from issues dating from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, peppered with the occasional image from the beginning of the century. There was a certain romance to what he had created, to look at many images and places morphed into one 'world,' It also distilled National Geographic's parallel history with the field of Anthropology, the study that came of age in the Victorian Era of collecting curiosities and that famed anthropologist Clifford Geertz described as a "science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages."

In the end, I refused to sleep in the room more than one night because I found the whole experience too creepy. As much as I liked many of the individual images, I also found the assemblage of photos effectively divorced the images from any sense of place or 'authentic' experience and cultural ties in favor of consumer-oriented tourist's gaze of what Arjun Appadurai (1988) calls 'natives' who 'are not only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places, but they are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined, in those places.' Moreover, I now believe that these lines of nationhood were largely the imaginations of mid-twentieth-century geo-political elites and that they tend to fail in part because notions of nationhood and 'nativeness' rarely express themselves along lines as clear and as smooth as those found on a map of this sort. Such maps assume a national unity and 'rootedness' within the straight thick borders that flatten cultural, ethnic, territorial differences (Malkki, 1992) and construct space and place in a manner that reveal a Western expectation that "we live in singular cultural worlds (i.e. imagined communities)" - and that a choice has been made between one world and another (Robins, 2008). Despite this problematic aspect of National Geographic's magazine, the images and maps they contain embody but one type of meaningful visualization of the geography of knowledge in the world.

My definition of a map has once again broadened significantly in recent years. The geo-political variety no longer seems quite as interesting as it once it, but still I find the concept of 'mapping' intriguing and deeply meaningful. Recently, I was staying in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at an apartment that was about two blocks from the site of a bombing of a school that killed several children. It was a pretty street in a 'good' part of town and had every sign of being a safe place. A guard directed traffic. The air was fragrant with the smell of jasmine. Parents walked children dressed in crisp white uniforms home from school. Nothing about the place suggested violence. I looked at the location on a (local) map and still found no sign that this might have happened. I find myself thinking once again about narrative and about the multiplicity of attachments and meaning that people around the world form to places through living in, remembering, and imagining them. How might the resident of Colombo map this experience into all of the other meanings of place and identity? A map might not hold all of the answers but it remains a powerful tool to remember stories that might otherwise be forgotten.

Bibliography:

Cosgrove, Denis E. and Veronica della Dora (2005) "Mapping Global War: Los Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens's Pictorial Cartography." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (2).

Malkki, Liisa. (1992) "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees." Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1, [Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference] (Feb.), pp. 24-44.

Parameswaran, Radhika. (2002) "Local Culture in Global Media: Excavating Colonial and Material Discourses in National Geographic." Communication Theory 12 (3), 287-315.

Robins, Kevin. (2008) "Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe." (unpublished manuscript).

Tufte, Edward. (1990) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press LLC, Cheshire, CT.

Turchi, Peter. (2004). Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Trinity University Press. San Antonio, Texas.

Turkle, Sherri. (ed) (2007) Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

A Media Literacy Exemption on the DMCA?: An Interview with Renee Hobbs

Today's blog post is a call to action. Renee Hobbs, a leading Media Literacy educator, has requested our help in changing the copy protection provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in a way that will further the goals of American media education. As Hobbs notes in the following interview, teachers often cite uncertainties about copyright and fair use as having a "chilling effect" on their efforts to bring media literacy skills into the classroom, even as there has been a growing public recognition that these 21st century competencies are vital in preparing young people for the new media landscape. One of the key areas for concern has to do with the legality of breaking copy protection codes on DVDs in order to insure greater access to clips for instructional use or for deployment in student projects.

Legal scholars have long noted that commercial producers are deploying copyright protection in ways which make it impossible for anyone to exercise their "fair use" rights over the materials and thus the code, to use Lawrence Lessig's famous distinction, restrict things which might well be protected under the current law.

But there are mechanisms for insuring exemptions from the DMCA provisions and Renee Hobbs has petitioned for an exception which would protect the rights of teachers to deploy copyrighted materials for teaching media literacy education, similar to the protections which already exist for me, as a Film Studies Professor, to break the code in order to make materials accessible to my students at the university level.

She's asking others who share her concern about these issues to send along supporting letters, which need to be received by February 2 2009 -- that is, the end of this month. (See details at the end of this post.)

The following interview with Hobbs outlines the argument and the process by which you can contribute your support. I'm drafting a letter of support myself and hope other readers of this blog will both write letters and help us spread the word about this worthy effort.

You recently completed a report for the MacArthur Foundation about the impact of copyright confusion on the field of media literacy education. How did you get involved?

I began teaching teachers about media literacy back in the 1980s, when VHS tapes were the latest technology--it was the age of dinosaurs, it now seems. I would bring in a handful of tapes which I had cued up, including excerpts from TV news, advertising, movies and popular television programming. I demonstrated a variety of instructional techniques that K-12 teachers could use to integrate critical analysis of mass media and popular culture into classes in English language arts, social studies, and health education. Today, because media literacy is mandated in nearly all state curriculum frameworks, often as part of 21st century skills education, I cross the country offering teacher workshops in states from Oregon to North Carolina. I now use my digital video recorder to record television programs and store clips on my computer's laptop.

But with every group of teachers I work with, there's a question that always comes up with an increasing spirit of trepidation: "Is it legal to use copyrighted material like this?"

"Of course," I say. Like many media literacy educators, I use copyrighted materials under the doctrine of fair use (Section 107 of the Copyright Law of 1976). Users have the right to use copyrighted materials without payment or permission, depending on the specific context and situation of the use.

It is ironic that, at a time when online digital technologies are enabling educators to create and share an ever-widening array of texts, sounds, still and moving images, music and graphic art, we are seeing a dramatic increase in the climate of fear among educators concerning the use of these resources for teaching and learning. And since fear reduces innovation, those of us who promote the use of digital media as tools for teaching and learning need to sit up and take notice.

In our 2007 report, The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy, we found that media literacy educators share certain values about the use of copyrighted material, including news, advertising, movies, music, videogames, and other aspects of mass media, digital media and popular culture. While they respect the rights of owners of intellectual property, they also believe that it is necessary to use copyrighted works freely for the purpose of strengthening students' critical thinking and communication skills.

However, some educators attempt studied ignorance, believing that increased knowledge about copyright would impede their work. Still others close the doors of the classroom and keep quiet about the use of copyrighted materials in order to avoid potential conflict. The most troubling thing we found was that teachers' lack of knowledge about copyright and fair use affects the quality of teaching and learning. It limits the distribution of curriculum materials and resources, thus affecting students' overall media literacy learning. Plus, most teachers we interviewed do not teach about the law of copyright and fair use because they themselves do not understand it. As a result, students do not learn that copyright is designed to protect both the rights of owners and users in order to promote creativity and innovation.

What factors have led to the confusion?

Many teachers receive misinformation informally from colleagues and supervisors. At some educational institutions, school policies are far more restrictive than the law mandates. Some teachers have tried to distribute their curriculum materials, but found publishers unreceptive due to copyright concerns because media literacy lessons inevitably quote from films, TV shows, advertising, popular culture, and online media.

One big problem is the widespread misunderstanding of the so-called "educational use guidelines," those negotiated agreements between media companies and some educational groups which present a list of hard-and-fast rules defining fair use. These guidelines are not the law. They do not define either the "safe harbors" or the "outer limits" of fair use. Relying on these guidelines actually hurts educators. Some legal scholars fear that if the educational community accepts these "educational use guidelines" in policy statements or in settling litigation, the concept of fair use will be weakened and narrowed, not strengthened. Columbia University legal scholar Kenneth Crews points out, "When the community actually use the guidelines and adhere to them, they are reshaping the normative understanding of the law," sacrificing the flexible nature of the doctrine of fair use.

What have you done to help educators better understand copyright and fair use?

With my colleagues Peter Jaszi of Washington College of Law at American University and Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University, we worked with media literacy educators following the "best practices" model developed at American University in groundbreaking work with documentary filmmakers, who also depend on the doctrine of fair use. With support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, we brought together groups of educators (from higher education, K-12 settings and youth media organizations) in ten cities across the United States, including Chicago, Austin, Texas, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. After introducing educators to basic concepts in copyright law, we offered them various hypothetical scenarios for discussion, inviting them to reason through the process of determining when educators' or students' use of copyrighted materials was "fair" and "unfair" according to the doctrine of fair use.

The consensus principles that emerged from these discussions is reflected in the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which was adopted by several national membership organizations, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) adopted the Code as an official policy in November, 2008. The Code identifies five principles, each with limitations, representing the community's own current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials. As stated in the Code, educators can, under some circumstances:

• Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use.
• Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.
• Share, sell, and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.

Learners can, under some circumstances:

• Use copyrighted works in creating new material.
• Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

To help students learn, understand, and apply their legal rights under the doctrine of fair use, we created lesson plans for educators and learners as well as videos and two "Schoolhouse Rock" style music videos to illustrate key concepts in copyright law.

When students use reasoning and concepts like purpose, audience and point of view to determine if their use of copyrighted material is a fair use, they develop critical thinking skills and apply an understanding of copyright law, learning to respect the rights of both authors and users.

What is the DMCA and in what ways does it constrain classroom practices?

It is the acronym of the 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law makes it illegal to use software to "rip" or circumvent the encryption codes on commercially-produced DVDs. Because media literacy teachers and learners depend on film DVDs as a source of relevant quotations for use in both in classrooms and for student media production assignments, this law has an extremely negative impact on our work.

Although some teachers use multiple DVDs when showing clips in class, it's really inefficient and ineffective--it wastes valuable classroom time. DVD players are slow to load. Some DVDs automatically play trailers for other movies every time you play them. Some DVDs don't let you cue up which means you have to go through all the chapters to find the scene you want to use. For all these reasons, teachers want to be able to make a copy of the scenes they want to use so they can use them more effectively.

For example, teachers who want to sharpen comparison-contrast skills may want to analyze two different film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. To conduct a historical analysis of media professionalism, they may want to show and discuss a series of clips focused on the representation of newspaper editors using excerpts from All the President's Men, Absence of Malice and The Paper. They may want to show film clips in an academic conference presentation to illustrate certain nuances of pedagogy and instruction concerning the use of film in education.

However, the DVD encryption code effectively prevents media literacy teachers and learners from gaining access to media clips for various educational purposes. Under the current law, all these examples of "ripping" DVDs are illegal.

What steps are you taking to overturn those restrictions?

Every three years, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress considers exemptions to the law for groups or individuals who can prove that the law substantially and adversely affects their ability to make lawful, non-infringing uses of copyrighted works. These exemptions last for three years. In 2006, Peter DeCherney, a professor of film at the University of Pennsylvania, got an exemption on behalf of film professors nationwide, enabling them to rip audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom. Sadly, this exemption does not apply to media literacy educators, who may be teaching in college English, history or fine arts classrooms, or in schools of education, or in K-12 settings, or in youth media or other non-profit organizations. It does not apply to students who may want to use film excerpts for class assignments.

How broadly or narrowly do you seek to define an exemption?

With the help of student attorneys at American University Washington College of Law, I have submitted a petition to the Library of Congress Copyright Office requesting an exemption for teachers to circumvent the technological protection measures of DVDs that illustrate and/or relate to contemporary social issues, when used for the purpose of teaching the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and communicating messages in different forms of media. This petition also requests an exemption for students to use DVD clips for specific educational assignments, including student media productions. Student media production is an essential component of media literacy education.

Does current copy protection technology restrict practices that are reasonably construed as falling under the doctrine of fair use?

Yes--that's the primary criticism of the DMCA, and it's why the Library of Congress Copyright Office grants exemptions. The creation of compilations for educational use is legal under the doctrine of fair use. Whether a teacher is creating a compilation or a student is producing a video class assignment, the intended use is for "criticism" and "comment," two uses singled out for protection under the law.

Right now, DRM restrictions make it impossible for educators to make a "transformative" use of copyrighted material. Transformative work uses copyrighted materials, but adds something new, with a further purpose, or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message. Transformative uses are considered to be legal under the doctrine of fair use.

Media literacy educators' use of copyrighted materials is inherently transformative, because our uses of copyrighted content are not for the same intrinsic purpose as the one the copyright owner intended. For example, think back to that professor who uses a series of clips focused on the representation of newspaper editors using excerpts from All the President's Men, Absence of Malice and The Paper. The original purpose of these films was for commercial entertainment. The professor's purpose is educational, as the clips are used to heighten student awareness of how media representations of the newspaper industry have changed over time.

In general, media literacy educators use copyrighted content to (1) illustrate key concepts of media literacy, (2) to deconstruct and critically analyze media messages, (3) to recognize and examine specific production techniques employed in moving image media, (4) to explore economic, political, or social issues or the cultural values depicted in the representation, or (5) as part of the process of building skills and knowledge through the creation of student-produced works to demonstrate those ideas and techniques.

Why couldn't classroom teachers use older media, such as VHS, which are more open to manipulation?

The video home cassette (VHS) format is becoming less and less effective for 21st century students. Have you ever tried to make a compilation tape with VHS? It's clumsy and complicated--and the quality of the image is substantially degraded. Plus, it's no longer possible to find contemporary film works in VHS format, since it has been obsolete since 2006. Many teachers and students do not even have a VHS player/recorder in their homes. Since media literacy educators depend on making rich connections between the classroom and the culture, contemporary content is important in our work.

Why can't they use materials which are under Creative Commons license?

Teachers and learners can and do use materials which are available under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. But CC licenses do not substitute for or replace the need for the doctrine of fair use. Fair use explicitly protects users. It gives users the ability to use excerpts from any copyrighted work under some conditions. Fair use enables us to use excerpts even from dominant cultural texts in our culture, the ones which are massively popular and produced by huge media companies like Disney, Viacom and Time Warner.

In fact, fair use is the safety valve that prevents copyright law from being a form of private censorship. Without fair use, copyright law itself would probably be unconstitutional. The doctrine of fair use enables people to use all types of copyrighted materials without payment or permission when the private cost to the copyright holder is outweighed by the public benefit of the use.

How do educators claim fair use? You simply use copyrighted works after making an assessment of the particular context and situation of the specific use of the work. There's nothing formal or official to "do" to claim fair use. You do not have to ask permission or alert the copyright holder when considering the use of materials that are protected by fair use. But, if you choose, you may inquire about permissions and still claim fair use if your request is refused or ignored. In some cases, courts have found that asking permission and then being rejected has actually enhanced fair use claims.

What can readers do if they want to lend their support to your efforts?

Act soon. For a 30-day period, the Library of Congress Copyright Office invites comment on the petitions received regarding DMCA exemptions. Has the DMCA law substantially and adversely affected your ability to make lawful, non-infringing uses of copyrighted works for media literacy education? Share your story and make a difference. Comments can be submitted online and must be received by February 2, 2009 at 5 p.m. EST.

Renee Hobbs is a Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media at Temple University's School of Communications and Theater where she founded the Media Education Lab. She is interested in all aspects of the intersections between media studies and education, with a particular interest in the pedagogy and practice of media literacy education in K-12 settings. She has created many multimedia curriculum materials, including My Pop Studio, an online play environment for girls 9 to 14. She is the author of Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English (2007, Teachers College Press).

Fan Fiction Someone Needs to Write...

From the Wikipedia entry on Rahm Emanuel, Obama's new chief of staff:

His brother Ari Emanuel is a talent agent in Los Angeles who inspired Jeremy Piven's character Ari Gold on the HBO series Entourage. Emanuel himself is the inspiration for the character Josh Lyman on The West Wing.

To my eye, this has the potential to be an entire new genre of fan fiction, given the popularity of both of these characters among fans of their respective programs. You can even see a family resemblance -- especially around the mouth and chin -- in these two photographs, though maybe that's my imagination. :-)

It's been a while since I've read a really good crossover story so I wanted to issue a challenge:

I am promising a signed copy of Convergence Culture to the first fan writer to produce a decent story (decent in quality, not necessarily in moral character) involving these two fictional characters. Extra credit if you can work Obama into the mix.

Inviting Our Participation: An Interview with Sharon Marie Ross (Part Two)

Today, I continue my interview with Sharon Marie Ross, author of the new book, Beyond the Box. I'm pleased to announce that Ross will be one of the featured speakers at our Futures of Entertainment 3 conference which will be held on Nov. 20-21. We will be releasing details and opening registration for this event next week. Whether you've attended our earlier events or simply heard about them, you are going to want to hold the date. Last year, we sold out in only two weeks time. In the discussion which follows, Ross talks about the ways the media industry thinks about and represents its fans, the role of seriality in supporting transmedia experiences, the implications of the recent Hollywood Writer's Strike, and the recent move of Fringe to cut back on story arcs in favor of more episodic stories.

Many of your examples of innovative practices come from smaller networks, such as Sci-Fi, The N, CW, Cartoon Network, and E! Why have these networks been so eager to experiment with alternative uses of the web? Why have the traditional networks adopted a more conservative "wait and see" response? Is this changing?

While the more traditional networks have been slower to adopt the practices of the smaller ones you mention, they are "changing their tune" to a degree. NBC and CBS especially are trying, with CBS doing quite well with blogs attached to shows (How I Met Your Mother) and of course with sports; NBC has very interesting things going on with Heroes, also. ABC is trying with Lost, but I think the show is the factor there more than anything.

The smaller networks have been more eager to adopt web strategies for a number of reasons. One is that they have built in niche markets who are already prone to go online and play with new media. Another reason is they have more to prove and as has been historically the case, when networks are struggling or trying to prove their viability, they are more willing to take risks--not just with strategies such as online applications, but with who they hire (younger execs) and with the shows they produce (more hands on producers who have embraced the internet). As the "big four" find themselves needing to compete for key markets they are likely to begin adopting more of what they see at smaller networks--especially with individual programs that lend themselves to the web (sci-fi, reality, and sports).

Throughout, you argue that programs which incorporate "seriality" and the "aesthetics of multiplicity" are most apt to also solicit audience engagement and participation. Explain. What are the implications of this argument for understanding the place of procedurals and episodic programs in the current programming mix?

I've been chatting with Belinda Acosta of The Austin Chronicle about episodic and procedural programs...It is true that the lack of seriality at work in such programs means there is less to do with them online, definitely. When a story ends within one viewing, viewers have little impetus to expand the text in a significant way--it doesn't garner them much in terms of their next viewing is perhaps the easiest way to think of it.

A serialized show, however, taps into an aesthetics of multiplicity. By this I mean that a show has layers of storytelling at work, embedded deeply into the text--seriality being the key element that breeds these layers. The possibility of differing outcomes prompts speculation and prediction--what might happen? WHY might it happen (or not)? Can I play an active role? Will producers be listening? The more layers at work, the more possibilites exist for the viewer to get in on the action--and when you can return in a week (or even a season) to see if you were right, you're more likely to take the time to weave your own psyche into the mix. People enjoy attaining a sense of mastery over the unknown, and open endings and/or multiple strands (dueling plotlines, large casts of players) provide ample opportunity. I think there will always be procedurals--no one wants to work hard all the time, after all--but I also think we will see more multiplicity built into such series (such as Bones' and the CSIs' relationships among characters and occasional lengthy story arcs) and when we see this, internet applications will likely arise for these programs. Especially as younger viewers savvy online age into mature markets, we're likely to see this. But I myself like the occasional break a procedural or closed sitcom offers...there are only so many hours in the day! This need for some "simplicity" is also why the most convoluted shows (such as Lost) work best also when they can be viewed without needing to go online to fully enjoy the story.

You provide a number of different perspectives from media producers about the value of fan input and "buzz" in making creative and programing decisions. What do you see as the current fault lines in the industry's understanding of fan consumers?

The current fault lines are many...The industry overall is paying attention to what fans can offer them, both the positive and negative. Fans' ability to mobilize via the internet has become key, as one example. When a show adored is canceled without fair warning, fans can smear a network in ways approaching a good old fashioned political campaign and networks hate bad publicity--and LOVE looking like they're heeding "the little people." But playing with fans is fraught with peril--if you don't have people in the industry who embrace fandom, you can misstep all too easily. I am curious for example to see what happens with ComicCon as more industry folk use this venue to promote and launch shows. Will fans begin to feel like they're being pandered to? Or that the industry is taking over their turf? I believe real change will occur when the industry begins hiring the right people (those with fandom in their background) and when they start according more power and respect to writers who truly care about their stories and their readers. So far this is occurring at ComicCon--but I worry the industry may overstep their boundaries (and knowledge) and begin pushing shows that are low quality simply because they have some of the "right" components (seriality, e.g.) or make promises they can't keep ("we'll have forums! and comic books! but shh! only as long as it's profitable...") Fans are the smartest viewers out there--the industry needs to really know this in their bones and act accordingly.

You cite several examples of misfires where the networks tried to personify their audience on air -- the Aerie girls around Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, the ATT campaign around American Idol. Why have networks had such trouble constructing images of participatory audiences and what might such failures suggest about their (mis)understanding of their consumers?

This taps into some of what I discussed above...Often the industry (especially at the network level) thinks of their viewers in simple, market-research oriented terms. Executives often forget that viewers are complex human beings who come to any given program with a plethora of expectations that can defy what a survey reveals or what a PR professional assumes about a given audience for a show. Networks are so very much driven still by numbers and trends--the business elements demand this--and people more often fall outside the norm than within it.

NOTHING is more irritating as a person than having someone make assumptions about you--we don't like it in everyday social circumstances, so why would we like it in storytelling? This is why the industry has to work harder (with writers and producers especially) to communicate with their viewers--"you can mess up, if you fess up" is how I see it. Admit when something misfires, be willing to take risks but explain why.

The producers of Farscape understood this well--listen, explain, but learn to not abandon your own role as a storyteller. If networks would accord more power to creatives (or think more creatively themselves), we would see not only better success--but also better stories overall. This means, of course, the ability to take financial risks--and fans have to understand this as well--especially in a market-driven TV industry like we have in the U.S.

The recent writer's strike center in part on the question of whether web extensions of television show should be understood as promotional materials or as part of the creative content of the program. Your analysis suggests that the same content may serve both functions. Any thoughts on how the industry will resolve its uncertainties about the status and value of such materials?

I am wary of what the industry learned from the strike. The best online materials have had storytelling at their heart--driven more by that than by the need to promote. But I fear that the strike may result in industry attempts to cut back on such applications if they have to pay for the work involved. (Unless the show is a smashing success.) The issue lies in vision: the industry needs to understand the value of building long term viewer relationships--which means the payoff might come later. They used to get the "later" with syndication. But with less syndie occurring, the payoffs are in the areas of (monetarily) DVDs and online advertising.

The real value comes in brand loyalty, I think. When viewers think a network will go to bat for their creatives and their viewers, they are more likely to commit to a new project the network offers. The N has managed this wonderfully--but they can do so because they are a small network within an umbrella of larger corporate structures that can absorb any financial losses. One route to embrace would be more co-productions globally to offset financial risk.

As J.J. Abrams has launched Fringe this year, he keeps stressing that the program will be accessible to people who only want to watch a single episode. He clearly wants to escape criticisms that have surrounded the seriality of Lost and Alias, yet in doing so, he may undercut the forms of viewer loyalty and participation that are generated through seriality. In the book, you offer an extensive case study around Lost. How might this case study help us to better understand the stance Abrams is taking around his new series?

Fringe will be fascinating to study! Abrams, like Joss Whedon, really gets it all--he understands fan loyalty but he also understands how the business side of things work. Lost hit at the right time and under the right circumstances--a struggling network was fundamental to this show succeeding. But Lost has lost (ha ha) fans along the way and also held off viewers who do not have the time or inclination to follow every strand. Yet, those surrounding the series have been quick to amend mistakes that have occurred with plotting and with online applications--they very wisely have ensured you don't have to go online to love the show. This is what is being applied to Fringe. And the thing is, fans of Lost (or any other highly serialized and mythology driven series) are not the stereotype many imagine: the most loyal of the fans are the ones who first and foremost appreciate good storytelling. By which I mean, these fans do not have to have every show they watch be as "messy" as Lost. Good storytelling CAN occur with one-shot storytelling if the the characters are developing. I think character growth is key. Look at Mary Tyler Moore or All in the Family or Scrubs today. The storytelling occurs with the growth of the people involved in the story world...slow, intimate, and enhanced by regular viewing--without demanding constant attention. And in the end, in my humble opinion, the pleasures of Lost lie with the characters and how they grow.

As a final string of thought, I think what we're seeing with TV and the Internet is an extension (versus a brand new "something") of what the best of TV has always given us: the opportunity for viewers to sink their teeth into stories that make us feel more connected to the world around us, the opportunity for writers to tell stories that matter to them, and in the best case scenario the opportunity for the industry to find new ways to make people find TV relevant and worth attending to! Please include my thanks to the many writers, marketers, industry execs, critics and fans who helped me with my book--I found people all over who fundamentally loved a good story and were eager to share their thoughts and genuine feelings with me. The best scholarly work, I believe, emerges from such communication...I am only "reporting" what many people took the time and passion to share with me.

Sharon Ross is an assistant professor in the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches courses in the areas of TV history and critical theory and her research focuses on issues of television reception; this semester she is excited to be teaching a 5 week intensive seminar on a single script from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is the associate editor of the journal for the International Digital Media Arts Association and co-editor with Dr. Louisa Stein of the anthology Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. She has too many "must see" TV shows to mention but highly recommends Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother this season.

Want to Learn More About CMS?

The Comparative Media Studies Masters Program In-House information sessions are held twice during the Fall semester. They offer an opportunity to ask CMS faculty, research staff, and students any questions that you may have about the masters program and to attend one or more classes or the weekly colloquium. Please RSVP to Generoso Fierro (generoso AT mit DOT edu) if interested in attending.

Information sessions are held on-campus and online from October through early December.

On-Campus

Thursday, October 2, 2008 9am-7pm

Thursday, November 13, 2008 9am-7pm

Online

Thursday, October 16, 2008 8-10am Eastern Standard Time (Asia)

Thursday, October 30, 2008 2-4pm Eastern Standard Time (Europe)

Previous Information Session Transcripts