Before and After Mickey: An Interview with Donald Crafton (Part Two)

Tell us more about the distinction you draw in the book between figurative and embodied performance. What assumptions about the nature of acting and spectatorship are implicit in these different styles of animated performance? What accounts for the shifting popularity of these different models over time?

 

Whether a performance is figurative or embodied stems from how the behaviors were intended by the animators and understood by the viewers (which often are not the same experience). They aren't opposites; they are registers that may overlap, like bass and treble adjustments. Figurative performances are given by cartoon characters (which I call toons, as used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) whose interest derives mainly from their exaggerated physical traits. These could be a funny walk, caricatural references outside the film, or a distinctive way of talking (like Goofy's “Uh-hyult, uh-hyult”).

Think of early Mickey or early Bugs. They were beings who were types (small-town boy and slick trickster, respectively). Their behavior was hostage to the collections of attributes, quirks and attitudes that constituted their actions. So Mickey was a caricature that blended recognizable traits borrowed from Charles Lindbergh and Buster Keaton; Bugs was hyperactive and nutty. Several have pointed out that he’s a schnorer, a friend or guest who takes excessive liberties. The repetition of their singular mannerisms was part of the humor. The figurative performance mode wasn’t limited to animation. Comedians like Harry Langdon, Jacques Tati, Roberto Benigni, Jerry Lewis, and Woody Allen in his first films exploited it too.

Embodied performance reflects animators' Stanislavskian goals and their expectations (or hopes) that viewers' empathetic understanding and belief in the temperament and uniqueness of the character would understand, accept, and “complete” it. The later 'thirties Mickey, say in Moose Hunters, integrates him into a believable environment. He responds to it as the viewer or any individual might, with some degree of unpredictability. He engages in banter and give-and-take with Donald and Goofy, who are foils with their own individuality. The animators and we spectators readily imbue them with characteristics that go beyond their simple existence. We care about the fate of the chums and the outcome of the story.

It may be too complicated to explain the mechanics of the change here, but the figurative and embodied modes complemented and competed all through the 1930s and 40s. Although Disney took his filmmaking far in the embodied direction, Langer shows that the figurative New York style could intrude even in that studio, as in the "Pink Elephants on Parade" number in Dumbo. Most of the Disney princes are figurative too—necessary placeholders in the plots in need of some "princeness" to redeem the princesses.

For various reasons, the public and critics grew tired of the embodied approach. The popularity of films from Warner Bros., MGM, and later from UPA avoided the embodied style or actively parodied it (Avery's Screwy Squirrel, Jones' What's Opera, Doc?).

It also became clear that the enormous investment in hardware (such as multiplane cameras) and the immense animation infrastructure of the Disney studio was not necessary to achieve empathetic characters. There’s Wile E. Coyote, naturally, but UPA's Gerald McBoing Boing might be the best example. Jones' geometric romance in The Dot and the Line, seen in this light, tested the minimal graphic investment needed to "embody" character.

Today there are plenty of examples of embodied acting in animation—Disney/Pixar's Up or Brave, for instance, which have a retro feel because of it, and despite their sleek digital surfaces.

The vast majority of animation, though, is figurative and exists in work for television and video games. These are stock characters in conventional roles doing conventional things. The personality is supplied imaginatively by the viewer/user, or programmed as a combination of preselected attributes.

Your titles call attention to the degree to which Walt Disney has dominated our understanding of American animation, even as your books make a concerted effort to discuss a much broader range of animators and studios. Why do you think animation history still remains so deeply under the shadow of the Mouse?

Having just done some holiday shopping at the Disney store, I’m inclined to say that it's all about character. The Disney formula for "toons" always has and continues to emphasize a certain definition of personality. There's limited individuality, meaning that certain expressive behaviors are allowed—let's say Ariel's rebellious actions—but never exceed the tightly enclosed limits of the character as a figure—those defining the role of "princess" in the mermaid's case. Another aspect that makes Disney characters eternal, to borrow the marketing lingo for a moment, is that they are believable versions of people, acting out childlike behaviors. We all know (or maybe are) someone like that. Peter Pan is one of those types. Disney films also are full of adolescent folks playing at being grownup—Ariel, Tiana, Wendy, and Snow White (and Remy, if rats have adolescence). But even that is regressive, since their behaviors are clearly childish. They’re playing house. They are not believable performances of adulthood (which can be relatively boring).

Cartoon characters, Disney's especially, succeed because they are designed to invite consumers to complete them imaginatively and to fully embody them. These characters often are diminutive versions of imagined selves. The possibilities are endless—aggressive, passive, maternal/paternal, sexy, smart, and even plush avatars. There was a stuffed Pumbaa in the store that I found particularly sympathetic…. Now conglomerate Disney enters our lives at some level almost daily, and whether these entertainment commodities are cinematic, or athletic in the case of ESPN, or the transcendental fantasies of the theme parks and cruises, or the plastic princesses, the company's in the business of selling mediatized bodies performing, whether real, simulated or virtual.

Of course, Mouse, as Variety calls Disney, has been perfecting the machinery for bringing this concept to consumers by way of various points of retail merchandizing for about 80 years. As for the animated films, the studio during its successful periods has been adept at anticipating and reacting to consumer interests. The immediate embrace of Winnie the Pooh as a collectible object and then the gradual acceptance of "Princess" as a desired existential category. On the contrary, we could cite the lack of traction for other franchises like Merlin and King Arthur (The Sword in the Stone), or "Kevin Flynn" (Tron). This suggests that animated filmmaking is like other Hollywood enterprises in the sense that box office trends ultimately are unfathomable because consumer response remains largely unpredictable.

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part Two)

Reclaiming historic models of fan practices has proven challenging, so I am hoping we might take some methodological insights from the ways you each approached this project. What were some of the challenges and opportunities in reconstructing monster fandom as a historical phenomenon?

Matt:  I found it essential to foreground the nature by which FM presented and remediated fan practices.  As such, FM offers a wonderful model of how fandom can be presented to itself.  This was, of course, key to my analysis of Ackerman as an intermediary who would liberally revise letters sent to the magazine, speak for the fan, and shape fan desires.  Ideally, I would have liked to include in my essay examinations of fan films that could not be represented in the magazine outside of stills.  There are a couple of very good compilations of “monster kid” amateur films available on DVD that would be a very good resource for this work (even if one cannot make a direct connection to FM in all cases).  Bob’s essay in particular did a good job of considering the actual film production in very productive ways.

Bob: I never think of myself as practicing anything so organized as a methodology, but certainly this project’s method hinged on having access to the text and texture of Famous Monsters itself, in particular the Captain Company advertising pages where so much of monster culture’s material practices were on explicit display. To today’s eye, FM’s ads might seem like simple commercial hype (as Mark mentions below), secondary to the editorial content. But along with other fixtures of the magazine like contests, fan clubs, and classifieds, FM’s ads were extremely busy sites of social and material exchange -- invitations to participate, nodes of interactivity in the magazine’s paper network of publishing and the U.S. Postal Service. And excitingly, through those pages thread names, titles, products that connect to larger histories of fan creativity and cult media, like Jim Danforth and Dennis Muren and their movie Equinox. My “archive,” by the way, was a DVD containing the entire run of FM in the comics-reader .CBR format, purchased online. No libraries nearby have FM in their holdings, and my personal collection is a handful of favorites cherry-picked over the years from eBay. Admittedly, then, that “texture” I mentioned earlier is a pallid, pixelated ghost of the weighty stacks of beautiful pulpy newsprint and vivid covers that constitute FM’s own material being. But without the digital archive’s ease of access, comprehensiveness of content, and ability to do screen captures, I wouldn’t have been able to write the essay.

Mark: I’m particularly interested in diachronic studies of fan responses to celebrities, and methodologically this means lots of time spent reading through letters to the editor of various old publications, hoping to stumble across those little gems that communicate something about audience reactions and responses in their historical contexts. For this essay, I wanted to chart the continuities and discrepancies of reception of Lon Chaney’s star image from the 1920s to the present. I find it fascinating that Chaney was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, but at some point in time interest in him became something “specialized,” and he also became an idol for boys rather than a star appreciated by a broader audience. FM is a really valuable source for researching this shift--in part because of Ackerman’s much-proclaimed love for Chaney, but even more because of the ways, as Matt put it, that FM presented and modelled fandom to fans. Primarily, though, FM is fairly unique in the sheer amount of reader-generated content, which at least theoretically provides greater access to “the people” in their own words. But this also raises a caution as far as methodology. I hadn’t realized that, as Matt mentioned, Ackerman would tinker with readers’ letters before they were printed. It just goes to show, with historic reception studies one always has to be on guard, both in granting too much credence to the evidence, and in being alert to ways in which you might be making presumptions or “thinking for” the historical audience through a 21st-century mindset.

Natasha: Like Bob, my primary archive consisted of a DVD (purchased online) that contained the entire run of FM.  Access to every issue of the magazine in a digital format was crucial in allowing me the opportunity to trace a female fan presence in the magazine spanning 25 years.   I was able to borrow a sampling of paper issues of FM from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, however, echoing Bob’s point,  it would have been impossible for me to write this essay without access to the entire digital archive.  Being able to access a comprehensive collection of the magazine was essential in conducting a diachronic study and tracing Ackerman’s steadfast and consistent support for a female fan presence in the pages of F.M. Digital access to a whole range of historical documents that used to demand time-consuming and expensive visits to archives provides a rich ground for re-examining cultural assumptions, generalizations and creating a more nuanced and multidimensional understanding of historic fan practices.

Most work in fan studies has centered around mostly female-centered forms of fan culture. In what ways does studying Famous Monsters give us a way into talking about the relationship of fandom to masculinity?

Matt:  Of course, Mark’s essay is an excellent model for this and Natasha’s essay offers an exemplary model of how to consider female fandom in the context of male fandom.  For me, both of these essays have inspired much thought and reflection on the gender politics of superhero fandom.

Mark: I think FM is very useful in the ways it complicates what we think we might know about childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s, in that it provides a historical record of things not “spoken” elsewhere--or at least not spoken as directly. You can find readers talking about feeling alienated from their peers, or of paying some price for non-conformity, which often means not conforming to normative masculinity. For another project, I spent quite a bit of time looking at old Boy’s Life magazines, and the contrast between the stereotypically uncomplicated, all-American, Leave it to Beaver image of 1950s/60s boyhood found therein and the more fraught relationship to masculinity evident in FM is pretty remarkable (although I must add I love Leave it to Beaver). I also want to voice my admiration for Natasha’s essay--not just for her valuable work, but for those girls and young women who sent their letters and photos in to FM, which in the 1950s was probably a pretty daring, brave move for many of them. They were pioneers!

Bob: I’m definitely interested in the boy culture reflected in FM’s pages, and the magazine’s larger function as a kind of primer in certain modes of fandom (the “affirmational” as it’s sometimes called, to distinguish it from the “transformative”) conventionally associated with the male gender. However, I take seriously the caveat that no fannish activity or orientation is exclusively the province of one gender or another, and that FM’s readership was a diverse collection of boys, girls, and presumably transgendered individuals outside that limiting binary. But the skills and predilections we discover as children are the roots of those we take into adulthood, so certainly I see FM as an important player in the acculturation and encouragement of behaviors that later come to seem “innate” or “essential” aspects of fanboys -- in particular, the accumulation of knowledge about make-up and visual effects that marked my own fascination with FM and most subsequent fan objects. So in short, while boys aren’t a priori horror fans who build model kits or collect action figures, being a horror fan who builds and collects arguably seeds the kind of subjectivities later associated, if only through self-identification, with being a boy/man.

Natasha, you turn the lens in the other direction, identifying the ways women were included or excluded from this fan culture which had historically been male-dominated. What roles do you think Ackerman and his magazine played in this process? What kinds of evidence did you find that helped you to reconstruct the history of female participation in monster fandom?

Natasha: Ackerman was extremely influential in creating an inclusive fan culture around his magazine.  As Matt’s interview with Ackerman reaffirms, he had total control over the content of F.M.  Not only did Ackerman strategically print captions such as “Guys and Gals Behind the Ghouls’ and ‘Girls will be Ghouls’ on the covers of the earliest issues of F. M., but he also insured that women held a variety of key roles in the magazine’s production.  Ackerman was highly aware of the way horror and science fiction fan cultures historically structured themselves as exclusive boyzones.  In 1946, Ackerman proposed an all-female guest-of-honour list for the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention, the Pacificon. This proposition was immediately shot down by his colleagues.  Ackerman used his agency at FM as a way to showcase that monster fandom wasn’t just for boys.  Pictures and letters by female fans were incorporated into the magazine’s regular features such as ‘Fiendom’s Finest’ or ‘Fan Mail.” With a circulation of 2.4 million in the 1970s, FM made a significant impact on American culture.  Ackerman’s influence on female monster/horror fans is still evident today.  Jovanka Vuckovic, director of The Captured Bird (2012) and editor-in-chief of Rue Morgue counts Ackerman as one of her key inspirations for pursuing her career path.

There’s a strong focus throughout these essays on the ways fandom translated into material cultural practices. What are some of the practices Famous Monsters inspired and supported? And what might the study of such practices contribute to a fuller understanding of the nature of participatory culture?

Matt: I’m intrigued by the notion of curatorial consumption.  I recently came across a fan’s posting of his FM collection that was quite detailed in terms of how he catalogued and stored his issues.  It was a museum level of archival care that provoked some counter-responses from other FM readers about denying the pleasure of simply reading your old FMs.   Further along these lines, a lot of these middle-aged ‘monster kids’ have transformed their homes into modest facsimiles of the Ackermansion.  Again, the notion of being a curator for a museum of one’s childhood passions is fascinating.  Such spaces are interesting because they typically remain these abstractions presented visually on the web and in competition with each other.

Mark: It’s a blast to look at the copious advertisements in those old issues, with all the “Scare your parents! Amaze your friends!” hype, for what turned out to be tawdry cardboard bats or “ghosts” made of vinyl sheeting (I know, for I was a victim of the come-on). Matt and Bob both have done really interesting work on fan consumption as a form of identity work, and as a form of archiving. I think it’s worth re-emphasizing that a lot of the material cultural practices prompted by the magazine were of a DIY nature--putting together and painting models, making films, using creating monster makeups, etc., and of consuming supplies in the interest of making a finished product.

Bob: I have little to add to Matt and Mark’s excellent thoughts, except to say that I’m increasingly dubious that fandom exists except in material cultural practices -- that is, fandom manifests in activities, objects, and spaces -- and that fan studies has traditionally been a bit narrow in approaching fandom primarily through what we might call its textual technologies and traces, such as reading, writing, rereading and rewriting, poaching, etc. While these are material practices as well, the temptation is to elevate them over the more bluntly material “things” of fan culture, since those things are so often damned through ties to commercialism or their positioning as amateurish, crude, or flawed. In future projects I hope to focus on the object forms of fandom as dynamically expressive practices, simultaneously social and private, that intersect with the commercial and the mass-produced in messy but significant ways.

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

The Visual Linguistics of David Mazzuchelli

I periodically get a chance to teach classes on comics and graphic storytelling. I was able to teach such a subject in Spring 2012 at USC and hope to teach it again here next year. I shared my syllabus for the class at the time. Early on in the class, the challenge is to get students to think more deeply about the range of different devices which comics artists might use to communicate meaning. We were lucky this most recent time to have a really rich essay on this topic which Randy Duncan wrote for Critical Approaches to Comics, which was our principal textbook. Duncan's essay uses David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp as its primary example. This book turned out to be an eye-opener for many of my students, because of its diverse range of visual symbols, its expressive use of color, and its diverse ways of deploying typefaces to capture the different communication styles of the various characters. Mikhail Skoptsov, then a Cinema School graduate student who was taking the class, was inspired to dig deeper into David Mazzuchelli's work and developed an argument about the persistent interest throughout many of his stories in exploring the challenges characters face in communicating with each other. Skoptsov, now a student in the Media and Cultures program at Brown, has continued to revise this essay and I am delighted to have a chance to share it with you today.  My own sense is that it sheds some important light both on Mazzuchelli and on the "language" of comics more generally. Enjoy.

The Visual Linguistics of David Mazzuchelli

by Mikhail Skoptsov

After working on a number of high-profile projects, such as Batman: Year One and Daredevil: Born Again, David Mazzuchelli broke away from superhero comics to self-publish the magazine Rubber Blanket. Despite lasting only three issues, the publication showcased works that Mazzuchelli had fully scripted and illustrated all by himself, forming some of the recurring techniques, themes and motifs he would later apply to his co-adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1994) with Paul Karasik and his original masterpiece Asterios Polyp (2009). I would argue that these three works evince that Mazzuchelli is a modern graphic novel auteur, who repeatedly explores issues of language and communication. To prove this, I will examine the aforementioned two novels and the short story Big Man from Rubber Blanket #3.

I will begin by analyzing a scene from Big Man, whose titular character is a mysterious giant that washes up on a riverbank, one day, to the consternation of a rural farming community. When Peter, a farmer, tries to unsuccessfully speak with Big Man, he realizes that the giant doesn’t understand English. In the first of the two bottom panels on page 23, Peter says to Big Man: “If you can understand me, we want to know where you come from.” (23). In the next panel, Peter tries to use hand gestures to clarify the meaning of his words. This time he speaks slowly, placing pauses between his words: “Where… do you… come from?” On the first panel of page 24, the Big Man responds with the sound “Hhhn?”, while mimicking with his hands the action of writing. By doing this, he physically expresses a desire to have something to write with.

Subsequently, we see Peter hand him a file clipper and a pencil in the next couple of panels, evincing that he understood the gesture. Big Man then begins to write. When panel 6 reveals the Big Man’s text, it turns out that Big Man’s writing is indecipherable, as it appears in the form of signs that resemble hieroglyphics, which Peter, the other farmers and the readers cannot understand. This establishes that Big Man normally speaks and writes in a language that is unfamiliar to normal people.

Thus, this series of panels juxtaposes the Big Man’s ability to communicate physically through gesture with his inability to communicate verbally and through writing. Through the juxtaposition, Mazzuchelli proposes the idea that language can be physical, that it does not necessarily have to consist of spoken words and written text. In other words, he espouses an alternate way of communicating. Supporting this idea is the fact that Big Man never utters a word via ‘speech balloons’ or ‘word bubbles’, which represent the traditional means of visualizing dialogue between characters in comics. This is clearly visible in panel 8 on page 34 and panel 2 on page 35, where the little speech-impaired girl Rebecca successfully communicates with Big Man without verbally forming words and sentences.

Instead, as we can see in panels 3 and 4 on page 35, both of them utilize the nasal sound “Snrrt!” to speak to each other. Though they pronounce the same noise, Rebecca’s appears within white speech balloons, designating it as ‘dialogue’, while the Big Man’s “Snrrt” appears outside of a balloon, placing it in line with other noises such as the “THUD” in panel 6. The fact that “Snrrt” appears as both dialogue and noise illustrates that noise can have the same communicative function as dialogue. This positions noise as a viable means of communication, an alternative to speech and writing.  Another possible interpretation could be that noise functions as a language, where a single sound can stand in for entire words or sentences.

One could construe the fact that Big Man and Rebecca converse using only “Snrrt” as them speaking a language only they understand. One doesn’t know exactly what Big Man and Rebecca mean by pronouncing “Snrrt!”, but the two apparently understand one another, as they use the sound repeatedly. As such, language becomes intrinsic not just to the plot and story of Big Man, but also to the perception of the titular character by the other characters and by the readers. Language essentially defines Big Man as a character, portraying him as an ‘other’ to the farmers and a familiar to Rebecca.

Language similarly defines the character of Peter Stillman, the reclusive billionaire of City of Glass, who hires main character Daniel Quinn to investigate Peter’s abusive and insane father. Quinn learns that Stillman Senior’s insanity apparently came about as a result of his research on language and religion. As Quinn’s narration indicates, Stillman believed that the fall of man from Paradise brought about the fall of language. After the fall, language “…had been severed from God.” (Karasik and Mazzuchelli 39) The idea of creating a new language or recovering the old language became a driving force for Stillman Sr., which he confirms to Quinn in a park conversation in the last panel on page 69. Thus, Mazzuchelli portrays language in City of Glass as part of one’s identity, as well as a source of character motivation. It can function not just as a means of communication, but as an extension of the characters.

Strengthening this view is the author’s visualization and foregrounding of communi-cation though an expressive utilization of text and word balloons, as well as the combination of words with abstract images. City of Glass first creates the impression that it abides by the traditional visualization of dialogue in graphic novels, wherein all the letters appear in the same font and the same size. For example, in the second panel of page 28, Quinn asks Stillman’s wife Virginia: “How was Peter finally discovered?” Virginia responds: “There was a fire”. Both lines of dialogue appear in spherical speech balloons with all letters in uppercase and in the same font. The majority of conversations within the novel utilize this style.

On the one hand, this establishes the font and speech balloon format Quinn and Virginia speak in as the ‘common’ format of the novel. On the other, this serves to distinguish the sequences, where conversations diverge from this format, which the scene that introduces Stillman Jr illustrates perfectly. When he begins to talk on page 15, the reader should immediately notice that Peter’s dialogue is visually different from that of the other characters. For one thing, his words mix lower and uppercase letters. The word “Peter” for example, capitalizes the “P” and the “T” while leaving the rest of the letters in lowercase. Such an amalgamation suggests that Peter speaks in an inconsistent, disorderly manner, in comparison to the other characters, who speak normally.

For another, Peter’s word balloon reaches deeply into his mouth, in stark contrast to the previous word balloons in the book, all of which appear at a distance from the mouth of the character, whose words they are conveying. This distinct visual presentation gives the impression that the balloon is a part of Peter himself, a natural extension of his character. Compounding this impression are the subsequent panels, which continue to display the word balloons literally emerging from inside Peter, each new panel closing the distance between Peter’s mouth and the frame. The second panel moves towards a medium close-up, the third to a close-up. This continues until the ninth and final panel has literally entered deep inside the throat of Stillman, which resembles an endless black-and-white spiral.

The word balloon continues to emerge from inside the spiral, the pattern making it appear, as if the panels have been following the spiral to its source. This continues in the 3x3 panels from pages 16-23, which display various surreal and abstract images, including a puddle of water (16), a gondolier (17), a grate (19), a bird (20) and a guitar (21). Multiple panels sometimes display the same image, only at different angles, with the gondolier occupying 15 panels from pages 16 and 17. All of the panels feature Peter’s word balloon emerging from the image and resuming his dialogue.

For example, Peter says in panel 9 of page 15: “…They say mother died.” On the next page, the frame displays the word balloon, reaching below the frame, continuing: “I say what they say because I know nothing.” The next panel shows the balloon coming from a puddle, continuing: “There was this. Dark. Very dark…” This combination of images signifies that Peter is the one speaking at all times. He remains the source of the dialogue. However, the reader sees different visual representations of the source/Peter. Thus, the use of multiple visual sources implies a continuous shift in Peter’s manner of speaking. The order of the images seems random and the lack of an identifiable pattern indicates that Peter has no control over what he says, his words essentially transmitting a stream of consciousness.

Additionally, Peter’s sentences can come off as incoherent, full of sudden changes of subject without a logical reason. As the aforementioned three lines of dialogue attest, after talking about the death of his mother, he suddenly and inexplicably shifts towards speaking about the dark room he was in as a child. Altogether, the mixing of uppercase and lowercase letters, the incoherent sentences and the different visual representations of Peter speaking express the idea that Peter is mentally unstable. He himself confirms his instability when he says: “I know that all is not right in my head” (21) As such, Mazzuchelli ultimately depicts communication expressionistically to visualize a character’s interiority to the reader.

Peter’s unique way of speaking/communicating distinguishes him from everyone else within the context of the novel. Thus, the image of the word balloon reaching literally inside him connotes that language is a part of him, an extension of his self. The plot confirms this by positioning Stillman Sr.’s search for language as the cause of his insanity. It compelled him to lock his son alone in a room for 9 years (Karasik and Mazzuchelli 27), ultimately leading to Peter’s mental instability.

Mazzuchelli expands on the idea of language functioning as one’s extension in Asterios Polyp by depicting every single character with a particular text font and speech balloon. To illustrate this, I present Figure 1, which features a sequence from the book between Asterios and his wife Hana, as they try to tell a story to a group of unseen interlocutors in a restaurant. Asterios’ text appears in all six panels in rectangular polygons, while his words are always uppercase, never lowercase, italicized or bold. The rectangular form of his speech balloons reflects his status as a professor of architecture and his preference for, as well his interest solids and rectangular flats. Meanwhile, while the use of solely uppercase letters reflects his aversion to change and his preference for rigid order and structure.

Hana, by contrast, speaks in spherical word balloons and her dialogue uses both uppercase and lowercase letters. This places her in direct opposition to Asterios visually, reflecting her down-to-Earth personality, her openness to change and her interest in non-rectangular figures, such as circles and straight lines, as she herself mentions towards the end of the book. Like in City of Glass, the text frame also functions in an expressive manner. For instance, the third panel portrays Asterios’ hexagonal speech box in the foreground, relegating Hana’s spherical speech bubble to the background.

As Hana describes how “…this one big guy tries to push…”, Asterios interjects with his addition: “Before that though, a couple of women squeezed in front of him.” Instead of telling the viewers via narration that Asterios interrupts Hana, Mazzuchelli depicts this through image and composition by visualizing Asterios’ box over Hana’s bubble. Through this, he additionally conveys Asterios’ egocentrism, his belief that he knows better than Hana. Hence, the text font and the text frame visually define and contrast the characters’ personalities, as well as convey how the characters speak, as opposed to just what they say.

By portraying everyone in the novel with his/her own particular text font and/or frame, Mazzuchelli illustrates that every person has an individual manner of speaking. Thus, the manner of speech becomes an extension of the character. This goes in hand with how the author describes language in Figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 opens with a narration. It states: “What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extension of the self? Wouldn’t that color the way each individual experiences the world?” The images on Figure 2 depict numerous people in a variety of art styles. Thus, the association of word and image indicates that the art styles all represent the different ways that individuals can experience the world.

If one’s perception of reality is an extension of one’s self and one’s manner of speaking is an extension of the self, then, by illustrating how every individual has a distinct manner of speaking, Mazzuchelli conveys that every individual has a different manner of perceiving reality. In Figure 3, the narration continues: “That might explain why some people get along so effortlessly…”. Images of men and women, drawn in an identical art style, appear next to it. In conjunction with the previous figure, the identical art style indicates that these men and women experience the world in a similar manner. The narration indicates that the images represent the people that get along easily, evincing that people who have similar perceptions of reality can effortlessly get along with one another.

Conversely, the characters in the next two images appear in different styles and the narration concludes with: “…while others don’t.” The association of these words with the images signifies that these characters perceive the world differently. So, they do not get along easily. Finally, the author presents two different characters speaking in one overlapping speech bubble. The words inside all say “Hello” in three different languages: English, Hawaiian and Hebrew. The narration below the image refers to the previous statement of people getting along: “Although people do keep trying.” Mazzuchelli associates the act of speaking, the act of verbal communication with individuals getting along or finding a common way of experiencing the world, as the overlapping speech bubble indicates.

This means that if language is key to verbal communication between different individuals, then language can be a means for people to find a common way of experiencing the world. While every character in the novel possesses a distinct style of speech and a unique perception of reality, the English language remains the one constant between them all. So, language becomes an extension of every single character within Asterios Polyp, functioning as an intermediary bet-ween the various individuals’ different perceptions of reality, allowing them to arrive at a unified perception. Together with the examples from Big Man and City of Glass, this proves that Mazzu-chelli is an auteur that visually foregrounds language and communication in comic form.

Overall, we can see that Mazzuchelli emphasizes language and communication throughout his body of work. By expressively using the text, the author helps define his characters through their manner of speech and their use of language. In addition, he raises various questions about how and why people communicate, about what language is and what its functions are. If communication is usually an unobtrusive and inexpressive element of mainstream graphic novels, it is a visible and distinguishing characteristic of the oeuvre of Mazzuchelli. So it isn’t surprising that Mazzuchelli and co-author Paul Karasik compared the adaptation of the novel City of Glass into a graphic novel to “… a translation from one language to another” (Kartalou-polos). In this regard, one could consider Mazzuchelli a graphic novel linguist.

Citations

Karasik, Paul and Mazzuchelli, David. City of Glass, The Graphic Novel. Picador, New York 2004. Revised version of Neon Lit: Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Avon Books, 1994. Based on the novel City of Glass by Paul Auster, Sun and Moon Press, 1985.

Kartaloupolos, Bill. “Three Questions for David Mazzucchelli” in Indy Magazine, Spring 2004. http://www.indyworld.com/indy/spring_2004/mazzucchelli_interview/index.html

Mazzuchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. Pantheon Books, New York, 2009

Mazzuchelli, David. “Big Man” in Rubber Blanket #3. Ed. David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis, Rubber Blanket Press, Hoboken NJ, 1993, 17-64

Mikhail Leonidovich Skoptsov is currently a second semester PHD student at Brown University's department of Modern Culture and Media. He has a BA in Cinema Studies from New York University and an MA in Film Studies from the University of Southern California. His current research interests include: postmodernism in cinema, media piracy, fan productions, serialization in cinema and television, as well as trans-media storytelling.

The More We Know: Academic Games Research and Industry Collaboration (Part Three)

In many ways, iCue was also designed to respond to some of the challenges confronting contemporary journalism. What insights did you take from this project about the difficulties of engaging young news consumers and the challenges of reforming current journalism practices?

This challenge was part of the original vision, but NBC was quite wary of what students might do with their media if left to their own devices, or what they might report on if they were the ones doing the reporting.  The remix ideas were quite limited through the games.  And the participatory journalism was a successful small scale experiment that was cut from the larger rollout.

You frame this book as an account of a "failure," yet you end with some hope that the lessons learned through iCue have informed subsequent initiatives by NBC News. In what ways?

NBC has learned a lot about what it takes to make something for the education market in terms of design, marketing and messaging.  Many of the same staffers remain in their NBC Learn department. They can now use that knowledge to do some interesting things.  They are certainly taking an incremental approach to making such change though, starting from the place that they know teachers are interested in and then slowly pushing those boundaries.  They have told us they want to bring back games and social media in their project.  The market is certainly more ready now than it was six years ago - we hope that they take that risk.

To its credit, NBC has also elevated the public conversation around education through the annual Education Nation summit and its associated workshops and presentations around the country.  To see a major network devote its “A Team” and multiple channels to shine a spotlight on important issues is perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of the “failures” that their project team encountered early on.  As we said, many of the core team, including the senior producers who believed in the initial project enough to leave the safety of their traditional roles, are still fully engaged in NBC Learn.  Their commitment to improving education is laudable and should be recognized.  They are warriors for the cause.

Many academic projects proceed with the assumption that "if we build it, they will come." What might be a better approach for academic researchers wanting to establish a community around their educational interventions?

Marketing.  Academic projects don’t think enough about this and often funders don’t provide for this portion of the project.  But academic projects need marketing too in order to get out there.  Yes, there are viral successes that have foregone this step, but those are few and far between.  We have seen marketing work in our project Vanished, which got thousands of kids playing an alternate reality game about science over the course of 6 weeks, and we have also seen in with our recent Lure of the Labyrinth challenge, which attracted tens of thousands

How did the iCue project contribute to the development of the Learning Games Network? What new model have you adopted for promoting innovation in education around games-based learning?

The challenges we confronted in getting the NBC team to understand the research and then apply it in design inspired us to start a non-profit that would help bridge the gap between research and practice.  We realized we could be better advocates for change as partners with a wide variety of stakeholders, supporting their efforts through the entire game-based learning pipeline, from design and production to implementation and student assessment.  Coming to understand the myriad challenges that are both shared and unique to textbook publishers, national broadcasters, and international technology companies as they strive to innovate in the education market has helped us explore better, we think, strategies to support their business goals.  We want to enable market leaders to succeed because those victories, small and large, ultimately raise the awareness of the power and potential game-based learning products and services. In turn, this enables our colleagues in academia to raise the level of scholarship they pursue.

What do you see as the biggest successes so far to come out of the work of the Learning Games Network team? How do you define success in this space? what factors do you feel contributed to their success?

Our biggest success is a somewhat personal one.  Having been working together for the better part of 12 years, first as colleagues at MIT and now as a group with our hands (and feet) in different organizations, our core team is still intact.  The fact that the four founders of Learning Games Network bring such different perspectives in scholarship, creative design, and business makes us uniquely strong and effective.  We each trust what the others bring to the table in solving challenges, which is really unique and especially necessary since game-based learning is such an interdisciplinary enterprise.

That trust manifests in the culture that’s emerged in our Cambridge and Madison studios.  We are developing professionals who are strengthening skills that are a hybrid of academic, technical, and commercial backgrounds, as well as encouraging that kind of cultivation with our partners.  Over the past few years, our efforts have been rewarded by grants from major foundations and contracts with market leaders.  Our most recent success came at this year’s Meaningful Play conference, where Quandary, a game we produced in our Cambridge studio to support ethical thinking among young people, and Fair Play, a game produced in our Madison studio that sensitizes players to the challenges of race and equity in science, both won awards among a very competitive field of submissions.

Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT.  Klopfer's research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems. He is the co-author of the book, Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo, and author of Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games from MIT Press.  Klopfer is also the co-founder and President of the non-profit Learning Games Network.

Jason Haas is Graduate Research Assistant in the Media Lab and in The Education Arcade at MIT. His research focuses on the design and efficacy of learning games. Recent research and design has been for The Radix Endeavor, a Gates Foundation-funded MMORPG for science and math learning. Previous research has involved the role of narrative in learning in the casual physics games Woosh, Waker, and Poikilia and in large-scale collective intelligence gaming  in Vanished.

Alex Chisholm is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Learning Games Network, a non-profit organization bridging the gap between research and practice in game-based learning.  He has collaborated on product and program development with Microsoft, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, BrainPOP, Federal Reserve Bank-New York, and the Hewlett and Gates Foundations, among others.

Attention Transmedia Producers, Attention Transmedia Scholars...

Today, I am using my blog space to share announcements of two upcoming events which may be of interest to some of my readers Transmedia Lab Competition at RioContentMarket 2013

The Transmedia Lab is one of the activities of the RioContentMarket, an international event on multiplatform content production open to the audiovisual and digital media industry. The Transmedia Lab aims to promote professional training and project improvement.

In the last edition of RioContentMarket, in 2012, more than 100 projects from all of Latin America were submitted and 12 transmedia projects were selected to participate in the Transmedia Lab, which lasted 4 days. The project’s authors and representatives consulted with market experts; were presented in pitching sessions to buyers, co-producers and television channels; and participated in meetings with domestic and international market players.

Besides creating opportunities for all participating projects, three awards were given and chosen by three different groups of judges:

(i)            Reed MIDEM Award (participation and pitching at MIPCube): Buenaventura Mon Amour project (Colombia);

(ii)           PETROBRAS/The Alchemists Award (participation in Transmedia Hollywood): Contatos project (Brazil), and

(iii)          Turner Broadcasting Award (USD 10,000 for project development): Contatos project (Brazil).

In the 2013 edition of RioContentMarket, the Transmedia Lab will focus on transmedia projects for TV series and 30 projects will be selected: 10 international and 20 Brazilian projects. The Transmedia Lab - Series will be held from February 17 through 22, 2013 in two steps (I) Capacitating from February 17th to 19th, and (II)Pitching and Panels, February 20th to 22nd. The Capacitating step will be held following the training of the projects’ authors for pitching and the scheduling of meetings between consultants and creative producers of the selected projects. The Pitching and Panels will be held during the RioContentMarket 2013 with keynotes and panels related to transmedia topics and pitching projects for industry and market professionals.

The Transmedia Lab objectives for 2013 are:

·                enhance television series narratives, through specialized consulting with market experts;

·                improve the transmedia projects for television series to qualify them for the audiovisual market nationally and internationally;

·                bring players together, encouraging the dialogue between independent producers and channel executives;

·                create business opportunities for the development of high quality TV series; and

·                give visibility to selected projects.

For more information, visit this site. 

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Media in Transition 8: Public Media, Private Media

Conference dates: May 3-5 (Fri.-Sun.), 2013 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

An archive of previous Media in Transition conferences, 1999-2011.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November). Please see the end of this call for papers for submission instructions.

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers.  While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice.  MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them.  It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Reality television and confessional journalism have done much to invert the relations between private and public. But the borders have long been malleable. Historically, we know that camera-armed Kodakers and telephone party lines threatened the status quo of the private; that the media were complicit in keeping from the public FDR’s disability and the foibles of the ruling elite; and that paparazzi and celebrities are strategically intertwined in the game of publicity. How have the various media played these roles (and represented them), and how is the issue changing at a moment when most of our mediated transactions leave data traces that not only redefine the borders of the private, but that serve as commodities in their own right?

The public, too, is a contested space. Edmund Burke’s late 18th century invocation of the fourth estate linked information flow and political order, anticipating aspects of Habermas’s public sphere. From this perspective, trends such as a siege on public service broadcasting, a press in decline, and media fragmentation on the rise, all ring alarm bells. Yet WikiLeaks and innovative civic uses of media suggest a sharp countertrend. What are the fault lines in this struggle? How have they been represented in media texts, enacted through participants and given form in media policy? And what are we to make of the fate of a public culture in a world whose media representations are increasingly on-demand, personalized and algorithmically-designed to please?

Finally, MiT8 is also concerned with the private-public rift that appears most frequently in struggles over intellectual property (IP). Ever-longer terms of IP protection combined with a shift from media artifacts (like paper books) to services (like e-journals) threaten long-standing practices such as book lending (libraries) and raise thorny questions about cultural access. Social media sites, powered by users, often remain the private property of corporations, akin to the public square’s replacement by the mall, and once-public media texts, like certain photographic and film collections, have been re-privatized by an array of institutions. These undulations in the private and public have implications for our texts (remix culture), our access to them, and our activities as audiences; but they also have a rich history of contestation, evidenced in the copybook and scrapbook, compilation film, popular song and the open source and creative commons movement.

MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific attention to textual practice, users, policy and cultural implications. As usual, we encourage work from across media forms and across historical periods and cultural regions.

Possible topics include:

• Media traces: cookies, GPS data, TiVo and Kindle tracking
• The paradoxes of celebrity and the public persona
• Representing the anxieties of the private in film, tv, literature
• MMORPGs / identities / virtual publics
• The spatial turn in media: private consumption in public places
• Historical media panics regarding the private-public divide
• When cookies shape content, what happens to the public?
• Creative commons and the new public sphere
• Big data and privacy
• Party lines and two-way radio: amplifying the private
• The fate of public libraries in the era of digital services
• Methodologies of internet and privacy studies
• Creative commons, free software, and the new public sphere
• Public and civic WiFi access to the internet
• Surveillance, monitoring and their (dis)contents

Submit an Abstract and Short Bio Short abstracts for papers should be about 250 words in a PDF or Word format and should be sent as email attachments to mit8@mit.edu no later than Friday, March 1, 2013. Please include a short (75 words or fewer) biographical statement.

We will be evaluating submissions on a rolling basis beginning in November and will respond to every proposal.

Include a Short Bibliography For this year’s conference, we recommend that you include a brief bibliography of no more than one page in length with your abstract and bio. 

Proposals for Full Panels Proposals for full panels of three or four speakers should include a panel title and separate abstracts and bios for each speaker. Anyone proposing a full panel should recruit a moderator.

Submit a Full Paper In order to be considered for inclusion in a conference anthology, you must submit a full version of your paper prior to the beginning of the conference.

If you have any questions about the eighth Media in Transition conference, please contact Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu.

Spreadable Media IS Coming...Spreadable Media IS Coming...

 

Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green,  is scheduled to come out at the end of January 2013. The book represents the culmination of a strand of research which we started when all three of the authors were working together on the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and it was the extension of a white paper which I co-authored with two of the Comparative Media Studies masters students, Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb.

We will be sharing more about the book as we get closer to its release, but as part of the plan for the book, we commissioned more than 30 essays from people who have at one time or another been linked to the consortium -- ranging from former graduate students who have since entered academia or the media industry and a range of faculty who have been fellows in the consortium, along with some others whose work has been central to our understanding of this topic.

Over the next few months leading up to the book's publication date, we are going to be releasing a few of these essays each week with mechanisms which make it easy to spread to the larger community. We want to put the book's core message, "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" to the test and encourage people to send links, to repost these through blogs, and otherwise, help to spark a larger conversation around issues of grassroots media circulation.

The time is certainly right for such a discussion following a year when Kony 2012 became the most widely spread and fastest spreading video in the history of YouTube and when "Binders of Women" emerged within minutes as part of the public's response to the presidential debates. Our argument, though, is that describing these processes as "going viral" does not deal adequately with the complex social processes and cultural stakes in expanding the role of the public -- as individuals and members of networks -- in shaping the circulation of media content.

Today, we are releasing the first of the essays, which foreground people who participated at this year's Futures of Entertainment conference. They are a good sample of the range of material which will be coming out through the Spreadable Media website (and I will be showcasing many more of these blog posts here, alongside the regular flow of interviews, announcements, and other materials, so stay tuned, and more than that, help us spread this content to people who might find it interesting.)

What follows are some highlights from the initial essays. To read the full entries, follow the links back to the Spreadable Media homepage.

Tecnobrega’s Productive Audiences

Ana Domb

Ronaldo Lemos (2008) has coined the phrase “globoperipheral music” to describe the emergence of music scenes that put central focus on the peripheries. Wayne Marshall (2009) has alternatively dubbed the trend “Global Ghettotech,” a more sardonic reference to the somewhat romantic international interest in the music from the slums of former colonies. Whatever you want to call it, a few years back, this emerging and tightly networked global music circuit was buzzing particularly about the infectious beats of Tecnobrega, Brazil’s “Tacky Techno.” In Belém, the capital of the Amazon, a whole industry had emerged around this music, and apparently it was very happily reinventing the music business’s status quo. A team of Brazilian researchers led by Ronaldo Lemos and Oona Castro (2008) encountered a vibrant grassroots economic system, one where musicians had decided to bypass traditional music labels and were instead making successful partnerships with the local “pirates” who loyally feature Tecnobrega artists in the midst of their very own bootlegged bounty.

With this research in hand, I headed to Belém myself to study the audiences’ role in this booming music scene. With 1.5 million inhabitants, Belém was reported to have 140 Tecnobrega bands and 700 aparelhagems (literally, “apparatuses”), the Tecnobrega sound systems that, in their most ambitious instances, are formed by gigantic retrofuturistic machines that elevate the godlike DJs through hydraulics at the end of the shows. This infrastructure supports more than 4,000 Tecnobrega parties a month in Belém. What I found not only involved audiences but empowered participants who valued their role as industry agents (Domb 2009). When the Tecnobrega musicians decided to forgo copyright and deem all uses and circulation of their music as not only legitimate but positive, local audiences thrived....

Transnational Audiences and East Asian Television

Xiaochang Li

Consider a clip from the Japanese variety show Arashi no Shukudai-kun that recently made its way onto YouTube in early 2009: a small group of Japanese pop singers are challenged to eat a “surprisingly large” hamburger named after a city in the Ibaraki prefecture and are joking about how “Super American” the situation is. They suggest that the burger inspires them to don overalls and grow “amazing” chest hair, while Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” blares in the background. The clip was then subtitled in English by two fans based in Australia and circulated based on its appeal to English-speaking audiences of the “J-pop” performers in the video as an embodied spectacle of Japanese popular culture. Various versions of the clip were distributed online through fan communities on LiveJournal, a Russian-owned social blogging platform with offices headquartered in San Francisco, and other forums, and fans shared the links through their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and other social media channels. In the process, the Arashi no Shukudai-kun clip was recontextualized, reformatted, resubtitled, and diverted to new (and sometimes unexpected) audiences at every step along the way. Far from exceptional, there are countless clips like this one on YouTube: in the global spreadable media environment, its crisscrossing path back and forth across multiple national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries is becoming perfectly common.

Not only is the transnational movement of media becoming increasingly pervasive; it has also become significantly more—and more visibly—multinodal. Thus, we must go beyond the use of Bruce Springsteen in the background of a Japanese variety show as part of a parody and indigenization of Western cultural materials to consider its subsequent movement as it is taken up, translated, and circulated by grassroots intermediaries, passing through divergent and overlapping circuits, often outside the purview of established media industries and markets. In short, we must look beyond sites of production and consumption to consider the practices of transmission and the routes of circulation—the means and manner by which people spread media to one another—which are increasingly shaping the flow of transnational content....

The Implicit Contract

Alec Austin

Everyone wants something from their entertainment. Whatever this desire is, audiences’ satisfaction with a product is dependent on whether their expectations are fulfilled or exceeded. As such, viewing the relationship between the provider and the audience of an entertainment property as a contract helps explain why audiences enjoy and accept some content choices yet reject and are angered by others.

Creators and critics of fiction and film have been aware for quite some time of the need to entertain audiences without boring or distracting them. One quote that is regularly cited in online writing communities comes from science fiction author Larry Niven, who described the reader as “entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling that his time has been wasted, you’re in violation [of the implicit contract]” (quoted, for instance, in Salway 2006).

While Niven describes the implicit contract in terms of engaging and entertaining the audience, film theorists have taken the metaphor further. Thomas Schatz (1977) and Henry Jenkins (1992) use the lens of a contract to discuss relationships between media producers and audiences. Schatz describes a film genre as a tacit contract which governs a reciprocal studio-audience relationship, while Jenkins argues that Schatz undermines the reciprocal dimension of the contract by assuming that what Hollywood delivers is what the audience wants (1992, 123)......

YouTube and Archives in Educational Environments

Ted Hovet

Students in a film studies class settle back and watch a clip of the iconic scene from the ending of Casablanca when Rick and Ilsa part at the airport. The clip that follows shows Rick sitting in his darkened bar, bitterly reminiscing about his past . . . when a balloon suddenly floats into the frame. Rick appears to knock it away as he pounds his fist on the table. A third clip begins with the animated Warner Brothers logo, followed by the eight-minute cartoon “Carrotblanca,” which, as the student presenting these clips points out, provides an ending to the film (Rick/Bugs and Ilsa/Kitty uniting rather than parting) that many viewers would prefer.

The sort of modified “mash-up” of Casablanca created by this student is hardly something new to fan communities and others who take images from one context and reshape or repackage them in an entirely new way. But the media studies classroom creates a context that encourages both students and educators to productively analyze the nature of the vast (though limited) archives of media images and the active recirculation of them for particular purposes. The classroom setting provides a laboratory that allows us to isolate and study the means by which media is spread. In the classroom, trends will be not only identified or predicted but actively shaped as students/fans (as well as the aca/fans who mentor them) grapple with the practical, ethical, and intellectual parameters of taking media into their own hands and reshaping its content.....

“Consumers” or “Multipliers”?

Grant McCracken

The term “consumer” is a fixture of the marketing, media, and cultural worlds. It is hard to imagine certain conversations without it. Lucky little term. “Consumer” is coin of the realm.

On the other hand, as Marshall Sahlins says, every theory is a bargain with reality (1976, 45). It helps us think some things. It discourages us from thinking others.

On the whole, “consumer” was a better term than the alternatives, “customer” or “buyer.” It evoked the distinction between producer and consumer, reminding the corporation that capitalism is not about the art of the possible but the art of the desirable. It doesn’t matter what the corporation does. It will sell only what the consumer wants.

Charles Coolidge Parlin made this paradigmatic shift official when, in 1912, he offered the slogan “the consumer is king.” A. G. Lafley, the CEO of Procter & Gamble from 2000 to 2010, renewed the term’s centrality when he reminded his staff, as he often did, “the consumer is boss.” (See, for instance, Markels 2006.) The term “consumer” has helped capitalism take the larger view.

On the other hand, not everyone likes the term “consumer.” Some think it’s antiecological. “Consumers” sound like ravening beasts who must destroy what they buy instead of renting it from the recycler.....

Chuck vs. Leno

Sheila Murphy Seles

In April 2009, a sandwich saved a television show. The sandwich was fairly large—12 inches, to be exact—but the feat was extraordinary nonetheless. Here’s what happened. Fans heard that the NBC comedy Chuck might be canceled at the end of the 2008–2009 television season, and they took the usual action fans take in these situations: they wrote letters to the studio and television network responsible for producing Chuck and putting it on the air. Then, they did something different—Chuck fans pled their case directly to Subway, one of the show’s prominent sponsors. On April 27, 2009, the day of Chuck’s season finale, fans went to Subway and bought foot-long sandwiches—a lot of foot-long sandwiches. They filled out comment cards, telling Subway managers that they bought the sandwiches to support Chuck. It worked. On May 19, 2009, NBC released a statement saying that Chuck had been renewed “due to an innovative advertising partnership with Subway.”

The campaign to save Chuck from cancellation, appropriately called the “Finale and Footlong” campaign, relied almost entirely on organization from the Chuck Internet community. The popular press eventually picked up on these fan efforts, but word spread primarily on Twitter and Chuck fan sites. The campaign was launched by fan Wendy Farrington (2009) through her LiveJournal page centralized on the fan website zachary-levi.com, which is named for (but not run by) the actor who plays Chuck. A description of the campaign on zachary-levi.com explains why the fans decided to buy sandwiches: “Lots of people want to help Chuck, but may not have the time or inclination to write letters, but the network will listen closer if we’re talking dollars. [. . .] The intent is to let the network and their sponsor know that we’ve received their message. This is something a Nielson [sic] box can’t do . . . this is a translation of fan loyalty into real dollars that NBC & Subway can measure” (Michelle 2009).....

Learning to Be a Responsible Circulator

Christopher Weaver and Sam Ford

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic operetta The Gondoliers, the song “There Lived a King” tells the story of a royal who desired equality and thought to promote everyone to high office within his kingdom in order to achieve a single class of well-to-do, content subjects (Gilbert 1889). But the inherent nature of an entropic universe resulted in unforeseen consequences that provided for a very different reality than intended. For, after the process of elevation in rank, “Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats, and Bishops in their shovel hats were plentiful as tabby cats—in point of fact, too many.” The last line of the song highlights the ultimate realization of such a world: “When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.”

A spreadable media environment by its very nature fosters a more participatory society. Yet, in a culture where a majority of the audience has access to a ubiquitous communication environment, each person should hold a greater level of personal responsibility for establishing credibility of both content and sources.

In a “broadcast world,” credibility was easier to establish. If we trust “name” news brands such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, or National Public Radio, we tend to treat those who work for the “brand” as trustworthy by association. As the number of published voices grows exponentially, however, it may become exceedingly difficult to make an informed judgment about how trustworthy sources are when they do not have a recognized brand behind them.....

Twitter Revolutions?

Henry Jenkins

In summer 2009, public discontent around the outcome of the Iranian elections sparked a worldwide response, largely because of the visibility these protests gained through social networking sites. What happened in Tehran retrospectively can be seen as an early sign of larger unrest in the region, which gave rise to the so-called Arab Spring which started in late 2010 and reached its fullest scope in 2011. Journalists, bloggers, and other cyber-enthusiasts have celebrated the use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube by protesters in each of these countries and by their supporters from the West as a decisive sign that grassroots communicators might be able to route around government censors and that citizen journalists might be able to force international concerns onto the agenda of the professional news media. And this perceived value of social media platforms as potential tools for political change were further fueled in the U.S. by early 2011 protests against the Wisconsin governor, who was pushing to end collective bargaining for government employees in in the state, and by the emergence of the Occupy movement in fall 2011.

In each case, the capacity of everyday people to circulate information and opinion online—rather than going through professional journalists—was key in shaping and mobilizing public opinion. A full account of these efforts would require a book of its own. However, here, I want to explore some key lessons from the Iranian example and to point to some of the larger questions it raises about the value of social media for political activism....

Joss Whedon, the Browncoats, and Dr. Horrible

Henry Jenkins

Experimentation among independent media creators is inspiring some mainstream media producers to create alternative systems of production and distribution. Few media producers have been as adept at courting and maintaining the engagement of dedicated fans as Joss Whedon—the showrunner responsible for such cult television series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004), Firefly (2002), and Dollhouse (2009–2010). Whedon has one of the most dedicated and concentrated cult audiences, yet he has often had difficulty building up a sufficient mass audience (as measured by Nielsen) to sustain a television series on broadcast or first-tier cable channels.

Whedon’s earliest series (Buffy, Angel) survived primarily because of deflated expectations about ratings numbers as new television networks were fragmenting the marketplace and as the television industry was adjusting to the erosion of younger viewers. His fan loyalty resulted in early successes in terms of DVD/video sales and rentals and, later, in terms of various legal download services.

Whedon’s more recent series have been short-lived, building desired and desiring audiences but getting canceled before the end of their first season (in the case of Firefly) or second season (in the case of Dollhouse). The Browncoats, Firefly’s most passionate fans, lobbied hard for a feature film, Serenity (2005), which would resolve some of the character and plot issues left open by Firefly’s cancellation. The Browncoats were out in force nationwide, drawing local interest in Serenity’s opening, camping out in front of theaters, developing online campaigns, and speaking to other science fiction fans who they hoped might embrace the series. By the end of their campaign, which was encouraged by the studio as “viral marketing,” the active Browncoats numbered more than 75,000 members, with more than 85 percent of them actively recruited by other fans. While the film had only modest box office revenue, its impressive DVD sales were attributed to the buzz created by the Browncoats (Affinitive 2006).

However, when the dust settled, the studio—Universal Pictures—sent cease-and-desist letters to some of the more enterprising amateur publicists, demanding retroactive licensing fees for the reproduction of series images on T-shirts and posters (11th Hour 2006). The fans regrouped, counting all of the time and labor (not to mention their own money) put into supporting the film’s release. They eventually sent Universal an “invoice” for more than $2 million as represented by their 28,000 “billable hours,” an attempt to translate their fan activities into the industry’s language (DMCA Wiki 2006). These Browncoats had understood their engagement in terms of their emotional connection with the property—measured within a nonmarket logic. However, if the studio wanted to read everything through a commercial lens, they pointed out that they had added much more value than they had taken....

Watch for more essays to be released each week through this blog and through the Spreadable Media website.

Rethinking the Industrial Mindset: An Interview with No Straight Lines' Alan Moore (Part Two)

In your chapter, “Me We,” you confront a core debate about the relationship of the individual and the community. This question is certainly invited by the notion of “participation” which runs across the book. This term, as some critics of my own work note, begs the question, Participation in what? If you are moving from an industrial model of conformity to mass expectations, you are not embracing a notion of total individualism. So, how do we resolve the relationship of the individual to the community? What models of community life are you embracing?

I agree a most challenging question and the answer(s) are multi-layered. I think it also requires a compassion and understanding human nature. The great Mohammad Ali was once asked what what his shortest poem was, without hesitation he said, ‘Me We’. Of course ‘Me We’ relates to Carl Jung’s insight that, “I” needs “we” to truly be “I” which points to how we construct meaningful identities – through meaningful networked relations to the world around us. It additionally leads us to the insight humanities greatest asset is its ability to work in aggregates – cooperatively. Which has multiple benefits for we and me.

Lets take one example. A systems level organizational change of the healthcare system is currently underway in Nova Scotia, through a process described as ‘Participatory Leadership’, whereby it is the participation of the people that are the true actors (nurses, clinicians, patients, etc.) within that healthcare system that are co-designing, and co-creating how they are going to find the answers to their difficult and challenging issues. This process allows all participants to contribute and in that they embrace systems change – or in other words, people embrace what they create.

As the Director Janet Braunstein Moody told me, ‘we are doing things today not possible without participatory leadership becoming the core operating process of the organization’. She points out that in her experience after working in healthcare for many years that you can do almost anything with a shared vision – when there is awareness and comprehension of that shared vision and so the needs of the whole outweigh the needs of the individual. This translates for example into the Nova Scotia healthcare system co-budgeting together, deciding as a group how to spend the budget, something that could never have been achieved before.

It has created the ability to move with great speed and flexibility and that leadership is now recognized as stewardship of an eco-system that must be nurtured not fought over like a battlefield.

People’s deep motivation is not monetary but more importantly it is based upon meaningful connection – how we make context and meaning, through the webs of relationships and how we derive value from those relationships and connections are central to human beings. This is an inversion of traditional top down coercive management culture, media culture (thinking about your work on fan fiction) or how we think about learning, or how we deliver healthcare services, or budget the finances of a village, town or region.

Further examples are the extraordinary work achieved by Michel Bauwens at the p2p foundation charting the multifaceted rise of the p2p society, new manufacturing capability such as wikispeed, 100k garages, the city of San Francisco working on the idea of shareable cities, which one could argue is built upon the amazing work of Mayor Jamie Lerner in the Brazillian city Curitiba in the 1960’s, the rise of crowdfunding and the changing of legislation to accommodate its potential in the US, regions like Mondragon in Spain that have run on participatory principles for many years, the entire open software movement, the work of Creative Commons that is built on how creative and intellectual content is shared rather than restricted, and Ushahidi the crisis management platform a prototype NGO of the future; flat, networked open source, adaptive that was built entirely by a volunteer workforce. We see participatory cultures in innovation, such as innocentive, your encore or topcoder. Or social movements such as SOCAP.

Participatory culture is about human identity, and about a different type of capital – human capital, social capital, cultural capital, intellectual and knowledge capital, as well as financial capital. Each of which is able to create value and release value. Each of these capitals relate to why the above examples work. But we have to understand humanity only gives it creative best, its highest sacrifice not for 50 pieces of silver but something else. The thing that enriches us, the thing that says we are more than just ourselves.

My views on this are also inspired by the work of Lewis Hyde, who writes about the gift economy and how and why the gifts we give to each other are deep cultural bonding agents between individuals, groups and communities. The universal nature of humanity is why in Japan it is seen as extremely rude to pour your own sake, your guest pours for you and so gives you the gift and the bond is co-created, a ritual also observed in the South of France at the beginning of a collective meal. To dig deeper we see this is the foundations of any regenerative society, the principle of reciprocity, re and pro – back and forth.

Academic Jay Rosen describes the mass media / industrial world where we were atomized into individuals and only connected up to each other across mass media. Today he says that power has eroded. It has eroded because in part a greater power has spoken a desire for a substantial change in the human condition. Having deconstructed humanity almost to the point of deconstruction, participatory cultures, part of the Human-OS say we are all rich and can be richer by how we cooperate and participate together.

There is no one size fits all, it requires us to evolve and develop a literacy that enables us to speak authoritatively, to discuss and design in great detail how participatory cultures could work in a multitude of situations.

A question you try to address in the book is “what happens when the right information gets to the right people at the right time” and you provide some examples of the transformative consequences of our shifting access to information here. What do these examples teach us? How do you address your own question? What factors prevent this productive allocation of information much of the time?

They teach us that sharing information is power, is powerful and enriching.

I address my own question by believing that openness is resilience, which allows greater diversity, and that if we do not have access to the right information at the right time we cannot be meaningful actors and authors of our own lives and destinies. It also is a redistributive model, which enables to deal with a more complex world but also changes and challenges power relationships in commercial and civic society.

So if we take the story of Patients Know Best, a healthcare service for people with chronic healthcare conditions, the ability for patients and clinicians to share and participate together in the diagnosis and treatment of common problems in unique circumstances, we see a dramatic improvement in the right clinical decisions being taken which means the reduction in wrong diagnosis, over prescription of drugs and the clogging up of waiting rooms in hospitals to see specialists. So sharing information improves safety, reduces costs, and saves time.

Ushahidi – the crisis management platform (Kenya – post election crisis, Haiti, Japan earthquake) and NGO, enables people and organizations to work more effectively in chaotic conditions, with limited resources to respond at internet speeds. Or enables the ability to create a cartography of information that enables more meaningful actions to be taken.

These also point to the idea of the learning organization that is able to iteratively learn and so evolve, adapt and develop naturally.

A story about power

What stops these things happening? A dominant theory that says control of knowledge and information is power – Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikispeed vs. Ford, Threadless vs. Gap. If you have been taught to see and act in the world in a particular way – linear and the organization as a hierarchical box, conceptualizing a new geometric organizational shape that is seemingly chaotic, complex and flat is very hard to do – it is a paradigm shift something that Thomas Kuhn identified.

These shifts however challenge cultural worldviews and they represent a fundamental reordering of the set of arrangements in how we work to get things done. As this shift becomes ever more present in the older paradigm organizations in incumbent positions of power increasingly resist as although this shift brings better things into the world it also signifies a change in values and power relationships – no one has ever given up all their power willingly and until they exhaust themselves morally and financially.

You seem to hold open the idea that the right commercial practices could work to enable and support the creative capacities of the general population. Yet, this sounds very much the promise made by early advocates of “web 2.0.” What lessons have we learned from the successes or more often, the failures of Web 2.0 companies to live up to these ideals?

There is no doubt that web 2.0 was seen as a utopian new beginning, and perhaps that was the problem – it was too utopian, the idea that everything was happening ‘online’ was a false one.

But you have to start somewhere and there is no doubt that if one studies the development of our online world many people over a considerable number of years worked extremely hard to create the foundational capabilities of a networked world.

What we are seeing is a greater sophistication in the design of organizations, and the blending of a variety of processes and capabilities for that to happen. For example, taking the keywords that describe Local Motors for example.

This represents the prototype of the networked organization, the company as a platform that runs lean, uses Creative Commons as a legal frameworks that uses co-creation as a core capability within the company whilst also using flex manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. One can see the DNA of 2.0 here in this chart and for that we can be grateful. We can also see a greater sophistication; a blending of tools and process that takes us beyond 2.0 thinking and doing as the previous example of Patients Know Best demonstrates.

Was 2.0 a failure? I would argue that it was a journey we needed to go on – from all that work and effort a better way of organizing has evolved.

Alan  Moore sits on the “board of inspiration” at the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab. He acts as “Head of Vision” for the Grow Venture Community, is a board director of the crisis management NGO Ushahidi and is as a special advisor to a number of innovative companies and organizations including publishing, mobile, the theatre and finance.

Can a Game Help Low-Income Youth Get into College?: An Interview with Colleagology Games (Part Two)

Mission: Admission represents an attempt to translate your earlier game into Facebook. What differs between the two versions? What has social media allowed you to do which you couldn’t do before?

TF: Mission: Admission is a Facebook adaptation of Application Crunch. Like the card game, it is about the application process. In the game, you take on a character that is applying to college. That character has a family financial background and an aspiration about what they want to be in life. The game takes place over a real world week, driven by a set of deadlines that are similar to those in the card game: applications for colleges, scholarships, FAFSA, etc.

Because it is a digital game, we can bring the game to life a bit more in this format. So, the game takes place in a school where activities that you can engage with are found in the various areas: the library, the counseling office, the fine arts studio, the gym, the tech lab, the writing lab, etc.

When you start out, your school only has a few activities available, so your character doesn’t have as much opportunity as you might like. We meant this to be representative of how many low income students might experience their schools.

As you help your character earn scholarships, get accepted to schools, and more, you earn “pride” for your school, which you can spend upgrading the various areas to include more options for your character. At the end of each week, your character goes off to school, if you were successful in getting them accepted and finding ways to pay for the college of your choice.

You get a new character to help, and your former characters will write you letters home telling you how they are doing in school. Overall, it is a much deeper system in many ways, than the card game, but I think they both have their strengths.

Some may wonder about your decisions regarding the duration of game play on Mission: Admission. Can you explain your rationale for having such a prolonged play experience?

TF: It’s an interesting question—especially when you think of how long people play games like Farmville. In truth, I think the real difference is that we have made a game with a fixed time cycle, rather than the kind of open-endedness that most Facebook games employee. This was dictated somewhat by our subject matter: the college application process has a fixed duration and then you go or you don’t go to college.

We could have chosen to make a shorter game, of course, like a casual game that took, like 10-20 minutes to play through the application process. If we had done this, however, we would have lost what we thought of as a key learning: that you need to keep these deadlines in mind while you’re going on with the rest of life.

When you play the Facebook game, you can only make so many moves per session before you use all your energy. Then, you need to wait and remember to come back to finish your applications.

You also need to plan ahead. For example, many applications require letters of recommendation. These take time so you need to request them at least 12 hours before an application is due—time in the game is abstracted, as is money. You might have everything you need to apply to a full ride scholarship that will let you go to the college of your dreams, but if you don’t get that last letter of recommendation in on time, all your plans will dissipate. That is a pretty important lesson to learn!

ZBC: It’s one thing to teach students information about college, it’s another thing to teach them strategies. The weeklong play session exposes first generation students to valuable “life” lessons.

Chances are that college-educated parents who are familiar with the complexity of college applications will nudge their child to ask for letters of recommendation early, participate in an extracurricular or volunteer activity, or make sure to stay on top of deadlines. Many low-income students do not have that kind of targeted support at home or in their schools. Mission: Admission’s weeklong play time cultivates in college-related cultural capital.

What can you tell us about the balance between competition and collaboration in terms of the ways high school students engage with your games?

TF: The games are really about competing with the system and not directly with each other. Of course, there is competition—sometimes fierce—to be accepted at the more selective colleges, or for scholarships, but we find there is a lot of collaboration between players as well.

Both Application Crunch and Mission: Admission have an “ask a question” feature which rewards both the person who asks the question and the person who answers it best. These questions tend to create an atmosphere of safe discussion around college topics, where students can share what they know, or what they’ve learned from playing.

Also, as I’ve already noted, students like to share their strategies for play. We see that those who’ve played before like to teach new players the ropes. This confidence in their own understanding of the process is a real win for us, and seeing them share this understanding with fellow students in a kind of peer mentoring is really exciting.

What aspects of the game do they seem to bring with them back to their real world educational experiences?

TF: The things we see them bringing to their second plays are vocabulary (FAFSA, letters of recommendation, etc.) and strategy (safety schools, time management, meeting deadlines, etc.). Also, they bring a heightened sense of efficacy back, as found by our research team.

The project is too early on to see how strongly this transfers to their real world application processes, but we would love to be able to follow our current test group to see how that plays out.

ZBC: Many times we meet with students who are invested in going to college but don’t know what questions to ask adults who could serve in an advisory capacity. The games often act as a catalyst for generating conversation among students and adults. While students are playing, they frequently ask questions with real-life applications to the teacher or advisor in the room.

You are now turning your attention to developing a game for middle school students. What different kinds of goals and expectations are informing this project? What do elementary school students need to know about college?

TF: The middle school game is a very different kind of game. First, it is not directly about college or the application process. Instead, it focuses on the “adventure” of middle school, a place filled with monsters created by fears and doubts. In this game, it is the development of your interests into passions and skills that give you the power to defeat those monsters and make your way through middle school.

As with the high school games, we worked with a “junior design team” of local middle school students to create the game. The designers spent a lot of time teasing out what kinds of understanding—or misunderstandings—the students had about college and careers. As it turned out, they had almost no idea about what college is, how you get there, and what it might have to do with your future career.

We didn’t want to make a game explaining all of that, but we did want kids to feel like the choices they make now, in middle school, will affect the opportunities they have as they move into high school, college and career. The best weapons they can have in their journey are their own passions and skills. So, we created a game where those passions and skills turn into powers that help them fight through the demons of middle school.

Along the way, they are scaffolded in other ways: making friends who have high ambitions, starting and participating in clubs about their interests, seeking out mentors and other “soft skills” that may help them along the way. In the end, it is really a game about exploring and keeping your options open.

What did you gain by developing these games in the context of a major research university as opposed to through a commercial game or ed-tech company?

TF: The partnership between the Game Innovation Lab and The Pullias Center for Higher Education is a critical part of how these games are being developed. The fact that we’ve had access to our target players from day one is invaluable, as is the insight into the concerns of teachers and counselors.

The research we’re doing to evaluate these games is something that would never have happened if we had developed them in a commercial setting. I also believe that the opportunity to develop the kind of deep systemic mapping between the real world “mechanics” of the application process and the game mechanics would not have happened in another setting.

These games are built to allow players to develop the kind of strategies they can transfer to the real world. A player who walks away thinking: “I really should take pre-algebra in middle school,” or “I should remember to turn in my FAFSA,” are taking away something real from playing these games.

ZBC: Besides working with students as an integral part of the design and playtesting process, we also work closely with teachers, counselors and practitioners to learn from them how to best implement the games and to gather and verify ideas for content.

As a researcher with the Pullias Center for Higher Education, Dr. Zoe Corwin has conducted research on college preparation programs and access to financial aid for underserved students, college pathways for foster youth, and the role of social media and games on postsecondary access and completion.  She is co-editor of Preparing for College: Nine elements of effective outreach with SUNY Press and in addition to academic articles, has published several monographs designed for practitioners outlining effective college preparation strategies.  Dr. Corwin is currently involved with the Collegeology Games project, collaborating with game designers to capitalize on game-based strategies and social media to engage students in college preparation, college application and financial aid processes.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment.  The USC Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several of the most influential projects to be released in the emerging field of independent games, including games like Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola.  Tracy is also the author of “Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games,” a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.  Prior to entering academia, she was a professional game designer and entrepreneur making games for companies including Microsoft, Sony, MTV, among many others.

Announcing Futures of Entertainment 6 Line-Up

We are pleased to announce that the Futures of Entertainment 6 conference will be held on Friday, Nov. 9, and Saturday, Nov. 10, at the Wong Auditorium on MIT's campus in Cambridge, MA. Registration is available here. Also, note there is a pre-conference MIT Communications Forum free and open to the public on Thursday, Nov. 8. Some details below.

At the two-day conference, each morning will be spent discussing key issues faced by media producers, marketers, and audiences alike, at the heart of "the futures of entertainment." Each afternoon, we will look into how some of those issues are manifesting themselves in specific media industries.

Here is the schedule outline, as well as some of the confirmed panelists who will be joining us at the event. More information will be released regularly from @futuresof on Twitter.

Thursday, Nov. 8

7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m.: MIT Communications Forum Pre-FoE6 Event at Bartos Theater New Media in West Africa Panelists: Fadzi Makanda, Business Development Manager, iROKO Partners Derrick "DNA" Ashong, leader, Soulflége Colin Maclay, Managing Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University Moderator: Ralph Simon, head of the Mobilium Advisory Group and a founder of the mobile entertainment industry

Friday, Nov. 9  7:30 a.m. Registration Opens

8:30 a.m.-9:00 a.m.: Opening Remarks from FoE Fellows Laurie Baird and Ana Domb

9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Listening and Empathy: Making Companies More Human Panelists: Lara Lee, Chief Innovation and Operating Officer, Continuum Grant McCracken, author, Culturematic, Chief Culture Officer Carol Sanford, author, The Responsible Business Emily Yellin, author, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us Moderator: Sam Ford, Director of Digital Strategy, Peppercomm

11:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.: Coffee Break

11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: The Ethics and Politics of Curation in a Spreadable Media World--A One-on-One Conversation with Brain Pickings' Maria Popova and Undercurrent's Joshua Green

12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.: Lunch

1:45 p.m.-3:45 p.m.: The Futures of Public Media Panelists: Juan Devis, Director of Production and Program Development, KCET Public Media Andrew Golis, Director of Digital Media and Senior Editor, FRONTLINE Rekha Murthy, Director of Projects and Partnerships, Public Radio Exchange Annika Nyberg Frankenhaeuser, Media Director, European Broadcasting Union Moderator: Jessica Clark, media strategist, Association of Independents in Radio

3:45 p.m.-4:15 p.m.: Coffee Break

4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.: From Participatory Culture to Political Participation Panelists: Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media, MIT Dorian Electra, performing artist ("I'm in Love Friedrich Hayek"; "Roll with the Flow") Lauren Bird, Creative Media Coordinator, Harry Potter Alliance Aman Ali, co-creator, 30 Mosques in 30 Days Bassam Tariq, co-creator, 30 Mosques in 30 Days Moderator: Sangita Shresthova, Research Director of CivicPaths, University of Southern California

6:15 p.m.-6:45 p.m.: Closing Remarks from Maurício Mota and Louisa Stein

Saturday, Nov. 10 7:30 a.m. Registration Opens

8:30 a.m.-9:00 a.m.: Opening Remarks from Xiaochang Li and Mike Monello

9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Curing the Shiny New Object Syndrome: Strategy Vs. Hype When Using New Technologies Panelists: Todd Cunningham, Futures of Entertainment Fellow and television audience research leader Jason Falls, CEO, Social Media Explorer Eden Medina, Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Mansi Poddar, co-founder, Brown Paper Bag David Polinchock, Director, AT&T AdWorks Lab Moderator: Ben Malbon, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab

11:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.: Coffee Break

11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.: Rethinking Copyright: A discussion with musician, songwriter, and producer T Bone Burnett; Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California; and Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California

1:00 p.m.-2:15 p.m.: Coffee Break

2:15 p.m.-4:15 p.m.: The Futures of Video Gaming Panelists: Ed Fries, architect of Microsoft's video game business and co-founder of the Xbox project T.L. Taylor, Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT Yanis Varoufakis, Economist-in-Residence, Valve Software Christopher Weaver, founder of Bethesda Softworks and industry liaison, MIT GameLab Moderator: Futures of Entertainment Fellow and games producer Alec Austin

4:15 p.m.-4:45 p.m.: Coffee Break

4:45 p.m.-6:45 p.m.: The Futures of Storytelling and Sports Panelists: Abe Stein, researcher at Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; graduate student, Comparative Media Studies, MIT; columnist, Kill Screen Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media, Boston Celtics Moderator: Mark Warshaw, President, The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company Other Panelists To Be Announced Shortly

6:45 p.m.-7:15 p.m.: Closing Remarks from Heather Hendershot and Sheila Seles

7:15 p.m.: Post-Conference Workshop--The Futures of Transmedia Studies: Collaborations in and beyond Higher Education

For more information or to register to attend the conference, check out its home page.

Learning Through Practice: Participatory Culture Civics

The Media, Activism and Participatory Politics Project, which I direct, released a new working paper this week: Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Sangita Shresthova's "Learning Through Practice: Participatory Culture Civics." The report is based on extensive interviews with members and leadership of two innovative organizations, The Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children (the group responsible for Kony 2012), which won the Chase Manhattan Bank's Community Giving Competition on Facebook on two consecutive years. The report describes these organizations as providing an important bridge between the expressive and social dimensions of participatory culture towards some more active engagement in civic and political life. As the summary of the report explains:  

We present the civic practices of the HPA and IC, defined as activities that support organized collective action towards civic goals. We group these civic practices into four clusters. The distinctive cluster of “Create” practices (including Build Communities, Tell Stories and Produce Media) strongly builds on the organizations’ foundation within participatory cultures. The other three clusters (Inform, Connect, Organize & Mobilize) have more in common with traditional civic organizations, but remain informed by the unique nature of PCCs. All of the practice clusters make extensive use of media, and particularly new media. In fact, engagement with media is a crucial dimension of PCCs.We argue that, while different in many respects, both HPA and IC combine civic goals with the shared pleasures and flexible affordances of participatory culture.

This research was funded by the Spencer Foundation as part of their initiatives to better understand mechanisms for promoting civic learning, but it has also been developed in dialogue with the work of the MacArthur Foundation's Youth and Participatory Politics network. I featured the initial survey data from YPP here on my blog a few months ago, and we will be sharing more reports emerging from our involvement in that network in the next year, including further research on the fan activist networks around Nerdfighters and Imagine Better, the Students for Liberty Movement, and the political lives of Islamic-American youth in the post-9/11 world. These reports will compliment our previous released study of the DREAMer movement. This report was also meant to extend upon earlier analysis we've developed around HPA and IC, including this essay published as part of a special "Fan Activism" issue of Transformative Works and Culture, and this report on Kony 2012 published here on Confessions of an Aca-Fan.

You can read the full report via the pdf embedded below:

Learning through practice kligler shresthova-oct-2-2012 from amandafo

Some of the key conceptual breakthroughs of the report are represented by a series of models, reproduced below, which describe some of these organization's core civic practices. For us, it was striking how much central forms of networking, storytelling, media production, and other communication acts were to the ongoing operations of such groups. We have been struck all along at the ways that these groups have been effective at recruiting youth who may already be active in other kinds of interest-driven and friendship-driven networks, tapping and enhancing their existing skills and social connections, and then deploying them towards social change agendas.

We began this research, and had completed our field interviews, prior to the events surrounding Kony 2012, though it has taken us a bit later to fully analyze our data and produce this report. In some ways, Kony 2012 forced into sharp relief both the strengths and limitations of these emerging kinds of Participatory Culture Civic Organizations. Here's how the report's conclusion addresses these concerns:

The events surrounding IC’s release of KONY 2012 revealed the limitations of IC’s “outward facing” abilities. On the one hand, the film’s incredible “spreadability” was a testimony to IC’s ability to speak to a much wider public than previously imagined. On the other hand, the criticisms directed at KONY 2012 challenged members, often forcing them to adopt new practices. For example, while IC members were usually well-versed in spreading the word, they sometimes had difficulty moving beyond the official story told by the organization and usually did not critique its representation of events and issues. In the days following KONY 2012, we observed highly engaged IC members forced to “drill deep” to respond to difficult questions concerning the campaign. Collaborating with each other and often without support from the organization’s leadership, IC members struggled to research questions concerning IC’s relations to the religious right or its stand on gay rights. They then used social media to share their findings with each other.

IC members’ struggles around KONY 2012 call attention to an additional civic practice, which seems largely absent within IC and perhaps other PCC organizations -- “rebuttal”, or defending your own position in the face of opposition. In more traditional political organizations, members are socialized to perceive their position as opposed to another political party. In internal discussions, members may discuss counter-arguments to their position, and learn how to defend their beliefs, ferociously if needed. The HPA and IC tend to operate differently. These organizations rely on community relations, friendship and fun. They thrive in environments that are generally perceived as supportive and welcoming. Members tend to offer polite feedback, not sharp critique. They often try to avoid discord. These characteristics are part of what makes PCC organizations so inviting and hospitable to young people. At the same time, IC should have anticipated some of the criticism it received, yet it failed to prepare its rank and file to respond to the push-back on its KONY 2012 campaign. Their training in personal and collective storytelling, say, had not given them the background they needed to engage in the less consensual political debate. Moving forward, we suggest these organizations may have to consider how to cultivate this ability, while at the same time maintaining the warm environment that usually renders it unnecessary.

We hope that these closing critiques offer some ways forward for the new kinds of Participatory Culture Civic organizations we are studying and we plan to be spending more time looking at the ways such groups might foster stronger critical literacy skills, especially those around investigation and argumentation, in the future.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project based at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work has appeared in several scholarly journals and her book on Bollywood dance and globalization (Is It All About Hips?) was published by SAGE Publications in 2011.

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik is a Doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She works with Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito on the Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, as part of the Youth & Participatory Politics (YPP) Network, where she is investigating how youth’s involvement in participatory cultures and new media encourages their civic engagement. The case studies she works on focus on organizations and groups building on networks of fandom, online and off-line, with the aim of encouraging and sustaining young people’s involvement in civic life. Neta is currently working on her Doctoral thesis on alternative citizenship models and their potential for youth civic engagement. She holds an M.A. in Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.

Digital Detournement: Jamming (With) the Simpsons-Banksy Intro, Jonnystyle

The politics and poetics of remix culture remains an ongoing interest of this blog. It's no secret that my own interests in this issue goes back to my early work about fan culture in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (some twenty plus years ago) or that I regard meaningful and ethical appropriation to be one of the core media literacies of the 21st century. I recently had a chance to sit down with Moritz Fink, a German-based researcher who has been doing some provocative work looking at The Simpsons in relation to the larger history of cultural jamming politics, a project which seeks to rethink culture jamming not simply as a disruption or interruption of mass media feeds but also as having the potential to "jam with" popular culture, creating something new out of the raw materials provided us by mass media producers. Anyone who has thought about The Simpsons and especially its relationship with Rupert Murdock's Fox Network recognize that there's something curious going on here: The Simpsons both embodies a highly successful commercial franchise, one which extends across conglomerate media, and at the same time, it often models subversive and resistant relationships to corporate culture, going back to its roots in alternative comics. Early on, Matt Groening embraced the grassroots entrepreneurialism represented by the "Black Bart" T-shirts which transformed the Simpsons into a vehicle for Afro-Centric critique of white culture.

As we were talking, Fink shared with me a really compelling and more recent example of how The Simpsons sought to incorporate a street art aesthetic (by employing Banksy to design a special credit sequence) and then how this incorporation was taken up and critiqued by another remix artist (Jonnystyle). This seemed like a very "teachable moment," i.e. a rich example which many of us might draw into our classes as we seek to explain cultural politics with our students, so I asked if he would be willing to write up and share his analysis through this blog. I am very proud to be passing his piece along to you today.

Digital Detournement: Jamming (With) the Simpsons-Banksy Intro, Jonnystyle

by Moritz Fink

How many culture jammers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is four: one to hold the camera, one to call the news, and another two to install a huge neon sign that reads turn the lights off day.

No, I don’t mean to make fun of culture jammers. In fact, I’m with former Dead Kennedys singer and culture jammer Jello Biafra’s notion: “A prank a day keeps the dog leash away.”[1] Especially in world saturated by media images and corporate-sponsored messages, culture jamming appears to be the most compelling form of rhetoric to make a voice of dissent heard. What I find irritating, however, is the common identification of culture jamming with a cliché of cultural pessimists and sticks-in-the-mud.

Initial to the theorization of culture jamming was Mark Dery’s groundbreaking 1993 essay, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. For Dery, culture jammers answer Umberto Eco’s call for “communication guerillas”: “Intruding on the intruders,” he writes, “[culture jammers] invest ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent.” Dery’s portrayal of anti-corporate or anti-consumerist activists such as the Billboard Liberation Front and Adbusters magazine under the catchy label culture jamming went viral. It just worked -- both as an umbrella term and popular buzzword.

But differentiating between a culture industry in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and the consumers, who get “seduced” by it, gets increasingly difficult. The end of network television and the rise of the Internet as a new participatory medium are but the two most evident developments that indicate how profoundly the cultural infrastructure has changed during the 1990s. Thus, if we still cling to the notion of culture jamming as a practice of would-be revolutionaries who perceive the (mass) media as a monolithic entity and one-way communication tool, we’re rendering the term obsolete instead of updating it for the 21st century.

I would like, therefore, to argue against a definition of culture jamming that privileges the countercultural (though it is undoubtedly part of the concept). Culture jamming has never just referred to a jamming of culture (as negation); it always included a jamming with culture (as artful appropriation). Adbusters, for instance, has never been only a form of cultural criticism and disruption; it has always been a form of cultural production, too. Although Adbusters represents an anti-corporate stance, it is an active part of the media landscape as we see it today. Vice-versa, the culture industries -- despite their capitalist raison d’être -- do not necessarily reinforce a capitalist ideology; some of their products involve anticorporate or anticonsumerist messages, for example, in forms of satire.

The year the Adbusters Media Foundation was born, 1989, also saw the debut of the television series The Simpsons, one of the most popular forms of satire today. A double-coded text, The Simpsons isn’t only a mainstream product and brand that brings millions of dollars to its producers as well as its mother network, the Murdoch-owned Twentieth Century Fox. At the same time, it’s a text that appropriates other artifacts of popular culture and satirically comments on their cultural meanings and contradictions (including parodying itself and its own context of commercial television).

In one of The Simpsons’ annual Halloween episodes, for instance, the people of Springfield face an armada of gigantic turned-to-life billboards and corporate mascots that literally intrude into their lives, rampaging through the town and destroying their homes. Finally, it is Lisa who successfully turns off the invaders (ironically by performing an anti-ad jingle together with the singer Paul Anka -- what Planet Simpson author Chris Turner compares to the tactics used by culture jammers). Lisa is “intruding on the intruders,” if you will; she beats the corporate monsters at their own game. In the final scene we see Springfield’s news reporter Kent Brockman talking into the camera (and thus implicitly addressing the viewers of The Simpsons): “Even as I speak, this scourge of advertising could be heading towards your town. Lock your doors! Bar your widows! Because the next advertisement you see could destroy your house and eat your family.” Then Homer appears in the image’s frame and adds the televisual commonplace, “We’ll be right back,” and The Simpsons cuts to commercials.

Of course, it’s not that The Simpsons invokes its audience to turn off their TV sets (you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you, right?). But the popular show has successfully redefined the boundaries of what can be said and done on and with television by offering trenchant social satire and sophisticated media parody. On the air for more than two decades now, The Simpsons has inspired several generations of what Alvin Toffler, back in the 1980s, envisioned as “prosumers” (a neologism coined of the words “producer” and “consumer” that has become reality at least with the development of Web 2.0).

If prosumers create texts that evoke a level of critique or challenge towards the corporate media, we can discuss these texts as forms of culture jamming. To illustrate this point, I will show you a video clip that I found on YouTube during my research on the cultural meanings of The Simpsons. It is a mashup of the special Simpsons opening sequence created by the show’s writers in collaboration with British street artist Banksy for the 22nd-season episode “MoneyBART” (2010). But before we start, here’s the original…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1iplQQJTo

…and here’s what became out of it: The creator of the mashup clip, who goes by the name of Jonnystyle, took the original intro sequence with all the self-ironic, postmodern shticks it sported in typical Simpsons-style, and transformed it into a critical response on both The Simpsons and Banksy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUwV3brLbYI

Mmm... Subversion

To be sure, the original title sequence is interesting in its own regard. It starts like every Simpsons intro -- the opening credits, the show’s theme, snapshots of life in Springfield. For those who watch The Simpsons now and then, however, it is already clear that this is not going to be an ordinary day in Springfield, not a normal Simpsons episode (no, I’m not referring to the new HD opening here -- it was already introduced one year before, during season 20.) If they hadn’t known before from the Internet or TV Guide, viewers may first note the visuals through which Banksy’s pseudonymous signature was added to the Simpsons text. We see a billboard with a “Banksy” tag on it; or Bart writing repetitively “I must not write over the walls” in what is known to Simpsons fans as the “chalkboard gag” (after all, Bart is writing all over the walls). While these visual jokes are supposed to conjure up the anarchic spirit inherent to street art, Banksy’s political voice becomes especially explicit as the Simpson family gathers around the couch. With a sinister tune, we are shown what is underneath the happy cartoon show. In a dungeon-like, premodern setting, a battery of workers, apparently Asian children, produce Simpsons material: animation cells, Bart Simpson dolls and other merchandise articles, Simpsons DVDs, and so forth. Clearly, in a highly satiric fashion, Banksy’s grim portrayal references the show’s outsourcing to South Korean sweatshops.[2]

So far, so good. But what to make of this media fragment? Of course, a mere one-minute, forty-four second farce may seem negligible in contrast to the show’s economic status as cash cow for Twentieth Century Fox, a subsidiary of the massive conglomerate News Corporation.[3] After all, it’s only with Rupert Murdoch’s blessing that The Simpsons is able to broadcast such a trenchant form of satire. Although The Simpsons is provided with more creative freedom than virtually any other program in mainstream TV, it is still filtered by Fox’s executives.[4] And yet, what could be more indicative of The Simpsons’ meaning as pop cultural institution and avant-gardist than inviting of one of today’s most popular culture jammers and enabling him to criticize the show’s own exploitative practices. Postmodern chic? Perhaps. But certainly, a win-win-situation for both The Simpsons and Banksy.

We don’t know much about the production of the Simpsons-Banksy intro. It is pretty obvious, though, that Banksy only contributed to the storyboard of the sequence but wasn’t very much involved in the visuals of it. It is all Simpsons, nothing really Banksy-esque about it. Everything is shaped in the smooth, iconic Simpsons look.

Banksy’s Exit Through the Simpsons Gift Shop

What the original sequence lacks -- or, perhaps, what it is not able to provide given Fox’s restrictive policies -- is, however, achieved by Jonnystlye. On an animation cell we see the Simpson family sitting on the couch, and Jonnystyle writes himself into the Simpsons text. Homer transforms into a Simpsonized version of Jonnystyle’s recurring character, a big-headed cartoon with a moustache (in fact, at this point, it still could be an actual Simpsons “couch gag”). We see a hooded cartoon character (apparently Banksy), tagging a billboard with the slogan “Banksy” (still, perfectly realized in Simpsons iconography). Then appears Jonnystyle’s alter-ego and starts to chase the masked stranger. As both characters literally jump out of the frame, they morph into animated sketches on a scratchpad. Jonnystyle pulls down the black cloak of the Banksy avatar to reveal Mr. Burns, whom he smacks back into virtual space of the original Banksy-Simpsons title sequence.

Then comes my favorite part. While in the original intro sequence we see a machine that incessantly produces Bart Simpson dolls, in the Johnnystyle version the same machine vomits a hooded Mr. Burns figure. In the next scene, we see an array of these action figures in a supermarket shelf, completely arranged in Simpsons design and packaging that features the name “Banksy.”[1] As the camera zooms out, it shows the Fox logo, modified to read “20th Century Fox -- Gift Shop” along with the brand logos of Ebay and Toys “R” Us as well as Polygone (which refers to a mall in Montpellier, the French city where Jonnystyle is from). To great effect, the shot parodies the original ending of the Banksy-Simpsons intro in which the Fox logo is depicted as huge monolith in the midst of a prison camp secured by barbed wire fence, watching towers, and searchlights. Also in mockery of the original, in the very last scene of the Jonnytstyle video, we see -- as usually at the end of The Simpsons’ intros -- an animated TV set with the credits (actually it reads “Copyright of Matt Groening” in the Jonnystyle clip) blended in, as well as a sledge hammer on top of it. As The Simpsons intro theme ends, the credits on the television screen read “Diverted by Jonnystyle.” We hear birds singing peacefully as the lower part of a real-life figure (Jonnystyle?) enters the scene, grabs the hammer, and with a loud BANG smashes the tube. At the point the screen bursts, we realize it actually was a real-life TV which just has been battered to pieces. Awesome.

So, what does the Jonnystyle video clip tell us? On one level, it illustrates many aspects of participatory culture in the Web 2.0 age. Not only is the clip circulated via YouTube, it also jams with The Simpsons with the same creative wit and pop cultural sensibility that The Simpsons has tapped into and taught its audience since the show’s inception, and especially before it became little less than a global institution of popular culture. In short, Jonnystyle embraces the series’ genuine aesthetics in order to write his own voice into the Simpsons text.

On another level, Jonnystyle revises the original sequence in that he provides us with several layers of critique. This aspect of culture jamming built into the remix clip is what I find particularly interesting. First of all, it is pretty obvious that Jonnystyle confirms Banksy’s original criticism of The Simpsons as a corporate brand in the age of globalization with everything that this entails. In addition to that, however, his video foregrounds Banksy’s own hypocrisy in this respect. Isn’t, after all, Banksy himself a brand?, the video implicitly asks. In this regard, it is no coincidence that Jonnystyle demasks Banksy as being Mr. Burns (read: the embodiment of capital and big business on The Simpsons). In linking Banksy with big business, Jonnystlye echoes the common accusation among street artists of Banksy being a sellout.

The sellout debate suggests another parallel to The Simpsons. In fact, a lot of Simpsons fans decried the series’ selling out as it went mainstream during the early 1990s. This parallel, then, is also present in Jonnystyle’s depiction of the Fox logo that comes along with the affix “Gift Shop.” Perhaps this allusion to Banksy’s 2010 pseudo-documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop was unintended, but regardless, it captures well the overall tone of the Jonnystyle video.

Digital Detournement

According to Jonnystlye, his work is a sort of “détournement,” and I think this label helps us to understand what the video is doing. Originally, the term détournement refers to subversive aesthetic practices executed by the Situationist International, a French art collective of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the leading figures in the Situationist circle was the Marxist intellectual artist Guy Debord. Mostly known as author of Society of the Spectacle, which is widely considered to be one of the central texts of the student revolts in France in 1968, Debord also wrote a number of political essays. In co-authorship with fellow artist Gil J. Wolman, Debord elaborated on the concept of détournement in a 1956 piece titled “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Typical of left intellectuals at that time, Debord and Wolman bathe in philosophical -- especially Hegelian and Marxian -- language to describe their vision of a dialectical form of appropriative art which approaches a so-called “parodic-serious stage.”[5] In other words, their concept calls for subcultural appropriation that negates the ideology of the dominant (capitalist) culture.

Détournement, according to Debord translator Ken Knabb, means “deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose.” At this point, I do neither want to go into detail of Debord and Wolman’s original conception of détournement as a revolutionary practice (e.g., what they refer to as “literary communism”), nor do I want to suggest that the Jonnystyle video operates according to the Situationists’ and Debord’s vision of détournement. For Debord and Wolman, the film medium was a powerful vehicle for détournement, and Debord’s own films, like his 1961 Critique de la séperation (“Critique of Seperation”), suggest what he understands as a filmic form of détournement. In fact, the usage of clippings and images from other films or newsreels and the aspiration for Brechtian distanciation effects as we see it on Debord’s films creates an avant-garde aesthetic that is very different from Jonnystyle’s entertaining riff.

Nonetheless, there are two factors that strike me in this regard. First, Jonnystyle (like Debord, a French native-speaker, albeit unaware of the historic background of the term) refers to his video as a form of “détournement,” by which he means subversive content disguised as a piece of “official” culture.[6] Second, Jonnystyle’s reformulation of the term is situated in a media environment that differs significantly from what Debord calls a spectacular society back in the 1960s. As Henry Jenkins points out, we live in a media culture where contexts converge, “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”[7] Hence, mediated détournement in the age of Web 2.0, what I propose to call digital detournement (the removal of the accent should imply the updated account of the term), does not so much come out of the motivation to negate the media per se, but rather to challenge the culture industries that distribute and sell the media content. Forms of digital detournement aren’t meant to disrupt communication channels; rather they understand these channels as their infrastructure and use the possibilities provided by the digital media age, such as YouTube, to circulate their subversive comments on the corporate media.

The Jonnystyle video is illustrating many aspects of this new media generation. Rather than taking snippets almost randomly from the realm of media, Jonnystyle deliberately appropriates one specific and also very popular media fragment to write his own narrative into it, and circulate the product in DIY fashion on YouTube and Vimeo. His ways of modifying the original, as well as circulating his mashup, then, are not acts of cultural pessimism. As I mentioned before, Jonnystyle embraces The Simpsons to create a new work that is sophisticated both in its aesthetics and critique vis-à-vis The Simpsons and Banksy. And, at another level, Jonnystyle’s critical voice -- represented by the virtual unmasking and butt-kicking of Banksy and the demolition of the tube (read: The Simpsons) at the very end -- emerges through gestures of culture jamming.

These different levels tell us a lot about the understanding of pop culture today as it is illustrated by the work of Banksy and, probably even more significantly, by The Simpsons. Jonnystyle does not “hate” the culture he criticizes -- rather, he is an insider. Jonnystyle adopts the materials and even the style of the culture he toys with. Yet all this reworking isn’t done with a bitterness; it is executed in a affectionately playful way and with an eye for the detail.

Conclusion

The Simpsons exemplifies one of the major contradictions of mass culture today -- that is, how mainstream can a product become, and yet still considered “oppositional”? Perhaps The Simpsons’ writers saw a connection there when they asked Banksy to do something for the show (indeed, Banksy’s rise from underground artist to major pop phenomenon is somewhat similar to The Simpsons’ cultural history). Or, was it because they were fans of Banksy? Of course, it would be just as plausible to suggest that Matt Groening & Co. figured it would be cool (let alone would pay off) to have a really famous guest star and hip cultural phenomenon for the show.

All this brings us back to Jonnystyle’s digital detournement. Jonnystyle appropriates the text, not only to artfully jam with it, but also to add a critical perspective to it -- to jam the capitalist culture that is behind it, so to speak. In creative ways, he demonstrates his individual counter-reading of the original text. What Jonnystyle does is to implement a perspective of correction. His work articulates contradictions the Simpsons text necessarily entails. That Banksy considers himself a culture jammer is certainly just one of the paradoxes Jonnystyle reveals about the original intro. At the end of the Jonnystyle clip, the television screen -- surely one of the major foci of the Simpsons series -- gets smashed with a sledgehammer, an option the consumer-critical Simpsons by nature cannot and will never suggest.

---

[1] From my interview with Jonnystyle, I learned that he had taken original Mr. Burns action figures from The Simpsons to remake--and thus repurpose--them in that fashion.

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[1] Qtd. in Mark Dery, “Culture Jamming.” http://markdery.com/?page_id=154.

[2] Banksy and The Simpsons’ writers were criticized for their morbid and degrading representation of Korean animations studios as sweatshops. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2027768,00.html.

[3] See Linda Holmes. “‘The Simpsons’ Tries To Get Its Edge Back With A (Kind Of) Daring Opening.” http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/10/12/130509380/-the-simpsons-tries-to-get-its-edge-back-with-a-kind-of-daring-opening.

[4] This is also true for the Banksy-intro, even so, as Simpsons executive producer Al Jean mentioned in an interview with The New York Times, about 95 percent of Banksy’s original storyboard made it into the final version. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-simpsons-explains-its-button-pushing-banksy-opening/.

[5] Guy Debord. “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Trans. Ken Knabb.  Bureau of Public Secrets. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm>

[6] Interview with Jonnytsyle conducted via email in June 2012.

[7] Henry Jenkins. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU P, 2006, p. 2.

Moritz Fink is a doctoral candidate in American Literature and Cultural History at the University of Munich. His dissertation project explores the cultural meaning of the television series The Simpsons in relation to cultural convergence and culture jamming. His areas of interest are media and television studies, cultural studies, disability studies, visual culture, political humor, and satire. Outside of his academic career, he’s a passionate musician and graphic designer.

Communication and Technology: A Sylabus Designed to Support Networked Learning

Lsst time, I shared some of my current thinking about the challenges of designing an "open-laptop exam" and the new approach we have sought to apply to my lecture-hall scale class on new media and culture this term. Today, I share the actual syllabus for the course and the ways we have set it up for the students.  

A key thing to notice here is that we introduced the notion of new forms of learning from the very first day of class, making it part of the course content and not simply part of the course mechanics. We have also introduced assignments -- such as one around Wikipedia -- which focus students on how networked communities do work together to achieve shared goals, again in anticipation of what happens when we move into a more collective mode for the second part of the class. Our goal has been to be as explicit and transparent as possible about each element of the class design and to link it to the larger concepts this class seeks to explore. It might be harder to be this reflexive about the process in a different kind of subject.

Second, I designed the requirements to give students an increased sense of control over their performance in the first half of the class, when they are functioning primarily as individuals, by having multiple paths to success, and we have also designed the discussion sections and topics across the term to have an emphasis on the investigative process, so that when we turn to collective problem solving in the second part, they will already have worked in teams of various sizes to think through basic issues around digital culture which have a strong applied dimension. I plan to share some samples of these small group activities later in the term. So keep an eye on this blog.

I am reluctant to say too much about the class itself while it is still in process. But I will say that so far, we all seem to be having fun with this new approach and the students seem, if anything, less anxious than they had been under more traditional assignment structures. But, we are still in the more familiar, individualized portion of the class, and I do not yet know what happens when we make the shift at the mid-term, just a few weeks from now.

COMMUNICATION & TECHNOLOGY

ANNENBERG COMM 202 - FALL 2012

Monday & Wednesday, 2:00pm - 3:20pm

ASC G26 (The Auditorium)

INSTRUCTOR:

Professor Henry Jenkins

TEACHING ASSISTANTS:

Rhea Vichot

Andrew Schrock

Meryl Alper

CLASS OVERVIEW

This class is intended as an introduction to issues of media, technology, culture, and communication as read through the lens of contemporary debates concerning the Web and digital culture more generally. Each class session will explore a central question that has emerged from popular and academic responses to the ways our society has dealt with introduction of the Internet, with readings drawn from a range of sources including journalistic and scholarly writings and major policy statements and white papers.

We will start with a focus on your own experiences as part of a generation that has grown up in a world where digital media use -- and opportunities to participate in networked communication -- have been widespread. We will explore what impact these experiences have had on your styles of learning, your sense of privacy, and your social interactions with your peers.

From there, we will broaden our consideration to think about the process of media change, drawing examples from both the history of the Internet and from the history of earlier communications technologies (from the printing press to the telephone, photography, the phonograph, film, and television). In this unit, we will consider what factors shape the embrace or rejection of new technologies, whether change is even across segments of society or across different parts of the world, and whether new media has encouraged greater interests in forms of cultural and civic participation.

In the third section of the class, we will sharpen our focus to deal with specific sites of media change, especially those concerning the intersection between old and new media, including those concerning advertising, cultural production and distribution, news, and political debate. Here, we will consider two core concepts – “Web 2.0” and “Piracy,” both of which represent points of conflict between the interests of media companies and their publics.

COURSE DESIGN & LEARNING OUTCOMES

The design of this course has been very much shaped by its content. Research is suggesting some fundamental shifts in the way knowledge is produced in the digital era, having to do with the access of participants to small and large scale networks which collaborate and debate information together. As a consequence, this course progresses from students seeking to identify your own strengths as learners and participants within a digital culture towards students making contributions to a larger collective intelligence process.

For the first half of the course, then, you will be graded individually while during the second part, you will function as part of knowledge communities (small scale teams) which will be graded collectively based on their effectiveness at responding to more complex challenges. For the first part of the course, you will be expected to do each of the readings and be ready to share what you understood from them. For the second part, more reading is assigned each day than could be done by an individual student with the expectations that the teams will divide the labor appropriately to insure that each group has mastered the material. The teams will be able to rehearse their collaborative skills through discussion group activities across the term, each of which are designed to apply the course concepts to specific aspects of contemporary digital culture.

PARTICIPATION

Because this class is structured around inquiry and dialogue, students will be expected to attend class sessions and respond to questions from the instructor. We will be calling on students individually across the semester, so you need to come to class prepared to contribute, and we will be keeping records of who volunteers and how well you respond to the questions they are asked.  This course is as much about teaching new ways of thinking as it is about conveying specific bits of content, so you need to be able to sharpen your ability to contribute to some of the central debates impacting contemporary culture.

READINGS

All course materials can be found on Blackboard. Many of these materials were originally published in digital formats, some of which take advantages of the specific affordances of the web, so students are strongly encouraged to read them online, and be selective about what materials they chose to print out in order to be environmentally conscious.

LAPTOP POLICY

You are expected to bring and use laptops, tablets, or other wireless devices during the class. While you are discouraged from doing non-class related activities that might distract you or your other students from the learning process, we will be actively deploying online resources throughout our discussion.

ASSIGNMENTS & GRADING

All assignments are due to your TA at the beginning of your discussion section. Your TA will explain the format and method for turning in your assignments in the first week’s discussion section. All assignments should include a list of citations (see Academic Integrity Policy below). You will receive graded feedback on your papers and graded scores on your exams. Students will automatically lose one point for each day the paper is late, unless arrangements have been made prior to the due date with your TA.

Fifty percent (50%) of the class grade will be based on individual performance (prior to the midterm exam) and fifty percent (50%) will be based on collective performance (after the midterm exam). Your final semester grade will be an average of the two letter grades derived from both columns below.

Semester Breakdown

First Half (8 Weeks) - Individual1. Participation in online forum (7 points + 3 additional)

2. Participation in class (10 points)

3. Attendance + participation in discussion section (7 points + 3 additional)

4. Autobiographical essay (5 points)

5. Reporting on Wikipedia (10 points)

6. Midterm Exam (20 points)

TOTAL POSSIBLE: 65 points

Second Half (7 Weeks) - Teams7. Collective Problem Solving (5 points per week for 4 weeks, 20 points total)

8. Collective Participation (10 points)

9. Final Exam (30 points)

10. Individual Reflection (5 points)

TOTAL POSSIBLE:  65 points

A+: 58 points or moreA: 55-57 pointsA-: 50-54 points

B+: 48-49 points

B: 45-47 points

B-: 40-44 pointsC: 35-39 points

D: 30-34 points

F: Under 30 points

First Half: Individual Performance

In the individual performance section, you may choose from a range of different mechanisms for acquiring points and thus demonstrating your mastery over the course materials. This formula allows you to play to your strengths as a learner and to focus your energy in ways which allow you to best demonstrate what you know.

1. Participation in online forum (Up to 10 points)

Every week, you will be expected to use Blackboard's Forum to share a core question or thought that emerges from the assigned readings. These questions can be a paragraph or so and informal, but they are intended to help the instructors better understand how the students are relating to the class materials and content.  You will get a Check if you make a substantive comment, which poses questions about the core premise of the readings, which uses outside examples to expand our understanding of the core concept, or otherwise shows creative and critical engagement with the course content.  In rare cases, you may receive a plus if your work goes well beyond what is typical for the class on a given assignment. You will not receive any points if the work turned in is perfunctory. You will be expected to post seven times prior to the midterm exam, so most students will receive 7 points on this assignment, but you may receive up to 10 points in cases of exceptional performance.

2. Participation in Class (Up to 10 points)

Our regular meeting sessions will be a mixture of lecture, screening, and discussion. You are expected to attend and be prepared to participate, and the instructor will be calling periodically on each student throughout the term. You will receive points based on your ability to meaningfully contribute, whether voluntarily or when called upon.

3. Attendance and Participation in Discussion Sessions (Up to 10 points) The Discussion Session is a central element in the class and attendance is mandatory. Regular attendance at all sessions will gain 7 points; students may acquire up to 3 additional points if they actively participate in the class discussions. Students lose one point for each class session they miss.

4. Autobiographical essay (Up to 5 points)

The opening sessions of the class explore the debates around the issue of how new media technologies and practices have shaped the current generation of students with some writers speaking of “digital natives” who have become very adept at navigating the online world and others dismissing the “dumbest generation” for its lack of familiarity with more traditional kinds of print literacy.  You should respond to one of the essays we’ve read or videos we’ve watched in class which stakes out a position on this issue.  You will draft a short (5 page) essay exploring their own relationship to new communication technologies and practices. There are many valid ways of approaching this assignment. You might describe a particular program you use regularly and how it impacts your day to day activities. You might trace your evolving relations to computers. You might describe a specific activity that is important to you and talk about the range of technologies you deploy in the pursuit of these interests. In each case, the paper is going to be evaluated based on the ways you deploy your personal experience to construct an argument about the nature of new communication technologies and practices and their impact on everyday life. The more specific you can be at pointing to uses of these technologies, the better. You do not need to make sweeping arguments about "Today's Society" but you do need to argue how particular technologies and practices  impacted specific aspects of your own experience. For some sample essays that achieve our goals for this assignment, see:

Henry Jenkins, "Love Online" http://www.technologyreview.com/web/12979/

Hillary Kolos, "Bouncing Off the Walls" http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/bouncing_off_the_walls_playing.html

Flourish Klink, "The Radical Idea That Children Are People" http://henryjenkins.org/2009/06/the_radical_idea_that_children.html

5. Reporting on Wikipedia (Up to 10 points)

Identify a Wikipedia entry that has undergone substantial revision. Review the process by which the entry was written and the debates which have surrounded its revision. Write a five-page essay discussing what you learn about the process by which Wikipedia entries are produced and vetted. How does the discussion and debate around the entry draw on the core principles of the Wikipedia community? Again, this paper is intended to combine research and analysis. You will be evaluated based on the amount of research performed, on the quality of the analysis you offer, on how you build off concepts from the readings and the lectures to help frame your analysis (including, ideally, direct references to specific readings), and on how well you understanding the nature of the new communications environment.

6. Midterm  Exam (Up to 20 points)

The exam will be open-notes. It may include a mix of identification terms, short answer, and essay questions. The terms and essay questions will be selected from a list circulated in advance. The Midterm Exam will cover material from the first two units.

Revisions & Extra Credit

You will be allowed to revise ONE of the two essays to be considered for a higher grade. The paper must be turned in no later than two weeks after the original paper was returned. The grade will only be raised if the revisions substantively address one or more of the criteria for the paper's evaluation. Students who simply correct cosmetic or grammatical errors identified by the grader will not receive a higher score.

Second Half: Collective Performance

Following the midterm, students will be divided into teams organized around their discussion session.  The teams will be assessed based on their collective performance on the assignments.  The class is designed so most, if not all, of the synchronous work of the teams is done within regular course meeting times, minimizing the need for outside meetings. Teams are encouraged to experiment with tools such as Googledocs, Skype, and social media in order to coordinate their efforts beyond the regular sessions.

1. Collective Problem Solving (Up to 5 points per week, for a total of 20 points)

Each week, the teams will be asked to use the discussion section time to work through problem sets as a group, pooling your knowledge from the class and beyond in order to answer complex questions which you would not be able to address as individuals. The TA will function as a coach helping the team develop strategies for dividing up the problem and developing a coherent response in the hour devoted to the discussion session. Students teams can acquire up to 5 points each week based on the thoroughness, originality, clarity, and accuracy of their responses to the problems. We will work through four problem sets together in discussion section before students are asked to coordinate and collaborate in responding to the exam. You are expected to attend and participate actively in these sessions; you will not receive any point earned by the group in an activity on which you were absent from class.

2. Collective Participation (Up to 10 points)

Each team will gather a collective score based on their regular attendance and participation in the lecture and discussion sections. While the instructors called on individual students by name throughout the first part of the term, we will now be calling on teams. Each team should determine its own name and develop strategies for delegating responsibilities for answering questions. Teams can acquire up to 10 points based on their participation and class attendance.

3. Exam (Up to 30 Points)

Student groups will be given three questions at the beginning of lecture on Monday, December 3 and will be responsible for completing them by the end of lecture on Wednesday, December 5. It is expected that groups will use the Monday lecture slot to start planning (and possibly writing) their answers and the Wednesday lecture slot to finalize their answers. Groups are allowed (indeed encouraged) to work on the exams in-between the two lectures. The questions on the exam will resemble the questions groups will have worked on in section except that they will require that answers synthesize material from throughout the second half of the semester (though you are welcome to include material from the first half of the semester and/or outside sources). A collective score (up to 30 points) will be given to each team based on the thoroughness, originality, clarity, and accuracy of their responses. (Note: Students are allowed to *consult* with members from groups other than their own while working on the exam, but they must acknowledge all consultation, and groups must write original answers with cited sources. More specifics on permissible and impermissible collaboration will be provided with the exam).

4. Individual Reflection

For the remaining 5 points of the collective performance grade, students have two options. Individuals can choose either option and this is the only portion of the collective performance grade that students will be graded on individually. The instructors would prefer you choose the first option, but you will not be penalized for choosing the second option.

Option 1: Adam Kahn, a doctoral student at Annenberg, studies group collaboration and is interested in using COMM 202 in a research study he is conducting. For Option 1, all you have to do is fill out a few (no more than 4), brief (no more than 10 minute) surveys throughout the semester. These surveys are ungraded...by completing all of the surveys he administers, you will receive the full 5 points (you must complete all of them though to receive any points). To protect your confidentiality and grades, Professor Jenkins and the TAs will never see your responses to the survey. On the surveys, you will be identified only by your USC ID number. This will allow Adam to let the teaching staff know at the end of the semester that you have completed the surveys, but at the same time protect your anonymity, as Adam has no way to translate a USC ID number into your name. By participating in the surveys, you are also allowing Adam to associate your grades (again, identified only by USC ID number) with your survey responses.

Option 2: If you do not want to participate in the research study, you can write a 5 page paper comparing your experiences taking tests as an individual with taking tests as a group.

ATTENDANCE POLICY

Attendance at all lectures and discussion sections is expected and has been built into the grading of the class. In lecture, we will not take attendance per se, but if you are called upon and are not able to answer because you missed class, you will not receive points for that session. Flexibility for dealing with emergencies is built into this mechanics since there are multiple ways to gain the number of points required to make an A in the class.

For those assignments which require/allow collaboration, students are required to disclose all people who contributed to their process and identify all outside sources they drew upon in developing their answers. Failure to do so will be considered academic dishonesty.

SEMESTER SCHEDULE & READINGS

PART 1: LIVING AND LEARNING IN A NETWORKED CULTURE

Week 1, Day 1

Monday, August 27

Are You a Digital Native?

• No readings.

Week 2, Day 2

Wednesday, August 29

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

• Nancy Baym, "Making New Media Make Sense," Personal Connection in the Digital
 Age (New York: Polity, 2010),
 pp. 22-49.

• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic, August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

• Clay Shirky, “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?,” The Wall Street Journal,  June 4 2010,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html

Week 1 Discussion Section

Course Mechanics; Autobiographical Essays

Week 2, Day 3

Monday September 3

NOTE: NO CLASS. Today is Labor Day.

Week 2, Day 4

Wednesday, September 5

How Are Educators Responding to the Challenges of a Networked Culture?

• Screen: New Learners of the 21st Century

• Ilana Gershon, “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 16-49.

.Henry Jenkins et al, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (MacArthur Foundation, 2006), http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Week 2 Discussion Section: Would You Break Up Online?

Week 3, Day 5

Monday, September 10

What Does Learning Look Like in a Networked Culture?

•Henry Jenkins, “Spoiling Survivor,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 25-58

Week 3, Day 6

Wednesday, September 12

Do Youth Still Care About Privacy?

• danah boyd and Alice Marwick, “Social Steganography: Privacy in Networked Publics,” Presented at International Communications Association, May 28 2011,  http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/Steganography-ICAVersion.pdf

Week 3 Discussion Section: Facebook and Privacy

NOTE: Paper 1 is due.

Week 4, Day 7

Monday, September 17

Is the Web Making Us Lonely?

• Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” The Atlantic, May 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

• Eric  Klinenberg, “Facebook Isn’t Making Us Lonely,” Slate, April 19 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/04/is_facebook_making_us_lonely_no_the_atlantic_cover_story_is_wrong_.html

• Sherry Turkle, “Does Technology Serve Human Purposes?,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August 22, 24,  26 2011, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/an_interview_with_sherry_turkl.html, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/does_this_technology_serve_hum.html, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/does_this_technology_serve_hum_1.html

Week 4, Day 8

Wednesday, September 19

Should Schools Ban Wikipedia?

• Henry Jenkins, “What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, June 26 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/what_wikipedia_can_teach_us_ab.html; June 27, 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/what_wikipedia_can_teach_us_ab_1.html

• Andrew Lih, "Community at Work (The Piranha Effect)," The Wikipedia Revolution (New York: Hyperion, 2009), pp. 81-132.

• Quora. “What does Jimmy Wales think when a university professor states not to cite Wikipedia as a source?” http://www.quora.com/Jimmy-Wales-1/What-does-Jimmy-Wales-think-when-a-university-professor-states-not-to-cite-Wikipedia-as-a-source

Week 4 Discussion Section: Wikipedia Mechanics

Week 5, Day 9

Monday, September 24

What Are We Using Mobile Media For? (Guest Lecture: Meryl Alper)

• “Pew Internet and American Life Project: Mobile” (2012) https://ca.edubirdie.com/blog/pew-internet-mobile Research highlights related to mobile technology in the US

• Jill Palzkill Woelfer and David G. Hendry (2011). Homeless young people and technology: Ordinary interactions, extraordinary circumstances. interactions, 18(6), 70-73.

• Chris Danielsen, Anne Taylor, and Wesley Majerus. (2011). Design and public policy considerations for accessible e-book readers. interactions, 18(1), 67-70.

PART 2: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA CHANGE

Week 5, Day 10

Wednesday, September 26

How Have Earlier Cultures Dealt with Media Change?

• Lynn Spigel, "Television in the Family Circle," Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). pp. 36-72.

Week 5 Discussion Section: Advertising New Media

Week 6, Day 11

Monday, October 1

Why Do Interfaces Matter? (Guest Lecture: Adam Kahn)

• Vannevar Bush. “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 101-108.

Week 6, Day 12

Wednesday, October 3

What Roles have Hackers Played in Defining Digital Culture? (Guest Lecture: Andrew Schrock)

• Doug Thomas, “(Not) Hackers: Subculture, Style and Media Incorporation,” Hacker culture (pp. 141–171). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 147-171.

• Heather Brooke, “Inside the Secret World of Hackers,” The Guardian, August 24 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/24/inside-secret-world-of-hackers

Week 6 Discussion Section: Hacking and Culture Jamming

NOTE: Paper 2 is due.

Week 7, Day 13

Monday, October 8

Why Does It Matter What We Call the “Web”?

• David Thorburn, “Web of Paradox,” The American Prospect, December 19 2001, http://prospect.org/article/essay-web-paradox

• Handout: Key Statements about the Nature of the Web

Week 7, Day 14

Wednesday, October 10

What Roles Does Participation Play in Contemporary Culture?

• Henry Jenkins, "Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, May 28 2007. http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_%20propositions_towards_a_cultu.html

.Lawrence Lessig, “REMIX: How Creativity Is Being Strangled By the Law,” in Michael Mandiberg (ed.) The Social Media Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 155-169.

Week 7 Discussion Section: YouTube’s Many Communities

Week 8, Day 15

Monday, October 15

What Can Science Fiction Teach Us About the History of Technology?

• Rebecca Onion, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Neo-Victorian Studies, Autumn 2008, http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/Autumn2008/NVS%201-1%20R-Onion.pdf

Week 8, Day 16

Wednesday, October 17

Has Networked Culture Gone Global? (Guest Lecture: Alex Leavitt)

• Toshie Takahashi, “MySpace or Mixi? Japanese engagement with SNS (social networking sites) in the global age.” New Media & Society, May 2010 vol. 12 no. 3, 453-475. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/12/3/453

• Shaojung Wang, “China’s Internet lexicon: The symbolic meaning and commoditization of Grass Mud Horse in the harmonious society.” First Monday, January 2012, vol. 17 no. 1. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3758/3134

Week 8 Discussion Section: Review for Midterm

Week 9, Day 17

Monday, October 22

Midterm Exam

PART 3: THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

Week 9, Day 18

Wednesday,  October 24

What Roles Do New Media Play in American Politics?

• Cathy Cohen and Joe Kahne, “Participatory Politics New Media and Youth Political Action,” Youth and Participatory Politics Network, 2011, http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/publications/YPP_Survey_Report_FULL.pdf

• Ryan Lizza, “Battleplans: How Obama Won,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza

• Daniel Kreiss, “Developing Technologies of Control: Producing Political Participation in Online Electorial Campaigning,” Paper presented on September 21, 2011 at the Oxford Internet Institute “A Decade in Internet Time” conference http://danielkreiss.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/kreiss_controltechnologies.pdf

Week 9 Discussion Session: Working Together in Teams

Week 10, Day 19

Monday, October 29

How Does Media Spread?

• Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “Why Media Spreads,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

• danah boyd, “The Power of Youth: How Invisible Children Orchestrated Kony 2012,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danah-boyd/post_3126_b_1345782.html

• Ethan Zuckerman, “Unpacking Kony 2012,” My Heart’s in Accra, March 8, 2012, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking-kony-2012/

• James Gleick, “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian.com, May 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a-Meme.html

• Ilya Vedrashko, “A Site That Went Viral and the Numbers Behind It,” Hill Holliday Blog, http://www.hhcc.com/blog/2010/07/a-site-that-went-viral-and-the-numbers-behind-it/

Week 10, Day 20

Wednesday, October 31

How Generative are Online Communities? (Guest Lecture: Rhea Vichot)

• Mark McLelland, “‘Race’ on the Japanese internet: discussing Korea and Koreans on ‘2-channeru.’” New Media & Society, 2008, 10(6), 811 - 829.

• Gabriella Coleman, “Anonymous: From Lulz to Collective Action,” 2011, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-lulz-collective-action

• Whitney Phillips, “The House That Fox Built: Anonymous, Spectacle and Cycles of Amplification,” Television and New Media, forthcoming.

http://hastac.org/blogs/whitneyphillips/2012/05/20/4chan-article-published-house-fox-built-anonymous-spectacle-and-cyc

• Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production.” In M. Knobel and C Lankshear (Eds.), 2007, A Media Literacies Sampler. 199 - 228.

Week 10 Discussion Section: Tracking Viral Success

Week 11, Day 21

Monday, November 5

Have There Been Twitter Revolutions?

• Ethan Zuckerman, “The Cute Cat Theory Talk at eTech,” My Heart’s in Accra, March 8, 2008, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/

• Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

• Evgeny Morozov, “Think Again: The Internet,” Foreign Policy, May/June 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/think_again_the_internet

Week 11, Day 22

Wednesday, November 7

What is Web 2.0?

• Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0," O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

• Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired, June 2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

• Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “What Went Wrong with Web 2.0?,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

• Geert Lovink, “Capturing Web 2.0 Before Its Disappearance,” Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (London: Polity, 2012), pp.1-23.

Week 11 Discussion Section: Kickstarter as a Web 2.0 Company

Week 12, Day 23

Monday, November 12

What Will Be the Future of Advertising?

• Cory Doctorow, "The Branding of Billy Bailey," A Place So Foreign and Eight More
(San Francisco: Running Press, 2003), pp. 86-98.

• Daniele Sacks, “The Future of Advertising,” Fast Company, November 17, 2010, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/mayhem-on-madison-avenue.html

• Campfire, True Blood - http://vimeo.com/8268162

• Weiden & Kennedy, Old Spice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg0booW1uOQ

• Burger King, Whopper Sacrifice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXxhEjnJA0

• Barbarian Group, Subservient Chicken (Burger King) -http://vimeo.com/16742192

• Hill Holiday, Mad Men + Newsweek - http://vimeo.com/44876203

Week 12, Day 24

Wednesday, November 14

Are Pirates a Threat to Media Industries?

• Nancy Baym, "The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom," First Monday, May 16, 2007, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1978/1853/

• William W. Fischer, "The Promise of New Technology,” Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment (San Francisco: Stanford U. Press, 2004), pp. 11-37.

.Cory Doctorow, “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin,” Locus Online, July 4, 2012,  http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/07/cory-doctorow-music-the-internets-original-sin/

• “Artist Revenue Streams, The Future of Music Coalition, http://money.futureofmusic.org/

• “Piracy Online,” RIAA, http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php?content_selector=What-is-Online-Piracy

Week 12 Discussion Section: Curation Policies

Week 13, Day 25

Monday, November 19

Are Video Games Art?

• Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” Chicago Sun Times, April 16, 2010, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

• Mike Snyder, “Are Video Games Art? Draw Your Own Conclusion,” USA Today, March 12, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/story/2012-03-12/video-games-smithsonian/53502696/1

• Ian Bogost, “Art,” How to Do Things With Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 9-17.

• The Art of Video Games, Smithsonian American Art Museum, http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/

Wednesday November 21 NOTE: NO CLASS. Today is part of Thanksgiving holiday.

Week 14, Day 27

Monday November 26

Is Print Culture Dying?

• Sven Birkerts, “Resisting the Kindle,” The Atlantic, March 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/resisting-the-kindle/7345/

• Matthew Battles, “In Defense of the Kindle,” The Atlantic, March 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/in-defense-of-the-kindle/7346/

• Ken Auletta, “Publish and Perish,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta

• Ted Striphas, “The Past and Future Histories of Books,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 19 2012, http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/the_late_age_of_print_an_inter.html

Week 14, Day 28

Wednesday, November 28

Has Networked Communication Changed the Ways We Tell Stories?

• Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 22, 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

• Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

• Nick DeMartino, "Why Transmedia Is Catching On Now," Future of Film Blog, Parts 1 (July 5, 2011), 2 (July 6, 2011), 3 (July 7, 2011).

http://www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/Why-Transmedia-is-Catching-On-Part-1.html,

http://www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/Why-Transmedia-is-Catching-On-Part-2.html,

http:/www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/Why-Transmedia-is-Catching-On-Part-3.html

Week 14 Discussion Section: Mapping a Transmedia Story?

Week 15, Day 29

Monday, December 3

Planning Strategy for the Exam

Week 15, Day 30

Wednesday, December 5

Complet

This article is translated to Serbo-Croatian language by Anja Skrba from Webhostinggeeks.com.

For a Polish translation, see http://www.pkwteile.de/wissen/wprowadzenie-do-technologii-komunikacyjnych

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part One)

Many of us may think we know the history of the role which American broadcast television played in fostering public awareness and rallying support behind Martin Luther King and his 1960s era Civil Rights struggle. We can all picture in our heads the black and white fuzzy images of King's powerful remarks in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, for example, and we know that people across the country must have watched those amazing words in their living rooms. Not so fast, argues Aniko Bodroghkozy, the author of a new book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement.  Bodroghkozy certainly argues that television played important roles in sparking the consciences of viewers around the country as the networks and the activists made reluctant, tentative, highly compromised "common cause" with each other to transform the civil rights struggles into a prime time spectacle. But, some of what you believe happened -- starting with how the networks covered the March on Washington -- turns out to be a bit more complex than popular memory and imagination might suggest.

I have had the joy of watching Bodroghkozy develop from a young graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying under John Fiske and Lynn Spigel, to the author of an important first book about the ways the student protests of the 1960s engaged with television, through to the publication of this masterful new book, which represents the culmination of more than a decade's work in the archives. Bodroghkozy has already written the definitive accounts of the controversy surrounding The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the reception of Julia by black and white viewers, both essays often assigned in television history classes around the country. Her work moves back and forth between news and entertainment programming, showing the ways that they were sometimes aligned, sometimes contradictory, in their depictions of the current state of race relations in the 1960s. Her work is surprisingly nuanced in dealing with the diversity of perspectives within the network journalists, within the civil rights movement, and with white southerners, as the country sought to resolve deep rooted conflicts around segregation. She offers rich readings of key programs and broadcasts which are contextualized by contemporary responses from newspapers and letters housed in archives, combining insights from social and political history alongside those she brings to the table as a gifted broadcast historian.

The book's consideration of media and political change is well timed, offering a rich historical counter to current debates about the role of new media in informing recent struggles, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement. For me, it especially resonates with the work that my Civic Paths team at USC has been doing on the DREAMers, undocumented youth whose current civil rights struggles are informed by their saavy use of YouTube and various social media platforms. But, as the country's first black president seeks re-election,  Equal Time offers us some great resources for placing into perspective various attempts to mobilize popular memories of the Civil Rights era.

The following interview demonstrates Bodroghkozy's careful, nuanced, yet engaged mind at work, describing some of the ways that Equal Rights helps to revise our understanding of this important era both in the history of American politics and in the evolution of television as a medium.

You can also follow this link for an interview with the author on public radio.

You begin the book with a powerful quote from Martin Luther King: “We are here to say to the white men that we are not going to let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” To what degree were the tactics King brought to the civil rights movement designed to encourage and shape television attention? What did King and the other civil rights leaders hope to accomplish by getting access to broadcast media?

King’s quote is really noteworthy because he and civil rights leaders of the era so very rarely talked openly about their strategies to elicit television coverage.  To be open about their “media campaign” would have appeared manipulative, anathema for a movement that was attempting to appeal to the moral conscience of the nation.  King and the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his organization) understood the power of strong visual images and the need to communicate a stark message of moral clarity – and to communicate that message and those images to a national audience that could put pressure on congressmen, senators, and the president to pass federal legislation around civil rights and voting rights.  Accessing a national audience was key.

You have to remember that in the early 1960s, there were few truly national media outlets.  There were the picture magazines, Life and Look, which reached a huge readership, and to a lesser extent the newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.  None, of course, had the reach of network television, which by the early 1960s had over ninety percent penetration in U.S. households.  This time period is also when the networks finally begin to invest significantly in their news divisions (CBS and NBC inaugurate their half hour nightly news shows in the fall of 1963 and throughout the early/mid 1960s large numbers of prime time news documentaries, special reports, bulletins and the like).  So you’ve got network news becoming a serious journalistic venue reaching unprecedented numbers of citizens.

King and the SCLC in particular appeared to intuitively understand the nature of television news and the need for dramatic pictures.  They knew to schedule marches no later than about 2:00 in the afternoon in order to work with the demands of the TV news room: film had to be flown to New York, printed, edited, and readied for broadcast for the nightly news.  And they knew that the news cameras would stick around only if the marches and demonstrations led to confrontation and even violence.  The movement did need to create situations in which white racists would beat and brutalize civil rights activists.

On the one hand, one could say that the movement was manipulating the media as well as Southern white police officials like Birmingham’s Bull Connor or Selma’s Jim Clark by creating a setting for confrontation (and certainly segregationists argued that these were all publicity stunts).  On the other hand, blacks had been beaten, lynched, and brutalized “in the dark corners” for decades and decades.  Staging this brutality out in public and inviting new forms of national media to witness it was a novel and clearly powerful tactic that both assisted the movement in making its larger arguments about Jim Crow and black disempowerment, but also played to the strengths of television as “new media.”

Was the goal to reach white viewers, black viewers, or some kind of community which included people of multiple races?

The goal clearly was primarily to reach white viewers, particularly outside the South.  Frequently network news stories about civil rights would be “blacked out” on Deep South TV stations.  Steven Classen has written superbly in his book, Watching Jim Crow, about the case of Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT-TV which systematically censored network news stories about civil rights or race relations and eventually, after long legal struggles by civil rights activists, finally had its broadcast license revoked by the Justice Department in 1969.  King would frequently appeal to “the conscience of the nation.”  He was obviously referring to the mass audiences produced by media like network television and to nationally distributed magazines.

The movement really didn’t need television to appeal to African Americans (either in the South or the North).  There was a very robust black press that was very effectively distributed to black communities.  News weeklies like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had national reach with black train porters often working as an informal distribution system to get these newspapers to black communities around the country, and especially into the Deep South.  The movement needed to reach and impact whites outside the South in order to make the case that segregation in Birmingham, Alabama or Albany, Georgia or voter disenfranchisement in Selma, Alabama weren’t regional issues to be solved at the state level, but rather national problems of concern to all Americans to be dealt with in Washington.  And Washington politicians would only care if they were hearing from constituents en masse.

It’s also important to remember this was the Cold War era and to some extent the movement was aware of the global audience. We aren’t really in the satellite era yet (although the Telstar communications satellite goes up in 1962 and live satellite transmission is possible).  The 1963 March on Washington coverage is transmitted live to most European countries.  Nevertheless images are traveling more quickly in this era and there’s lots of concern about how global audiences are making sense of the “leader of the Free World” oppressing its black citizens.

Does television mean something different in the context of this movement than newspapers and print based media?

I think the distinction is more “visual media” versus “print media.”  My book was going to press just as Martin Berger Seeing Through Race came out.  He examines the photojournalism around the civil rights movement and comes to some similar conclusions to mine about network news coverage.  In both cases, the emphasis is on dramatic images of moral clarity: good versus evil, clearly marked.  It calls to mind Peter Brooks’ arguments about “the melodramatic imagination” and the moral occult: in a secular era, we need narratives to give us that clarity that used to be presumably provided by the church in the pre-modern era.

Both television news and photojournalism assumed a white viewer.  The preferred images are of helpless, supplicating or brutalized black bodies that need assistance.  The white viewer is hailed into the position as saviour or rescuer.  The white viewer, whose conscience is being appealed to, is called on to do something, respond in some way to come to the aid of the helpless black victim.  Berger very usefully traces this trope back to abolitionist iconography with the widely circulated image of the kneeling, supplicant slave holding up his chained arms.  In television news coverage, black civil rights activists are almost always mute; only King is authorized to speak.  Preferred images include docile marchers, praying bodies, and, of course, tear-gassed, whipped, beaten bodies.  Print media had a significant role to play as well and Richard Lentz in his (terribly titled!) book Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King does a great comparative analysis of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report in their coverage of King and the movement.

But ultimately I think the power of the civil right movement comes from its visuality and the movement’s intuitive grasp of how to communicate via imagery.  Print media, I think, functioned in an ancillary role providing background, context, and information to the images.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education

Today, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab released Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education.A PDF of the full report is attached below/ This report represents the collaboration of a working group composed of "a mixture of researchers, teachers and school administrators from a variety of disciplines, schools, and states," who wanted to better understand how we might best prepare educators in order to incorporate "participatory learning" models into their classroom practices. This working group emerged as part of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

The report includes case studies of innovative professional development initiatives ( Vital Signs, PLAY, Scratch, Ask Ansai, the Participatory Assessment Project) with a larger exploration of what it might mean to adopt a more participatory model for working with teachers. These "best practices" are shared in a robust multi-media format, which allows you to see media materials produced by these programs and their participants, and in some cases, here educators describe their own experiences.

Ioana Literat, an Annenberg PhD candidate who helped to coordinate the working group's activities, summarized their key goals and findings in the report's introduction:

The principal goals of this working group were to:

• Provide a common forum for professional development conversations centered around participatory learning
• Foster interdisciplinary dialogue among vested audiences in participatory learning
• Identify synergy among members and facilitate learning from each other
• Construct a common framework for participatory models of professional development
• Extract best practices and lingering challenges in the field
• Build a collection of case studies exemplifying these best practices and share them with the larger community of stakeholders in participatory learningOur collective experiences in the realm of professional development and our dialogues within the context of this working group led to the identification and explication of four core values that we consider key to effective participa- tory PD programs. We believe that these four values, along with the design principles that they inform in practice, are an essential take-away from this multi-stakeholder conversation.Thus, in our view, the values that shape the design of participatory PD are:

1. Participation, not indoctrinationThere is a critical need, in the field of education, to transition from professional development for teachers to professional development with teachers. Participatory learning relies on a model of “distributed expertise”, which assumes that knowledge, including in an educational context, is distributed across a diffuse network of people and tools. We believe that professional development for teachers should similarly be conceived and implemented in a non-hierarchical, inclusive and partic- ipatory manner, thus modeling the type of dynamic pedagogy that characterizes participatory learning.
2. Exploration, not prescriptionIn order to inspire this sense of ownership and co-design in the participants, PD initiatives must allow ample room for personal and professional exploration. Attention must also be paid to what teachers want from a professional development experience, rather than just what is required of them. By allowing teachers to explore who they are and what their professional goals are, the PD program can provide educators with an opportunity to connect to the content and to display their own individuality in the process.
3.  Contextualization, not abstraction:  PD programs should be tailored to the specific questions and particu- lar career goals of the participants. We acknowledge the tension between the desire to create scalable and flexible initiatives, and the need to cater most effectively to specific disciplines and levels of instruction; this challenge is all the more acute when it comes to sharing strategies for integrating media and digital technologies into the classroom. However, we believe that there is a way to reconcile this tension. By addressing the common core standards teachers need to fulfill, while in the same time accounting for the various disciplines and grade levels, program designers can craft versatile PD initiatives that represent – and feel like – a genuine investment in professional growth.
4.  Iteration, not repetition:In order to sustain ongoing learning, the design of successful PD programs must provide opportunities for constant improvement, trou- bleshooting, and evaluation. In this sense, assessment emerges as a problematic yet nevertheless vital topic in the realm of professional development implementation. We hope that assessment practices in professional development will increasingly mirror the participatory shift in program design and reflection. These values offer a blueprint for an innovative type of professional devel- opment. By incorporating these values into the design of professional development programs, researchers and practitioners can efficiently craft initiatives that are participatory, non-hierarchical, personally and profession- ally meaningful, relevant, flexible and sustainable.

Pd working group-v5a from amandafo

If you'd like to learn more about participatory learning, let me also recommend you check out the current issue of Knowledge Quest: The Journal of the American Association of School Librarians, which is focused on "Participatory Culture and Learning," which includes a essay asking "Can Public Education Coexist with Participatory Culture?," which I wrote with Elizabeth Losh. Other contributors include Allison Druin, Buffy Hamilton. Antero Garcia, Howard Rheingold, James Paul Gee, and Kristin Fontichiaro.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Hungary and Italy (Again!)

Budapest, Hungary Cynthia and I had really enjoyed traveling by rail inside many of the countries we visited this trip, so we decided to take the train from the Czech Republic  north to Hungary, passing along the way through Slovokia. We alternated between reading and looking out the window as the train click-clacked through farm country, small towns and villages, and lush forests, giving us a much bigger picture of what Eastern Europe looked like once you got outside of the major cities. America has somehow lost its historic relationship with the railroads, but in Europe, people of all classes and backgrounds travel by train, the trains are clean, affordably priced, and comfortable. So, what's not to love.

Around the time we passed into Hungary, something changed though. The temperature outside got hotter and hotter, there was no air conditioning working inside the train, and the windows did not open to allow outside air to circulate. The train was becoming a sweat box and the scaldingly hot temperature (I say scalding because the air was so humid that it felt like we were sitting in boiling water) began to percolate our brains. Needless to say,the experience had cured us of our romance with the rails.  By the time the train arrived in Budapest, we were melting into a puddle and in a punch drunk stupor.  Then, our host, Ellen Hume, swooped down upon us, with fresh bottles of cold water, with a driver to take our bags and an air conditioned car, like an angel of mercy!

Ellen Hume is probably the most resourceful person I have ever met! She covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal; she ran PBS's Democracy Project, where she became a major advocate for citizen-driven and resource-based journalism; she helped direct Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, and she ran a major Boston-based initiative on Ethnic news media. And, for a year and a half, she worked with me as the Research Director for MIT's Center for the Future of Civic Media, a initiative funded by the Knight Foundation, a collaboration between Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Media Lab.  Below you see Ellen and I together on the grounds of the Buda Castle.

Budapest, Hungary's capital and largest city, was historically two cities named, predictably, Buda and Pest, which are separated from each other by the Danube River (as you can see fairly well in the photograph below). When we arrived, we dropped our bags off at our hotel, which was near the river on the Pest side, and then walked across the bridge to visit the historic center of Buda.

Our experience of Buda was dominated by the Buda Castle, built in 1265, and long the home of the Hungarian Kings and Emperiors, and the Castle Hill. The architecture of this area, as the image below suggests, is commanding, giving us just a taste of what life might have been like during the hayday of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

The closer you get to the Castle proper, the more you get a taste of Medieval Hungary . It was too late in the day to get inside the buildings, but we wandered the grounds, enjoying the sight of this falconer in traditional garb and especially the view looking out across the Danube, a vista which gave us a clear sense of why this location was originally chosen to support a fortress.

A distinctive feature of Budapest's architectural tradition are the brightly colored Zsolnay tiles, shown here covering the roof of Matthias Church. The Zsolnay company has manufactured parcelain and ceramic tiles since the early part of the nineteenth century, though it has struggled to hang on during the current economic crisis in Europe.

Budapest became the country's capital in the late 19th century as several local towns were united to create one large urban area. Most of the public buildings were built during this period, and by the early 20th century, Budapest had developed a reputation for being one of the most cosmopolitan areas in Europe. For all of those reasons, the city's look and feel was strongly influenced by a particular inflection of Art Nouveau. These grand old world buildings exist side by side with monstrosities from Stalin- and Khruschev-area Soviet monumentalism, not exactly the most satisfying combination in the world, but a physical reminder of the transformations (political, cultural) which Hungary underwent across the twentieth century.

One of the best bits of advice we received upon launching on our grand European adventures was to "look up!" The most spectacular aspects of Europe often are above eye-level -- especially the decorative details along the roofs and top floors of buildings. We were constantly struck by the distinctive national styles that define each of the European countries, despite, what might seem to us by American standards, as very limited distances between them geographically.

Note, for example, the bee-hives on the building above, a key motif in the architecture of Budapest, which historically stood for all the work going on inside.

And, the same would be true of the ceilings inside buildings, such as the one below from the Hungarian Parliament, which is ornately decorated as a showcase to the wealth and power commanded by Imperial Hungary.

Of course, not all of the decorative details are along the skyline. There is also an attention to style which extends to the sidewalks and public plazas of the city, which often become staging grounds for personal and shared rituals.

We turned one corner and found an entire group of ballroom dancers waltzing inside a fountain which was shooting water up all around them. Did we mention yet how blasting hot it was when we were visiting Budapest?

Ellen took us to visit the Grand Market Hall at Nagyvasarcsarnok. Sometimes described as "a symphony in iron," the building was designed by Gustave Eiffel (of the Eiffel Tower fame). I always enjoy visiting farmer's markets and food halls as I travel because they give us such a strong sense of the everyday lives of the people who live in each place we visit. Here, Ellen and I are admiring a shop dedicated to Paprika, in all of its many manifestations. Paprika is the core spice used in Hungarian cooking. I especially enjoyed Paprika in a bowl of authentic Hungarian goulash. My mother used to prepare goulash when I was a child, but it bore very little relationship to this dish, which was a rich, spicy , bright red soup. I have to say how much we enjoyed our meals in Eastern Europe -- both the roasted meats and dumplings we had in Praha and the soups (hot and cold) we tasted in Budapest .

Ellen and her husband, John Shattuck, took us to a a Ruin Bar. These bars have been springing up over the past ten years or so in the old District VII neighborhood (the old Jewish quarter) in the ruins (hence the name) of abandoned buildings, stores, or lots. The area had been largely left to decay in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it has only recently come alive as the hub for the city's hipster nightlife. The ruin bars, many of which operate without a license, allegedly rely on monetary compensations handed directly to local law enforcement, and feel like something out of a post-appocalyptic science fiction film. Somehow, the Mad Max movies or Escape to New York came to mind, but there is also this distinctive Post-Communist feel that is not really captured by the analogy. The walls are covered with graffiti; the furniture looks like it was picked up off the streets, there are Christmas lights and old computers and rusting bathtubs and plastic gewgaws everywhere you look. There may be a band playing in one of the darker corners, and the whole place is teaming with people of all backgrounds and ages. Ellen had promised us that the ruin bar would be one of the highlights of our trip to Europe, and it certainly was.

Here, you see Ellen, John, and I drinking Unicum, the local drink whose family history was memorialized in the film Sunshine, and Cynthia and I (below) surrounded by the graffiti at Szimpla Kert, which was the original and still the largest of the ruin bars. John was the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor  under Bill Clinton, where he helped to establish the International Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic, the former CEO for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and the current president of Central European University, which hosted my talks in Budapest.

Central European University operates with a heavy endowment from George Soros, and was designed to be an instrument fostering a greater sense of cultural understanding and appreciation of human rights, a meeting place for students from across Europe, and indeed, from around the world. Its students come from more than a hundred countries, and its faculty represent thirty different nations. I spoke in the morning with the students from their summer program (again, featuring probably the most ethnically and nationally diverse audience I encountered on my trip) and in the afternoon, I gave a public lecture (again, the Content talk) at the Open Society Archives, a research facility dedicated to preserving the records of the Communist era.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW9750DLJ54

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkeIrH3DA8o&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YkR4qgjAvA&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wbg4FcV4pE&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh5l1k7izmQ&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph7EbCNAICI&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvjQpn9vo-c&feature=relmfu

Ellen and John were nice enough to host a lovely salon and dinner in their home, which brought together a mix of intellectuals, artists, writers, and political leaders, which gave us a great taste of the cultural life of Budapest's intelligentsia.  I was especially delighted to reconnect with Tibor Dessewffy, the Hungarian Director for the World Internet Project. I had met Tibor when he was a visiting scholar at the USC Annenberg School, and he provided us with some very helpful critical feedback on our Spreadable Media manuscript.

Each leg of the trip was shaped by the personality of our hosts as much as by the personality of the cities themselves. Our experience of Praha was primary focused around culture, especially the rich heritage of film and the graphic arts. Our experience of Budapest, in part because we were spending time with people who have enormous expertise on foreign policy, was focused much more on the political history of the region, especially on the struggles to define a national identity in the wake of many decades of foreign dominance (by the Nazis and the Communists) and the current struggles to protect free expression under an increasingly repressive regime. Our sense was that Budapest is a city which still struggles with the legacy of the Cold War in ways that Praha seems to have moved beyond, but what do I know, I was only there for a few days.

We were lucky enough to get a guided tour of some of the political landmarks of the city by Jeff Taylor, an American art history professor at SUNY Purchase who is an expert on international art forgery, and who sometimes takes tourists around the city to give them a counter-history to some of the national monuments. You have to love a tour guide who quotes  Edward Said in his opening remarks.

Jeff's guide of the Museum of Terror helped to debunk and deconstruct the official accounts of Hungary's experiences with the Nazis and the Soviets, drawing out what was not explicitly stated, filling in what was intentionally occluded, and otherwise, poking fun at the ways history was being mobilized to support the country's current leadership. In particular, the bulk of the museum dealt with the Soviet era with very limited space given to the Nazi period, and little to no mention made of the ways that the Hungarian government had officially partnered with Hitler in the early days of World War II.

Jeff also showed us some key monuments, both those which survive from the era of Soviet dominance, and those which reflect the fall of Communism, as it has been framed from the Hungarian perspective. Here, for example, you see me clowning around at a statue dedicated to Ronald Reagan. Seeking to explain that it was as much American popular culture and consumer goods as it was American foreign policy which contributed to some of the political shifts that impacted his adopted country, Jeff has launched the Two Ronalds project, playfully paying tribute to American president Ronald Reagan and American fast-food brand icon Ronald McDonald, by having guests take their picture next to this statue, once they have inserted a Big Mac into Reagan's open hand.

When the good folks at  Central European University learned of my strange obsession with understanding the comics cultures of Europe, they tapped their collective networks and got me in touch with Robert Vass, an independent comics artist in Budapest, who took me to his local shop, gave me a guided tour of its contents, and a mini history of comics publishing in Hungary under Communism and its aftermath. I am still absorbing much of what I learned and trying to parse my way through the various comics I purchased, but I have found this Wikipedia entry especially helpful in understanding the local comics scene there.  One of my favorite books was Matyas a Kiraly: kepregeny-antologia.  Matthias Corvinus was the Renaissance era King of Hungry who has been credited with helping to promote arts, science, and law in his country, and who was later named one of the most important saints in the region. Here, we see his statue outside Matthias Church, which, we saw earlier, was in the Buda Castle region.

During communism, many of the comics published were literary and historical adaptations, which was seen as less "political" than some of the themes that dominated comics elsewhere in Eastern Europe.  I am always intrigued how strands in American comics which had largely died out in my country continue to exert influence in other parts of the world, and I've discovered that Hal Foster's Prince Valiant offered a compelling model for many Eastern European comics creators.  This collection of contemporary alternative comics drew inspiration from Matthias's story but pushed it in radical new directions, demonstrating that Hungarian comics can be so much more than classics illustrated. Here's a sample page from the collection which I found online. The building depicted here is the Matthias Church.

BOLOGNA, ITALY

My original plan for Bologna was to spend a week sitting in dark theaters and watching beautifully restored prints of great old movies at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Organized by the Cineteca Bologna, this film festival organizes retrospectives intended to deepen our understanding of key figures and chapters in the history of global cinema. For example, among the topics this year, there was an extensive series of films by Lois Weber, perhaps the most important female director of the American silent cinema whose films are deeply shaped by the political and spiritual values of first wave feminism, and by Alma Hitchcock, the wife of Alfred, but also a well known scenario writer in the late silent and early sound British cinema.

The festival also featured a series showing the coming of sound in Japan, which included several films whose soundtrack captured the performances of famous Benshi. In the Japanese tradition, silent films were narrated by live performers, who might recount the story, embody the perspectives of the various characters, direct attention onto key details, or offer their own moral (and sometimes ironic) commentary on the action. These benshi were so popular in their own day that they helped to slow down the coming of sound in Japan, when they resisted the shift to new technologies that might mean their eventual unemployment and the end of their tradition. During this transitional period, some of their performances were recorded, which gives us a chance to better understand their mode of presentation and the diverse ways they shaped spectators' experience of silent Japanese movies.

There was a series of films showing how America and Europe had dealt with the economic crisis of the early 1930s and another showcasing the work of Ivan Pry'ev, who was one of the most popular directors of musicals in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period (fascinating historical documents which might include celebrations of the heroicism of wives who renounce their husbands for acting against the interests of the State or which might open with vast musical numbers involving farmers singing as they drive their tractors across their fields.)

My favorite screening series, though, was a retrospective of the works of Raoul Walsh, whose career spans from silent films (such as The Thief of Bagdad and The Big Parade) all the way into the 1950s (represented here by Band of Outsiders, Pursued, and Distant Drums). The festival decided, wisely, not to focus on the Walsh films which are perhaps best known to retro house audiences -- his films of the late 1930s and early 1940s with Humphrey Bogart (They Drive By Night, High Sierra), James Cagney (White Heat, The Roaring Twenties), and Errol Flynn (They Died with Their Boots On, Gentleman Jim), but rather to focus primarily on the transition from silent to sound cinema. As a result, I got to see The Big Trail, for example, an epic western which made effective use of deep focus photography to cram every frame with action and details, and was filmed (and shown) in an early wide screen process, Grandeur,  Me and My Gal with a wet-behind-the-ears Spencer Tracy and Sailor's Luck which managed to perfectly merge the screwball and anarchistic comedy traditions. Another highlight from the festival for me was Frank Borzage's Man's Castle, also with Spencer Tracy, a dark and twisted romance set amongst the homeless camping out in Central Park during the early depression.  Kristin Thompson wrote a typically thoughtful and detailed account of her experiences at this year's festival.

The film festival has become a favorite academic junket, drawing together many of the world's leading film historians, who enjoy hanging out together, watching obscure yet interesting movies, having long conversations over plates of pasta, and grabbing a quick Gellato on the way back to the hotel, before starting the process all over again the following morning.

Bologna has been gaining in recent years on the other great Italian retrospective festival, Pordenone, which is held each year in October, and which showcases almost exclusively works from the early and silent film periods. Bologna has a more diverse program, including silent and sound films from around the world, and has the virtue of falling during the summer, when American academics can get away for a more extended period. So, this year, I had a chance to catch up with old graduate school instructors (Donald Crafton, Kristin Thompson, Susan Olmer, Richard Abel) and classmates (Charlie Keil, Leslie Midkiff-Debauche, Matthew Bernstein, David Pratt) as well as more recent friends who I see in Los Angeles (Janet Bergstrom, Virginia Wright-Wexman, John Huntington).

While in Bologna, I had a chance to sit down in person with Wu Ming 1 (and for part of the meal, Wu Ming 3b). I had interviewed Wu Ming 1 and his collaborators for my blog some years ago, where he spoke with me about his interests in "multitudinous authorship, crossmedia storytelling, world making, identity games, RPG guerrilla warfare, old/new media collision, copyleft-oriented practices, media hoaxes and so on).” This creative collective has written some top-selling novels, such as Q and 54, but they have also spearheaded the Luther Blissert cultural movement, which has conducted any number of pranks and hoaxes to shake up the media establishment in his country. Wu Ming 1 wrote the introduction for the Italian language edition of Convergence Culture, and we've remained in close contact ever since. We had a great discussion, comparing the ways American and Italian activists have responded to the economic crisis, debating my current interests in fan activism, pondering the reasons why social media has played out differently in America and Europe, sharing Wu Ming's new transmedia projects, and above all, assessing current struggles over intellectual property. We were also joined at this meal by Giovanni Boccia Artieri, an expert on social media, who is on the Faculty of Sociology at the University Carlo Bo of Urbino.

Artieri was instrumental in getting me invited to speak at his university during the festival. Wu Ming 1 attended and has shared these notes and audio files of the presentation. This photograph, taken during the talk, gives a hint at the very very baroque environment in which my remarks were delivered.

Afterwards, I was taken to lunch by Veronica Innocenti, who has written extensively about television seriality,  and some of her faculty colleagues.  Meanwhile, Cynthia had some of the American film studies crowd for a day trip to nearby Ravenna, a town overflowing with sixth century churches, which include intricate mosaic work.

Here, you see Cynthia with Virginia Wright-Wexman, Susan Olmer, Donald Crafton, and John Huntington, taken by their tour guide on this exposition.

Bologna, itself, is a delightful place to visit, characterized by long arcade-like walkways and narrow winding streets, often full of bikes and motorcycles.

I was much taken by this fountain, near the center of the city, which seems racy even by European standards, whether we are looking at the ways the women are shown fondling their own breasts (part of the mother's milk fixation observed earlier)

Or the proud display of certain elements of the male anatomy.

Somehow, the juxtaposition of the two leaves this fountain a particularly charged space in my memories of European waterworks. I would say that this guy's "having a party in his pants", if he was wearing any.

I mean no great insult to Italian food, which is everything you imagine it to be, and then some. We dove deep into one great plate of pasta after another across our various legs in Italy, and I think my number one take away from the trip is Prosciutto and Melon, which goes down really well in the sweltering heat we had been experiencing since Budapest. But, by this point in the trip, we had been in Europe for going on two months, having one exotic meal after another. And, I found myself more and more being drawn towards American fast food places, like the McDonalds depicted here. McDonalds functions as the unofficial American Club across Europe -- a place you can go where you recognize pretty much everything on the menu and where you know precisely what you are going to get, where you can -- usually -- get ice in your drinks, where people around you are speaking English, and where you can strike up a conversations with anyone at any table and likely get some fresh news from home, assuming your sense of home is North America between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

My graduate mentor, David Bordwell, was scheduled to participate in a panel near the close of the film festival, having a public conversation with Dave Kehr, who currently writes a column on dvd releases for the New York Times, who maintains maintains the  blog Reports from the Lost Continent of Cinephilia, and who recently published a book of his film reviews from the Chicago Reader, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade. The panel was supposedly about the current state of Cinephilia, though our discussion ranged pretty broadly across historic and contemporary film cultures. As the title of Kehr's works suggest, he thinks that something vital has been lost in contemporary audiences' relationship to cinema, reporting dwindling attendance at retrospective screenings in New York City, and expressing concern that fewer and fewer classic works are making the transition across each new media platform. My own response was, characteristically, a bit more optimistic, so the exchange was a lively one, which I enjoyed very much. It was also fun for me to be speaking some place where I seemed to be better known as the author of What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic than for Textual Poachers or Convergence Culture, and it was fun to use my extensive knowledge of other forms of media fan culture to tweak some of the pretensions of the art house crowd.

http://vimeo.com/44974590

COMING SOON: THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation : Italy and Switzerland

  Damanhur

I suspect this "eco-society" in the mountains of Northern Italy will be unknown to most of my readers, but it created a certain amount of "alarm" and "concern" for some of the Italians involved in planning other stages of the trip. Domahur is an alternative society, founded on environmental and spiritual principles, in the 1975. Unlike many of the other "utopian" communities of that era, it still survives, even thrives, despite a reputation for secrecy and some public misperceptions which link it to "demon worship," a charge which carries weight in a culture that is so deeply rooted in Catholicism. I was invited to visit Damanhur by Betsy Pool, a veteran of the American media industries, who came to this community several years ago with her husband and her daughter.  Pool has been asked by the community to help tell their story to the world, and she has increasingly been drawn into current discussions around games-based learning and transmedia storytelling, reaching out to a number of key thinkers in this space, and inviting them to visit Northern Italy and explore possible collaborations.

The first thing we felt when we arrived in Damanhur was an enormous sense of community: much about this society is co-operative. Many, though not all, of the residents live in group arrangements and give a certain amount of time and work each week to the betterment of their community. As you walk through the community, you can see and feel  how deeply these people care about each other's well-being, how connected they are to each other's lives, and how much they believe in what they are doing.  Everywhere you look, you see signs of the community's commitment to a kind of participatory culture, one where each person is encouraged to be creative and share what they create with the people they care about. We saw paintings, sculpture, architecture, fashion, food, gardening, and farming, all treated as artistic endeavors. We certainly saw signs of people who were still learning how to create and trying their hands at crafts which were unfamiliar to them, but at the same time, we were impressed by the overall high quality of accomplishment the Damahurians had achieved in their respective crafts. At the same time, there was a commitment to protecting the environment, which has led the group to experiment with advanced techniques that allow them to create a more sustainable lifestyle.

This commitment to creativity is perhaps most fully expressed through the religious life of this community. We were taken on a tour of the Temples of Humankind. The Temples are a remarkable accomplishment -- more than 8,500 cubic meters on five different levels, linked by hundreds of meters of corridors, all carved out of the inside of a mountain.  On first entering this space, you are overwhelmed by its scale, by the incredible attention to detail, by the craftsmanship, and by the colors and textures which constitute this built environment.

As the guides showed us this space, I was impressed by  how deeply they have thought through the core elements of their belief system.

In many ways, this is perhaps the fullest realization I've seen yet of what Joseph Campbell once called Creative Mythology. You get some taste of what it's like to visit the Temple when you watch this video we found on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNWQFNGtHdw

One room in the Temple, the Labryrinth, is devoted to what they see as the many faces of God, with stain glass windows paying their respects to Hades, Aphrodite, Amaterasu, Anahita, Arvisura, Anubis, Astarte, Athena, Balder, Baster, Brahma, Bran, Brigit, Buddha, Christ, Cybel, Enlil, Ganesh, Gaia, Judaism, Horus, Huhuetecotl, Islam, Manitou, Marduk, Mithra, Osiris, Pele, Persephone, Poseidon, Pan, Ra, Sin, Tengri, Thoth, and Unkulu Unkulu, that is, Gods from many corners of the Earth and from many different historic civilizations.

At the same time, there are attempts to incorporate the lived experiences and shared memories of the local people into this larger representation of their belief system, so that the residents create their own self-representations, through a range of media, and place them inside the shared spiritual space. The personal and collective stories  of the community, especially the faces of its founding members, are woven into the stain glass windows and murals, suggesting the links between their lives and core values or beliefs of the Damanhuran people.

On a personal level, I was delighted to find the dandelion as an important artistic motif running through the Temple's design: the dandelion also functions as a core metaphor in Spreadable Media, and it was around this same time we were working with NYU to develop a cover design which features the Dandilion as a model for dispersion and circulation.

The Damahurans embrace what they call "estoricism," a particular understanding of the spiritual world, which I find difficult to explain, even though they were generous in seeking to explain its core beliefs to us and answering our many questions. They feel strong connections, for example, with the people of Atlantis, and many of the motifs in their art take inspiration from those bonds. We attended, for example, a shared ritual where members of the community gather each month to consult the Oracles, amongst dancing and drum-beating. I am tempted to say that I am too much a rationalist to share their beliefs, though I value the creative processes through which they seek to share their insights with the world. Yet, they would not see these beliefs as "anti-rationalist," often using terms like "science" to describe their "research" into the metaphysical realm, and they claim to have developed "technologies" which allow them to communicate with other times and with the plant world.

These beliefs, some of which are ancient in origin, co-exist easily with a pretty open attitude towards contemporary technologies. It is not a closed community: people come and go freely, and there were plenty of examples of outside media throughout the living spaces of the homes which I visited.  Young people often leave the community to explore the outside world and many return, choosing to live here. Despite some reputation for secrecy, Damanhur is not an enclave, but rather the community's homes, public buildings, and farms intermingle with other local residents who do not share their beliefs. Betsy and her fellow community members are quite knowledgeable about current developments in digital media theory and they are committed to using state of the art techniques to share their narratives with the world. Indeed, any effort to create Damahuran transmedia experiences will build on the foundation of other public outreach projects, which have included picture books and graphic novels seeking to explain their understanding of the universe.

Many of the core texts that have defined transmedia  -- from The Matrix and Star Wars to Lost -- have had mythological themes, have drawn their core plot structures from Joseph Campbell, and many of them have tapped into strands of "esoteric" philosophy, so perhaps the world is ready for a transmedia franchise which presents the Damanhurian mythology  and which helps us to embrace some of the core values -- creativity, religious tolerance, diversity, community, and concern for the natural world -- which are part of a way of living here.

It was an amazing experience to spend my birthday in Damanhur, learning more about this remarkable culture, and getting to know some of the community members. Betsy and her family were nice enough to prepare a birthday dinner for me, including a traditional Italian cake, which consisted more or less entirely of icing.

Turin 

The following day, Peppino Ortoleva, a distinguished Italian media scholar, took us on a walking tour of Turin and shared a delightful lunch with us talking about the state of research on popular culture in Italy. For me, the highlight of this tour was a visit to Il Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the national museum of cinema, whose displays about early and silent cinema Ortoleva has helped to curate . Among the collection's more spectacular holdings is the statue of Moloch, created for the 1914 Giovanni Pastrone epic, Cabiria, which was considered to have been a primary influence on D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and which established Italy as a major creative force in the silent film era.

In Los Angeles, they have recently built a shopping mall which lovingly recreates the giant elephants from Intolerance, but here, in Turin, they have preserved the original statue which was so central to the film's iconography.

The museum does not simply present artifacts from world film history, with a strong focus on the accomplishments of Italian cinema, but it also seeks to interpret the experience of film genres and film going into a series of evocative environments -- ranging from a Western saloon to a mad scientist's laboratory.

The museum becomes a totally immersive environment that provokes strong emotional responses in visitors, very different from the contemplative distance we associate with more traditional museums. One certainly comes away with a deeper appreciation of film history, but the lesson is delivered with such showmanship that this has instantly become one of my favorite museums.

Afterwards, I shared a public lecture at the Circolo die Lettori about new media literacies and the value of play in educational practice, which seemed to be heavily attended by area teachers. My respondents included Peppino Juan Carlos De Martin (computer science professor at Politecnico engineering school and a commentator on web/computer subjects in national newspaper La Stampa, based in Torino), and Aldo Grasso (TV critic of II courier, Italy’s main newspaper, who teaches media at Catholic University in Milan).

And then we raced to catch a train which took us to Milan. Here, Cynthia caught an image of me, true to form, working on the train.

And from that same train trip, here's another entry in my series focused on the Slapstick imagery found on European warning signs.

Gotta hurt!

Milan 

In Milan, I gave three public lectures in two days:

First, I spoke to the Italian Scientific Society on Media Education’s national conference. What made this talk especially memorable was that they had brought in a class of local high school students who seemed especially engaged by my discussion of new media and education. At one point, I asked the audience who knew about Invisible Children's Kony 2012 video: all of the students shot their hands instantly, while a surprisingly few of the adults in the audience raised theirs. The young people seemed very proud to be more connected to what was happening in the world than their teachers had been, and I had a wonderful time talking with the students afterwords. They had even brought a video production team to interview me for their school newscast, suggesting that the school was finding good ways to integrate their media literacy skills into the classroom activities.

Second, I spoke to graduate students and industry professionals at Bocconi University, an event organized by the U.S. Embassy in Milan, and hosted by Paola Dubini.

Third, I was one of the invited speakers at Media City: New Spaces, New Aesthetics, an international seminar promoted by Triennale di Milano and curated by Francesco Casetti. The event sought to balance excitement about the ways that new media has enhanced our experiences of living in urban environments ("media makes cities easier to inhabit, more beautiful to see, more intense to share, and more complex to understand") with some skepticism about the ways that smart cites "respond to new needs when they provide a system of surveillance or when they inspect our bodies or when they grant control from distance." Most of the other speakers I heard took this more critical perspective, discussing new forms of "boredom" which emerged as people were subjected to public media which over-rode their ability to enjoy private contemplation or interpersonal conversation as they traveled through public spaces, such as train stations or described in pretty negative terms what happens when the public sought to reclaim spaces of shared celebration in areas controlled and dominated by commercial interests.

My own talk, "From 'Bowling Alone' to 'The New Urban Mechanics': Redesigning the Civic Ecology," took a somewhat more optimistic perspective, describing a range of different models of civic participation and engagement reflected in recent experiments in civic media developed through the Annenberg Innovation Lab, MIT's Center for Civic Media, and the City of Boston's Office for New Urban Mechanics. I organized the projects in terms of data aggregation, information exchange, civic engagement, and collective deliberation.  My abstract sums up the key idea: "As we move to think about the future of the city as the locus of a new civic ecology, there has been a tendency to concentrate on notions of information access and transmission to the exclusion of attention to the affective and ritual dimensions of connectivity and mobility.....He examines the ways information technologies may not only support the public sphere but may also offer us a way to reclaim the roles played by the coffee house, the bowling alley, the town pagent, or the carnival, all previous rituals and locations as much or more invested in creating strong social ties as they were to ensuring rational and informed discourse."  The following videos showcase some of the projects I identified across my rather rapid tour of current experiments in civic media.

Projects from The Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw1DabyLJAs&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QSYp0dUxx8&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0dpDw7SJFU&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUT-cVpevGE&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5utjMK8Us&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn29ZCarhd8&feature=player_embedded

Projects from the MIT Center for Civic Media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh_uhaGnqW4&feature=player_embedded

Here's another project developed by Audubon Dougherty, a former Comparative Media Studies student.

Afterwards, Cynthia and I had dinner with Will Straw (McGill University), who has been doing some work on the construction of popular memory online, which has informed some of my recent writings. So, we had a great conversation about zines, obscure forms of print culture, and collecting, all topics I hope to be spending more time thinking about as I get deeper into my new Comics project.

While I was spending my days giving talks, meeting with academics, and giving interviews, Cynthia had a chance to explore Milan. For example, her sightseeing took her to The Duomo, the great 14th century Cathedral, which has been described as the "heart" of this great renaissance city.

Here, you see a detail from the 1562 statue of St. Bartholomew Martyr, which is noted for its depiction of a man who was completely flayed alive, and carries his skin around draped over his shoulder . This sculpture's fascination with muscular and bone structure suggests the role the biological sciences was starting to play in the creative imagination of this period.

Here, we see a monument at the Palazzo Marino erected in the 19th century to honor Leonardo Da Vinci, who did many of his greatest artworks in Milan. The Palazzo is near the Scala, Milan's historic opera house, another key stop on Cynthia's tour.

That evening, Cynthia took me back out to walk at dusk along the outskirts of the Sforza Castle. The Castle/Fort was constructed in the 15th and 16th century during a period when Milan was under Spanish domination. By this point in the trip, Cynthia and I were both deep into reading George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, and thus, we were really fascinating with the heraldic trappings here.

As you can see, this particular castle embraced the image of the snake as central to its identity (again, allowing us to make certain fannish connections with the House of Slytherin in the Harry Potter novels).

It can be hard to make the snake an heroic or even a menacing figure, given all of the negative connotations that often surround reptiles in western culture, but somehow, the castle did a pretty good job of pulling it off.

And Cynthia fell for some stray cats who made their home amidst the ruins and rubble of the castle.

It had to happen. We had been joking the whole trip that we were keeping a "Rock Star" schedule. People had suggested that we print up t-shirts to sell at my talks listing the full route of the tour. I had been comparing notes with my friend, MC Lars, who was doing an honest-to-goodness rock (well, nerd core) tour of Europe over this same period. And every stop along the way, we kept noticing that Bruce Springstein had either just given or was just about to give a concert. Well, we ended up in the same city, Milan, at the same time, but Bruce didn't call me.

VENICE

Venice is exotic, beautiful, romantic, historical, and above all, wet.

We arrived by train from Milan and immediately had to take a water taxi to get to our hotel. I had passed through Venice on the way to the Pordonone Film Festival almost two decades ago and had been scheming to get back ever since; this was Cynthia's first trip, and I think we both became immediate fans of the city, its history, its culture, and its waterways.

For me, a key pilgrimage for this trip was to see the Bridge of Sighs. Historically, the bridge connected the Palace of the Doge's Palace with the prison, so convicted prisoners would cross the bridge and catch their last glimpse of the world outside before being shoved into a dark, dank hole for many years to come. Lord Byron gave the bridge its name and along with it, bestowed a kind of romantic aura around this space. The bridge figures prominently for example in George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, a personal favorite of mine, where two young lovers runaway from their parents in Paris and make their way to Venice where they want above all to cement their romance by kissing underneath the Bridge of Sighs at twilight. So, here, you see me standing in front of the Bridge of Sighs.

And this photograph  is taken on the Bridge looking out at the canals below, more or less what the prisoners might have glimpsed as they crossed.

Leave the myth of the Bridge of Sighs aside, the Dodge's Palace represents one of the most epic spaces I have ever visited. It does seem to be full of people who have fallen out of their clothing at the most inappropriate or awkward moments. We had fun imagining the flirtation which might be taking place between the male and female statues who have stood and looked each other across the courtyard for many centuries now.

Inside the palace, outside the men's room,  we also saw what was perhaps my favorite example of slapstick signage on the entire trip. Sorry for an image which may be NSFW but it is also hanging in a very public space at the Castle.

There's no attempt here to use euphemisms to explain the functions of this room, which should be clear to anyone in any language. But, I can't help but think that the rush this guy is experiencing is a bit life-threatening in its intensity, which is why it seems to me that this sign belongs alongside the other warning signs I've been featuring here.

While sitting in a cafe near St. Mark's Basilica, we observed a grand procession of priests and worshippers, full of pomp and circumstance.

For Cynthia, who has trained as a glassblower, a key pilgrimage was to the Island of Morino, which for many centuries, has been home of the some of the greatest glass-makers in the world.  While glass-blowers from all over come to Morino in hopes of learning more about their crafts, the island's secrets are fiercely protected.  It was not hard to find examples here of fine craftsmanship, though it was also not hard to find lots and lots of cheap knockoffs, aimed at the growing herds of tourists who are finding their way to the Island.

I was intrigued to see these figurines of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan from The Kid (1921). I knew, of course, that Chaplin had left a strong cultural influence on Europe, but I was consistently surprised at how often we encountered Chaplin iconography as we moved across the continent. And more often than not, it was this film, more than Modern Times or City Lights, which was being evoked, suggesting something about the European understanding of the Little Tramp.

Venice was a great city to people-watch, and here are two wonderful images which Cynthia captured of children at play.

I've shared several times through this blog some of the great candy shops we encountered in Europe. What can I say!  I have a major sweet tooth. One shop in Venice had turned the sculpting and paint of marzipan into an art form and we had to buy one of the little fish you see in this image to take home and enjoy in our hotel room.

And of course, Venice is strongly associated in the public imagination with carnival, especially with the elaborately decorated masks which people wear to the festivities.

If these images seem a bit random, it is in part because we took Venice easy. We wandered around the streets, looking in windows, watching boats on the canals, sampling local food, drinking wine, and sleeping late. After the intense speaking schedule of the previous few weeks, it was great to have some time to re-energize.

LUCERNE

From Venice, we flew to Zurich, Switzerland, and then, took a train to Lucerne, where I would be speaking at a conference focusing on Social Media and Participatory Storytelling. The event, which included artists, intellectuals, and industry people, was organized, in part, by Kurt Reinhard, whose documentary series on the Future of Storytelling was spotlighted on my blog a few years ago.  The conference has set up a Vimeo channel which showcases the proceedings. My talk featured here was the only one presented in English. Lucerne is in the German-speaking region of Switzerland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNzVnDJbPGQ

Interestingly, as we got ready to travel to the talk, I spotted some Kony 2012 graffiti spray painted at the base of a distinctly Swiss fountain, an interesting signpost given how often that campaign surfaced in my talks across Europe.

The  conference was held in the basement of the building which housed the Bourbaki Panorama. Created in the 19th century, the panorama is a 360 degree painting which depicts an incident during the Franco- Prussian War of 1870-71, where the defeated French General Charles Denis Bourbaki sought refuge in Switzerland and was greeted warmly by the ever-neutral but ever welcoming Swiss people. This incident gave rise to the modern Red Cross. Visitors stand in the center of the painting, which extends via sculpture into the physical space. Such panoramas were a widespread phenomenon in the 19th century all over the world. I grew up visiting the Cyclorama in Atlanta which is from about this same period and depicts the Battle of Atlanta. But, these works have gradually disappeared or been destroyed, so I was happy to get a chance to visit this one. Historically, these paintings might be incorporated into elaborate performance pieces, where plays with light and sound might intensify the drama.

Given a few hours before we needed to head back to the train, we spent some time exploring the waterfront. Those are the Swiss Alps you see in the background.

There was a large bank of swans, more than I had ever seen at one place in my life, who swam the waters and wallowed on the shore. Behind them here, you see the Chapel Bridge, a wooden structure whose origins date back to the 14th century. The Chapel Bridge spans the Reuss, a body of water which eventually contributes to the Rhine in Germany.

This stone lion honors the Swiss mercenaries who served the French royal family and who were massacred during the French revolution.

 Coming Soon: Germany, Czech Republic, and Hungary

How Did Howard Rheingold Get So "Net Smart"?: An Interview (Part Three)

You talk in the book about what you call “network knowledge.” Can you define this concept? What kinds of things do you think the ordinary internet user should know about the ways networks work and why?

Networks of the technical and social kind -- and especially their combination -- have become particularly important today because of our growing reliance on networked devices and online social networks. At the same time, knowledge of how technical and social networks work is emerging from empirical research. Network science is illuminating the way the structure of networks influences what can be done within and with them. Social network analysis -- which predates the Internet -- shows how people use networks (sparsely knit, loosely bound) as well as communities (densely knit, tightly bound) in their daily lives, offline and online. Research into social capital has revealed the importance of networks of trust in informal collective action. Some of the most important political conflicts over the future of the Internet, such as the net neutrality debate, are tied up with issues about the architecture of the Internet.

Knowing how to cultivate and make use of personal learning networks has become a life skill in school and the workplace. And Manuel Castells has argued, with impressive evidence, that the linkage of global communication networks with human social networks is transforming world civilization into a "network society." None of this knowledge is particularly complicated, at least at the level of grasping the fundamentals. But the practical lore is embedded in a number of different disciplines that the average web user is unlikely to have studied.

So when I say network knowledge I refer to the knowledge of how a small world network works, the role of trust and reciprocity in social capital, the importance of centrality and structural holes, bridging and bonding capital, the architecture of participation that grows from the Internet's end-to-end principle, the differences (and advantages and disadvantages) between communities and networks, the importance of portfolios of loose and strong ties. Each of these terms has a technical meaning within network science, sociology, political science, but each also has practical application: If you know how to do it, you can use networks to find people who know what they are talking about  and you can engage those people and learn from them. You and others can get things done together online more effectively.

I'll just give one example here. Of course I've detailed this lore in Net Smart. The architecture of the Internet -- the way in which information travels and is controlled -- was deliberately designed to be decentralized by the authors of the TCP/IP protocols. Instead of a centralized switchboard like the telephone system, the packets that carry information on the Internet contain their own addressing and other metadata and are cooperatively routed around the Internet in a decentralized manner. The control doesn't lie in a centralized switchboard, but in the way the packets encapsulate the agreements about how the system works and the cooperation of all the nodes in the system enables information to find its own way around.

One important philosophical foundation of this architecture (and certainly there were many technical reasons behind the design of the protocols) was that the creators of the protocols knew that they could not foresee  how people would use the system and -- most importantly -- would innovate within the system's rules -- in the future. If control of how information moved around the Internet was centralized, future innovators might be forced to ask permission or argue for a reconfiguration of the control mechanism. If anybody at any node can invent a new way to use the system -- a World-Wide Web, for example, based on protocols that conform to TCP/IP and build on it -- there is no need to ask for permission or reconfigure the control mechanism.

As we've seen, this philosophical basis for a technical architecture led to unprecedented innovation. The freedom to innovate is one of the most important things at stake in the net neutrality debate. Will future innovators, perhaps in their dorm rooms, perhaps barefoot geniuses with smartphones, be able to invent new ways of knowing, new industries, in the future? Or will they have to work for one of the big content or communication companies?

"Architecture of participation" is a term Tim O'Reilly used to describe the way Internet services can be configured so that individual acts of self-interest add up to public goods that are useful to everybody. I love social bookmarking, for example, not just as a personal knowledge management tool, but as a way of both sharing and discovering resources and expertise. When I select a site to bookmark, select a snippet, add tags, I am doing something that I need to do for my own interest. But when Diigo, delicious or the newer curation sites make it possible for me to make my decisions public at no additional financial or time cost to me, then my decisions aggregate with the decisions of others.

Napster's secret to success was a form of architecture of participation in which people provisioned a resource (music) in the act of consuming it. Set aside for this discussion the ethical and legal issues around stealing music and just look at the architecture. When Napster users downloaded music, it wasn't from a central server, but from another Napster user online at the same time who had the music the downloader sought. By default, the folder where Napster stored downloaded music on users' computers was open to other Napster users who were searching for music at the time. Cory Doctorow called this "sheep that shit grass." The web itself is an architecture of participation. This is a real and not too difficult to understand implication of specific affordances built into online networks.

Many have talked about a pyramid of participation in which many consume information online but few actively produce it. These models are clearly hierarchical with production valued more than consumption. Yet, concepts like curation, which is central to your discussion, or circulation, which will be central to my forthcoming Spreadable Media book, focus on mid-level activities  which are more widespread in our culture and which nevertheless have been central to defining digital culture from the beginnings. You describe tagging as a “fundamental building block” of networked communities.  Can you share more about your understanding of curation as an important form of participation?

I don't have the figures at my fingertips, but my guess is that there are orders of magnitudes more participators in web culture than there were in print culture, in terms both of raw numbers and as a percentage of the population. There were far more readers than writers when the printing presses was the mode of production and the transport of physical books was the distribution channel.

I think there is an answer to the problem of the rising tide of noise online -- spam, porn, misinformation, disinformation -- and that lies in enabling people to find the good stuff and to make their choices public in a way that adds up. Certainly that, crudely put, is where Google's search algorithm came from -- when millions of people began putting links on their website, their choices added up to the input for PageRank.

The wisdom of the crowd is not infallible and it's important to always start there -- triangulation by finding three independent sources or looking at the material in question three different ways ought to be applied to collective decisions along with all the other information found online. Crap detection is about the kind of critical thinking and verification tools and techniques that can help people avoid wrong information.

Curation, however, is about the social production of decisions about which information is worth paying attention to. As I detail in Net Smart, we're seeing the evolution of hybrid social and algorithmic systems for transforming large numbers of individual decisions into valuable metadata. But at the fundamental level, curation depends on individuals making mindful and informed decisions in a publicly detectable way.

Certainly just clicking on a link, "liking" or "plussing" an item online, adding a tag to a photograph is a lightweight element that can be aggregated in valuable ways (ask Facebook). But the kind of curation that is already mining the mountains of Internet ore for useful and trustworthy nuggets of knowledge, and the kind that will come in the future, has a strong literacy element.

Curators don't just add good-looking resources to lists, or add their vote through a link or like, they summarize and contextualize in their own words, explicitly explain why the resource is worthy of attention, choose relevant excerpts, tag thoughtfully, group resources and clearly describe the grouping criteria. Think of these little information details as the metadata for a collective intelligence.

There's one formula for collective intelligence: introduce a large number of people making refined decisions to a platform that makes it easy for them to share those decisions, add intrinsic value to the curation platform that serves the curators' self-interest, mix in  ways for individual curators to group and communicate. If it sounds easy, the hidden difficulty lies in recruiting a sufficiently large population of participants.

I see three linked occurrences that provide some hope for raising the quality of information people are able to access: Curation platform companies such as Diigo, Delicious, Pinterest, Digg, Scoop.it, Pearltrees and many others are engaged in a commercial competition that is driving development of higher quality, easier to use, more rewarding services. More people are using curated resources through social media sharing via Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus .And more and more people are learning to make their curation decisions more effectively. That's why I interviewed Robert Scoble and Robin Good via video and made the videos available online as well as extracting quotes from my book. I can see curation as the basis of an entire course, and of course it has a long tradition in the information sciences that have evolved from library science.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1IeOzIoRDs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMn-cJHzF8A

You enter into the debates around “Playbor.” When and how does the “architecture of participation” become exploitative? How conscious do you think users are about the trade-offs they make in deploying certain commercial sites as tools and resources for participatory culture?

I have learned a great deal from Fred Turner, Trebor Scholz, and Mirko Schaeffer about the way some profit from the actions of many, so I believe an important part of social media literacy, comprising components of crap-detection, participation literacy, and collaborative skills, is the habit of asking oneself who is profiting from one's actions online -- and what they are giving back in return.

I know that when I upload a video to YouTube or a photo to Flickr and take the time to tag them that I am contributing a small amount of monetary value to Google and to Yahoo, which of course adds up to a very large amount of money when that small amount of value is contributed by millions of people.  When I take into account of leasing my own server to share my videos and photographs, the network effects of sharing with YouTube's or Flickr's large population, the software I would need and the time it would require to host my own media, then, to me, the value proposition that Google and Yahoo offer is a fair one.

Yes, I also know that tracking cookies and other mechanisms invisible to me are used to compile my use of these services and other online activities into valuable commercial metadata and for more nefarious dataveillance purposes. So, knowing this, are participative resources like YouTube, Flickr and many others an evil plot? You can argue this politically, but again I believe the better answer lies in education: in medicine the legal doctrine of informed consent compels my doctor to explain what might happen to me when I give consent to operate upon me. I'm giving Google and Yahoo my informed consent. But I'm informed.

Shouldn't everybody be? I certainly don't argue with and wholeheartedly support efforts to create free, inexpensive, open-source services. And I do think it's always important to be wary of the actions of monopolies. But mostly, I'm for informing people about possible exploitation of their labor.

I think trade-off is a good way to think about it. So much of the "entertaining ourselves to death" mass media journalism has trained us to see complex issues in starkly simple and manichean terms. Maybe the way Playbor works is that a big capitalist corporation makes profits by providing a service that has to compete with other services seeking to exploit our attention, decisions, and media (again, beware monopolies). And maybe it also provides a platform upon which participatory cultures can be built.

In the business world, some cooperative corporations such as Mondragon in Spain enable the workers to also be shareholders; Mondragon owns banks and other industries. Might some future entrepreneurs create playbor hybrids that are cooperatively owned? Critiques are important and it is especially important now to think critically around our use of media, but in addition to critiques, attempts at better ways of doing things are also important.

One thing I took away from Mirko Schaeffer's Bastard Culture was his argument that I (and Henry Jenkins) promulgate a "narrative of participation" that promise empowerment to those who learn to participate online, and that this narrative is being manipulated and exploited by corporate culture producers. Well, in the spirit of crap detection, I agree that it's always good to ask "who profits from this?" and "who is funding this?" I decided to contribute to the profits of book publishers every time I bought a book, and in turn I gained knowledge and entertainment. Of course, book publishers weren't able to use technology to wring further profits out of observing how I read their books and how I share them.

Again, it comes around to being mindful. I want to be mindful in my agreements to be exploited and I want to be mindful in the way I frame my narrative of participation. Participation is empowering. But that doesn't mean I think it's utopian.

James Paul Gee has used the term, “affinity space,” to describe what he sees as highly generative online spaces where learning and knowledge production takes place within groups of people who share common interests. He argues for this term because he feels that many of these spaces do not share the social cohessiveness or emotional connections we might associate with communities. As the person who coined the term “virtual community,” I need to ask you how important is it that online networks have attributes traditionally ascribed to communities in order to function effectively?

Barry Wellman calls this "the community question." In 1955, George Hillery compiled 94 different definitions of community in sociology papers, and one of the most important roots of contemporary sociology goes back to Tönnies decrying the shift from gemeinschaft to geselschaft, often translated as the shift from community to society that occurred in the 19th century with industrialization, urbanization, the rise of capitalism.

As Wellman notes, there's a long history of a kind of pastoralist nostalgia: community is seen as something wholesome that people used to have, but which has been eroded, debased, replaced by modernity, mass media, social media. Most definitions include some people who communicate in some way over some period time and have something in common.

Wellman introduced me to finer distinctions. What most people have in mind when they talk about community are people who are geographically linked, densely knit (many or most people in one's group tend to know one another), and tightly bound (relatively few from outside the boundaries of the group). Networks, however, are not bound by geography (which was true before the Internet -- think of diaspora communities of emigrants, or national/global businesses), are sparsely knit (most people don't know each other -- does your teacher know your spouse, your mechanic, your doctor?), and loosely bound (people from different groups/networks are not uncommon).

I also like how Wellman et. al. describe what people get out of communities -- information, social capital (favors for and from others), support (emotional, financial), and a sense of belonging. I think it's fair to say that unless there is some other compelling factor that forces people to provide one or more of these benefits (e.g., your boss says you have to communicate and share information with your colleagues), you are more likely to get them from networks of people who communicate regularly and have come to trust one another to some degree. This kind of trust comes from familiarity, from small exchanges of informational favors, from shared experiences, jokes, the kind of trivial but humanizing knowledge people gain about each other through "small talk."

From these characteristics, I think community and networks ought to be considered as part of a continuum of social relationships. Some relationships have greater depth, longevity, degree of commitment than others, and so do some networks. A community of practice, for example, might not widely share the kind of trust that would allow you to leave your children with someone for the night, or the kind of trust you'd need to take a long automobile trip with each other. But you might recognize a member of a network as someone who has proved to be helpful to others, who doesn't act like a jerk, and someone you've communicated with about matters of mutual interest -- whether it's technical lore among engineers or various tricks of the trade among online gamers.

A COP can function effectively without a great deal of affective component to communication, but it's hard to think of a group that calls itself a community in which people don't exhibit or signal emotion. This loops back to gemeinschaft-gesellschaft. When most people in the world lived in agrarian communities or small villages, then the people you work with, the people who provide professional services, your friends, and your neighbors were largely part of the same group. Now it's easy to switch from your support group for people caring for aging parents, which is probably pretty community-like, to an online community of practice for educators who use social media, which might be convivial without being familiar. I think the community question is a good way for people to reflect on their relationships and obligations and the media they use to maintain them, but ultimately I also think we have not yet developed a rich enough vocabulary to describe the different varieties of sociality that different media afford -- from skyscrapers and elevators to email and multiplayer games.

Humans keep changing the way we communicate -- writing, the alphabet, print, telephone, broadcast media. And with new media practices come new social practices or new twists on older social practices. We attach familiar names to the new -- horseless carriages and wireless telegraphs came to be known as automobiles and radios, and now we have Internet radio, shortwave radio, FM radio, satellite radio. Affinity spaces and hacker spaces, co-working spaces are emerging in the physical and the online world. So I do agree with Gee that it doesn't make sense to call every affinity group a community, as well as agreeing with Wellman that people can receive the general benefits most people attribute to communities from online communications.

Howard's Story:

I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983 and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connection (1986) with Howard Levine, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases.(1988).

I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology through the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers and wrote Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifiers (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.

In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a "computer conferencing" system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community(1993 [New edition,MIT Press, 2000]). I am credited with inventing the term "virtual community." I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). Here's my introduction to the Catalog, my riff on Taming Technology and a selection of my own articles and reviews from both publications.In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazineand was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. Since the late 1990s, I've cat-herded a consultancy for virtual community building.

My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of our ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. The TED talk I delivered about "Way New Collaboration" has been viewed more than 265,000 times. I have taught Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford and continue to teach VirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University, was a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. In 2008, I was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. I have aYouTube channel that covers a range of subjects. Most recently, I've been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. I've blogged about this subject for SFGate, have been interviewed, and have presented talks on the subject. I was invited to deliver the 2012 Regents' Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I also teach online courses through Rheingold U.

You can see my painted shoes, if you'd like.

Howard Rheingold / hlr@well.com

Au Revoir: Heading to Europe

I will be coming soon to a European city near you (that is, assuming you live near a European city). As of today, my wife, Cynthia, and I am departing on a 2 1/2 month, 20 city, 11 country, lecture tour of Western Europe. I will be speaking to academics, journalists, policy makers, industry insiders, secondary educators, and the general public at various legs of the trip, sharing my ideas about spreadable media, civic media, fan activism, transmedia, new media literacies, fan studies, and comics studies, depending on the audience, both looking backward to some of my recent research projects (including the several books which will be published over the next six months or so) and forward to my new project (especially the work I want to do on comics, media history, and material culture.) Along the way, we will see many of the great cities and monuments of both the modern and classical world, most of them for the very first time. For those who want to follow along, here's the schedule of the stops on my tour: ay 1: Travel to Germany

May 2: Marburg, Germany

May 3: Göttingen, Germany

May 4-6: Frankfurt, Germany

May 7: Gießen, Germany

May 8: Stuttgart, Germany

May 9-13: Lisbon, Portugal

May 14-16 London, England

May 17:Nottingham, England

May 18: Sunderland, England

May 19: London, England

May 20-21: Dublin, Ireland

May 22-26: Paris, France

May 27-30: Madrid, Spain

May 31-June 2: Barcelona, Spain

June 3-7: Milan, Italy

June 8-10: Venice, Italy

June 11-12: Zurich, Switzerland

June 13:-16 Delmenhorst, Germany

June 17-19: Prague, Czech Republic

June 20-21: Budapest, Hungry

June 22-30:Bologna, Italy

July 1-11--vacationing in Rome, Italy; Athens, Greece; and Kea Islands,Greece

July 11: Travel Back to U.S.

People are asking what will be my home base. Home bases are for wimps. We are living out of our suit cases, moving city to city, and not looking back. Thanks to the enormous help of the ever remarkable Amanda Ford in pulling together this trip for me and for all of my many hosts along the way who have been so welcoming to this American visitor.

While I am in Europe, my blog is going to go dark. They are going to be doing some work on the back-end and I did not want the responsibility of maintaining it while facing the inconsistencies of maintaining digital access while visiting so many different cities in so many different countries. So, you will have to get along without me for a bit, but know that there will be many good things coming when I get back -- including some recounting of the various sites I saw and hopefully interviews with some of the people I met.

On my way out the door, I thought I would leave you with a few goodies to remind you of me while I was away.

First, this is a video blog created by Lauren Bird from the Harry Potter Alliance in which she offers a very nuanced summary of my ideas about the relationship between folk, mass, digital, and participatory culture. I've become a big fan of Lauren's videos over the past few months, so I was most flattered that she decided to share this account of my work.

A few months ago, I was asked to perform in a USC Student Thesis Film (directed by Nicholas Musurca) which dealt with the career of an imaginary Korean filmmaker. I was delighted when they asked me to play the part of film scholar and critic, David Bordwell. As it happens, I know David very well: he was my dissertation advisor and we've remained good friends ever since. Besides, there's some degree of physical resemblance between us. They've launched a preview for the film through Kickstarter which includes a snippet from my cameo performance, and I thought I would share with those of you who will appreciate the inside jokes here.

Finally, I wanted to share with you an animated short that was made to explain my ideas about media convergence. I have to say that I responded to this video with some degree of bemusement or sadness. It seems my avatar has been putting on too many pounds since my move to USC and now he has to carry around all of that weight with him.

This is how my avatar looked when I was at MIT, partying up with the young folks at Global Kids, and looking pretty lean and spry. I joked at the time that Second Life takes 20 pounds and several decades off you.

And here is how my Avatar looks now, hanging out in bars, eating stuff that is not good for him. This is a real wake-up call and when I get back from Europe, I am going to put that porker on a diet!

Responses to Invisible Children's KONY 2012 campaign

by Zhan Li

On behalf of the Civic Paths Project Research Group, I have been selectively collecting online essay and article responses - both critical and positive - to Invisible Children's KONY 2012 campaign, as well as Invisible Children's reactions to them. I have focused on blog responses from experts and activists in relevant fields with particular attention given to Ugandan and other African voices. I've attempted to capture a broad  range of representative responses to IC's campaign amongst these groups. A selection of the links have been categorized using the Storify website here. You can also cut and paste this link:
http://storify.com/zhanliusc/kony2012-campaign-responses-march-5-10-2012

Comics from the 19th to the 21st Century: An Interview with Jared Gardner (Part Two)

Your book contributes in important ways to recent efforts by a number of comics scholars to reconsider Frederic Wertham not simply as a public crusader against comics, but as perhaps the first critic to take comics seriously as a medium with its own aesthetic and reading practices. What do you think more recent work about comics as a medium might learn through this reconsideration of Wertham?

Wertham's demonization by comics history makes a certain amount of sense, even as it often requires gross oversimplification of his important if flawed book. More troubling to me has been Wertham's virtual erasure from the history of media studies. In histories of the field, if he is mentioned at all, it is only as a McCarthyite bogeyman, which couldn't be further from the truth. This is, after all, the same man who would write the first study of fanzines, the first psychologist to set up a free clinic in Harlem, and a passionate defender of "juvenile delinquents" against a judicial system he saw as destructive and often unfair, especially for those coming from underprivileged backgrounds.

In the end, Wertham's mistake was an honest one--one originating with his fierce commitment to his patients and his willingness to take comics and his patients' interpretations of them as seriously as they did. Unlike almost any other "expert" witness from the period (the other exception, on the other side of the debate, would be Lauretta Bender), Wertham really took comics very seriously indeed--and recognized their unique hold over the imagination of readers. He understood the ways in which the form made demands upon readers to work to fill in the gaps and spaces--between panels, between word & image--in the process leading to imaginative investments that he found both fascinating and terrifying. Where he went wrong was in imagining that it was the publishers' intention to "seduce" young readers into this intense relationship with comics in order to produce a generation of weak-minded consumers primed for the exploding consumer marketplace of the 1950s (in this way, he is much closer to Adorno than to any of the other contemporary critics of the comic book). He did not yet understand that it was the form itself that uniquely generated this intense and collaborative relationship between reader and creator.

One thing that surprised me as I read the book (and frankly thrilled me) was your ongoing emphasis on the relationship between fanzine publishing and the history of comics. What functions have comic fanzines played through the years?

This was perhaps the biggest surprise for me as well, and one that ended up guiding a lot of my research and thinking over the past decade. I early on noticed that long before the emergence of anything we might call a "fanzine," the earliest comics creators began their careers imitating their favorite cartoonists and came to New York or San Francisco with a portfolio in hand of their best examples--and often made their first sales peddling some of this fan work work on the streets. Many of us read a remarkable novel or see a special film and think: "Hey, I want to do that!" But the concentrated labor involved in plotting and writing a novel and the technical and financial logistics involved in making a movie (at least until fairly recently when we all have movie cameras in our pockets) discourage all but the most determined and fanatically inspired.

Comics however have always invited audiences to pick up a pencil and try it themselves: from the earliest days of the form creators and publishers have encouraged readers to send in their stories, their sketches--even offering how-to guides for drawing favorite characters. The fanzine phenomenon in comics began with scrapbooks in the 1920s: readers clipping their favorite serial strips from newspapers and assembling their own collections of what would otherwise be an ephemeral medium. Scrapbook clubs developed around the most popular strips, and readers often sought out the mediation of the cartoonist himself to help them track down missing installments.

In a way, the history of comics is the history of fan art and the fanzine. Walt Kelly describes himself endlessly peddling versions of Percy Crosby's Skippy before he finally found his way to Pogo. Siegel & Shuster's Superman began as fan art, growing out of their shared love for the newspaper comic strip action hero and the new world making possibilities opened up by the early science fiction pulps. And of course the majority of the cartoonists we associate with the underground movement of the 60s began making fanzines.

And this is what ultimately brought Wertham to fanzines toward the end of his career. If Seduction of the Innocent was all about the dangers posed by the intense interactive experience of making meaning out of comics, Wertham's research on fanzines told the other side of the story he had not acknowledged in his earlier work: of the ways in which comics summoned readers to become creators themselves.

Of course, Wertham could fairly safely celebrate fanzines in the 1970s, when their role in the creation of underground comix was clear for all to see. In fact, in the early 1950s, Wertham and other opposed to comics were targets in some the earliest publications to explicitly define themselves as comics fanzines--especially those devoted to EC, such as Bhob Stewart's pioneering EC Fan Bulletin. Bill Gaines, the publisher of EC, liked the idea of Stewart's fanzine so much he essentially borrowed the title and the format for his own official fan club publication. But while Gaines intuitively understood the importance of nourishing a deep and interactive relationship with his readers in a way no one in comic books had or would again until Stan Lee in the early 1960s at Marvel, Gaines somehow completely missed the opportunity to summon those fans into action through their various local fan clubs and fanzines until it was far too late. Many historians of the form suggest it was simply denial on the part of Gaines and other publishers as to the seriousness of the forces being arrayed against them. But I suspect it had more to do with the lack of seriousness with which they took their own readers and their fan publications, at the end of the day--even as EC which prided itself on its loyal readers.

In the end, of course, the publishers lost (all except a small handful who were poised to profit on the newly mandated "safer" content), but the fanzines continued, with more fanzines devoted to EC emerging after the demise of the comic book company than existed during its lifetime. And the fanzines carried the energy, community, and possibilities of comics across the deadzone of the Code era and into the new frontiers of underground, alternative, and independent comics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

I was especially interested in the emphasis in your account of contemporary comics on themes of collecting. As you note, many key comics creators have been collectors not only of comics but also of other ephimeral media, especially of other print culture, from post-cards to pulp novels. What influence has their collecting practices had on the themes and style of their books?

Collecting and OCD! As someone who has more than a touch of both in my genes, I suspect it is one of the things that first attracted me to the form.

Art Spiegelman suggested once that he learned the disciplines of the form--arranging a complicated assortment of often mismatched symbols and signs in a contained space--from his father, a Holocaust surviver, who had taught him how to pack a bag quickly. Comics is the art of the suitcase: never enough space for all that needs packing. And that surely is part of the attraction of cartoonists to collecting (and interesting, again remarking on the negligible distance that separates creators from readers of comics, the same is famously true for comics readers as well). But it is also the art of leaving out and leaving behind. So collecting, the fantasy of completion, of not having to leave anything behind, is perhaps also a necessary salve to the daily sacrifices of cartooning.

Late in the book, you use the concept of the "database" taken from digital media to describe the structure of some recent comics. To what degree do you think the works of artists such as Chris Ware have been influenced by the model of digital media? Did you get to see the interactive comic Ware published recently through the McSweeney iPad app?

I am fairly certain that Ware would deny any influence from digital media, even as I see his iPad experiment as precisely the kind of work we need more of to make the transition of comics into digital platforms a productive one. Like so many of his contemporaries in alternative comics, he has been fairly outspoken in his skepticism about computers and digital utopias, despite using many digital tools himself in his own work. And yet, it is impossible to look at something like this page from Jimmy Corrigan and not see it as a powerful visual representative of what Manovich and others call the database aesthetic. Here, Ware is describing the work two simple panels from a comic require of a reader, fanning out on the page the range of choices and systems from which the reader will make determinations (in the blink of an eye and/or obsessively, repetitively over time) as to how to fill in the gaps between and bring the story "to life." I can't help here but see something like Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases, where Greenaway leaves on the screen the 'leftovers' from earlier takes, screen tests, and narrative pathways not taken.

Of course, the difference is important, and perhaps it gets to the heart of the difference between comics and film, even film at the hands of the man who is arguably the Godfather of the database aesthetic in cinema. Ware's focus here is on the work of the reader--the database of association, assumptions, memories, icons and signs with which the reader works to activate the comic. Greenaway's ambitious and highly interactive Tulse Luper experiment can offer on the screen the visible outlines of the database from which he drew in making the film. I am going that one step too far that will get me in trouble with my film studies colleagues, I know, but in the end, film, at least as its developed in the western narrative tradition, offers far fewer spaces for agency and interaction on the part of the spectator. Comics, for better and worse, always have to meet the reader (and her database) halfway.