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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin didn't start with Robin. Robin won't end when Robin ends. In fact, it's arguable that Robin's already begun to move on from Robin. In less smartypants language, what I mean is that the ingredients which were brought together to create the character of "Robin," Batman's red-and-green-and-gold-wearing sidekick, were ingredients which already shared numerous common elements. And once Robin could no longer embody these elements, other pop culture arose to take over the character's place.

Or so goes the opening paragraphs of Mary Borsellino's fascinating new work, Girl and Boy Wonders: Robin in Cultural Context. The self-published text, which can be downloaded here, explodes with new insights and information about Batman's oft-neglected and marginalized sidekick, the kinds of information that could only come from a dedicated aca-fan. I will be honest that despite being a life-long Batman fan, I had never given that much consideration to Robin's cultural origins, his contributions to the series, or his influence on our culture. Works like William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson's The Many Lives of the Batman or Will Brooker's Batman Unmasked have made significant contributions to our understanding of the mythology around the dark knight, but most of them given short shrift to his "old chum." Borsellino argues that Robin's marginalization, sometimes in response to homophobia, sometimes in response to a desire for a "more mature" caped crusader, is part of his message. The character has special appeal, she argues, for "those readers and viewers who are themselves marginalized."

I checked in with Borsellino recently, asking her to share some of her insights with my readers.

This project emerged in part from your own very active involvement in Project Girl Wonder, which responded to what you saw as DC's neglect of Stephanie Brown. Can you give us some background on this controversy? What were the issues involved? Why was this character so important to you? What was the outcome of the campaign?

Actually, Project Girl Wonder came about out of the project. I was so immersed in the potential meanings of all the stuff going on with Robin in comics, and so tuned in to the rapid decline of relevance with DC's mandated interpretation of Robin. The idea of Stephanie Brown as Robin was so fresh and strange as a direction, but was handled so clumsily and with such obvious institutionalised sexism that it was pretty vile to witness, both as a cultural observer and as a fan who's also a feminist.

Essentially, for those not familiar with the character or with Robin's larger back story: when the second Robin, a boy named Jason, died, Batman created a memorial out of his costume in the Batcave. Stephanie was the fourth Robin, and her costume was different to the three boys who'd had it before her in that she sewed a red skirt for herself. Just a few months after her first issue as Robin was released, Stephanie was tortured to death with a power drill by a villain, and then died with Batman at her bedside.

The sexualised violence alone was pretty vomitous, but what made it so, so much worse for me was that Batman promptly forgot her. DC's Editor in Chief had the gall to respond to questions of how her death would affect future stories by saying that her loss would continue to impact the stories of the heroes -- how sick is that? Not only is the statement clearly untrue, since the comics were chugging along their merry way with no mention of her or her death, but it was also an example of the ingrained sexism of so much of our culture. Stephanie herself was a hero, and had been a hero for more than a decade's worth of comics, but the Editor's statement made it clear that he only thought of male characters as heroes, and the females as catalysts for those stories. It was a very clear example of the Women in Refrigerators trope, which has been a problem with superhero comics for far, far too long.

Long story short, I got together with a few like-minded comics fans and set out to petition DC Comics into giving Stephanie a memorial like Jason's -- to acknowledge that she was just as much a hero, and just as much Robin, as any of the boys. It made such a clear and striking image: a costume in a memorial case, just like Jason's now-iconic one, but this time with a little

red skirt on it as well. We couldn't have asked for a better logo for our cause.

We were lucky enough to have some invaluable help, both outside comics and inside. Shannon Cochran wrote a wonderful, in-depth article about the situation for Bitch magazine; we were a Yahoo site of the day; the webcomic Shortpacked ran a sharply funny strip about it all; and several comics writers working for DC -- Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison, in particular -- dropped references to the absence/potential presence of a memorial case for Stephanie into comics.

In the end, DC glossed it all over by having a storyline where Stephanie shows up, miraculously alive this whole time, and having the current Robin say to Batman "oh! you always knew she was alive! no wonder you never made her a memorial case!". Despite the fact that stories in the interim had featured Stephanie's death, autopsy, burial, and appearances as a spirit in the afterlife. Nope, Batman knew she was alive the whole time! Good job with the damage control there, DC.

Still, a live heroine's better than a dead one any day, so I count the whole thing as a victory in the end.

Critics have written a fair amount about how Batman's persona was inspired by earlier popular heroes, including Sherlock Holmes and the Douglas Fairbank's version of Zorro. What popular figures helped to inform the initial conception of Robin?

Within comics, the most direct inspiration was Junior, who was Dick Tracy's young offsider. Robin was the first time that boy helper figure was put into a superhero costume, but Junior was playing the detective's assistant role years before, and screwing up in all the same ways Robin so often does, ending up as a hostage and things like that. More widely, you've gone halfway to answering your own question -- Sherlock Holmes had Watson there, to listen to his theories and help solve the mysteries. The sidekick role has been around a long time, and provided the template for Robin's role.

Culturally, the figure of the daredevil boy hero is an ancient one, dating back through epic literature of the middle ages to the statuary and myths of Greece and Rome. Robin just gave the archetype a new costume.

You suggest that the marginalization of Robin as a character has helped to make the sidekick a particularly potent point of reference for other groups who also feel marginalized. Explain.

The two examples I use in my book are queer fans and women, though I also know readers who've used this same framework for class and race. As a queer person, or a woman, or someone of a marginalised socio-economic background, or a non-Caucasian person, it's often necessary to perform a negotiated reading on a text before there's any way to identify with any character within it. Rather than being able to identify an obvious and overt avatar within the text, a viewer in such a position has to use cues and clues to find an equivalent through metaphor a lot of the time.

A recent example of this is Spock and Uhura in the new Star Trek movie. Uhura has always been vitally important as a role model to women of colour -- even Martin Luther King Jr thought so. And she still fulfils that role in the new movie. The narrative themes of racial discrimination and of the conflicts which dual cultural heritage can bring with it are in the movie as well, but they're not the story of Uhura, because Gene Roddenberry was committed to the idea of a future where the crew of a starship could be mixed-race without remark. The character who offers these is Spock: he's the one with all the 'outsider' cues in his makeup, which I think goes part of the way to understanding why the recent Star Trek movie has seen a massive re-emergence of Kirk/Spock slash on the fannish landscape: female fans and those seeking a queer reading are drawn to that sense of marginalisation, of the ongoing fight to be recognised as present and worthy.

I got off-topic a bit there, sorry -- my reason for bringing up Spock and Uhura was to demonstrate that 'otherness' as part of a character's construction isn't necessarily bound directly to traits such as race or gender. It can stand for them, but does so obliquely. And Robin, by being put down and rejected by wave after wave of commentators and creators, has

come to embody anything that's been sidelined or disregarded, anything that's rejected in the relentless quest to make Batman as heteronormatively masculine and dour as possible. Just as those who fight against personal discrimination can find an avatar in Spock, those who struggle to re-establish their voice in dialogues where they've been silenced can find an avatar in the way Robin is pushed out of the way by official texts.

Many know of the ways that DC has struggled with the homophobia surrounding the relationship between Batman and Robin. How has this concern shaped the deployment of Robin over time? Are there any signs that in an era of legalized gay marriage, our culture may be less anxious about these issues?

We also live in an age of Prop 8, alas. I live in Australia, and both Australia and America recently switched from a longstanding conservative leadership to a potentially more progressive government -- but both Prime Minister Rudd and President Obama have gone on-record as saying that they believe marriage should be between a man and a woman. Progress hasn't yet progressed as far as I'd like to see it go, frankly.

And I think DC Comics is an absolute trainwreck mess at this point, to be even more frank. You only have to look at All Star Batman and Robin, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, to see what a disaster the company's current concept of a flagship book is. The writing's incredibly sloppy, sexist, homophobic, and unengaging. "That is so queer" is used by Robin as a slur.

Batman calls Robin "retarded" and declares himself "the goddamn Batman". It would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful.

It hasn't always been that bad, of course, but right now it appears to me that DC is more anxious than ever about potential gay readings. And then there's Christian Bale, who has stated outright that he'll go on strike if anybody tries to incorporate Robin into the movie franchise. His Batman is so joyless that it's no wonder everybody went starry-eyed for the Joker -- the guy may be a psychopath, but at least he seems to know that running around Gotham City in a stupid outfit is meant to be fun.

You argue that Robin is in many ways a "transgender figure." Explain.

Robin crosses all sorts of imposed gender boundaries, both literal and figurative. Carrie Kelley, for example, the young girl who becomes Robin in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, is referred to by a news broadcaster as 'the Boy Wonder'; she looks completely androgynous in-costume, and so is assumed to be a boy. Dick Grayson and Tim Drake both assume female identities to go undercover in numerous stories -- Dick even played Bruce's wife on one occasion back in the forties -- and Stephanie Brown's superhero identity before she became a Robin, the Spoiler, is thought to be a boy even by her own father.

Those are just the literal examples of gender transgression. There're also a lot of background cultural cues coming into play, in the way the Robin costume looks, the way different backstories for the Robins are structured, and how sidekicks function in adventure narratives -- all these elements work against the notion of pinning Robin down as definitively male or female as a character; the only classification which really fits is that of being constantly in-motion between options and unclassifiable.

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

Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities in the Digital Age: An Interview with Sonia Livingstone (Part Two)

A real strength of your new book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, is that it combines ethnographic and statistical, qualitative and quantitative approaches. What does each add to our understanding of the issues? Why are they so seldom brought together in the same analysis?

I'm glad you think this is a strength, as it's demanding to do, which may be why many don't do it. The simple answer is that I am committed to the view that qualitative work helps us understand a phenomenon from the perspective of those engaged in it, while quantitative work helps us understand how common, rare or distributed a phenomenon is.

Personally, I was fortunate to have been trained in both approaches, starting out with a rigorous quantitative training before launching into a mixed methods PhD as a contribution to a highly qualitative field of audience research and cultural studies. While I don't argue that all researchers must do everything, I do hope that the insights of both qualitative and quantitative research can be recognised by all; as a field, it seems to me vital to bring these approaches together, even if across rather than within projects.

You begin the book by noting the very different models of childhood which have emerged from psychological and sociological research. How can we reconcile these two paradigms to develop a better perspective on the relationship of youth to their surrounding society?

I hope that the book takes us further in integrating psychological and sociological approaches, for I try to show how they can be complementary. Particularly, I rebut the somewhat stereotyped view that psychologists only consider individuals, and only consider children in terms of 'ages and stages', by pointing to a growing trend to follow Vygotsky's social and materialist psychology rather than the Piagetian approach, for this has much in common with today's thinking about the social nature of technology.

However, this is something I'll continue to think about. It seems important to me, for instance, that few who study children and the internet really understand processes of age and development, tending still to treat all 'children' as equivalent, more comfortable in distinguishing ways that society approaches children of different ages than in distinguishing different approaches, understandings or abilities among children themselves.

One tension which seems to be emerging in the field of youth and digital learning is between a focus on spectacular case studies which show the potentials of online learning and more mundane examples which show typical patterns of use. Where do you fall?

Like many, I have been inspired and excited by the spectacular case studies. Yet when I interview children, or in my survey, I was far more struck by how many use the internet in a far more mundane manner, underusing its potential hugely, and often unexcited by what it could do. It was this that led me to urge that we see children's literacy in the context of technological affordances and legibilities. But it also shows to me the value of combining and contrasting insights from qualitative and quantitative work. The spectacular cases, of course, point out what could be the future for many children. The mundane realities, however, force the question - whose fault is it that many children don't use the internet in ways that we, or they, consider very exciting or demanding? It also forces the question, what can be done, something I attend to throughout the book, as I'm keen that we don't fall back into a disappointment that blames children themselves.

As you note, there are "competing models" for thinking about what privacy means

in this new information environment. How are young people sorting through these

different models and making choices about their own disclosures of information?

There's been a fair amount of adult dismay at how young people disclose personal, even intimate information online. In the book, I suggest there are several reasons for this. First, adolescence is a time of experimentation with identity and relationships, and not only is the internet admirably well suited to this but the offline environment is increasingly restrictive, with supervising teachers and worried parents constantly looking over their shoulders.

Second, some of this disclosure is inadvertent - despite their pleasure in social networking, for instance, I found teenagers to struggle with the intricacies of privacy settings, partly because they are fearful of getting it wrong and partly because they are clumsily designed and ill-explained, with categories (e.g. top friends, everyone) that don't match the subtlety of youthful friendship categories.

Third, adults are dismayed because they don't share the same sensibilities as young people. I haven't interviewed anyone who doesn't care who knows what about them, but I've interviewed many who think no-one will be interested and so they worry less about what they post, or who take care over what parents or friends can see but are not interested in the responses of perfect strangers.

In other words, young people are operating with some slightly different conceptions of privacy, but certainly they want control over who knows what about them; it's just that they don't wish to hide everything, they can't always figure out how to reveal what to whom, and anyway they wish to experiment and take a few risks.

You reviewed the literature on youth and civic engagement. What did you find? What do you see as the major factors blocking young people from getting more involved in the adult world of politics?

I suggest here that some initiatives are motivated by the challenge of stimulating the alienated, while others assume young people to be already articulate and motivated but lacking structured opportunities to participate. Some aim to enable youth to realise their present rights while others focus instead on preparing them for their future responsibilities.

These diverse motives may result in some confusion in mode of address, target group and, especially, form of participation being encouraged. Children I interview often misinterpret the invitation to engage being held out to them (online and offline) - they can be suspicious of who is inviting them to engage, quickly disappointed that if they do engage, there's often little response or recognition, and they can be concerned that to engage politically may change their image among their peers, for politics is often seen as 'boring' not 'cool'.

In my survey, I found lots of instances where children and young people take the first step - visiting a civic website, signing a petition, showing an interest - but often these lead nowhere, and that seems to be because of the response from adult society. Hence, contrary to the popular discourses that blame young people for their apathy, lack of motivation or interest, I suggest that young people learn early that they are not listened to. Hoping that the internet can enable young people to 'have their say' thus misses the point, for they are not themselves listened to. This is a failure both of effective communication between young people and those who aim to engage them, and a failure of civic or political structures - of the social structures that sustain relations between established power and the polity.

Sonia Livingstone is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is author or editor of fourteen books and many academic articles and chapters on media audiences, children and the internet, domestic contexts of media use and media literacy. Recent books include Audiences and Publics (2005), The Handbook of New Media (edited, with Leah Lievrouw, Sage, 2006), Media Consumption and Public Engagement (with Nick Couldry and Tim Markham, Palgrave, 2007) and The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (edited, with Kirsten Drotner, Sage, 2008). She was President of the International Communication Association 2007-8.

If you've enjoyed this interview, you can hear Sonia Livingstone live and in person this summer at the 2009 Conference of the National Association for Media Literacy Education

(NAMLE)to be held August 1-4 in Detroit, MI. Her keynote address for this biennial conference -- the nation's largest, oldest and most prestigious gathering of media literacy educators -- is scheduled for Monday, August 3 at 4:00 pm in the Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit.

The conference - four days of non-stop professional development on topics such as teaching critical thinking, gaming, media production, literacy, social networking and more! -- will feature more than sixty events, including keynotes, workshops, screenings, special interest caucuses and roundtable discussions. Among the special events are the launch of the new online Journal of Media Literacy Education, the Modern Media Makers (M3) production camp for high school students, and a celebration of the 50th

anniversary of Detroit's famous "Motown Sound."

The conference theme, "Bridging Literacies: Critical Connections in a Digital World" speaks to the educational challenges facing teachers, schools and administrators in helping young people prepare for living all their lives in a 21st century culture. Complete details and online registration are available here.

Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities in the Digital Age: An Interview with Sonia Livingstone (Part One)

The first time I saw Sonia Livingstone speak about her research on the online lives of British teens, we were both part of the program of a conference organized by David Buckingham at the University of London. I was impressed enough by her sober, balanced, no-nonsense approach that I immediately wrote a column for Technology Review about her initiative. Here's part of what I had to say:

A highlight of the conference was London School of Economics professor Sonia Livingstone's announcement of the preliminary findings of a major research initiative called UK Children Go Online. This project involved both quantitative and qualitative studies on the place of new media in the lives of some 1,500 British children (ages 9 to 19) and their parents. The study's goal was to provide data that policymakers and parents could draw on to make decisions about the benefits and risks of expanding youth access to new media. Remember that phrase -- benefits and risks.

According to the study, children were neither as powerful nor as powerless as the two competing myths might suggest. As the Myth of the Digital Generation suggests, children and youth were using the Internet effectively as a resource for doing homework, connecting with friends, and seeking out news and entertainment. At the same time, as the Myth of the Columbine Generation might imply, the adults in these kids' lives tended to underestimate the problems their children encountered online, including the percentage who had unwanted access to pornography, had received harassing messages, or had given out personal information....

As the Livingstone report notes in its conclusion: "Some may read this report and consider the glass half full, finding more education and participation and less pornographic or chat room risk than they had feared. Others may read this report and consider the glass half empty, finding fewer benefits and greater incidence of dangers than they would have hoped for." Unfortunately, many more people will encounter media coverage of the research than will read it directly, and its nuanced findings are almost certainly going to be warped beyond recognition.

The last sentence referred to the ways that the British media had reduced her complicated findings to a few data points about how young people might be accessing pornography online behind their parents' backs.

This week, Sonia Livingstone's latest book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, is being released by Polity. As with the earlier study, it combines quantitative and qualitative perspectives to give us a compelling picture of how the internet is impacting childhood and family life in the United Kingdom. It will be of immediate relevence for all of us doing work on new media literacies and digital learning and beyond, for all of you who are trying to make sense of the challenges and contradictions of parenting in the digital age. As always, what I admire most about Livingstone is her deft balance: she does find a way to speak to both half-full and half-empty types and help them to more fully appreciate the other's perspective.

Given the ways I observed her ideas getting warped by the British media (read the rest of the Technology Review column for the full story), I wanted to do what I could to make sure her ideas reached a broader public in a more direct fashion. (Not that she needs my help, given her own skills as a public intellectual.) She was kind to grant me this interview during which she talks through some of the core ideas from the book.

In the broadest sense, your book urges parents/educators/adult authorities to

help young people to maximize the potentials and avoid the risks involved in moving into the online world. What do you see as the primary benefits and risks here?

My book argues that young people's internet literacy does not yet match the headline image of the intrepid pioneer, but this is not because young people lack imagination or initiative but rather because the institutions that manage their internet access and use are constraining or unsupportive - anxious parents, uncertain teachers, busy politicians, profit-oriented content providers. I've sought to show how young people's enthusiasm, energies and interests are a great starting point for them to maximize the potential the internet could afford them, but they can't do it on their own, for the internet is a resource largely of our - adult - making. And it's full of false promises: it invites learning but is still more skill-and-drill than self-paced or alternative in its approach; it invites civic participation, but political groups still communicate one-way more than two-way, treating the internet more as a broadcast than an interactive medium; and adults celebrate young people's engagement with online information and communication at the same time as seeking to restrict them, worrying about addiction, distraction, and loss of concentration, not to mention the many fears about pornography, race hate and inappropriate sexual contact.

Indeed, in recent years, popular online activities have one by one become fraught with difficulties for young people - chat rooms and social networking sites are closed down because of the risk of paedophiles, music downloading has resulted in legal actions for copyright infringement, educational institutions are increasingly instituting plagiarism procedures, and so forth. So, the internet is not quite as welcoming a place for young people as rhetoric would have one believe. Maybe this can yet be changed!

Risk seems to be a particularly important word for you. How would you define it

and what role does the discussion of risk play in contemporary social theory?

I've been intrigued by the argument from Ulrick Beck, Anthony Giddens and others that late modernity can be characterised as 'the risk society' - meaning that we in wealthy western democracies no longer live dominated by natural hazards, or not only by those. But we also live with risks of our own making, risks that we knowingly create and of which we are reflexively aware. Many of the anxieties held about children online exactly fit this concept.

My book tries to show how society has created an internet that knowingly creates new risks for children, both by exacerbating familiar problems because of its speed, connectivity and anonymity (e.g. bullying) and generating new ones (e.g. rendering peer sharing of music illegal). These are precisely risks that reflect our contemporary social anxieties about children's growing independence (in terms of identity, sexuality, consumption) in contemporary society.

As you note, some want to avoid discussion of "risk" because it may help fuel the climate of "moral panic" that surrounds the adoption of new media into homes and schools. Why do you think it is important for those of us who are more sympathetic to youth's online lives to address risks?

I have worried about this a lot, for it is evident to me that, to avoid moral panics (a valid enterprise), many researchers stay right away from any discussion or research on how the internet is associated not only with interesting opportunities but also with a range of risks, from more explicit or violent pornography than was readily available before, to hostile communication on a wider scale than before, and to intimate exchanges that can go wrong or exploit naïve youth within private spaces invisible to parents. I think it's vital that research seeks a balanced picture, examining both the opportunities and the risks, therefore, and I argue that to do this, it's important to understand children's perspectives, to see the risks in their terms and according to their priorities.

Even more difficult, and perhaps unfashionable, I also think that we should question some of children's judgments - they may laugh off exposure to images that may harm them long-term, for example, or they may not realise how the competition to gain numerous online friends makes others feel excluded or hurt.

Last, and I do like to be led in part by the evidence, I have been very struck by the finding that experiences of opportunities and risks are positively associated. Initially, I had thought that when children got engaged in learning or creativity or networking online, they would be more skilled and so know how to avoid the various risks online. But my research made clear that quite the opposite occurs - the more you gain in digital literacy, the more you benefit and the more difficult situations you may come up against.

As I observed before, partly this is about the design of the online environment - to join Facebook, you must disclose personal information, and once you've done that you may receive hostile as well as valuable contacts; to seek out useful health advice, you must search for key words that may result in misleading or manipulative information. And so on. This is why I'm trying to call attention to how young people's literacy must be understood in the context of what I'm calling the legibility of the interface.

You argue that we should be more attentive to the affordances of new media than

its impacts. How are you distinguishing between these two approaches?

Many of us have argued for some time now that the concept of 'impacts' seems to treat the internet (or any technology) as if it came from outer space, uninfluenced by human (or social and political) understandings. Of course it doesn't. So, the concept of affordances usefully recognises that the online environment has been conceived, designed and marketed with certain uses and users in mind, and with certain benefits (influence, profits, whatever) going to the producer.

Affordances also recognises that interfaces or technologies don't determine consequences 100%, though they may be influential, strongly guiding or framing or preferring one use or one interpretation over another. That's not to say that I'd rule out all questions of consequences, more that we need to find more subtle ways of asking the questions here. Problematically too, there is still very little research that looks long-term at changes associated with the widespread use of the internet, making it surprisingly hard to say whether, for example, my children's childhood is really so different from mine was, and why.

Sonia Livingstone is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is author or editor of fourteen books and many academic articles and chapters on media audiences, children and the internet, domestic contexts of media use and media literacy. Recent books include Audiences and Publics (2005), The Handbook of New Media (edited, with Leah Lievrouw, Sage, 2006), Media Consumption and Public Engagement (with Nick Couldry and Tim Markham, Palgrave, 2007) and The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (edited, with Kirsten Drotner, Sage, 2008). She was President of the International Communication Association 2007-8.

Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part Three)

Are the "vast narratives" created under commercial conditions different from some of the avant garde experiments or eccentric art projects (Henry Darger) also discussed in the book? In other words, do artists think about such world building differently removed from the marketplace?

Artistic considerations can be opaque at the best of times, and that's especially true with someone like Darger. But it's probably safe to say that commercial considerations played no part in his mind. His work was obviously a very private, very internal process. As far as we know, no one but he even knew it existed until after he died. But it's impossible not to speculate, isn't it?--why someone would spend their life creating something like In the Realms of the Unreal. He's almost like a Borges character.

But getting back to the commercial considerations: Walter Jon Williams addresses this directly in his Third Person chapter, and goes into some detail about the commercial considerations of shared-world novels and novel franchises, and how they inform his artistic choices in different ways than his single-author series.

Monte Cook and Robin Laws also discuss this in regards to the tabletop RPG industry, and here we get into very interesting areas of artistic choice. Because what a tabletop RPG writer is doing is creating a kind of machine that other people can use to create stories. Speculatively, someone could write an entire RPG system from scratch, for their individual use, but they'd still be playing the system with other people. The primary consideration in any RPG design is: Does it work? In other words, does it create the kind of stories I want it to, in the way I want it to? And because the tabletop RPG hobby is an inherently social one, this question is very, very close to: Will other people want to play it?

Laws' essay touches pretty directly on the commercial considerations that go into publishers' decisions to go with one property or another, or create their own. And Cook's essay focuses on the sequence of choices a gamemaster has to make in order to enact a particular rules system for the players. What we still don't have much of, outside some of the other 2P and 3P essays (Hite, Hindmarch, Glancy, Stafford) are really nitty-gritty analyses of why designers have created particular rules systems. Why does Call of Cthulhu have a "Sanity" mechanism? Well, that's an easy one, but why, for instance, does Dogs in the Vineyard have a dice pool system, with which players "bet," "raise" and "call" against the gamemaster? Why does The Mountain Witch have a "Trust" mechanism? For every example like that, some designer or team of designers balanced genre appropriateness, individual preference, commercial potential, player familiarity, ease, elegance, playability, and on and on.

For comics, as much as we love them, there are serious narrative handicaps to anyone working within one of the established commercial universes. In particular, it's rare that anything ever truly ends in any real sense. Storylines wrap up, series get cancelled, characters die--but the universe spins on. It happens in this way because DC and Marvel can still make money from it. It takes a huge apparatus of creators, editors, printers, distributors, retailers, consumers, etc., to keep these universes functioning.

You see something analogous in MMOs, although in that case it's weighted much more heavily on the creative and consumer ends, with fewer middle steps. But in both MMOs and comics, there's an unslakeable thirst for new content. You can't just stop producing, or the whole thing dries up and blows away. The advantages MMOs have over comics in this regard are: 1) They are much, much more profitable, and 2) Consumers create a large part of the new content themselves, in the form of their characters, inter-character interactions, and user-created emergent storylines. Anyway, all of this exists in the marketplace, not the ivory tower; the final judgment is the commercial one.

Of course, the art world is also a marketplace--and even the competition for faculty positions (which support many of the more interdisciplinary and experimentally-oriented digital media artists) exerts what might be seen as a market-like pressure. But the pressures aren't the same as those for commercially-oriented vast narratives.

Comics and science fiction fans have long stressed continuity as a central organizing principle in vast story worlds. Yet, you close your introduction with the suggestion that continuity is only one of a range of factors structuring our experience of such stories. Can you describe some others?

"Continuity" is a byproduct of telling a bunch of stories within the same setting. If someone writes a stand-alone novel, she doesn't have to worry about it, except in the simplest sense of making sure that a character who dies on page 50 isn't alive again on page 200. It's only when an author writes a series of novels, or comics, or something else, or other people start writing in that world, or it otherwise grows longer and more complex, that continuity becomes an issue. On the most basic level, it's a sort of contract between author and reader, showing that you care enough to keep the details straight (and aren't engaged in a metafictional exercise or parallel-worlds plot). Too much sloppiness in this area breaks the trust and announces the story's fictionality too directly.

That said, in certain genres, like big comics universes, maintaining continuity is hilariously difficult, bordering on impossible. Grant Morrison is probably right when he says that continuity is mostly a distraction in big comics universes, and will be as long as characters are not allowed to age and die away. No one is going to kill off Batman permanently, no matter what happened in Final Crisis 6, just as Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen, Superman and the others all came back from the dead.

This speaks to a wider problem in comics continuity--without any real endings, and with no meaningful change that can't be revised or done away with at any time, the DC and Marvel universes lack consequences. Any individual storyline might be good or bad, but because they all exist within this ceaseless flow of stories, any narrative power is slowly worn away. One of Pat's favorite DC storylines is Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen's 1984 "Legion of Supervillains" storyline, in which Karate Kid is killed. Now we see that Karate Kid is back in Countdown to Infinite Crisis. What does this do to our appreciation of the original story? Nothing has changed about the text, but now it's been robbed of permanent consequence, and Pat's pleasure in it is diminished. Maybe that's a shallow way of appreciating narrative, but few comics readers will deny that it's a significant part of their enjoyment. And not just comics: the same thing happens in all forms of storytelling. We don't know of any literary critic who appreciates the narrative twist with Mr. Boffin near the end of Our Mutual Friend. You feel cheated; it's arbitrary and it undermines everything that's gone before, and robs the story of what James Wood calls "final seriousness."

This is what made The Dark Knight Returns so powerful, when it was first published. By providing an ending to Batman's story, it cast its shadow both forward and backward over Batman's entire publication history. Suddenly it became possible to read a Batman story in light of where the character was ultimately going. Alan Moore tried to do the same sort of thing--provide a possible ending--for the entire DC universe in his unproduced Twilight of the Superheroes miniseries, a missed opportunity if there ever was one.

Even Agatha Christie recognized this, though her series novels are almost completely continuity-free, with Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple staying essentially static thoughout her uncountable novels. But she still wrote Curtain (and kept it in a bank vault for over 30 years, until a few months before her death) to provide an end to Poirot.

Maybe the best approach to comics is to view them, as Grant Morrison seems to, as existing in a sort of permanent mythological or legendary space, in which the importance lies in the relationships between the characters and the ritual reenactment of certain actions, and not in the movement of these characters through time. We're okay with Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripedes all giving us versions of the story of the House of Atreus, and we appreciate them on their own merits, as literary instantiations of the same story. We don't spend much time trying to reconcile the discontinuities.

Greg Stafford's 3P chapter discusses the process of distilling multiple sources of the Arthurian stories into a coherent, playable RPG campaign. This was a heroic undertaking, but it was possible because 1) Stafford had final authority to accept, reject, or reconcile discontinuous story elements, and 2) he was not working with a constantly-expanding data set, such as the DC Universe. The question is not so much "Could you coherently reconcile all of DC's continuity?" as, "Why would you bother?" Without meaningful consequence, it's better to view the whole universe as existing in a sort of timeless fugue state, with only transitory consequences.

Incidentally, Doctor Who exhibits a different strange mixture of semi-continuity, with irreconcilable story elements (e.g., the multiple histories of the Daleks) combined with actual, permanent consequences (e.g., the Doctor's regenerations). A lot could be said about this, and what it means for narrative reception, and there's certainly a lot of that discussion in Third Person, but we've gone on a bit long here already.

The issue of the "ending" is a recurring issue in the book with several essays promising us "my story never ends" or "world without end," while others point to the challenges of sustaining creative integrity given the unpredictible duration of television narratives. Does the idea of a "vast narrative" automatically raise questions about endings and other textual borders?

Perhaps not automatically, given that we're treating as "vast" projects that are both ambitious in scope and yet planned for a particular, bounded shape from early on. But it's a very common move for vast narrative projects to make, and it's probably an inherent part of those that are conceived as productive systems. Why turn the system off? Similarly, those that are connected closely to events in the world beyond their control, or which have important audience contributions, have something in their dynamics that resists not only the hard border (those are intentionally designed away) but also the ending. That's why we've seen audiences attempt to continue projects that the authors bring to an end. But, of course, that's just a current twist on an old phenomenon, one you've also seen in your work on fan cultures.

That said, and though it may betray a little stuffiness, Pat does prefer narratives that seem to have a traditional shape to them, with meaningful endings that pay off everything that's gone before. And Noah thinks this is essential to a certain kind of project, even if some of his favorite fictions (from Mrs. Dalloway to Psychonauts) succeed on different terms. Commonly, comics and television structures work heavily against traditional narrative closure, but for commercial reasons, not even interesting modernist, postmodern, or currently-experimental ones. Which is why it's so exciting to come across something like The Wire, which is a coherent literary work realized in the televisual medium, which until recently Pat at least didn't think possible.

What demands do "vast narratives" place on the people who read them? Is a significant portion of the reading public ready to confront those challenges?

At this point, the question might actually be whether the expanding end of the reading public is willing to take on something that isn't as vast as, say, the Harry Potter or Twilight books. Perhaps it's just our skewed viewpoint, but it seems like large fictional projects, which either start with novels or have them as part of a cross-media environment, are a key way the reading public is growing. This reminds Noah of how his experience of being in the university is changing, now that even graduate students often can't remember a time before the Web very clearly and most students think that games are "obviously" as important a media form as, say, television. Vast possibilities and large interaction spaces now seem a kind of media norm.

That said, the pleasures of our youths--e.g., reading Marvel and DC comics and playing Call of Cthulhu and Champions (not the forthcoming online version)--were pleasures that grew with extended engagement, with developing understanding and elaboration of fictional universes and their characters. Those could be thought of as "demands," but we didn't feel that way about them, and we don't have the sense that people today reading a long series of novels or playing a computer RPG for 50+ hours (without even being completionist) feel that way either.

T-t-t-that's all, folks!

Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part Two)

A reader asked me whether the book included a discussion of soap opera, which would seem to meet many criteria of vast narrative, but doesn't fall as squarely in the geek tradition as science fiction series like Doctor Who or superhero comics like Watchmen. Pat does include a brief note about his own experience watching soaps with his grandmother. What do you see as the relationship between "vast narratives" and the serial tradition more generally?

Soap opera is definitely a missed opportunity for us. We had intended to have at least one essay on the subject, but it fell by the wayside as our contributors came aboard and our word count ballooned. We had also intended to have more essays on more purely literary topics; as it stands, Bill McDonald's essay on Thomas Mann seems a little lonely in the middle of all that television. We had wanted at least an essay on Faulkner, probably one on Dickens, and some others. But it's exactly there that Third Person would have started to tip over into more traditional areas of literary history, theory, and narratology. We think one of the strengths of the series is the unexpected juxtaposition of very different fields and genres. So in the end, we opted more for the digital.

The serial tradition seems to us to be a huge and maybe indispensible part of most "vast narratives." Comic books and television especially follow very naturally from the serial tradition exemplified by Dickens. In all cases, the story unfolds in the public eye, as it were: David Copperfield appeared in monthly installments, as do most modern comic books; TV serials are generally weekly. In all cases there's ample opportunity for the public to respond to plot developments and offer feedback.

In David Copperfield, for instance, you have the strange character Miss Mowcher, who appears first as a rather sinister and repulsive figure, but when she reappears is pixie-ish, friendly, and plays a role in helping David. What had happened in the meantime is that the real-world analogue of Miss Mowcher (Catherine Dickens's foot doctor) had recognized herself in the installment and threatened to sue. And as we understand it, the characters of Ben on Lost and Helo on the new Battlestar Galactica were both intended to be short-term minor characters, but proved so popular with viewers that they were promoted to central recurring positions.

There are plenty of artistic problems that arise from serialized storytelling, one of the most serious of which is the potential for unbalancing the narrative. Writing an unserialized novel allows you to edit, revise and generally overhaul the story before the public sees it. To serialize a story forces you to go with your thoughts of the moment, which may change before you finish the story, whether because of new artistic ideas of your own or because of outside forces (TV cast changes, editorial shifts in direction, Miss Mowchers, etc.). The Wire is one of the strongest televised serials ever aired--arguably it's simply the best--and that show was blessed with a strong writing staff with long-term narrative plans, substantial freedom from editorial direction, and as far as we're aware, very few unplanned cast changes. David Simon and the other creators like to talk about Dickens in reference to the show, but The Wire is in fact much more narratively balanced and formal in structure than most of Dickens's novels.

At the same time, a lot of exciting art happens in exactly the improvisational space that seriality provides. The writing staff on David Milch's Deadwood seems to have, on a daily basis and under Milch's direction, group-improvised nearly all of the Deadwood scripts. The end result is a constantly surprising story that still somehow appears as a tightly-structured drama, even down to following, more often than not, the Aristotelian unities of time and place. (And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that Sean O'Sullivan does great work discussing seriality both in his Third Person essay, and in his essay in David Lavery's collection Reading Deadwood.)

First Person experimented with placing a significant number of its essays on line and encouraging greater dialogue between the contributing authors. What did you learn from that experiment?

One thing we learned is that putting a book's contents online, which previously had mostly been done with monographs, could also work with edited collections. MIT Press was happy enough with the results that we followed this practice with Second Person and will do it again with Third Person. We'd like to see this practice expand in the world of academic publishing, since we now have some evidence that it doesn't make the economic model collapse (it's other things that are doing that, unfortunately, to some areas of academic publishing).

Another thing we learned is that, while blogs were already rising in prominence by the time we started working with Electronic Book Review on this portion of the project, the kind of conversation encouraged by something like EBR isn't obviated by the blogosphere. In general, blog conversation is pretty short-term. People tend to comment on the most recent post, or one that's still on the front page, and this is only in part because blog authors often turn off commenting for older posts, as an anti-spam measure. EBR, on the other hand, solicits and actively edits its "riposte" contributions (returning them to authors for expansion and revision, for example) and ends up fostering a kind of conversation that still moves more quickly than the letters section of a print journal, but with some greater deliberation and extension in time than generally happens on blogs. These different forms of online academic conversation end up complementing each other nicely.

As you note, comics have had a long history of managing complex narrative worlds. What lessons might comics have to offer the new digital entertainment media?

Digital media has already absorbed a lot of helpful lessons. In Third Person this can be seen in Matt Miller's chapter on City of Heroes and City of Villains, which goes into depth on how Cryptic translated comics tropes into workable MMO content.

The place to speculate might actually be the reverse of the question: what comics could take from contemporary digital media. We don't have any idea what a Comics Industry 2.0 would look like, but we suppose it's possible that DC and Marvel could take some of the pressure off themselves by integrating user-generated content of some sort; overseeing, funding and formalizing fan web sites, or who knows.

Every so often the industry does try something like this: back when we were growing up, there was a comic series called Dial "H" for Hero, in which a couple of kids had some sort of magic amulets that would turn them into different random superheroes when activated. The twist was that all of the names, costumes and powers of the heroes were reader-generated. Readers would send in letters with drawings and descriptions of superheroes they'd invented, and then those heroes would be integrated, with the appropriate credit, into later issues. This sounds extremely childish, and it was. There were no opportunities for readers to affect anything except the most replaceable elements of the story. (Although we do give DC credit for making it a boy-girl team, so that one of each pair of superheroes created would be female. Trying to build female readership is an ongoing problem for the big companies.) Later in the '80s, DC did give readers the opportunity to alter the narrative, when they ran the "A Death in Family" storyline in Batman. In this case, the Joker attacks, beats and blows up Jason Todd, the unlikeable second Robin, and DC established a 1-900 number which readers could call to vote on whether Todd lived or died. Well, they voted for him to die, and so he did, but the whole thing is regarded, rightly, as pretty distasteful, and they never bothered with anything like it again.

So the impulse toward interactivity exists in the industry, though it's never really gone anywhere. We suspect that some type of formalized interactivity will be a part of the comics industry going forward. What it will look like, we don't know.

More to Come

Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part One)

One of the first classes I will teach through my new position at USC will be Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment. I've already started lining up an amazing slate of guest speakers and have put together a tentative syllabus in the class. The primary textbook will be Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, which was edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Many of you who have been working with games studies classes may already know the first two volumes in the MIT Press series which Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin have edited. I've been lucky enough to be included in two of the three books in the series: my essay "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" was included in First Person and my student, Sam Ford, interviewed me about continuity and multiplicity in contemporary superhero comics for Third Person. So, I am certainly biased, but I have found this series to be consistently outstanding.

A real strength is its inclusiveness. By that I mean, both that the editors reach out far and wide to bring together an eclectic mix of contributors, including journalists, academics, and creative artists working across a range of media, and I also mean that they have a much broader span of topics and perspectives represented than in any other games studies collection I know. They clearly understand contemporary games as contributing something important to a much broader set of changes in the ways our culture creates entertainment and tells stories.

For my money, Third Person is the richest of the three books to date and a very valuable contribution to the growing body of critical perspectives we have on what I call "Transmedia Entertainment", Christy Dena calls "Cross-Platform Entertainment", Frank Rose calls "Deep Media," and they call "vast narratives." Each of us is referring to a different part of the elephant but we are all pointing to an inter-related set of trends which are profoundly impacting how stories get told and circulated in the contemporary media landscape. I found myself reading through this collection in huge gulps, scarcely coming up for air, excited to be able to incorporate some of these materials into my class, and certain they will be informing my own future writing in this space.

And I immediately reached out to Pat and Noah about being interviewed for this blog. In the exchange that follows, the two editors speak in a single voice, much as they do in the introduction to the books, but they also signal some of their own differing backgrounds and interests around this topic. The interview is intended to place the new book in the context of the series as a whole, as well as to foreground some of the key discoveries that emerge through their creative and imaginative juxtapositions of different examples of "vast narratives."

Can you explain the relationship between the three books in the series? How has your conception of digital storytelling shifted over the series?

First Person was originally conceived as an attempt to reflect and influence the direction of the field, at a particular moment, while also trying to do some work toward broadening interdisciplinary conversation (in the vein of Noah and Nick Montfort's historically-focused New Media Reader). As such, most of the essays grew out of papers and panel discussions from conferences, especially Digital Arts and Culture and SIGGRAPH. This is also why we used the multi-threaded structure--in order to preserve some of the back-and-forth of ideas characteristic of any emerging field. Unfortunately the book didn't come out as quickly as we hoped, and we were a little worried that it would become more of a history. But it turned out that many of the issues the field was concerned with at the time (e.g., the ludology/narratology stuff) remained, and still remain, things that people entering the field have to think through--so readers still find the book useful today.

That said, we learned an important lesson about the potential for delay, and about thinking of the long-term relevance of a project, so for Second Person we very consciously tried to commission a book that we didn't conceive of as trying to influence the conversation of a particular moment. Pat was working at Fantasy Flight Games when 1P was released, and had been thinking a lot about the relationship of stories to games, especially board games and tabletop RPGs. We both thought it would be an interesting area to explore, especially considering that there wasn't much out there, to our knowledge, that covered similar ground. So the idea was to explicitly draw connections between hobby games, digital media, and other similar performance structures (like improvisational theater) and meaning-making systems (like artificial intelligence research). It was much less "of the moment" than 1P and to our minds, that's when the series really started to take its shape.

Third Person wound up being something of a hybrid of the first two books. Like 2P, it addresses some underserved areas of game design and experience--such as Matt Kirschenbaum's essay on tabletop wargames--but again we're trying a bit to change the terms of the discussion, arguing for a broader conception of our topics. While 2P may have been one of the first books to integrate real discussion of tabletop and live performance games with computer games, its concept is one that goes down easily with most people in the field (we even got reviewed in Game Developer magazine). 3P is a bit of a challenge to digitally-oriented people who think about their field as "new"--or exclusively concerned with issues related to computational systems--because we believe people making digital work have something to learn from people doing television, comic books, novels and the other forms discussed in the book. And we also believe there's something to be learned in the opposite direction as well, and from continuing to connect projects from "high art" and commercial sources. We're very curious to see what the reception turns out to be for this volume, which we view as completing a kind of trilogy.

One striking feature of this series has been the intermingling of perspectives from creative artists and scholars. What do you think each brings to our understanding of these topics? Why do you think it is important to create a dialogue between theory and practice?

Broadly speaking, our scholarly essays often provide a big-picture view of a subject, providing context and analysis, and our artists' essays provide a more detail-oriented, granular view, usually of just a single work or small number of works. Inevitably these distinctions become pretty blurry; for example, we intended John Tynes's 2P essay to be strictly about the Delta Green design process, but he wound up providing a wide-ranging, highly analytical piece about game design philosophy--which is wonderful! Later, in 3P, we gave Delta Green co-creator Adam Scott Glancy the same mandate, and got something of the same result, with a history of the Delta Green property mixed in with wider ideas of narrative strategy.

This is one of the benefits of getting all these contributors side by side in the same series of books; you can see ideas from one person reflected in very different contexts, or, in the case of Delta Green, how the somewhat different design philosophies of two of the three Delta Green creators combined to create the property. This is then situated in the larger context created by the contributions of other creators and scholars, working in a variety of forms related to our themes, resulting in something far richer than one author could deliver.

Incidentally, one notable thing we've found about hobby games designers, is that they're very willing to talk about what goes into their design process, but they're seldom asked! That's a result of the anemic academic attention paid to the field. For literary critics, a novelist's or poet's design process, philosophy, and narrative strategies are all legitimate areas of study (even if "author studies" is now rather out of fashion). Even video game designers are getting some respect these days. But the hobby games industry is too small, it seems, to have merited much attention. This despite the fact that many current video game designers started in the hobby games field: Tynes, Greg Costikyan, Ken Rolston, Eric Goldberg, etc.

While a central focus of the books has been on digital media, especially games, you have always sought to define the topics broadly enough to be able to include work on other kinds of media. In the case of Third Person, these include science fiction novels, comic books, and television series. What do we learn by reading the digital in relation to these other storytelling tradition?

When we talk about "digital media" or "computational media," we're talking about something that is both media and part of a computational system (usually software). As we see it, the lessons digital projects can learn from non-digital projects are both in their aspects that are akin to traditional media (for example, how they handle stories and universes constructed by multiple authors) and in their systems (how they function--and how these operations shape audience experience). The articulation between the two, of course, is key.

We're certainly not the first people to note this. For example, it's been suggested (Noah remembers hearing it first from Australian media scholar Adrian Miles) that digital media creators often fret about a problem well known to soap opera authors: What to do with an audience who may miss unpredictable parts of the experience? Obviously the problem isn't exactly the same, because one case is organized around time (audiences may miss episodes or portions of episodes) and the other is organized by more varied interaction (e.g., selective navigation around a larger space). But there is a common authorial move that can be made in both instances: Finding ways to present any major narrative information in different ways in multiple contexts, so that the result isn't boring for those who see things encyclopedically and doesn't make those with less complete experiences feel they've lost the thread.

Of course, what the above formulation leaves out is that this problem doesn't have to be solved purely on the media authoring side, and perhaps isn't best solved there. Another approach is to design the computational system to ensure that the necessary narrative experiences are had, as appropriate for the path taken by any particular audience. This requires thinking through the authorial problem ("How do we present this in many different contexts?"). But ideally it also involves moving that authoring problem to the system level ("How can we design a component of this system that will appropriately deliver this narrative information in many different contexts, rather than having to write each permutation by hand?"). And, if successful, you don't have to solve the difficult authoring problem of keeping your audience from being bored because they're getting variations on the same narrative information over and over. Then you can use the attention they're giving you to present something more.

Obviously, this isn't easy to do. Computationally-driven forms of vast narrative are still rapidly evolving (at least on the research end of things). But the basic issues are ones that non-digital media have addressed in a rich variety of ways. Even the question of what kinds of experiences one might create in this "vast" space is one that we need to think about broadly--it's a mistake to think we already know the answer--and looking at non-digital work broadly is a part of that.

You write, "Today we are in the process of discovering what narrative potentials are opened by computation's vastness." Is that what gives urgency to this focus on "authoring and exploring vast narratives"?

Personally, that's an important part of our interest. But it's certainly not the only source of urgency. As the variety of chapters in the book chronicles, in part, we're currently seeing exciting creativity in many forms of vast narrative. One might argue that something enabled by computers--digital distribution--is part of the reason for this (e.g., television audiences and producers are perhaps more willing to invest in vast narrative projects when "missing an episode" is less of a concern). But we think of this as distinct from things enabled by computation (permutation, interaction, etc.), especially because some systems (such as tabletop games) carry out their computation through human effort, rather than electronically.

How are you defining "vast narratives"? What relationship do you see between this concept and what others are calling "transmedia storytelling," "deep media," or "crossplatform entertainment"?

Definition isn't a major focus of our project, but there are certain elements of vast narrative that especially attract our attention.

First, we're interested in what we call "narrative extent," which we think of as works that exceed the normal narrative patterns for works of a particular sort. So, for example, The Wire doesn't have that many episodes as police procedurals go (CSI has many more), but it attains unusual narrative extent by making the season--or arguably the entire run of five seasons--rather than the episode, the meaningful boundary.

Second, vast narrative is interesting to us in the many projects that confront issues of world and character continuity. Often this connects to practices of collaborative authorship--including those in which the authors work in a manner separated in time and space, and in many cases with unequal power (e.g., licensor and licensee).

Third, and connected to the previous, we're interested in large cross-media narrative projects, especially those in which one media form is not privileged over the others. So, for example, the universe of Doctor Who is canonically expanded by television, of course, but also by novels and audio plays. On the other end of the spectrum, Richard Grossman's Breeze Avenue project includes a 3-million-word, 4,000 volume novel, as well as forms as different as a website and a performance with an instrument constructed from 13 automobiles--all conceived as one project.

Fourth, the types of computational possibilities we've discussed a bit already, which are present not only in games (we have essays from prominent designers and interpreters of both computer and tabletop games) but also in electronic literature projects and the simulated spaces of virtual reality and virtual worlds.

Fifth, multiplayer/audience interaction is a way of expanding narrative experiences to vast dimensions that we've included in all three books--including alternate-reality, massively-multiplayer, and tabletop role-playing games. Here the possibilities for collaborative construction and performance are connected to those enabled by computational systems (game structures are fundamentally computational) but exceed them in a variety of ways.

Given all of this, it's probably fair to say that our interests are a superset of some of the other concepts you mention. For example, your writing on transmedia storytelling certainly informs our thinking about vast narrative--but something like a tabletop RPG campaign is "vast" for us without being "transmedia" for you.

Patrick Harrigan is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor. He has worked on new media projects with Improv Technologies, Weatherwood Company, and Wrecking Ball Productions, and as Marketing Director and Creative Developer for Fantasy Flight Games. He is the co-editor of The Art of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (2006, with Brian Wood), and the MIT Press volumes Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (2004), all with Noah Wardrip-Fruin. He has also written a novel, Lost Clusters (2005).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin works as a digital media creator, critic, and technology researcher with a particular interest in fiction and playability. His projects have been presented by conferences, galleries, arts festivals, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. He is author of the forthcoming Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies(2009) and has edited four books, including Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), with Pat Harrigan, and The New Media Reader (2003), with Nick Montfort. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Expressive Intelligence Studio in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

A New "Platform" for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part Two)

Henry: Does Platform Studies necessarily limit the field to writers who can combine technological and cultural expertise, a rare mix given the long-standing separation between C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures"? Or should we imagine future books as emerging through collaborations between writers with different kinds of expertise?

Nick: We definitely will encourage collaborations of this sort, and we know that collaborators will need all the encouragement they can get. It's unusual and difficult for humanists to collaborate. When the technical and cultural analysis that you need to do is demanding, though, as it is in a platform study, it's great to have a partner working with you.

Personally, I prefer for my literary and research collaborations to be with similar "cross-cultural" people, such as Ian; I don't go looking for a collaborator to balance me by knowing about all of the technical matters or all of the cultural and humanistic ones. It is possible for collaborators on one side to cross the divide and find others, though. Single-authored books are fine as well, and it's okay with me if the single author leans toward one "culture" or the other, or even if the author isn't an academic.

Ian: I also think that this two culture problem is resolving itself to some extent. When I look at my students, I see a very different cohort than were my colleagues in graduate school. I see a fluency in matters of technology and culture that defies the expectations of individual fields. So in some ways, I see the Platform Studies series as an opportunity for this next generation of scholars as much as it is for the current one, perhaps even more so.

When you think about it, popular culture in general is also getting over the two culture problem. There are millions of people out there who know something about programming computers. As I've watched the press and the public react to Racing the Beam, it's clear to me that discussions of hardware design and game programming are actually quite welcome among a general readership.

Henry: What relationship do you see between "platform studies" and the "science, technology and society" field?

Nick: A productive one. We're very much hoping that people in STS will be interested in doing platform studies and in writing books in the series. Books in the series could, of course, make important contributions in STS as well as in digital media.

Ian: Indeed, STS already tends strongly toward the study of how science and technology underlies things. Platform studies has something in common with STS in this regard. But STS tends to focus on science's impact on politics and human culture rather than human creativity. This latter area has typically been the domain of the humanities and liberal arts. One way to understand platform studies is as a kind of membrane between computing, STS, and the humanities. We think there's plenty of productive work to be done when these fields come together.

Henry: Why did you decide to focus on the Atari Video Computer System as the central case study for this book?

Ian: We love the Atari VCS. It's a platform we remember playing games on and still do. In fact, the very idea for platform studies came out of conversations Nick and I had about the Atari. We found ourselves realizing that a programmer's negotiation between platform and creativity takes place in every kind of creative computing application.

Nick: Another factor was historical. While contributing to the cultural understanding of video games a great deal, game studies hasn't looked to its roots enough. A console as influential as the Atari VCS deserved scholarly and popular attention beyond mere retro nostalgia. We wanted to bring that sort of analysis to bear.

Ian: Finally, I've been using the Atari VCS for several years now in my classes, both as an example and as an exercise. I have my Introduction to Computational Media class program small games on the system as an exercise in constraint. I also taught a graduate seminar entirely devoted to the system. Moreover, I often make new games for the system, some of which I'll be releasing this spring. So overall, the Atari VCS is a system that has been and remains at the forefront of both of our creative and critical interests.

In fact, I've continued to do platform studies research on the Atari VCS beyond the book. A group of computer science capstone students under my direction just completed a wonderful update to the "Stella" Atari VCS emulator, adding effects to simulate the CRT television. These include color bleed, screen texture, afterimage -- all matters we discuss in the book. I have a webpage describing the project at http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml.

Henry: You focus the book around case studies of a number of specific Atari titles from Adventure and Pac-Man to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Can you say more about how these examples allowed you to map out the cultural impact and technical capacities of the Atari system?

Nick: The specific examples gave us the opportunity do what you can do with close readings: drill down into particular elements and see how they relate to a game, a platform and a culture. But we wouldn't have found the same insights if we had just picked a game, or six games from different platforms, and got to work. We used these games to see how programmers' understanding of the platform developed and how the situation of computer gaming changed, how people challenged and expanded the 1977 idea of gaming that was frozen into the Atari VCS when they put this wonderful machine together.

Ian: We also chose to focus on a specific period, the early years of the Atari VCS, so to speak, from 1977 to 1983. These games in particular allowed us to characterize that period, as programmers moved from their original understanding of this system -- one based on porting a few popular coin-op games -- to totally different and surprising ways of making games on it.

Henry: Platform Studies seems to align closely with other formalist approaches to games. Can it also be linked to cultural interpretation?

Nick: Formalist? Really? We were indeed very concerned with form and function in Racing the Beam, so I won't shun the label, but we tried to be equally attentive to the material situation of the Atari VCS and the cartridges and arcade games we discussed. For instance, we included an image of the Shark Jaws cabinet art so that the reader could look at the typography and decide whether Atari was attempting to refer to Speilberg's movie. We discuss the ramifications of using a cheaper cartridge interface in the VCS design, one that was missing a wire.

Ian: We should also remember the technical creativity that went into designing a system like the Atari VCS, or into programming games for it. The design of the graphics chip, for example, was motivated by a particular understanding of what it meant to play a game: two human players, side by side, each controlling a character on one side of the screen or another.

By the time David Crane created Pitfall! many years later, those understandings had changed. Pitfall! is a one-player game with a twenty minute clock. But it's also a wonderful mash-up of cultural influences: Tarzan, Indiana Jones, Heckle and Jeckle.

Nick: I'll admit that ours is a detailed analysis that focused on specifics (formal, material, technical) rather than being based around broad cultural questions: it's bottom-up rather than top-down. We're still trying to connect the specifics of the Atari VCS (and other platforms) to culture, though. The project is not only linked with, but part of, cultural interpretation.

Ian: I'd go even further; there's nothing particularly formalist about a platform studies approach, if formalism means a preference of material and structure over cultural reception and meaning. If anything, I think our approach offers a fusion of many influences, rather than an obstinate grip on a single one.

Henry: There is still a retro-gaming community which is deeply invested in some of these games. Why do you think these early titles still command such affection and nostalgia?

Ian: Some of the appeal is related to fond memories and retro-nostalgia, certainly. Millions of people had Ataris and enjoyed playing them. Just as the case with the Apple ][ or the Commodore 64 may have introduced someone to computing, so the Atari VCS might have introduced him or her to videogaming. So part of the appeal of returning to these games is one of returning to the roots of a pleasurable pastime.

Nick: That said, we resist appeals to nostalgia in the book and our discussions about it, not because nostalgia and retro aesthetics are bad, but because it would be a shame if people thought you could only look back at video games to be nostalgic. There are reasons for retro-gaming that go beyond nostalgia, too. It's driven, in part, by the appeal of elegance, by a desire to explore the contours of computing history with an awareness of what games are like now, and by the ability of systems like the Atari VCS to just be beautiful and produce really aesthetically powerful images and compelling gameplay.

Ian: It's also worth noting that there is a thriving community interested in new Atari games, many of whom congregate on the forums at AtariAge.com. For these fans and hobbyist creators, the Atari is a living platform, one that still has secrets left to reveal. So the machine can offer interest beyond retro-gaming as well.

Henry: What factors contributed to the decline of the Atari empire? How did that decline impact the future of the games industry and of game technology?

Nick: I think it takes a whole book on the complex corporate history of Atari to even start answering this question. Our book is focused on the platform rather than the company. Scott Cohen's Zap!: The Rise and Fall of Atari is a book about the company, and my feeling is that even that one doesn't really answer that question entirely. We're hoping that there will be more books on Atari overall before too long.

Ian: There are some reasons for Atari's decline that are connected specifically to the Atari VCS platform, though. It turned out to be incredibly flexible and productive, to support more types of game experience than its creators ever could have imagined. No doubt, Atari never imagined that third-party companies such as Activision would come along and make literally hundreds of games for the system by 1983, cutting in on their business model right at the most profitable point. But the system was flexible enough for that to happen, too.

Nick: That's why Nintendo did everything they could, by license and through technical means, to lock down the NES and to prevent this sort of thing from happening with it. The industry has been like that ever since.

Ian: As we point out in the book, this was a bittersweet solution. Nintendo cauterized the wound of retailer reticence, but it also introduced a walled garden. Nintendo (and later Sony and Microsoft) would get to decide what types of games were "valid" for distribution. Before 1983, the variety of games on the market was astounding. So, on the one hand, we're still trying to recover from the setback that was first-party licensing. But on the other hand, we might not have a games industry if it wasn't for Nintendo's adoption of that strategy.

Henry: Can you give us a sense of the future of the Platform Studies project? What other writers and topics can we expect to see? Are you still looking for contributors?

Nick: Yes, we're definitely looking for contributors, although we're pleased with the response we've had so far. We expect a variety of platforms to be covered -- not only game systems, but famous early individual computers, home computers from the 1980s, and software platforms such as Java. Some families of platforms will be discussed in books, for instance, arcade system boards. And although every book will focus on the platform level, we anticipate a wide variety of different methods and approaches to platforms. While getting into the specifics of a platform and how it works, people may use many different methodologies: sociological, psychoanalytic, ethnographic, or economic, for example.

Ian: In terms of specific projects, we have a number of proposals in various stages of completeness and review. It's probably a bit early to talk about them specifically, but I can say that all of the types of platforms Nick just mentioned are represented.

There are a few different types of book series; some offer another venue for work that is already being done, while others invite and maybe even encourage a new type of work to be done. I suspect that Platform Studies is of the latter sort, and we're gratified to see authors thinking of new projects they didn't even realize they wanted to pursue.

Henry: You both teach games studies within humanities studies in major technical institutions. How do the contexts in which you are working impact the approach you are taking here?

Ian: Certainly both Georgia Tech and MIT make positive assumptions about the importance of matters technical. Humanities and social science scholarship at our institutions thus often take up science and technology without having to justify the idea that such topics are valid objects of study.

Nick: I have to agree -- it's very nice that I don't have to go around MIT explaining why it's legitimate to study a computing system or that video games and digital creativity are an important part of culture.

Ian: Additionally, at Georgia Tech we have strong relationships between the college of liberal arts, the college of engineering, and the college of computing. I have many colleagues in these fields with whom I speak regularly. I have cross-listed my courses in their departments. We even have an undergraduate degree that is co-administered by liberal arts and computing. So there's already an ecosystem that cultures the technical pursuit of the humanities, and vice versa.

I also think technical institutes tend to favor intellectual experimentation in general. We often hear cliches about the "entrepreneurial" environment at technical institutes, a reference to their tendency to encourage the commercial realization of research. But that spirit also extends to the world of ideas, and scholars at a place like Georgia Tech are perhaps less likely to be criticized, ostracized, or denied tenure for pursuing unusual if forward-thinking research.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009). Bogost's videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

A New "Platform" for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part One)

Any time two of the leading video and computer game scholars -- Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) and Nick Montfort (MIT) -- join forces to write a book, that's a significant event in my book. When the two of them lay down what amounts to a new paradigm for game studies as a field -- what they are calling "Platform Studies" -- and apply it systematically -- in this case, to the Atari system -- this is something which demands close attention to anyone interested in digital media. So, let me urge you to check out Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, released earlier this spring by MIT Press. In the interview that follows you will get a good sense of what the fuss is all about as the dynamic duo lay out their ideas for the future of games studies, essentially further raising the ante for anyone who wants to do serious work in the field. As someone who would fall far short of their ambitious bar for the ideal games scholar, I read this discussion with profoudly mixed feelings. I can't argue with their core claim that the field will benefit from the arrival of a generation of games scholars who know the underlying technologies -- the game systems -- as well as they know the games. I certainly believe that the opening up of a new paradigm in games studies will only benefit those of us who work with a range of other related methodologies. If I worry, it is because games studies as a field has moved forward through a series of all-or-nothing propositions: either you do this or you aren't really doing game studies. And my own sense is that fields of research grow best when they are expansive, sucking in everything in their path, and sorting out the pieces later.

That said, I have no reservations about what the authors accomplish in this rigorous, engaging, and ground-breaking book. However you think of games studies as an area of research, there will be things in this book which will provoke you and where Bogost and Montfort are concerned, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Henry: Racing the Beam represents the launch of a new publishing series based on what you are calling "Platform Studies." What is platform studies and why do you think it is an important new direction for games research?

Nick: Platform studies is an invitation to look at the lowest level of digital media -- the computing systems on which many sorts of programs run, including games. And specifically, it's an invitation to consider how those computing systems function in technical detail, how they constrain and enable creative production, and how they relate to culture.

Ian: It's important to note that platform studies isn't a particular approach; you can be more formalist or materialist, more anthropological or more of a computer scientist, in terms of how you consider a platform. No matter the case, you'll still be doing platform studies, as long as you consider the platform deeply. And, while platform studies is of great relevance to the study of video games, these studies can also be used to better understand digital art, electronic literature, and other sorts of computational cultural production that happens on the computer.

Nick: In games research in particular, the platform seems to have a much lower profile as we approach 2010 than it did in the late 1970s and 1980s. Games are developed for both PC and Xbox 360 fairly easily, and few scholars even bother to specify which version of a such game they're writing about, despite differences in interface, in how these games are burdened with DRM, and in the contexts of play (to name just a few factors). At the same time, there are these recent platforms that feature unusual interfaces and limited computational power, relative to the big iron consoles: Nintendo's Wii and DS and Apple's iPhone.

Ian: And let's not forget that games are being made in Flash and for other mobile phones. Now, developers are very acutely aware of what these platforms can do and of how important it is to consider the platform level. But their implicit understanding doesn't always make it into wider discussions, and that understanding doesn't always connect to cultural concerns and to the history of gaming and digital media.

Nick: So, we think that by looking thoroughly at platforms, we will, first, understand more about game consoles and other game platforms, and will be able to both make better use of the ones we have (by creating games that work well with platforms) and also develop better ones. Beyond that, we should be able to work toward a better understanding of the creative process and the contexts of creativity in gaming and digital media.

Henry: What do you think has been lost in game studies as a result of a lack of attention to the core underlying technologies behind different game systems?

Nick: For one thing, there are particular things about how games function, about the interfaces they present, and about how they appear visually and how they sound which make no sense (or which can be attributed to causes that aren't really plausible) unless you make the connection to platform. You can see these in every chapter of Racing the Beam and probably in every interesting Atari VCS game.

Ian: And more simply put, video games are computational media. They are played on computers, often very weird computers designed only to play video games. Isn't it reasonable to think that observing something about these computers, and the relationship between each of them and the games that they hosted, would lead to insights into the structure, meaning, or cultural significance of such works?

Here's an example from the book: the graphical adventure genre, represented by games like The Legend of Zelda, emerged from Warren Robinett's attempts to translate the text-based adventure game Colossal Cave onto the Atari VCS. The machine couldn't display text, of course, so Robinett chose to condense the many actions one can express with language into a few verbs that could be represented by movement and collision detection. The result laid the groundwork for a popular genre of games, and it was inspired largely by the way one person negotiated the native abilities of two very different computers.

Nick: More generally, the platform is a frozen concept of what gaming should be like: Should it come in a fake wood-grain box that looks like a stereo cabinet and fits in the living room along stereo components? Should it have two different pairs of controllers and difficulty switches so that younger and older siblings can play together with a handicap? Only if we look at the platform can we understand these concepts, and then go on to understand how the course of game development and specific games negotiate with the platform's concept.

Henry: Early on, there were debates about whether one needed to be a "gamer" to be able to contribute to games studies. Are we now facing a debate about whether you can study games if you can't read code or understand the technical schematics of a game system?

Nick: All sorts of people using all sorts of methods can make and have made contributions to game studies, and that includes non-ethnographers, non-lawyers, non-narratologists, and those without film studies backgrounds as well as people who can't read code or understand schematics. Games are a tremendous phenomenon, and it would be impossible for someone to have every skill and bit of background relevant to studying them. We're lucky that many different sorts of people are looking at games from so many perspectives.

That said, whether one identifies as a "gamer" is a rather different sort of issue than whether one understands how computational systems work. If your concern is for people's experience of the game -- how they play it, what meaning they assign to it, and how the experience relates to other game experiences -- then the methods that are most important to you will be the ones related to understanding players or interpreting the game yourself. But if you care about how games are made or how they work, it makes a lot of sense to know how to program (and how to understand programs) and to have learned at least the bare outlines of computer architecture.

Ian: Even if you want to thoroughly study something non-interactive, like cutscenes, won't you have to understand both codecs and the specifics of 3D graphics (ray tracing, texture mapping, etc.) to understand why certain choices were made in creating a cutscene? How can you really understand Geometry Wars without getting into the fact that vector graphics display hardware used to exist, and that the game is an attempt to recreate the appearance of those graphics on today's flat-panel raster displays? How could you begin to talk about the difference between two radically different and culturally relevant chess programs, Video Chess for the Atari VCS (which fit in 4K) and the world-dominating Deep Blue, without considering their underlying technical differences -- and going beyond noticing that one is enormously powerful and other minimal?

Nick: I certainly don't want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing about computing systems, but I also think it would be a disservice to give out game studies or digital media degrees at this point and not have this sort of essential technical background be part of the curriculum.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009). Bogost's videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part Two)

As you wrote the book, you clearly struggled with the issue of how to balance the classic examples in the field, many of which reflect the successive generations of television scholarship, with the need for contemporary examples which are relevant to the current generation of students. How did you resolve that issue?

I hope I resolved it! The book was based on my own course (also entitled "Television and American Culture") which has evolved over the past decade. I initially began teaching the course as a chronological history of broadcasting, starting with radio, moving through network television, and ending up in the convergent present - there are good textbooks to frame such a historical narrative. But I found that students taking the only television-centered course in the curriculum were itching to talk about the contemporary context - while I would highlight how early radio frames our understanding of 1990s internet, or 1950s single-sponsorship helps explain contemporary product placement, I found that the course wasn't working well to either capture the historical or the contemporary, and needed to be restructured.

When I shifted to a topical format that mirrors the structure of the book, I found that historical examples could work well to help explain what students think they know about the present. Thus it's essential to understand All in the Family to grasp South Park or Chappelle's Show, or the 1950s quiz show cycle to contextualize the 2000s reality boom. While the book is not a substitute for a television history text or course, I hope it's complementary to such histories, and lends itself to various teaching contexts. If a curriculum has only one TV-centric course (like at Middlebury), the book can frame the medium while introducing its history; if there are other courses in television history, the references should build on that exposure and knowledge to deepen students' understanding. And the book hopefully stands alone outside the teaching context, serving as an introduction to the academic study of television for readers of all ages with an intellectual interest in media. Or at least that's what I was aiming for.

A current debate in television studies centers around our tendency to focus on hip programs with self-reflective elements or on ensemble cast dramas to the exclusion of other genres and formats which often have much higher viewership. How did you confront this challenge in designing your textbook?

When choosing examples and areas to cover, my first imperative was to pick examples that spoke to students and encouraged them to look deeper into the shows that they know and enjoy. So while using programs like South Park, The Simpsons, Lost, and The Daily Show as examples does cater to my own tastes, it is really motivated by student interest - I have found that students get really excited when I tell them about my research on The Wire and Lost, much more than my work on Dragnet! Contemporary programs that get high ratings, like Two and a Half Men and NCIS, are not on the radar of most undergraduates, and thus fall short as pedagogical examples.

Additionally, I have no doubt that the historical significance of the more groundbreaking and "hip" shows will be more long-lasting than many of today's conventional hits, and thus tackling innovations is a better long-term strategy than looking at today's typical television. For example, John Fiske's examination of Hart to Hart in Television Culture is a great analysis, but virtually incomprehensible to readers today who have never heard of the show. Todd Gitlin's account of Hill Street Blues from the same era is much more readable and relevant because that more innovative show has lingered in consciousness and curricula.

That being said, I made a conscious effort to include sections on reality television, game shows, talk shows, soap operas, the news, and educational television. The world of television programming is so vast and expansive that it's impossible to be comprehensive. I didn't attempt to account for every genre and programming trend, but hopefully readers won't come away with the common misconception that important or interesting television only airs in primetime on networks or premium cable.

I was struck looking at the references in your book by how much television studies has expanded and matured as a field over the past decade. How did the current state of this field impact the decisions you made in creating this book?

The primary job of a textbook is to synthesize the field into an introductory framework; given the growth of television studies in recent years, this was both exciting and daunting. I didn't want to structure the book by methodology or theoretical approach, which is an organization that some other television textbooks use, so I mapped out the key elements of television and looked for scholarship addressing those core aspects. It also feels like the field has moved away from theoretical modeling and more toward an applied mode - take the approaches to the medium developed in previous eras, and provide detailed historical and analytical accounts of a wide range of examples and moments. Thus it was a rich vein of scholarship to mine.

It was interesting to see what facets of television have not gotten much scholarly attention, and frame the book to invite further investigation. One large area that seems to have been underexplored in recent years is advertising - besides a few specific case studies (like your own work on American Idol) and the typical broad jeremiads against commercialism, I found a lack of culturally-oriented accounts of the contemporary advertising environment, which is undergoing such rapid transformation. This is certainly a fertile area for any graduate students looking for a new project!

There were two smaller areas that seem to have been outside the main thrust of television studies, but I strategically included to inspire more research: copyright and media literacy. Both of these realms are inspiring a tremendous amount of activism and scholarship in other fields, but they have not been addressed by American television scholars as much as I would hope (I do think media literacy education is more central to British television scholarship). Again, I hope the brief sections on these areas will encourage further research.

Others have argued that there has been much more work on the ideological and economic dimensions of television, especially in regard to television audiences, than to the aesthetic dimensions. What challenges did you find in writing the chapters that deal with more formal issues?

A good indicator is that Chapter 5, "Making Meanings" (about the formal dimensions of the television text) is the only one without any endnotes! Not to suggest that there is no scholarship in this area, but it certainly has been less explored than issues of industry, reception, and representation. Most of the core scholarship on the formal elements of television is quite dated today, dealing with examples and modes of production that are less central to contemporary television. In some ways, scholars have been reluctant to return to questions of form and aesthetics due to the politicization of the field (which I've written about elsewhere concerning Lost). But I also think it's because there hasn't been a recent tradition to build on, and the comparable scholarship from the 1970s is hard to update. So I hope these chapters help lay things out enough to encourage scholars to build on this foundation.

Chapter 5 was in many ways the most difficult to write because of the vast number of terms and ideas that need to be laid out. I was trying to distill a vast formal vocabulary and framework into a succinct chapter, accounting for the variety of television styles spanning fiction and non-fiction, live and recorded onto various media. This is compounded by the fact that the majority of American high school graduates have not been exposed to any formal media education - while we can assume that a college-bound student has at least been exposed to some basic concepts of literary style, there are no guarantees that anybody has been taught the basics of editing and camerawork. Students do know a lot as savvy media consumers or self-taught producers, but the lack of consistent terminology and conceptual framework means that an introductory media course has to cover a lot of ground. So the sections on form and aesthetics is a large "brain dump" of material, that will hopefully be clear enough to provide a solid foundation for students to engage in their own analyses of television programming.

You provide a good deal of original research and analysis in this book. What do you see as the relationship between this textbook and your other scholarly projects, such as you work on genre theory and television, or your analysis of complexity in contemporary television narrative?

When I started the textbook project, my Genre & Television book had recently been released and I was starting to build my narrative project. I conceived as the two modes of writing as distinct - the textbook would be synthesizing other people's research, and the narrative book would be my own ideas more in line with my first book. But as I got deeper into the textbook, I found that these two modes of writing were far less distinct from one another than I had thought. The textbook does build on others' works more fully, but I'm still framing arguments, selecting examples and evidence, and guiding readers through a narrative. I also became enamored of a more accessible writing style - while I've always tried to write with a minimum of jargon or density, looking back on early publications shows how much my writing style has changed (hopefully for the better!). So I anticipate that even though the ideas will be less synthetic, I hope that the tone and style of my narrative work is more like the textbook than my earlier scholarship.

The other key influence on my writing has been blogging. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how gratifying it is to be able to put up an essay in progress and see the hits accumulate, knowing that people are reading your work, engaging with it, and offering feedback. The textbook has been out in print for a little over a month now, and I feel like it's less public than it was when I was posting chapter sections on my blog - reading a book is so private and detached from the author. I hope the textbook's website becomes a place of more active engagement and community once it is adopted and used in classes, but that's still an unchartered model. In planning my book on narrative, I'm striving to find ways to capture the engagement and immediacy of blogging, even while achieving the more archival mode of book publishing - but that's a topic for another interview.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media

Culture, and Chair of Film & Media Culture, at Middlebury College. He is the

author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American

Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP,

2009), numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and the blog Just TV. He

is currently writing a digital book on narrative complexity in contemporary

American television.

Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part One)

I can think of very few examples of textbooks that have made original contributions to scholarship in media studies: Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art and Film History books may be the notable exception. I generally prefer not to use textbooks in my classes, exposing my students to cutting edge articles from books and journals, and increasingly to blog posts from key public intellectuals. Most textbooks homogenize and generalize, lacking the particularity and pointedness of other kinds of academic writing. They try to appeal to everyone, try to include everything that matters, and in the process, they mask the criteria which shape their construction of the field. For these reasons, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Jason Mittell, who I consider to be one of the top thinkers in television studies, was tackling the task of writing a textbook for this field. Mittell has been working on late on the issue of complexity in television narrative, having already contributed to our understanding of genre and television. We share a common intellectual background -- both being alums of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications Arts Program. Mittell is involved in our Convergence Culture Consortium and recently posted some interesting thoughts on his Just TV blog which compliments my focus on "spreadability" with what he calls "drillability." You can learn more about Television and American Culture here.

I had a chance to read some of this textbook project in draft form and was excited by what I saw, so as soon as I heard Television and American Culture was being released, I contact Mittell to do an interview for this blog.

Let me be clear: Mittell has done what I would not have thought possible, creating a compelling, up-to-date wide-reaching, nuanced, readable, and engaging introduction to television studies, a textbook which does what we want a good textbook to do but doesn't read at all like a textbook. As you will see, I wanted to get the genre theorist Mittell to reflect on textbooks as a genre and on the ways he chose to reinvent that genre through this project. In talking about Television Studies textbooks, Mittell also offers some reflections on why we should study TV and what the current state of the field looks like.

You open the book with a consideration of the Janet Jackson flap at the Super Bowl. What does this incident teach us about the range of different ways television functions in relation to American culture?

This was the first section I wrote during the book proposal process. I knew that the book's core model would be to show how television, like all media, can be understood as spanning a number of facets that are often treated separately - this was based on the "circuit of culture" model emerging out of British cultural studies in the 1990s. For television, the six facets that I identified are commercial industry, democratic institution, textual form, site of cultural representation, part of everyday life, and technological medium - the first draft of the book actually had only six (very long!) chapters, each covering one of these facets.

In drafting the book's introduction, I needed to come up with an example that would literally sell the book - to publishers looking at the proposal, to faculty reviewing the book for adoption, and to students on the core concepts and engaging tone to keep them reading. This was in late 2004, so the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" was still a current event, with ongoing legislative and judicial processes. It struck me as a perfect example to demonstrate this circuit of television in action, comprising the full scope of issues within an example that was very easy to write about - you don't need to see the clip to understand the case study, while many other examples that I could have used required more familiarity with a program, channel, genre, etc. The only problem is that the writing process took long enough that what started as a hot-button contemporary example reads a bit dated for today's students - and in a few years, it will be old news. So I'm keeping an eye out for a newer example to plug-in for the book's revised edition.

Many textbooks strive for a "neutral" voice which balances out competing perspectives in the field. You do lay out competing arguments here, but as you note in your introduction, you also take sides, constructing your own arguments about key contemporary trends and programs. How do you see your book relating to the genre expectations surrounding the "textbook"?

When I decided to tackle a textbook, I spent some time reading through a number of textbooks on the market, both within media studies and other fields. What struck me most was how disengaging and dull the majority of them were. Even when they were written by authors who can be lively and compelling writers in their other scholarship, the genre of the textbook seemed to follow the edict of a lot of network television: provide least objectionable content. They present material in a seemingly objective, overly-simplified manner, and write without passion or personality.

I had no interest in writing such a book. And my experiences as a teacher suggests that forcing neutrality, oversimplification, and disengagement results in bad pedagogy and bored students. While I want students to grasp material such as the differences between broadcast networks and cable channels, that's not the core of education to me - instead, they should be thinking about the significance of these systems more than simply recalling them. So I made it clear to interested publishers that I wanted to write a textbook with a more engaging voice and distinct argumentation - to quote my proposal, "By explicitly offering arguments and challenging assumptions, the book will be designed to engage students and force them to question their own positions, rather than the more typical textbook goal of recalling factual information." Oxford University Press fully embraced this approach, encouraging me to write the book for a sophisticated and engaged reader, not the typical textbook model.

This approach is certainly forged by my experiences teaching at a top-flight liberal arts college like Middlebury. I work with students who are taking my course as part of a broader liberal arts curriculum, not a pre-professional track that typifies a lot of Communications departments. To fit into an institution like Middlebury College, I need to make the study of television an intellectually-engaging and interdisciplinary endeavor - I wrote this book in many ways to spread that approach of "television studies as a liberal art" more broadly to other types of institutions. I'm optimistic that a lot of faculty will find my book more engaging to teach because it "talks up" to students, rather than assumes that they need to be distracted by glossy photos and random sidebars. We'll have to see how it's received by both faculty and students, but I wrote the book that I want to teach from (or would have wanted to read as an undergraduate 20 years ago).

The cover of your book shows contemporary television projected across a range of different screens, some of which look like the boxes we've used for years, and

some represent mobile phones, computers, and other emerging platforms. Does the cover of the book signal the obsolescence of its content? At what point as we

explode the range of distribution options, does television cease to be television as a specific medium and begin to blur over into all of the other media around it?

When I started working on this book in 2004, YouTube didn't exist, iPods had no video capabilities, and networks had only just begun to experiment with putting their programs online. By the time the book came out in 2009, the idea of television as defined by the box in your living room had lost its centrality. And there's no doubt that the last five years are not the end of this core technological shift - honestly, I don't know what "television" will mean in another five years. But I'm certain that the history of the medium and its industrial and regulatory systems will still matter - whatever technological ecosystem we'll be living in during the 2010s and beyond, some remnant of television will matter, just as the lingering presence and influence of print, theater, cinema, and radio still matter today.

The cover was designed to signal the book's engagement with technologies and programming of the past, present, and future. I suggested the idea of "lots of different shows on a variety of devices" to Oxford, and they came up with a design that I really love. But I'm sure in another decade, it will look like a dinosaur! Of course, the very idea of publishing a "textbook" might be arcane by then as well, so clearly I've embarked on a project with a potentially short half-life for both content and form.

You could argue that many of the topics you deal with here - convergence, digitalization, globalization, branding, shifts in audience measurement - are impacting all media. What do you see as the relationship between television studies and a more generalized media studies? Can we read the title of your blog, "JustTV," as a statement of sorts about how you position yourself in the space between television and media studies?

I see television studies as both on the forefront of media studies, and in danger of being forgotten. In many ways, television studies has led the charge for a humanistic model of media studies, and it has really set the model for a mode of scholarship that is both theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written, socially engaged yet historically grounded. This is probably in large part due to the luck of the draw in its intellectual history, as the field came of age after the peak of high theory in film & literary studies, and was in the right place at the right time to introduce the British cultural studies model to America, in large part through the work of our mutual mentor John Fiske. When I look at the best of media scholarship today, whether it's about videogames, popular music, or transmedia narrative, I see the influence of television studies of the past two decades and the model it helped establish.

But the danger of convergence is an assumption that all media are the same. This is certainly a lesson that the industry has faced repeatedly, as with ill-fated devices like WebTV, and I've seen similar scholarly missteps when academics trained in literature or film try to study a different medium as if it were simply another textual form (I won't name names here...). Specific aspects of television, from regulation to ratings, help shape the medium to an extent that you can't simply disregard the industrial systems and viewer practices that are unique to television. So my fear is that as television becomes more diffused - either through technological transformation or dilution across media - media scholars will neglect the specific practices and systems that shape our understanding of the medium. The specific lessons and facets of television studies shouldn't be lost as the boundaries of the medium blurs.

As for the name of my blog, Just TV refers both to the dismissive reflex common to academics viewing television, and an attempt to delineate the blog's scope. I do embrace broader issues in media studies, such as gaming, fair use, fandom, etc., but try to tie it to the specificities of television whenever possible. I hope that work like mine and many of my TV-centric peers helps legitimize the medium in the eyes of academia, just as the programming itself is becoming more accepted and embraced by scholars across disciplines. But I'm reminded of a wonderful talk that Charlotte Brunsdon gave at Society for Cinema and Media Studies a few years ago - she warned that "poor old television" might get lost in the transition from cinema studies to a digital-centric media studies, and called for scholarly spaces that still privilege television. Hopefully Just TV fits that bill.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media

Culture, and Chair of Film & Media Culture, at Middlebury College. He is the

author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American

Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP,

2009), numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and the blog Just TV. He

is currently writing a digital book on narrative complexity in contemporary

American television.

Studying Media Industries: An Interview with Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Part Two)

How can historical perspectives contribute to our understanding of the current

moment of media change?

AP: As our contributor (and former WB network executive) Jordan Levin notes in his essay, executives immersed in the media industries often face strong institutional and economic pressure to "think in the now." Similarly, at times it can be easy for scholars to get caught up in the proclamations by the press and industry that what is happening in the present is unlike anything that has ever taken place before.

Both Jennifer and I have studied and written about media industry history, and thus recognize that the more you know about these histories, the more similarities and parallels you can find between past practices, behaviors and assumptions and present-day activities. From our view, an historical perspective is crucial because it forces you to more profoundly consider what is in fact new, or the specific ways in which something is new. Certainly policy shifts, the rise of new technologies, media consolidation, and the growth of niche markets have dramatically altered how media are produced, distributed and consumed. Yet we think it is important to move past the broad generalizations that are often made in top down approaches to consider more precisely how and why these changes have taken place.

On the one hand, looking closely at media industry history can lead one to look at the present more closely, forcing one to question the latest marketing or journalistic claims about how "this new technology will change the way media is produced" or how "this new corporate strategy will reshape how media is consumed." We can see that, in fact, much of what we take to be so novel has been around for years (if not decades).

On the other hand, contemporary developments can also lead us to reexamine and rethink historical processes in a new light. In recent years, talk of the rise of "convergence" has led many media historians to look back at what were previously conceptualized as "distinct" media forms (not just film and television, but also comics, music, radio, magazines and newspapers). This has led some, including Christopher Anderson, Michele Hilmes and Tom Schatz, to reassess the relationships between these different media forms (and the companies producing and distributing them). Michele Hilmes, in particular, was one of the first to do this in her book, Hollywood and Broadcasting. Her essay in our collection builds upon many of the ideas she proposed earlier in her career, considering how recent developments might lead to new directions in media industries scholarship.

What role can the study of media industries play in the creation of media policy?

JH: I think one way media industry scholarship can play a significant role in the creation of media policy is in the framing (or reframing) of certain issues. Academics from many disciplines have used their work to affect how issues like competition, diversity, violence and intellectual property can be understood and framed in policy discourse (e.g., Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, Mara Einstein, Robert McChesney, Henry Jenkins, and Phil Napoli to name just a few). Scholars like John McMurria and Thomas Streeter have written about the power structures, discourse and ideologies that have guided policy making at the outset, offering additional historical examples of how humanistically-oriented research can contribute to policy analysis. While it has traditionally been social scientists that have been the most visible in policy-making circles, there are a few notable exceptions; I think it is in the best interests of humanities scholars to increase these numbers, make it a priority to network and take a more activist role in affecting the parameters or at least the considerations of policy. Only then will terms like "access" and "competition" have more nuanced definitions that incorporate the critical social, political and cultural issues which can otherwise disappear from the discussion.

What do you see as the most important disagreements that emerge between the contributors to the book?

JH: I wouldn't necessarily see them as disagreeing with each other per se, but I did note some hostility by many writers towards a certain reductive tradition of political economy that paints the industry in particularly broad strokes. This goes back to a general resistance toward a "monolithic" perspective on the media industries Alisa mentioned above.

The reason we did not see much direct disagreement is in part because each author was given a specific task: to outline one critical modality, methodology or historical trajectory of media industries research. The essays were not written or designed to be in conversation with one another as much as they were intended to help establish the various components and contours of what a field called "media industry studies" might look like.

As part of that collective project, the essays remained somewhat contained and focused instead of debating the relative merits of different approaches to industry study. Some authors wound up putting themselves into dialogue with one another unwittingly, such as those writing the essays on the Global (Michael Curtin), the Regional (Cristina Venegas) and the National (Nitin Govil). However, even in those essays, I found that rather than disagreement, the pieces offered new ways to think about these concepts in relation to one another. Venegas, for example, theorized transnational and local media flows in relation to Latin American cinema. While looking at trade relations, economic alliances, cultural policies and industrial histories, she presented the regional as a valuable theoretical tool but also discussed the region in relation to the global, the national, and the local. Similarly, Govil offered a complex discussion of how "thinking nationally" actually creates avenues for thinking globally and locally as well. While their considerations were different - Govil looked at piracy, diasporic media and cultural citizenship and Venegas looked at government policies, industry initiatives and market behavior across Latin America, for example - they were pursuing similarly expansive conceptual projects that are tremendously useful for scholars of national, regional and global media industries.

Jennifer, you are in the process of finishing a book on regulation and media

ownership issues. What do you think is the most common misunderstanding in

current discussions of media concentration?

JH: I think that the media reform movement has done a great deal to educate the public about this issue, but we have a long way to go. One of the most common misunderstandings might be over the ways in which media concentration is "regulated." The standards for regulating concentration and vertical integration in the various media industries are widely divergent. Historically, they have been unevenly applied by the FCC, the FTC, the Department of Justice and Congress. When it comes to policing the business of entertainment, there is no one-size-fits-all policy.

Regulation also operates much differently than common sense would dictate. Regulatory policy currently lags far behind reality - something the financial markets have just visibly (and painfully) demonstrated. This also applies to our increasingly converged media landscape. New technologies continue to combine various products and sites of engagement with policy into one very fraught wire; so, as a result of technological advancements, marketplace innovations, industrial consolidation and rapidly blurring boundaries between media and telecommunication, the standards and goals of regulation have become outdated. Old media are being used in new ways, content and carriers no longer conform to their original borders or boundaries - and that has presented us with a regulatory crisis that has yet to be fully addressed by policymakers.

This divide between the present regulatory philosophy and industrial reality is a consequence, indeed a legacy, of how media industries (broadcast and cable, for example) have been unevenly and separately regulated as technology has converged.

As a result, the government is driven more by the concerns of the market as opposed to the public interest or by a philosophy that is relevant to current conditions; the size and scope of mergers has put regulators in the back seat, following the lead of market activity rather than setting the boundaries. Consequently, the reality of regulation is one in which the industrial economy has outgrown the dimensions and arbiters of current policy. So, while most people think that regulators are out in front of the industries, right now they are hopelessly behind, applying outmoded policy to a marketplace that is, in many ways, setting its own rules.

Alisa, you're finishing up a book on Miramax. What does the rise and decline of

this company tell us about the way Hollywood is responding to a rapidly changing

media environment?

AP: My study of Miramax focuses on how and why this company was both a product of - and took advantage of - tremendous industrial and cultural changes that occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The company was among the first to exploit the major studios' reorientation toward big budget event fare, effectively branding itself as the premier producer and distributor of niche-targeted "quality" product. The combination of savvy marketing, shrewd production and acquisition choices, and high-profile talent (not to mention lots of Disney money after 1993) all enabled Miramax to quickly rise to prominence.

However, as I explore in my book, to a large extent Miramax became a victim of its own success. By the late 1990s, the company's accomplishments had been widely emulated by a number of other companies, and, in an effort to remain competitive, Miramax began over-spending, over-diversifying and generally overestimating the market for certain types of niche-targeted material. The situation became further complicated by the tremendous changes taking place throughout the media industries on a much broader scale - changes that included the rapid rise of the Internet, the improving quality of fictional television series (e.g., The Sopranos, The Shield), the speedy diffusion of DVDs, and the growing availability of lower cost, higher quality digital production and postproduction technologies. All of these factors worked in tandem with a heightened emphasis by media conglomerates on developing material that could be easily exploited across as many of their platforms as possible. Cumulatively, by the early 2000s, there emerged a much different - and far less friendly - media landscape than that which was present when Miramax first grew to prominence. This landscape was much more difficult for indie companies to navigate effectively with their existing business models (a fact most recently borne out by the closure or downsizing of several different studio-based specialty divisions).

Studying Miramax (and indie subsidiaries more broadly) suggests the degree to which relatively self contained films - especially those lacking name talent and big budgets - face a challenging terrain in the contemporary industry. It seems quite likely that those types of media that cannot be easily imagined and exploited as multi-platform experiences are likely to face substantial challenges from now on. None of these developments, of course, seem to have had much of an impact on the number of people striving to make low-budget films for the theatrical market, dreaming that they may make the Next Big Thing. Yet the tale of the rise and fall of Miramax as an indie company can ultimately be viewed now as a cautionary one - a tale of the narrowing opportunities and possibilities for those seeking to make and release movies following a traditional theatrical distribution model. It remains to be seen how well low budget films will fare in the contemporary convergent media landscape, and what shape the next generation of independent cinema will take.

You explicitly focus this book around the audio-visual industries, yet as you

note, the concept of media industries is potentially much more expansive. What

would do we miss by focusing only on the audio-visual here? For example, can we

understand contemporary film practices without some grasp of developments in the

comic book industry?

AP: Choosing the proper scope proved to be one of the more challenging tasks in developing the book. There is no question that the media industries expand far beyond film, television and new media (the focal points of our collection). We chose the scope we did for a few key reasons: first, we thought that looking primarily at audio-visual media would offer a greater degree of coherence and specificity across the essays. Readers would not only be able to learn about concepts, but also about the operations of these industries in greater detail, from a variety of perspectives.

Second, we felt this approach would make the material more accessible for those undergraduate and graduate programs oriented toward film and television studies - programs that are often less likely to have extensive course offerings on the media industries than those based in communication departments, for instance. Third, this focus offered a means of differentiating our book from others already in print. The emphasis on audio-visual media enabled us to address a key tension in studying the media industries: namely, that these industries are at once distinct (in many respects, the film industry differs from the cable television industry, for example), and yet they also are and always have been deeply interdependent and interactive.

Thus, while focusing primarily on the audio-visual risks overlooking the important relationships and contributions of other industries such as comics, music and publishing to film, television and new media, were we also to examine all of those other industries as well, we would likely have a book both too general and unwieldy (not to mention several hundred pages longer!). We believe that the case studies offered by our contributors explore concepts that, though most directly applicable to audio-visual media, can also be extrapolated to other media as well.

It is worth adding that, on several occasions, our contributors do weave in examples from other media forms to make their points. Should we pursue a second edition of this book, one of our goals would be to further expand our discussion to other media. We see the current book as but an early step in what we hope to be a much more extensive conversation about what theories and methods are most productive when studying and writing about the media industries.

Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in film and television history, and media

industry studies. Her current research looks at regulatory policy in the age of

convergence. She has published articles in various journals and anthologies including

Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, Fifty Contemporary Film Authors and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. Her forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment examines deregulation and the media industries between 1980-1996 and will be published by Rutgers University Press.

Alisa Perren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Research specializations include media industry studies, television studies, and U.S. film and television history. Her forthcoming book, Indie, Inc. (under contract, University of Texas Press), traces the evolution of Miramax in the 1990s as it transitioned from independent company to studio subsidiary. Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, The Television History Book, and Flow.

Studying Media Industries: An Interview with Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Part One)

A while back, I gave the regular readers of this blog a "sneak preview" of an essay I was writing with Joshua Green on the "Moral Economy of Web 2.0." The essay has now appeared in print in an rich and diverse anthology, Media Industries: History, Theory and Methods, which was edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren. It's contributors represent a who's who of contemporary research on how media industries operate and its content span the full spectrum of audio-visual media, including a full consideration of cutting-edge topics such as convergence and globalization. Since I thought this book would be of interest to many of you, I asked its editors to share some perspectives with us about the current state of research on Media Industries. For more information on this project, check out Alisa Perren's blog.

How would you characterize the current state of research on media industries?

JH: I would characterize it as a significant growth area and a landscape of great opportunity and energy at this time. The challenging economic conditions of late have placed the media industries under tremendous financial strain. When you factor in the dramatic technological developments that are impacting production and distribution, a new administration with a lot of policy defining left to do, as well as all of the changes in audience activity and "produsage," we find ourselves at a moment of transformation. Much of this is not news to many who track the industries regularly. Yet these conditions present new and interesting challenges for researchers and scholars of media industries because there are emerging business models to understand, different aspects of audience address and behavior to analyze, and a need for the perspective and contextualization that media industry historians, critics, and theorists have to offer.

As we hope our anthology demonstrates, there is a great deal of vital research being done on all aspects of the media industries right now - labor, economics, policy, technology, audiences, texts, trade, and more. We look forward to more of this work seeping outside the boundaries of academia (as some of it already has, yours included) and taking a more active role in shaping larger cultural and policy discourses about the media industries. Ideally, this collection will help contribute to the visibility of the important work already being done by our authors. It is worth noting that there is also significant work being done outside of the academy by journalists and activists that has been very influential on media industry research. Some of the most insightful and informative analysis of media industries can be found in the popular press, the blogosphere and trade publishing, where journalists and critics have generated a tremendous amount of momentum for our "field." I see this leads right to your next question...

So, let me ask the question you pose in the title of your introduction, "Does the world really need one more field of study"?

JH: I would argue (as we did in the intro) that indeed it does. With a more formalized "field of study" comes a more focused attention to the history and development of that field, to the many disciplinary traditions that comprise its foundation, and a more coherent cultivation of scholarly perspective on this type of work. In addition to having more established (and easily accessible) curricular materials and traditions to draw upon, having the benefit of conferences, journals and anthologies devoted to a field are key aspects to creating disciplinary expansion and growth. Most often, communal projects and institutional support only come when a field of study generates enough traction to warrant and inspire them, and so having the academic community (and beyond) thinking about media industry studies as a "field" would be enormously beneficial.

In the book, we don't suggest that we "invented" this field by any means...we just want to begin the process of identifying, historicizing and theorizing the vast range of industries, analytical tools, critical traditions and potential paths of inquiry that comprise what the field of media industry studies looks like to us, at this point. We hope that others will continue the conversation and expand it beyond what we were able to address in this one volume.

AP: Let me also add that we felt honored to have so many individuals involved with the book who we believed played a vital role in shaping work on the media industries during the last couple of decades - individuals such as John Hartley, Horace Newcomb, David Hesmondhalgh (all three of whom wrote compelling essays offering their perspective on what "media industry studies" should be. Complementing these perspectives are views from many newer scholars of the media industries, including moving image archivist Caroline Frick and media historian Cynthia Meyers. As Jennifer notes, we see this as but the start of a discussion, one that many others will add to in the near future.

What can the study of media industries add to our understanding of media texts?

AP: In many of the more humanistically-oriented areas of study, the text has remained a focal point of analysis. Part of this is a function of the roots of this type of work in film studies. Much of this work developed primarily in English departments that approached cinema primarily as self-contained texts that could be explicated in isolation.

Over the last few decades, work in cultural studies has helped to substantially broaden discussions of texts, demanding that scholars think more in terms of social, cultural, political, economic and industrial contexts. However, though early work by cultural studies figures such as Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson encouraged discussion of both production and consumption processes, the majority of such work over the years has tended to be focused far more heavily on the consumption side. Thus, an immense amount of scholarship has been generated that situates texts culturally, and thinks about what audiences do with media texts. Yet, until recently, far fewer scholars have looked at the cultural processes involved in actually making texts in the first place. That's one of the goals of our book: to add to the growing literature produced by scholars such as Amanda Lotz, Elana Levine, Serra Tinic, and John Caldwell, the latter of whom is a contributor to our collection. Their work underscores the need to consider the myriad institutional and cultural forces affecting how media are produced.

When we talk about production, we are not simply referring to individual actions taken by key "above-the-line" figures such as directors and writers. Rather, production must be thought of much more broadly. The potential impact of diverse individuals (both above and below-the-line), groups (ranging from labor unions to film commissions), and institutions (not simply production companies and conglomerates but also tech companies and government agencies) must be taken into consideration.

One of the primary goals of our book was to unite many of these diverse perspectives in one place, thereby initiating a more focused and coherent discussion about media industry scholarship. Ideally, by bringing wide-ranging perspectives from media studies, communication, cultural studies, sociology, telecommunication and anthropology together, we can begin to have a better sense of the multitude of ways that media texts are shaped by diverse factors. In addition, we can try to encourage a shift away from a view in which the only potentially politically progressive elements of media texts are those which are brought to them by active fans. A traditional political economic tradition often tends to view commercial media texts as inherently conservative products of a monolithic system. Our authors collectively underscore numerous ways such notions need to be further complicated.

Can we study media production meaningfully without an understanding of media

consumption?

AP: One thing we have learned in this age of convergence, and which you, Henry, have shown so effectively in your own work, is that we always need to keep in mind how cultural products are both produced and consumed. In part, the rise of a more participatory online media culture has helped us rethink older models that only considered production practices or media texts in isolation. In the past, such approaches might have been more viable for both the industry and scholars alike because feedback from audiences wasn't so immediately available. Thus it might take a weekend or two for word of mouth to circulate widely about a movie and affect it adversely at the box office. However, in an age when people can post responses to a movie or TV show on Facebook or Twitter as they watch it - and such responses, in turn, can lead to relatively direct economic consequences for the companies producing and distributing them - both executives and academics must recognize and explore the interrelated nature of production, text and consumption in more complex and nuanced ways than they have previously.

Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in film and television history, and media

industry studies. Her current research looks at regulatory policy in the age of

convergence. She has published articles in various journals and anthologies including

Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, Fifty Contemporary Film Authors and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. Her forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment examines deregulation and the media industries between 1980-1996 and will be published by Rutgers University Press.

Alisa Perren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Research specializations include media industry studies, television studies, and U.S. film and television history. Her forthcoming book, Indie, Inc. (under contract, University of Texas Press), traces the evolution of Miramax in the 1990s as it transitioned from independent company to studio subsidiary. Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, The Television History Book, and Flow.

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

What role have science fiction conventions played in fostering this amateur film

culture? Why has fan cinema been slower to emerge around other genres?

Science Fiction conventions are often run on a shoestring budget, so amateur films constitute free programming; at the same time, sci-fi fans are often attracted to technology-oriented hobbies--like filmmaking. Put them together and it's a tight fit. The modern pop culture and sci-fi conventions blossomed during the 1970s when 1960s sci-fi TV shows entered reruns, most famously Star Trek and Lost In Space. If you were a hobbyist filmmaker and you went to a convention, it was easy to see that a homemade sci-fi flick presenting new adventures of a beloved old franchise could find an appreciative audience at such an event.

Likewise--and I'm hardly the first to suggest this--men bond by 'doing,' so a group of male sci-fi fans getting together to explore their fandom through a group activity like filmmaking makes sense. Additionally, since many guys collect memorabilia as an expression of their fandom, a fan production provides a convenient way to rationalize some purchases: "Yes, Honey, I spent $700 on a Stormtrooper costume--but it's for my fan film!"

What place does the female fan practice of "vidding" hold in your account of fan

cinema?

To be honest, it's barely present in my book, which is not to imply that Vidding is insignificant. Rather, it's a very different art form, deserving its own in-depth exploration, such as the Vidding History project by the Organization of Transformative Works. I discussed Vids in passing a few times in the book, because to ignore them would be disingenuous; however, it would be presumptuous and insulting to that community for me as an outsider to attempt to tell Vidding's story.

The fan remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has generated much greater visibility than any other fan film in my memory. How typical is that production of fan filmmaking practice in general and what brought that film to such a high level of public consciousness?

There's a lot of elements at play when it comes to the (relative) success of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Primary among them is the fact that you can't see the film. Despite the fact that it has gained a high profile, it isn't readily available on the internet or home video; the only way to see it is to attend one of the scattered screenings held around the country each year by the filmmakers at non-profit cinemas and the like. By using the media to spread the word about the film--but not the film itself--the filmmakers have created a pent-up demand to see it...and fortunately, it is one of those rare cases where the movie actually beats audiences' expectations.

As far as fan filmmaking practice goes, the level of work that went into Raiders was unprecedented up to that point. For three pre-teens in the 1980s to spend seven years shooting a movie without any parental help is unusual enough; once you throw in the fact that they recreated all the major set-pieces of the original--Indiana Jones being chased by a boulder, getting dragged under a truck, fighting in a bar that's on fire, and so forth--it becomes astounding. Besides rooting for the kids--how are they going to pull off the next part?--I think many viewers relate to the film because everyone role-played as a child, whether it was "Cowboys & Indians," "Superheroes" or something else. These kids elevated that experience to the next level by videotaping it. At the same time, the sheer scope of what they achieved is inspiring--they had an impossible, idyllic dream as 11-year-olds and tenaciously made it happen, despite overwhelming odds. That's an experience anyone can get behind.

One of the things I talk about in Homemade Hollywood is how fan films are the offspring of scripted entertainment and Reality TV, and the Raiders adaptation is a great example of this, because you're seeing familiar scripted characters enacted by regular people in real-world settings without the perfect Hollywood sheen. When you see 13-year-old Chris Strompolos as Indy, trying to outrun a 100-lb. boulder made out of fiberglass or hanging off the front of a rolling truck, the look of terror on his face is undeniably real. It's a very analog, visceral experience to view the film and it sucks viewers in, because these days, that's something you often can't get from professional movies.

Ironically, Hollywood reacted to that analog, visceral experience by buying the life-rights to the filmmakers' story in a six-figure deal that made the front page of Variety. In a few years, you can expect to find a professional tribute movie about their amateur tribute movie about yet another movie at your local multiplex.

How has the web reshaped amateur film production, publicity, and distribution?

The web has certainly become the lifeline of the fan film community and has affected all the aspects you listed. Before the mid-Nineties mainstreaming of the internet, there were plenty of fan filmmakers out there, but they weren't aware of each other. In fact, the term "fan film" didn't exist because no one realized that this was a filmmaking movement instead of merely a few isolated movies mentioned in the back pages of enthusiast magazines like CineMagic.

In terms of production, sure, amateur filmmakers use the internet for obvious things like buying costumes or equipment (or, in some cases, pirating editing and effects software), but now they can build a virtual crew as well. For instance, the 2005 fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, was an ambitious, 40-minute effort covered by all the major news channels and downloaded over a million times in its first 48 hours on the web. Part of the appeal was its eye-popping special effects, which were created by a volunteer team of CGI enthusiasts around the world that used the web to recruit artists, exchange files and compile the finished effect shots.

The internet also provides varied levels of distribution, from simple YouTube clips to over-the-top efforts like Revelations, which was available in a variety of forms, from iPod-friendly MP4 files to a Bit Torrent package that that could be burned to DVD-Rs to create a two-disc set--one for the movie and one for the behind-the-scenes extras, naturally.

As for publicity, websites and the blogosphere are certainly the main forum for spreading the word about fan films today, because a simple link will get your work seen. I run a daily fan film blog called FanCinemaToday.com, and I get everything from illiterate emails ("Dude, U rite on my movie?") to professional-quality digital press kits. No press junkets or swag yet, but I can dream (just kidding). Like the films themselves, the publicity efforts range all over the map.

You describe a number of cases where studios have struggled with how to respond to fan films produced about their franchises. What factors have shaped their decisions in regard to fan cinema? How would you characterize the current perceptions in Hollywood towards fan films?

Hollywood has been fairly alarmed by them--and with good reason. While I'm an advocate of fan filmmaking, I think the studios are right to be concerned. If you owned a sleek Maserati and the 12-year-old next door took it for a joyride, you'd be furious even if it came through without a scratch. That's something like what's going on with the studios, because amateurs are basically hijacking these billion-dollar franchises and doing whatever they want with them.

Now, to be fair, 99.9 percent of all fan films are tributes in some form or another, they pose no real monetary threat to a studio's franchise and they don't impact the public consciousness when you compare the number of people who saw The Dark Knight last summer to 6,000 people watching Batman's Bad Day on YouTube. Studios realize this and I think that fuels the current take on such flicks--that they're relatively harmless. At the same time, going after fan filmmakers with IP lawsuits would be a waste of resources because they'd cost more than could be won, plus they'd be a PR nightmare similar to the travails that Warner Brothers experienced when it tried to shut down Harry Potter websites a few years ago.

On the other hand, the current state of things where most studios are looking the other way is going to end sooner or later. To make up an example, let's say you make a $20,000 fan film where Superman goes crazy because of Kryptonite and starts graphically killing babies with his X-ray vision. If it's a well-made film that grabs the eye of a cable news pundit on a slow news day, that could blow up into a serious problem and potentially damage the franchise.

A more likely scenario, however, is that studios will get involved with fan films simply because there's money to be made, whether it's through some form of licensing out characters to the filmmakers, or making the best flicks available on a studio-sanctioned X-Box channel for a buck apiece, or something else entirely.

Lucasfilm has taken an interesting approach to dealing with fan films with its annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. The contest is used to reach out to the fanbase, it appears to show fans great largesse because George Lucas is "allowing" them to make fan tribute movies, and yet it gives Lucasfilm indirect control over what material goes into such flicks, because if you're going to go through all the effort to make a Star Wars fan film, why wouldn't you follow the content guidelines so that you could enter it in the contest?

As you note, far fewer women than men have been involved in the production of

original fan films. Why do you think this pattern has emerged and are there

signs that more women are producing fan movies now than in previous decades?

There are lots of theories about this out there--for instance, that women are more interested in characters' internal lives--an aspect more easily explored through fan fiction--or the comment earlier that guys bond by 'doing' so they gravitate toward a group activity like film production.

I think one overlooked aspect is sheer momentum. Fan fiction took off in the 1960s and 70s with zines and quickly became an outlet for female fans. I suspect that since then, women looking to create new stories for a favorite franchise have looked at the fanfic community and said "That's where my peers are; I guess I'm going in that direction." It's self-perpetuating at this point.

Of course, I'm not a female fan filmmaker and never will be, so I can't speak from a place of authority. As a result, in Homemade Hollywood, I spent a chapter interviewing women filmmakers and a number of them spoke of women being uncomfortable with being in charge. One filmmaker who teaches film to girls noted that the idea of being a director never occurred to her students and when she suggested it, they couldn't envision themselves in that position at all.

With all that in mind, I don't see the current male-to-female amateur filmmaker ratio changing anytime soon. One thing I would like to see is more collaboration between the fanfic and fan film communities. Most fan films would benefit from better characterization and more fully rounded stories; who better to write them than fanfic authors? It's happened in a few cases--most noticeably the aforementioned Star Wars: Revelations--and I think both sides of the equation could benefit from it.

In the case of Star Trek, we are seeing increased collaboration between fans and some of those involved in the commercial franchise itself, including actors,

script writers, and technicians. What are the implications of this kind of collaboration for the future of fan cinema?

There are a number of high-profile fan efforts with sophisticated production values now, most noticeably Star Trek: Phase II, a fan series which sports a $100,000 Enterprise bridge set. They've been known to feature Trek alumni such as George Takei ("Sulu") and Walter Koenig ("Checkov") recreating their original roles, and have had original series writers script and sometimes direct their episodes

Quasi-pro efforts like Phase IIdo point the way towards a number of possibilities for fan films in the future beyond obvious things, such as that they may prove to be a "farm league" for tomorrow's professional casts and crews. For instance, fan productions may wind up being used by Hollywood to see if the time is right to bring back a shuttered franchise. Similarly, analyzing fan films based on properties that are still up-and-running may provide insight into what aspects resonate most with die-hard fans. Alternately, if fan films show a trend of including a specific characteristic not in the original--for example, many Star Trek fan films pointedly feature gay characters--they may provide insight into what would realign a troubled franchise with its fanbase.

And as noted before, studios are likely to eventually get involved with fan filmmakers simply because there's money being left on the table under the current arrangement of pretending they're not there. If fans are going to make an amateur production based on your IP, why not sell them a specialized set of rights, props, costumes, digital filmmaking "toolkits" customized to the franchise with trademark sounds, music and "greenscreenable" effects, and rent them space on a special website just for "official fan productions" based on your franchise? Once there are enough decent flicks, they can be repackaged as a TV special, a DVD, or some other product. There's a lot of way studios and fans can work together in a symbiotic fashion that would benefit all parties.

Getting into bed with the studios works for fan films primarily because most filmmakers in the hobby daydream of breaking into Hollywood; such a model would be far less successful if applied to other media like fan fiction, where similar efforts have failed.

Also, another concern is that high-end, high-profile fan productions are a lot of fun to watch, but they can be intimidating to potential fan filmmakers--"Why should I bother if that's what a fan film is supposed to be? I can't do that." Phase II, in particular, is far removed from the underground, "punk rock" aesthetic that has powered so many fan efforts throughout the years.

Ironically, that sheen of perfection is exactly what Hardware Wars parodied back in the 1970s, showing that a fan production didn't have to be perfect--much less made with professional help--to be enjoyable. Perhaps things are coming full-circle and we need a new low-rent flick like Hardware Wars to burst that bubble again. Who knows?

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

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

Computer Game Spaces: An Interview with Georgia Tech's Michael Nitsche (Part Two)

You also suggest that the design of games space has been heavily influenced by our shared understanding of cinematic conventions. Which aspects of film form exert an influence on the design of game worlds?

Video games, film, and television are all part of the moving image media family. They share many aspects, differ in many others and continuously add to each other's vocabulary through their shared origins. There are at least two connections that we have to take into account when we discuss game spaces and their visual representation.

On the one hand, a large number of games try to remediate cinematic visuals. There is no reason for a lens flare effect in Unreal Tournament because there are not physical optics involved. But the programmer included it. Neither is there any technical reason for suddenly increasing grainy imagery in sections of Fatal Frame. But the images are altered nevertheless. These are rendering effects applied to the game world in order to recreate cinematic visual effects and to achieve distinct dramatic impacts.

Most of the time, we have to read and understand a game world to interact meaningfully with it. That is why visualization is a very powerful form of expression in digital games and not necessarily subordinate to interactivity. Cinematic traditions are built into these games to direct our reading of the world. Because designers constantly develop new visual expressions for their games, we cannot pinpoint a single cinematic reference point for video games. The main visual traditions of 3D game cinematography (following camera, overhead view, first-person point of view and pre-defined viewing frames) have all connections to existent cinematic traditions but they have developed their own specifics over time.

The interactive following camera, for example, changes the way that the main character is visually situated in the game world and often becomes not only a visual but also a action controlling device when the hero is programmed to always run in the direction the player points the camera. Equally important is the question of montage of different viewpoints in video games. Film has developed multiple techniques of montage and games seem to gradually follow with some own concepts that are organized around their interactivity.

In many 3D games players not only control the virtual hero but have also taken on the role of virtual cameramen and editors. Maybe the most surprising fact is how seamlessly audience can accept this responsibility. The camera work in the newer Prince of Persia titles is highly developed and might be influenced by the player in the midst of equally complex game play situations. Nevertheless, players seem to readily adapt to that task. Nowadays, a player not only accepts the role of the virtual hero but also that of the "man with the movie camera." And this transition happened extremely smoothly overall. Maybe because of our familiarity with cinematic techniques.

This points to the second main connection between games and film: players have developed certain expectations towards the moving image. We have been educated by television conventions and cinematic visual storytelling and look at game through this expectation.

This allows players to understand the elegant intro sequences of the Half-Life games as descendents of the classic long opening shots that we have seen in Altman's The Player or Welles' Touch of Evil. Players bring this kind of media literacy to the game and can read it through their proficiency in film and TV visual storytelling. So we expect games to work a bit like movies because film and TV are essential sources of our visual literacy.

This is a two-way street, of course, and with the growing role of games as media for socialization the influences starts to shift. We can see that games start to educate our visual expectations and drive shots in television and cinema productions. So instead of a single influence I would argue for a growing shared ground that is based on the tradition of the moving image.

As you note, game designers rely on a range of spatial metaphors to discuss

their craft -- drawing parallels between games and gardens, sand boxes,

amusement parks, labyrinths, mazes, and arenas or talking about games as being

on "rails" or "tracks." Which of these analogies are most productive for

thinking about games space? Which do you think are confusing or misleading?

The book does not directly pick up the discussion of games as gardens or sand boxes - not because these metaphors are misleading but mainly because to me it seemed that a lot of detail is lost in such an approach. These are very useful approaches and often well applied in other works but a bit too large for the detailed analysis I had in mind. In my case, I tried to look into more precise spatial subcategories - like the path, the arena, or the labyrinth.

So instead of discussing the overall summary of a virtual space, which indeed might work and feel like a virtual garden, the focus is on details that might evoke this impression. I call these details evocative narrative elements and they work like spatialized hooks that affect the way the player experiences the game universe. They support the player to make sense of the virtual world and the situations in it and offers opportunities to connect and contextualize the events in relationship to each other. Finding a item important to the player, defeating an opponent or saving a friendly character, discovering the value of a certain item and overcoming threshold - all these can be evocative narrative elements that are situated in the game world.

However, how the player truly interconnects these hooks is up to her. Evocative narrative elements can add up to a fuller picture of a garden of a sandbox-like world, but in the end this depends very much on the player.

That is why I suggest a different metaphor in the end of the book, namely that of the kitchen. The kitchen caters for the growing role of players in the formation and re-usage of game environments. Following established recipes or gradually experimenting with new ones might be translated in the players' actions in innovative titles from Spore to Little Big Planet to Second Life or MetaPlace. And getting all the set up right might just about decide the fate of worlds like Sony's Home.

Michael Nitsche is an Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Communication,

and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches courses on virtual

environments and digital moving images. Michael heads the Digital World and Image Group, which works the design, use, and production of virtual spaces, Machinima, and the borderlines between games, film, and performance. His work combines theoretical analysis and practical experiments and his collaborations include work with the National Film and Television School London, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Turner Broadcasting, Alcatel Lucent, and others. He is author of Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008), and has published on Game Studies, virtual worlds, digital performance, games and film, and machinima in numerous publications. In a former life he was co-author for a commercial videogame, professional Improv actor, and dramaturgist.

Computer Game Spaces: An Interview with Georgia Tech's Michael Nitsche (Part One)

For a while there, it looked like the debate between the ludologists (who focus on game play mechanics) and the narratologists (who focus on storytelling) was going to define the range of perspectives in games studies. As someone who was falsely labeled a narratologist for a bit, I found this model of the field constraining and distorting. Now, of course, we've seen an explosion of different perspectives in the academic study of computer and video games. One of the most promising approaches emphasizes the spatial dimensions of game design, a topic which was, in fact, the real focus of my own early writing on games (and not coincidentally a recurring focus of the work of Espen Aardseth, a card-carrying Ludologist), suggesting that space is not only the final frontier but also the common ground of many of the first generation of game scholars. Michael Nitsche, a games researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology (better known as Georgia Tech), has written a significant new book, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008) which sums up what we can learn about games by examining them as spatial systems. His writing is informed not only by work in games studies but also from media studies, performance studies, urban planning and architecture. As he discusses in the interview below, this work has been informed by his work with the Digital World and Image Group at Georgia Tech.

I had a chance to visit Nitsche and his colleagues down in Atlanta late last fall and came away tremendously impressed by the spirit of collaboration and exploration which exists within that particular academic community. The Georgia Tech folks are doing cutting edge work across many different research areas. I am lucky enough to have Michael's colleague, Ceila Pierce, presenting the opening colloquium this term, sharing her work on the construction of fictional ethnic identities within multiplayer game worlds.

Here and next time, Nitsche shares some thoughts about the theoretical stakes of thinking about games space.

You come to this book both as a game designer and as a game theorist. How have the two perspectives informed each other here? To what degree do you see your design work as a mode of experimentation with the basic building blocks of games as a medium? Can you describe for us some of the projects you've worked? How does work with games done in research centers differ from the kind of work which occurs within commercial games companies? What value do you think university-based game research brings to the evolution of games as a medium?

Most examples in the book are drawn from commercial video games but it does include a wide range of research projects, too - including some of my own practical experiments. We need these experimental game projects to fill in the gaps left by commercial titles.

Commercial video games have to make money and they often have to be streamlined and optimized to reach that target - university-based games research projects have all kinds of limitations but they thankfully do not have to sell. This allows us to explore some of the more complicated areas that commercial games have to avoid to stay afloat.

My own work has always been a mixture of theory and practice but I have to admit that I somehow lack a single direction in the experiments I have conducted. I have worked on educational virtual environments, procedural game spaces, virtual and mixed media performance spaces, augmented reality prototypes, and these days I start to experiment with location-based handheld applications. In my case these experiments are truly explorative. They start off with a relatively simple question and snowball into more and more challenging test beds. While a commercial game production has to streamline the design at that point and focus on the core, research projects remain free to explore. I like that - a lot.

At Georgia Tech we are used to testing theory and analysis in such an experimental set up. So, shortly after I joined the faculty here, I started the Digital World & Image Group. One of our first major projects was Charbitat, an experimental game that creates a 3D world around the virtual player depending on how you play the game. First, we focused on the question of procedural space generation and how to design for these new and dynamic worlds. But once we had the functional prototype up and running, we moved on to look into procedural quest generation, dynamic camera control and patterns to support spatial navigation in infinite worlds - all based on the original game prototype. Any commercial developer would have cut this additional research, which is why this kind of gradual experimental discovery is only possible in a non-commercial environment. This certainly does not mean that academics should tell developers how to create their games, but it shows that research projects can offer additional information because they are free to explore venues that are locked off by deadlines and budgets in commercial production.

Other areas are not covered by commercial games, yet. For example, I am very interested in game worlds as performance spaces where players do not play to achieve certain high scores but instead to express something effectively. Consequently, some of my projects deal with virtual puppetry or augmented reality performance spaces.

I also have done quite a lot of work in machinima. The industry might recognizes the promise in these areas but it is simply not clear how these ideas might work out in a viable single application. So here the university-based research project can break completely new ground.

Many accounts of game theory have emphasized the tension between ludological approaches, which focus on game play mechanics, and narratological approaches, which focus on story telling. Does a focus on game spaces give us a different way of thinking about the relations between these two approaches?

I believe it does. Space is certainly not the single answer to all of our problems but it surely predates play as well as narrative. We learn how to deal with space before we start to tell stories or play games. If we translate this into video games, space becomes a higher category, one that can include narrative qualities as well as ludic ones.

I started to look into expressive 3D game spaces around 1999, when I began my studies at the University of Cambridge's Department of Architecture. This was just around the time the debate about narratology and ludology heated up. We did a lot of work with video but I felt somewhat shielded from the divide because even in the darkest controversies nobody ever argued against the importance of space in games. From where I was standing, you had to ask whether there is really a substantial divide at all between ludology and narratology. For me, both become part of how we deal with spaces and are not opposites but complementary to each other.

In the book I talk about Story Maps, a form of imaginary map that we form in our mind as we play our way through a virtual environment. These maps are shaped by what we do in the game world as well as how the action it told through various forms of presentation in sound and image. Sure, there is a strong narrative element in these maps but they can only be created when the game is played. So I could never really fully see the divide because my work seemed to be right in the middle of this discussion without conflicting with either.

A key goal throughout the book has been to map the many different devices that shape the player's perception and experience of games space. What value is such a catalog to the game designer? What do you see as some of the under-developed opportunities in the creation of expressive game spaces?

Game Studies has covered a lot of ground and opened up a wide range of approaches, which is good. What I suggest is a combination of different fields. That is why the book references various disciplines from architecture to film, to drama and literature studies.

Game designers very often use these and other references already as they collect ideas and inspirations. They do this often intuitively and this book might help to stimulate this messy process and provide an additional perspective.

Any designer worth their salt is aware of the fundamental role of a video game such as Mario 64 for the way we design games today; this book offers an additional view at some details regarding these innovations specifically for 3D game worlds. It does not suggest a single solution or a unique missed opportunity but instead discusses a range of available options by looking at the underlying basics.

For example, the whole argument of the book is built on the idea that game worlds are not simply polygon masses arranged in a certain way in the engine. Instead, we should look into different layers where game spaces come to life. These include the play space in the living room of the player, as well as the fictional and mediated spaces generated by the presentation and the imagination of the player. The rule-based level is only one of five layers for game space analysis. The task, then, is to find the connections between the different layers. New interfaces such as the Wii remote or webcams are good examples for these connections. They put much more emphasis on the world in front of the screen. But what can we make of this expansion into the physical space? Among other things, the book invites us to think about ways these connections into the living room can be made more effectively.

Throughout the book, you draw heavily on ideas from architecture and urban planning. What do these fields have to contribute to games studies?

There are some obvious parallels, such as the relevance of urban planning for the design of free-roaming game worlds or the way architectural styles are copied in video games. However, I would argue that we have to look a bit deeper to identify more fundamental parallels.

One example for a more direct connection is the way we read large-scale environments no matter whether it is a real world like my hometown or a virtual one like an online world. We gradually form a cognitive map based on certain key features and navigate through the world based on this map. Architectural theorists like Alexander or Lynch have done extremely valuable work in precisely this area and a range of research projects has shown that the same ideas apply to virtual environments.

However, games offer different means to accentuate a players' development of a cognitive map. Designers have full control over the space and the possible actions in it and use it to dramatize the experience. That is why we also have to take theatrical spaces into account.

Most virtual worlds are designed not for a "live-like" experience but for overly dramatic ones. These game worlds would fall short if they would provide "only" realistically functioning virtual cities. Instead, they have to deliver virtual stages, full or extraordinary events and opportunities that are not available in real world designs. That is why we have to add these dramatic functions to the architectural ones and combine dramatic moments with cognitive maps.

Likewise, architecture is very helpful in the discussion of specific spatial structures, such as paths, arenas, or labyrinths. They clearly reflect and reference existent architectural structures but we have to add the game specific elements that usually enhance their dramatic impact. The labyrinths of Doom or Silent Hill are not just navigable virtual architectures but the actively put the player into a highly engaging dramatic situation.

The video game world tells the player where she is projecting her actions. It positions the player via spatial means and uses references to architecture and urban planning. At the same time, it is a dramatic positioning. Players do not enter a game world as a neutral observer or visiting tourists but as cops staged in the middle of a gang war, a superhero with the power to destroy or rescue Metropolis, a lost soul that only tries to escape and survive.

These options are embedded in the game world's architecture, its presentation, and its functionality. Urban planning, architecture and performance studies help us to balance and connect these features better.

Michael Nitsche is an Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Communication,

and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches courses on virtual

environments and digital moving images. Michael heads the Digital World and Image Group, which works the design, use, and production of virtual spaces, Machinima, and the borderlines between games, film, and performance. His work combines theoretical analysis and practical experiments and his collaborations include work with the National Film and Television School London, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Turner Broadcasting, Alcatel Lucent, and others. He is author of Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008), and has published on Game Studies, virtual worlds, digital performance, games and film, and machinima in numerous publications. In a former life he was co-author for a commercial videogame, professional Improv actor, and dramaturgist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of them seemed interested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans are increasingly getting their news from national papers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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