Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part One)

Jessica K. Parker's new book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12 manages to be visionary and pragmatic in equal measures. Drawing heavily on the work done by researchers affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiatives, especially the Digital Youth Project, the book offers educators, especially classroom teachers, new ways of understanding young people's online lives and how the resources of new media and participatory culture can be effectively integrated into their pedagogical practices. The book brings together smart people -- researchers, classroom teachers alike -- to talk through the implications of our present moment of media changes on the kinds of learning which are taking place in school. The authors move deftly from considering the big picture to explaining specific activities which might be deployed in the classroom. I was proud to see some discussion of the work we've been doing through Project New Media Literacies sprinkled throughout the book and not simply because our Research Director, Erin Reilly, has contributed an essay on learning through remixing. I am using the release of the book this week as an excuse to bring together several key contributors to the volume, including Reilly and the book's editor Parker, for a conversation about the ways that this new research is challenging some of the assumptions that govern how teachers and administrators often respond to the potentials of new media and learning. And while you are at it, check out this rich website developed to provide teachers with resources around the book.

Can you give me a sense of your goals for this book? In some ways, it is translating or popularizing insights from the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning research for an audience of teachers. What do you see as the value of this research for impacting the decisions which teachers make everyday in the classroom, given, as you note, the primary focus of this research was on informal learning outside the classroom?

Jessica:

With this book, I wanted to invite educators, specifically classroom teachers, into this larger discussion of digital media and learning (DML). I felt that if I wrote a book for teachers my invitation needed to connote, "I trust you. Here is something that I want to share with you. I value your opinion and your insights." In the DML community, there is a sense that this current moment is a defining one. It is a profound moment. And I don't think my collective academic community has reached out enough to classroom teachers to say, "Join us in this moment." Join us--even though we may exist as researchers, educators, and mentors in different learning environments--join us as we analyze these important educational concepts and discuss how learning, literacy and knowledge creation and sharing are changing. Changing the culture of learning within schools starts with teachers.

I wanted to share this research with classroom teachers and listen to their responses. And yet, I realize that the book that I created with 28 collaborators will force educators to shift their perspective of learning by going beyond a normative understanding of formal education. I don't think this discussion will be an easy one: in fact, this book might take readers out of their comfort zones. And that is why it was important for me to "invite" teachers into this discussion. We desperately need this kind of philosophical discussion. In order to do this, I followed in the footsteps of the MacArthur Foundation and wrote a book that focuses on "learning" rather than "education" or "schooling." We must take a different angle on learning in order to see beyond the constraints of our own educational system.

I also wanted to avoid framing the book as a teacher's guide with a focus on one single subject with cut-and-paste activities for the classroom. This kind of thinking seems to promote an educational system devoid of curricular connections and deep participatory learning, and lacks application to everyday life. I framed the book as a philosophical discussion regarding learning in the 21st century in the hopes that we could take a step back from the everyday realities of the classroom and reflect on what it means to be an educator in these changing times. I know too well the teacher-mode of the treadmill, where from August to June I would run from unit to unit and chapter to chapter and miss making connections between topics, across disciplines or even daily lessons. We need to stop running on our treadmills and start asking serious questions about what it means to learn, to be literate, and to know something in a mediated culture.

In terms of the value of the research from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative, it is an excellent opportunity for teachers to explore pioneering research in this emerging field. Additionally, I don't buy into the notion that informal learning and formal learning are completely separate entities that have no bearing on another. I realize that they usually exist in separate settings and have different properties, but as a teacher and a learner, I have always viewed them as fluid. I don't want to draw a line in the sand and promote one over the other or frame our discussions as an either/or issue; in fact, I advocate that we should learn, reflect on, and analyze both settings. This can only make us better teachers and--most importantly--better learners.

You frame the book around issues of what learning, literacy, and knowledge mean in the 21st century. While it is clear you want educators to continue to ponder these issues, you also clearly have some thoughts that guide this book towards certain answers. What do you know about these concepts at the end of the process of writing this book that you did not know before?

Jessica:

In my current work with pre-service and in-service teachers in Northern California, when I introduce the topic of reassessing learning, literacy and knowledge, it takes more than just reading research to unpack these issues. It takes more than just having a class discussion; it takes more than just testing out an idea in their own classroom. Analyzing and re-visioning these core educational concepts takes a lot of effort and it is really a combination of factors that allow teachers to really grapple with these topics: reading, discussing, experimenting and testing out ideas in their classrooms, and then coming back to our graduate class and reflecting and getting feedback from peers. This is a process that needs to be woven into the daily life of teachers--and it's hard to create time and space to accomplish this. We have to know ourselves as teachers and be willing to analyze our own philosophies of education. It's not an easy road to take but it is required if we are to rethink school-based learning.

Many teachers fear that new media practices -- such as texting - leave students less literate. Yet, your book challenges this presumption. How do you see new media practices changing the range of expressive opportunities available to students?

Maryanne:

With regard to new media practices making youth less literate, it's a version of an old argument that surfaces every time there's a new wave of practice. Each new wave of media practices encounters resistance. Literary scholar, Nina Baym (2006), chronicles magazine and journal articles from the early 1800's in which editors asserted the need for reviewers to exercise surveillance and provide direction to the newly literate masses who had taken up the habit of reading fiction. Novels were dangerous! There was a similar kind of backlash in response to comic books. If anyone had taken that criticism seriously we would never have the incredible array of graphic novels we enjoy today.

As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, the critical change in the latest of the new literacies is that of convergence. The problem with "either/or" thinking with regard to traditional and digital literacy is that it fails to capture the experiences of youth. The child who is reading a novel from a traditional text, or listening to it on her ipod, downloading it onto her e-book, and visiting a website where she can play a game as a character from the book, participate in a forum discussion, and answer challenge questions, is transforming the practices of reading and writing. The sad fact is that she is not allowed to bring her e-book to school, even though some of her classmates wear outfits that cost more than her Kindle. She only sees a computer when her teacher beats out the thirty other teachers attempting to sign-up for the school's only computer lab on Wednesday, after lunch. Though at home she rarely writes with a pen, during the school day it is the only tool she is allowed to use in most of her classes. Even her cell phone must be kept in her locker or it will be confiscated.

Phil:

Students express themselves through a variety of media. Kids are writing independently more now than they have since I started teaching in1992. What is new is the range of digital communication modalities that kids are adopting with zeal and creativity. That they are doing so using communication tools that are new to all of us and somewhat foreign to many teachers is immaterial. They are practicing the skills we teachers value on a daily basis. When teachers build on students' passion, they are capitalizing on an opportunity to help kids deepen both their use of communication tools and their understanding of (hopefully) relevant course content.

You note that teachers often want to be told how they can use specific technologies in their classes. But you argue that this is not an adequate approach to the potentials and challenges of new media. Explain.

Erin:

When technology was first being used in the classroom, everyone involved in the process (from the developers to the school administrators, to the teachers working with the students) tried to replicate one to one what was already happening in the classroom. But we learned that this is the wrong approach. Integrating technology into the classroom provides new practices and scenarios that don't exist when technology is not there.

On top of that, technology moves at such a rapid pace that to introduce teachers to specific technologies to use in the classroom would be doing them an injustice in better understanding how to incorporate new practices in the classroom. If teachers only learned how to use specific types of tools, they would not be prepared to adapt and negotiate new spaces and new innovations that continuously happen in this rich media landscape.

No one technology is the savior for the classroom. It's not about asking ourselves what technology should I be using but instead we should be asking ourselves, "What practices enable my learning objectives?" This shift in question will encourage teachers to not be betrothed to a tool but instead encourage acquiring the new ways of thinking and doing through participating in new forms of practices.

New Media Literacies (NML) is working with the state of New Hampshire on a project called the Early Adopters' Network. This is a group of teachers from schools across New Hampshire who we collaborate with through NML's Community to better understand our pedagogical approach and try new methods and tools to increase collaboration among educators. One of the participating New Hampshire educators recently wrote us a reflection on her experience, "No longer am I looking to transfer some tech skill for use of an application but facilitating thoughts and skills through them. It's funny, because I always thought I did this, but the reality was my model basically encouraged to seek support from a classmate. The activities and lessons themselves were not thought-provoking or designed to encourage collaboration."

Though I don't endorse teaching teachers specific technologies, I think its important to provide ample time during each week to play. Play is one of the new media literacies, and we define it as the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving. What about setting up a digital tool playground for your school as part of your teachers' professional development and as a way for students to share their expertise with the adults in their lives? This would provide a new space for teachers and students to come together wearing different hats than what we see in the classroom. In an unstructured format, this digital playground would allow teachers and students to collaborate in new ways and make visible the value of the different expertise available right in their own school.

This is messiness at its best where teachers and students struggle together to better understand the social and cultural competencies and in a place where one isn't judged on outcome but on participation, teachers and students would have time to practice and reflect on what it means to be part of this networked world.

Jessica:

To reinforce what Erin said it isn't as easy as insert technology, out comes student learning. The excitement, sleekness, and allure of contemporary technology should not suggest that educators only have to incorporate laptops and webcams into their classrooms for students to magically acquire technical skills and understand academic concepts. We need an educational mindset that views technology as more than a mere tool--using technology in a classroom is in fact an application of a philosophy of learning. It is possible to incorporate digital media in a way that simply reproduces a particular kind of knowledge, a static notion of student identity, and a rigid understanding of teacher-student relationships. Viewing technology as both a philosophical issue and pedagogical practice offers teachers a way to avoid an overly deterministic approach to integrating technology.

Maryanne:

As a classroom teacher myself, I do not think that teachers want "canned" products that they can only employ in a particular way. Rather, they want tools and environments that can be used to extend and support the worlds they are creating in their classrooms. Excellent teaching involves a degree of risk and sadly today there are many constraints on teachers that keep them from trying anything new. Being too cautious can cause a teacher to miss the wave of enthusiasm that can generate real engagement in learning. I think that teachers need to look at how students use particular tools, how they participate in particular practices, how they act in particular virtual environments and then ask themselves, 'how can I use this to forward the subject I teach?'

I saw how much my students enjoyed instant messaging when it first became available to them and so I devised a project through which students used IM to discuss literature. The point is to try and play with the forms, bend the rules to serve learning in school. I made strict guidelines about IM-ing. I didn't want the conversations to be superficial. Students had to support their ideas with quotes from the text. There is a way of balancing the excitement of a new practice with the rigor demanded by a particular discipline.

With regard to specific uses of technology in classrooms we should be wary of practices that standardize student investigation and expression of knowledge. What the five-paragraph essay has done for writing, the powerpoint has done for presentations. Standardization of practices kills innovation as well as what we used to call "voice" in writing. While we want to introduce practices that help students organize their thinking, we also want to ensure that students will have opportunities to exercise agency in their own educations. I worry about this with regard to virtual worlds. Quests and adventures could be very exciting narratives through which students might learn all kinds of subjects, but there also needs to be studios and stages, places where young people can determine how to use the environments.

After an initial surge of interest, many schools have started to dismiss virtual worlds such as Second Life as potential distractions from the learning process. What was missed in this first wave of experimentation with virtual worlds for education? How valuable are such immersive experiences for learning? Which educational groups have been most effective at deploying virtual worlds?

Maryanne:

Of the reading I've done, the most interesting work has been in the field of medicine, not only with technical training but through experiments with virtual patients. Studies indicate that pre-service health care professionals respond to virtual patients as they would to actual ones--they have physical responses of anxiety and empathy when interacting with virtual patients.

With regard to virtual worlds, I think we will learn important lessons from Second Life. Before the recession there were 50+ virtual worlds emerging. I'm hopeful that we'll see lots of innovation in the development of immersive environments. What I envision happening is that schools and perhaps individual teachers will have access to virtual environments that they will be able to customize for their own uses. In the meantime, teachers should investigate virtual environments of all kinds, but especially immersive ones in order to experience how their literacy practices change when one dons an avatar. In Second Life, a teacher could join the very large and active education group and participate in virtual conferences and programs, in order to familiarize themselves with the possibilities. Teachers can visit http://simteach.com to get started.

Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a

quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she

becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral

candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley

Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a

small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of

English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media

education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in

high school back in the earliest days of videotape.

Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies

first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and

development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered

by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work

with women and girls in Zoey's Room.

Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State

University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia

literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,

high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created

and taught professional development courses for teachers.

Ludic Narrans:Drew Davidson Talks Cross-Media Communication (Part One)

One of my first classes at USC was in transmedia entertainment and storytelling and I plan to be teaching a large lecture hall class on transmedia in the Cinema School starting in the 2011-2012 academic year. My growing interest in transmedia is one of many reasons I have ended up here. I want to be closer to the entertainment industry to be able to watch some of the changes that are unfolding as this emerging conception of popular entertainment really takes root and I want to be in a position to influence the entertainment workers in training. Think about how the generation of "movie brats," such as Spielberg and Lucas, influenced the American media. For generations, directors emerged from one or another of the guilds, bringing with them specialized skill sets. Robert Wise was an editor; William Cameron Menzies was an art director; most of them knew how to work with actors, but few of them had an integrated perspective on all of the technical skills required to produce a movie. With the rise of film schools, we got directors who knew the full vocabulary of their medium, who knew how to speak to workers with more specialized skills (who often trained alongside them and spoke a shared language) and who knew the history and genres that constituted their tradition. As Hollywood begins to embrace transmedia, a common concern is that there are few people who fully understand how to tell stories or create entertainment experiences in more than one medium: comic book people don't know how to think about games, say, or television people have limited grasp of the web. My own hope is that the Film Schools will once again be the space where future media makers get exposed to a broader range of different kinds of media and also develop the social relations and vocabulary to meaningfully collaborate with others who have specialized in different modes of expression.

For this to happen, transmedia entertainment needs to emerge as a subject not simply at USC but at film schools all over the country. And, indeed, I am hearing more and more from other faculty who are starting to teach such classes at their own institutions. That's why it is such good news that Drew Davidson, Director of the Entertainment Technology Center Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University, has produced a new textbook designed to introduce undergraduate critical studies and production students alike to the world of what he calls "crossmedia entertainment." (Full disclosure: the book includes a short piece by me which offers my definition of transmedia.) I have long admired Drew Davidson's contributions to the space of games studies, especially through the Well Played books, which offer smart, engaging criticisms of specific games by some of the top games scholars in the world, and his earlier book, Stories in Between is a hidden gem which already poses important questions about new and emerging forms of storytelling.

This new book, Cross-Media Communications: an Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences will play a central role in shaping how concepts of "cross-media" or "transmedia" expression get taught, encouraging educators around the world to explore some of these intriguing concepts in their classrooms. Over the next two installments, I will be sharing this interview with Davidson about the book and about his thoughts on all things crossmedia.

What are your goals for this book? Are we far enough along in identifying and explaining these new techniques that there is a space for an undergraduate textbook on crossmedia? Is the book focused on developing critical understanding, practical skills or both?

My primary goal was to try and create an introductory textbook to this topic, so I was aiming for a freshman-level book. An inspiration was the various textbooks currently out that focus on mass communications. I thought it would be interesting to do something similar, but with a specific focus on how media communications are tending more than ever to be threaded together.

Thinking about where we are in our understanding of cross-media techniques and how media experiences can be threaded together, we could go back to Plato's concept of ekphrasis (roughly, using one medium to relate another). So it's been around for some time, particularly if you think of advertising campaigns since the advent of mass media. There are some sophisticated ad campaigns that link together various media (e.g. print, radio, tv and collectibles) in ways that are primarily meant to get us to consume. And

more recently, there is the increasing ability for us to also join in the creation of these experiences. Plus, as you've pointed out so well, the current generation of students are accustomed and acclimated to being this (inter)active with their media experiences. So, I think it's a good time to try and engage this topic in a textbook.

That said, I worked to create a textbook that is more broad than deep. It is meant to provide a good overview of the critical concepts involved as well as some practical application experience in a design and development context. It's a starting point and foundation for more in-depth study and practice of cross-media communications. The exercises, illustrations and information graphics in the book and DVD-ROM are meant to introduce students to the design process, and the professional perspectives throughout the book help give students a sense of the range of ideas involved. From here, students could work on their design skills specifically while also digging more deeply into concepts covered by people like yourself, Christy Dena, Kurt Kurt Lancaster, Monique de Hass, Jonathan Gray/a>, Max Giovagnoli, and Geoffrey Long (just to name a few). This textbook can be a way to show the various opportunities for them to consider.

.

What do you see as the role of academic programs in preparing the next generation of crossmedia designers and/or in educating an audience to become better consumers of existing transmedia properties?

To borrow a term from alternate reality games, I think academic programs can serve as a rabbit hole for both the preparation of crossmedia designers and the education of audience members. By helping introduce both groups to crossmedia, academic programs can then guide them deeper into what it has to offer.

For designers, courses of study could be developed to help teach students both the practical skills as well as the conceptual rigor they would need to create crossmedia experiences that took full advantage of the interplay of all the media involved together.

From a perspective of audience members, a crossmedia 101 course could introduce students to exemplars of crossmedia experiences and illustrate their fundamental characteristics. Subsequent courses could help students develop a deeper critical literacy that would help enable in-depth analysis of crossmedia.

In both cases, academic programs can help shape the understanding and direction of the field as it continues to develop. Going down the rabbit hole would just be the start of the adventure.

There has been a jumble of terminology around this topic. I prefer to use "transmedia." Frank Rose talks about "deep media." and you went with "cross-media." Do you see "transmedia" and "crossmedia" as two words to describe the same thing or as capturing different aspects of this new aesthetic?

To be honest, I think they're all fairly synonymous, and I think they could be interchanged for the most part. That said, here's how i see some of the distinctions and specific emphases between the three terms.

I like how you use transmedia to describe narrative universes that we can experience through multiple entry points which are accessed through various media. For me, this terms serves as a foundation for the other two.

Deep media is similarly about exploring experiences that take place across media. But it seems to have more of a focus on how the internet is performing as the glue that helps hold the narrative together and enables a deeper experience of the story.

And crossmedia focuses more specifically on how the audience needs to become interactively engaged in order to experience narratives that occur across, between and through various media. So the focus is more on how interactive you get.

But even just trying to point out these distinctions shows that they are quite subtle. Personally, I feel comfortable with all three terms and how they define this aesthetic.

Your discussion of "crossmedia" places a particular emphasis on interactivity. So, can you share with us what you mean by interactivity? Does this imply that other kinds of narratives are consumed passively? In a networked culture, are there any kinds of narrative which do not spark some form of participation and interactivity?

I think all communication is inherently interactive in nature, narratives included of course. But different media can enable different levels and types of interactivity. I like Espen Aarseth's distinction on how digital media can enable us to interact more directly within an narrative experience and help shape it through our interactions; whereas with other media (like books and film) we also interact, but with less agency within the

experience.

Building on this, I've noodled around with the notion of ludic narrans, or playful stories. Looking at Johan Huizinga's idea of homo ludens, and how humans begin life in a playful pre-linguistic consciousness as babies where we're solely homo ludens as we literally learn everything through play as we interact with the world. And then we learn language, and a new phase of consciousness begins, one that dominates, shapes, and constrains our worldview for the rest of our lives. We are now homo narrans, as we

discursively talk about what we play, what we learn, what we feel, believe, think, etc. But I don't think being homo narrans erases our foundational homo ludens nature; we are always already homo ludens, it¹s just now we talk about it.

Looking at how interactivity can be found in crossmedia, I believe Aarseth's notion of interactivity evokes a type of narrative experience that has definite para-linguistic activities involved; meaning is conveyed across media through gesture, space, color, sound, activity and agency. I think one of the reasons these experiences are so compelling is that they enable us to tap more directly into our pre-linguistic homo ludens consciousness as we can playfully engage with them. Of course, we then step back and talk about it, which engages our discursive homo narrans consciousness. So we have

ludic narrans, playful stories.

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press. He completed his Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, he received a B.A. and M.A. in Communications Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He chaired Game Art & Design and Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute Online and has taught and researched at several universities. He consults for a variety of companies, institutions and organizations and was a Senior Project Manager in the New Media Division of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He was also a Project Manager in Learning Services at Sapient, and before that he produced interactive media at HumanCode. He helped create the Sandbox Symposium, an ACM SIGGRAPH conference on video games and served on the IGDA Education SIG. He works with SIGGRAPH on games and interactive media and serves on the ACTlab Steering Committee, and many review boards and jury panels. He founded the Applied Media & Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is the lead on several MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative grants and has written and edited books, journals, articles and essays on narratives across media, serious games, analyzing gameplay, and cross-media communication.

Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life (Part Two)

This is the second part of an account of recent events in Second Life written by Peter Ludlow, a long-time observer of virtual worlds, a professor in the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, and the co-author, with Mark Wallace, of The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid Which Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, published by the MIT Press. As with any other representation of complicated and controversial events, different people will have different perspectives on what happened and different assessments of the motives and actions of the people involved. The essay is presented here in the hopes of sparking discussions about the blurring of politics and fantasy in virtual worlds, a topic to which we will return in the next installment. Watching the Watchers

by Peter Ludlow

In 2008, a member of the Justice League quit and gave an interview to the Herald, detailing the operations of the Justice League, claiming that they were keeping massive intel on Second Life users, were abuse reporting people capriciously, sometimes successfully getting them banned without cause, and that members of Linden Lab were complicit in these operations. These charges were dismissed by the League. Tizzers Foxchase and the Woodbury kids needed the smoking gun if their charges were going to stick, and so they began to plot an infiltration operation.

Infiltrating the Justice League would not be easy. Clearly any friend links to Woodbury would raise red flags. Nor would it work to just create a new avatar and ask if it could join Woodbury. New avatars are dangerous for obvious reasons. What one needed was a clean avatar with a reasonable age on it. Kalel certainly knew that it would be a nightmare if details of his operations ever made it into the wrong hands. So whoever took ran the avatar would have to be special - someone who had a reasonable rez date on their avatar, no friendship links to Woodbury, and who could disarm the seemingly paranoid Kalel and pass as an anti-griefing do-gooder. In 2009, the Woodbury kids found just such a player.

Haruhi Thespian was an avatar without an agenda, and a certain kind of élan. As it turns out, she was a thespian in real life and an award winning improv actor. Perhaps she had just the right stuff to infiltrate the Justice League. One day she was chatting with the Woodbury kids and they asked if she would be willing to undertake the operation. Harui decided that it sounded like fun and Operation Wrong Hands was born.

Kalel shows Haruhi the JLU "command center"

Haruhi was quickly admitted into the Justice League, but there were lingering suspicions. One day it seemed to Harui that her cover had been blown:

13:57] Kalel Venkman: I have to admit I'm having trouble figuring you out.

[13:57] Kalel Venkman: You just seem like the perfect applicant, and that's just uncommon.

[13:58] Haruhi Thespian: hehe, is that a compliment?

[13:58] Kalel Venkman: Every now and then we get a really good one that hits all the marks.

[13:59] Kalel Venkman: Anyway, it's just so rare, it takes me by surprise when it happens.

[13:59] Haruhi Thespian: I dont know what to say hehe

[13:59] Haruhi Thespian: >.<

[14:00] Haruhi Thespian: I'm so good its Criminal? (quote from the anime Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya)

[14:01] Kalel Venkman: Sort of.

[14:01] Kalel Venkman: We've got a pile of people from Woodbury trying to sneak their way into the JLU, and on the whole they're not very clever.

[14:01] Kalel Venkman: If somebody did get in, it would have to be somebody who looked like as good an applicant as you do.

[14:02] Haruhi Thespian: it seems I've applied at a bad time >.<

[14:02] Haruhi Thespian: thats unfortunate

[14:02] Kalel Venkman: And at the same time, we've just gone through an episode with JB Hancroft.

[14:03] Kalel Venkman: Now he was a problem, because nobody trusted him, and everybody was afraid to say so.

[14:03] Kalel Venkman: And I had nagging doubts too, but I suppressed them, thinking it was just me.

[14:03] Haruhi Thespian: Its understandable I guess

[14:03] Kalel Venkman: Always listen to your gut feelings, Haruhi. They'll never steer you wrong.

[14:04] Haruhi Thespian: I'll take that advice to heart

While in chat with Kalel, Haruhi was also in skype with Tizzers Foxchase and other Woodbury students. Haruhi told them she thought her cover was blown. Tizzers suggested that Haruhi talk to Kalel about boy troubles. The misdirection worked.

[14:04] Haruhi Thespian: So... this is kinda awkward? hehe, I'm sorry

[14:06] Haruhi Thespian: Hey Kalel, can I ask you for some advice?

[14:06] Haruhi Thespian: its about RL boy troubles

[14:07] Kalel Venkman: Sure.

Days later, Haruhi downloaded the JLU wiki and posted it to the Woodbury IRC channel, and from there it was reposted to numerous locations on the Internet. Within days it had been reproduced all over the internet.

Haruhi gets access to the JLU database

In an interview given to the Herald after the fact, Haruhi described Kalel as a kind and loving man who thought he was doing good. How Haruhi was able to maintain the disconnect is far from clear. In comments to the interview a disgusted reader summed up his feelings about the act of betrayal: "this makes for really unappetizing reading. Ick.". Another reader offered that this is simply the price one has to pay for being a spy:

It's the nature of spying that those who find themselves in that role have to go to unpleasant places and do things that in normal circumstances they would balk at. ... Personally I take my hat off to Haruhi for being willing to carry out this role and to then show a sense of morality and decency in her subsequent actions.

Haruhi informs the JLU of her actions

Whatever the moral standing of Haruhi's actions, one thing is clear: Haruhi had opened a Pandora's Box.

The Justice League did not merely have a data base on Second Life users. It had a massive data base on Second Life users. It contained 1,700 pages of information and misinformation on users, ranging from chat logs, to presumed real life identities of avatars (including real life information), to a history of the abuse reports that they had filed -- and many many abuse reports had been filed.

Predictably, the content of the Justice League data base was posted on various web sites. Kalel, understandably furious, responded in a scattershot fashion by filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down notices, bizarrely arguing that the chat logs etc were his intellectual property. When some Internet service providers complied, the materials were moved to safer havens in Canada and ultimately Montenegro. Woodbury sympathizers organized the material into a searchable database.

Meanwhile Herald editor Pixeleen Mistral began combing through the database and found example after example of disturbing revelations. Not only was she surprised to learn that she had been declared a griefer, but the claims of Linden complicity appeared to be supported. One particularly telling Wiki entry seemed to suggest that Linden employee Plexus Linden was revealing the real life identity of avatars.

Pixeleen published a series of stories to the Herald, including passages like the above. Then the other shoe dropped. Kalel filed a DMCA take-down notice against the Herald! Six Apart, which owns the Typepad blog hosting service used by the Herald, removed the material, apparently without giving any thought at all as to whether the charges were frivolous. Pixeleen would have to counterfile.

This was going to be no simple matter. Counterfiling would require Pixeleen to reveal her real life information, and she had guarded her privacy for years. Understandably so. Crossing people in Second Life can lead to real life stalking. As previous Herald editor Peter Ludlow had learned, angering someone with an article could lead to real life confrontations that ranged from angry phone calls from the United Arab Emirates to orchestrated campaigns by users to call his university and try to get him fired (not unlike what had happened to a Woodbury University instructor).

Pixeleen Mistral was a petite 20 something female avatar with a sharp fashion sense and a bit ditzy on technical matters. Her typist, turned out to be Duke University computer scientist Mark McCahill, who in addition to being male, 6'5'' tall, and having no apparent fashion sense at all, had been team leader in the development of the Gopher search program, team leader in the development of POPmail, and had worked with Tim Berners-Lee on the protocols for the World Wide Web. He was one of the gods of the Internet. He was also going to have to out himself.

Tizzers' alt and Pixeleen Chat (Intlibber Brautigan stands behind Tizzers)

Legally, if you file a DMCA counter notice, the service provider is required by law to restore the missing material in 14 working days. Several weeks after filing the counter claim McCahill contacted Typepad and asked them why they hadn't restored the material. They responded that they had lost it and couldn't restore it. McCahill of course had backed up the material, but disgusted, he moved the Herald from Typepad to another service.

As of today, this is where matters stand. Second Lifers continue to pour over the leaked materials, Kalel continues to file bogus DMCA actions, and feeble service providers like Typepad continue to enforce them.

It's a sad state of affairs on many levels, not least because of what it says about our future in both the real and virtual worlds. How does this keep happening to us? Even in play are we condemned to be "defended" by institutions that overreact to evil and effectively become a greater danger than what they are trying to defend us from?

One cannot help but think of George W. Bush when reading Haruhi's account of Kalel Venkman. A good hearted guy who "trusted his gut", and decided he needed to protect us from some distant and obscure and poorly defined axis of evil, constructed out of a kind of guilt by association. A guy who would turn the place he cares about and wants to protect into a massive surveillance state. A guy who would recklessly apply laws in ways for which they were not intended, and a guy who just did not no how to back off or change his mind when it was clear that the only sane thing to do was to stop digging. And must it always be the case that the institutions that we rely on for communication and other infrastructure needs will roll over at the drop of a hat, forever opting to side with the censor whatever the legal position of the censor?

And then too one has to wonder how much more dangerous our world is because of people like Kalel and George W. Bush. Tizzers once confided to Pixeleen that the only way he kept the Woodbury crew together and engaged was by giving them an enemy to fight against: Kalel. Is it not at least equally plausible that what enemies we have are held together and galvanized by enemies like George W. Bush? - people with no sense of proportion and who fight blindly, not caring about the effectiveness of their methods or the innocents that are harmed along the way.

In the end, this isn't a story about the virtual world imitating the real world, nor is it a story about how the real world imitates the virtual world. The problem is that neither the real world nor the virtual worlds are prior. They both seem to bubble up from some deep dark corner of the human mind. These events aren't really about games or virtual spaces. The events are really about us and who we are.

"A Kind of Vast Game": An Interview with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks) (Part Two)

Throughout the book, you hint at a mainstreaming of geek culture, which is also evoked in the quotation above. How close are we to seeing this happen? What is gained or lost for the communities you studied if geek goes mainstream?

I think the mainstreaming has happened already. Once you see the term "geek" being co-opted and used by other subcultures --- wine geek, film geek, fixed gear bicycle geek --- you know the word, at least in its pejorative sense, has passed. And films like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Spider-Man and Batman have made the previously cloistered worlds of comic books, superheroes, horror, fantasy, science fiction and fandom a palatable experience, at least in a superficial way. There's an entire generation of kids --- millions --- who have now grown up either reading Harry Potter or having it read to them. Jocks and dweebs equally play Xbox and Playstation games. That guarantees (I think) that these kids aren't going to be ostracized for having geekly hobbies.

To be "cool" is to like things because everyone else does. To be a "geek" is the opposite: to have a passion, to care about the details of a thing, to care about getting it right, to go deep into a subject matter --- and not care what people think. Geeks are the keepers of that secret flame for something long before it's cool, or long after the fad has passed, whether or not the thing they loved was ever in fashion or not. The downside of the mainstreaming of geek culture is that a lot of geeks have forged their identities as being counter to the mainstream --- i.e. we are weird and therefore special, and you all are boring and mainstream. Now that traditional geek areas have gone mainstream, I suspect that those who want to remain "geeks" will need to find new areas to colonize. The fringe will have to move further to the edge.

In many ways, your book can be seen as an argument for the value -- no, values -- of escapism. How would you define escapism and to what degree is it a positive force in the lives of the people you interviewed?

I struggled with using the terms "escapism" and "escapist" because of the negative associations with them (both mine and the culture's) and also because I wanted to discover how fantasy and gaming had real meaning, not just as mindless distraction. But aside from the "healthy" aspects of gaming and fantasy that I mention above (that these activities provide community, rites of passage, ethics and values, personality development through role-playing, etc), I do think that "escapism" --- defined as a release, as mental downtime --- is essential. In that regard, it doesn't really matter what you escape into, as long as it isn't taken to the extreme. America's obsession with watching TV is a perfect, and totally acceptable way to escape. No one really thinks it's weird to watch 4 hours of TV reality programming or basketball playoffs each day. But if you play 4 hours of WoW, then many think you're anti-social.

Of course, anything can be taken too far. Sex, drugs, gambling, pornography, eating, shopping, the Internet --- all of these activities, when taken to the extreme, can be dangerous. They can be used to blot out the self. No one, in their right mind, should use any one experience, like a movie or game or book, to find meaning and attribute so much meaning to it that it looms large to the exclusion of other influences, or is a substitute for intimate human relationships. We all need balanced lives.

What bothers me with the "escapist" label for fantasy in particular is that many who don't get it accuse Tolkien, for example, of being frivolous. But Lord of the Rings is full of fully-realized characters who grapple with tough moral choices, endure great hardship, and make mistakes. Gollum is a great example of this: psychologically complex, twisted, haunted, damaged. Nothing "escapist" about that!

You end with this call: "so, my fellow freaks and geeks, if we must escape, let us escape for a reason." What kinds of reasons did you discover amongst the people you spoke with?

Fantasy escapism can be a way to retreat from the world --- not to avoid the world, but to take pause, and recharge our psychic batteries. In my book I went to New Zealand to play out my own obsessive Lord of the Rings movie location quest. When I was in Wellington, I interviewed Erica Challis, a blogger for the Tolkien movie fan site TheOneRing.net , which she co-founded as a way to report on news about the Rings movies shoot. She told me something about fantasy and escapism I had never considered: for people in oppressive societies who read Tolkien, the books gave them hope in hopeless times. "Fantasy is a genre people can read and retreat [to] and gather strength to face the real world," she said. Likewise, I think we need downtime to escape, but also to work out problems and issues and roles. Imaginary worlds offer solutions to problems --- they're a testing ground for ideas, a place to imagine other possibilities, other futures, other ways to live, to govern, to be. Then, with our D&D manuals put away and our Xbox consoles turned off, we can return to real life, rejuvenated to kick ass.

As you note, the stereotype of fantasy fans and gamers is that they are socially isolated. How central are the social dimensions of the play experiences you describe? How strong were the communities and relationships you observed in your travels?

The social aspects of gaming can't be underestimated. For many, like me, who never found their community in high school or college, gaming is huge. Same for the disabled, who can find a world of liberation in gaming that's free from judgment. Specifically with online games, where one's identity is masked, no one knows if you're in a wheelchair; you're judged based on how you play the game, not what you look like. Similarly, the social dynamics of gaming guilds can reinforce values; guilds are often founded on ethical codes and ideals the players share (even religious values - there are Christian groups who go on raids together in WoW!). Many gaming and live-action role-playing groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism are involved in public service and charity work. Conventions like DragonCon and Gen Con organize blood drives and donate to food banks. In a fantasy setting, the games end up creating shared values, which is something we all crave, and a re-entry point to connect with the real world.

The need to hang out and do things together, to participate in shared interests, I think is hardwired into our DNA. But we can't all be on the football team. For me, a misfit boy, I needed things to do with my peers. I craved the camaraderie and fellowship that team sports denied me, minus the perils of a testosterone-charged locker room. Dungeons & Dragons was that collaborative refuge, outlet, and playing field. This desire is the same for many others. And I think the various geek communities we encounter in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks are among the most welcoming of all subcultures. They are accepting, kind, generous, because they know what it's like to sit alone at the cafeteria table, to not have friends. And I think we geeks carry that memory of loneliness through our lives, and reach out to those who need a safe haven of their own.

There's a wonderful organization called The Game Loft in Belfast, Maine that I found out about (alas!) after I wrote my book. The Game Loft is run similar to a traditional youth development-oriented organization like the Boy or Girl Scouts, except that it uses role-playing and table-top strategy games to teach kids (in a sort of underground, indirect way) how to be social, make friendships, take risks, form bonds with mentors, become assertive, become leaders and become involved in their communities. They have a safe and supervised space for kids to interact and test out these "roles" so they can be functioning adults in society. It's a wonderful example of turning the "gaming is anti-social" stereotype on its head.

One of the closing images of the book is of you burying your Lord of the Ring collectibles in the soil of New Zealand and walking away. Are you really ready to walk away from the fantasy and play you describe in the book? What aspects of this culture will you carry with you?

Spoiler alert! Just kidding. I think that moment in the book was impulsive, but also a kind of rite of passage for me. But rather than see that as leaving those plastic figurines behind, and fantasy behind, I see that moment as leaving a part of ME behind in New Zealand. I wanted to be part of that movie experience, but couldn't. Leaving part of me there was the next best thing. It was my homage to my fandom. I still have all my old D&D gear, and I still have other trophies from my quest. I'm not willing to walk away. My quest put me in touch with so many people who felt no shame about their geekly passions. They embraced their inner geek. And they gave me courage to "out" myself as a geek. I'm back.

Is New Media Incompatible with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part Two)

In this second installment of my interview with Rich Halverson, we explore some of the trends impacting contemporary schooling, including the significance of home schooling, his vision for transforming schools, his research on fantasy baseball leagues as a literacy practice, and his thoughts on how and why schools should foster failure. As always, Halverson remains a provocative and yet substantive thinker about technology and learning.
Your book writes extensively about home schooling as an alternative to the current educational system. What advantages do home schoolers have in dealing with technological change? What are the limits of home schooling?

Home schooling is an interesting phenomena on several levels. First, it represents an effort to sever the traditional ties of institutional schooling and learning, individualizing instruction while keeping many of the curricular goals and sequences in place. Second, it cuts across cultural boundaries - many families on the left home-school for academic reasons, while families on the right home often homeschool for predominately cultural and religious reasons. Finally, the integration of technology with homeschooling may well signal a new path toward individualizing instruction in traditional schools. The predominant instructional model in the K-12 world aims toward moving students toward common learning goals, playing down individual difference in the interests of standardized outcomes. Home schooling has clear limitations - it is clearly too expensive (in terms of time, materials and money) to be conducted at scale, and the virtual curriculum used by many homeschoolers is typically based on very conventional page-turning pedagogies. But homeschool communities use technological resources to provide instructional coherence while maintaining individualized attention in ways that is would be smart for traditional school designers to watch.

You describe in the book some aspects of what an emerging educational system might look like. Can you share some of that vision with my readers?

The current state of education looks like an unlikely federation of uneasy partners - some for profit, others non-profit; some non-denominational, others ideological - who provide services to students without apparent coordination. NCLB legislation alone has sparked a vast expansion of third-party tutoring, assessment and coaching services that threaten schools and can be seen as competitors for future school funding. Digital media production, social networking, mobile computing, gaming and blogging operate entirely outside the control or influence of schooling. This motley collection of education services appears more like a consumer-driven market that could not cohere into a an educational system.

However, there are several key steps that might be taken to link these services together into an emergent system. We'd like to highlight two possible steps: 1) when administrative information technologies come to integrate user-driven networking practices, and 2) when some classroom subject-matter areas move to embrace digital learning tools. Schools are developing sophisticated tools for tracking student learning and teacher quality - but these systems are largely constructed about, but not for or by students and teachers. Social networks would provide a personalized complement to such systems that could link technologies designed to measure learning with tools to facilitate the activities of learners. It is not hard to imagine profile software that students and teachers could use to link educational activities, calendars, support services, interest groups, etc. The emergence of these personalized information tools may help usher in an integration of where schools are to where they might be.

In the classroom, one key indicator may be the degree to which non-tested subjects in schools embrace new approaches. Most K12 systems are experimenting with new kinds of media-based extracurricular activities and clubs. A threshold will be crossed when core instructional efforts in vocational education, arts, physical education and language programs follow the extra-curricular example toward greater integration of learning technologies. These subject areas are currently on the fence between embracing the standards-and-accountability practices of literacy and math or moving in another direction. Significant changes in these vital disciplines could serve as an example for how digital media technologies may transform teaching and learning.

In your historical account of the evolution of American education, one key difference between the apprentice and public school systems was how they dealt with the possibilities of failure. You suggest that in the apprentice system, it was taken as given that most students would learn, eventually, what they needed to know, while the public school system starts from the premise that only a small portion of the population can fully master its expectations. Many argue that we learn through failure -- through making mistakes and correcting them -- but that for this to work, we have to lower the costs of failure. How can we do this?

The idea that the apprenticeship model was successful for individual learning is by and large true. Because the master could work closely with the learner in apprenticeship, most learning failures could be mitigated or averted. In contrast, the American public school system provided little guidance for individuals to learn from local learning errors. Public schools were expected to provide opportunities for interested students to learn, and students who took advantage of these opportunities were able to progress. Public schools structures have typically lacked scaffolded support for individual learners to learn from mistakes - particularly across grades and classes. At the system level, comprehensive public high schools, community colleges and undergraduate programs addressed the learning failure issue in part by providing abundant course and program options for learners who failed in their initial efforts. But the long-term individualized attention to learning-from-failure that came with apprenticeship learning was not a part of traditional public schooling.

The issue of learning from failure in public schooling became more complicated by the civil rights movement. In the early years of public schooling, students (and families) bore the responsibility of taking advantage of educational opportunities. However, beginning in the 1950s, public education priorities in the US began to shift. The 1954 Brown decision demonstrated that providing access to educational opportunities was no longer sufficient. The War on Poverty of the 1960s and the IDEA act and reauthorizations of the 1970s-90s shifted the national discourse from the opportunities to the outcomes of learning. It was no longer appropriate for states to provide schools where students could choose to learn (or not); instead states increasingly saw their role as creating schools that guaranteed learning outcomes. The 2001 NCLB Act make these new expectations into law by holding public schools accountable for improving the learning of all students. Thus the premise of the early public school model was turned on its head - instead of a system that created opportunities for all students to succeed now expected schools reach all students successfully. Public schools as institutions were expected to take responsibility for educational outcomes, while at the same time absolving students and families from responsibility for learning.

We can either learn from failure, or try to avoid it. Connecting high stakes consequences to institutional failure has led many public schools to pursue a risk-avoidance approach to instruction. This intolerance for failure at the system level has been translated into a similar intolerance to experiment at the classroom level. Contemporary public school policies insist that all students show learning progress, which has led to dominant models of instruction that emphasize efficiency, smooth learning trajectories and predictable outcomes. Schools are often reluctant to experiment with high-yield, high-risk, instructional practices. Innovation is risky - most innovations fail, and even the ones that succeed are usually fundamentally transformed before achieving wide dissemination. The federal educational research policies that emphasize "what works" seem to take for granted that we already know what we need to know to improve learning for all students, and that what is mainly needed is thorough vetting and rigorous implementation of tried-and-true instructional practices. Still, high school dropout rates have held steady, the achievement gap has not closed significantly, and the love of learning continues to drain out of schools that emphasize "what works" over genuine inquiry. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the tree of learning must be refreshed from time to time by the failures of policy makers, teachers and students. The wild market swings in digital media - in hardware, software and virtual worlds - continue to demonstrate the power of failure to spark new innovation. It seems that schools feel that walling themselves off from the digital media/learning circus will insulate a path toward eventual elimination of learning problems. A more likely scenario is that by cutting off opportunities for interesting failure, schools will continue to apply the same time-tested practices that resulted in contemporary institutional inequalities in the first-place.

Richard, apart from this project, you've been looking at fantasy baseball leagues as a site for learning and participatory culture, seeing them as a fusion of fan and gaming culture. What insights do you think educators can gain by looking at these kinds of alternative knowledge communities?

Participatory cultures, such as fantasy sports, highlight three critically important aspects of learning missing from many school learning activities: motivation, production and legitimate audience. Fantasy sports team owners are motivated to play because they are fans, and this (typically) far-reaching set of beliefs, passions and knowledge spark owner interest in competition. The development and maintenance of a team requires owners to produce a competitive roster and to iteratively adjust their production in terms of competitive feedback within the league. Other team owners present a legitimate audience for game play - owners are praised, ridiculed, emulated or resented based on moves against other players. Because typical fantasy leagues persist for months, owners get reputations for game play within the league. Owners acquire status as players, particularly in anonymous leagues, because of their demonstrated abilities within the game.

Many school settings have features of participatory cultures as well, but the participatory culture of schooling is often unrelated to the topics learned. Students are often motivated (or not) to succeed in academic contexts for non-academic reasons; production is typically valued (if at all) as a means toward other forms of reward (grades, etc.), and academic prowess often fares miserably as a path toward peer culture acceptance. Fantasy sports communities provide existence proofs of how learning activities can intrinsically connect motivation, production and audience in assessment rich contexts. It is not a trivial task to select the kinds of tasks around which school-based fantasy leagues can be organized, although activities such as stock-market games or Model UN can bring some common structures to bear in traditional schools. The question is not really how to make a direct translation of fantasy leagues to school settings, but for this and the next generation of educators to understand how the underlying principles of these kinds of learning environments work, then to think about how to design local environments around similar principles.

Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of education and social policy at Northwestern University and formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education.

Richard Halverson is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.

Is New Media Incompatable with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part One)

This week, I want to use my blog to call attention to a provocative recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. The authors of the book are Allen Collins, formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education, and Rich Halverson, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group. I have gotten to know Halverson through the Games, Learning, and Society conference, where I will be speaking this summer, so I was curious to look at this book when it came out. Given its authors, it's no surprise that the book is well informed about contemporary debates surrounding new media and education, and like the best books that have come out in the past year or so (including those by Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins, which I have profiled here), it strives to balance between the inflated hopes of early digital advocates and the inflated fears of those who would lock technology out of the classroom.

The authors offer sage new proposals for how we might deal with the apparent tensions and incompatabilities between education as it has been conducted in this country and the new media landscape as it is lived beyond the schoolhouse gates. But the real surprise and strength of the book is the ways they are able to situate the contemporary moment of media transition in relation to the several hundred year history of American education. In doing so, we avoid the breathless sense of the "unprecidented" or "Inevitable" consequences of new media and we also avoid the sense that things have always been this way and are thus not subject to change. They show how American education's processes, policies, and structures shifted over time in response to, for example, the industrial revolution and thus give us a context for imagining the gradual yet decisive transformation of schooling which will grow out of our current moment.

I was lucky enough to get Richard Halverson to agree to an interview about the book, which I will be running over the next two installments. Much of the interview focuses on the historical insights and how they contribute to putting the present into a greater perspective.

My father used to have the expression, "never let schooling get in the way of your education." You make a similar distinction across the book. In what ways is schooling getting in the way of more informal kinds of learning today and why?

Your dad's expression was really the state of the art once upon a time! The rise of institutional schooling in the 20th century- from preK to lifelong learning - can be seen as an effort to permanently weld schooling to learning. Beginning in the early 1900s, schools rooted in formal learning environments expanded to incorporate most areas informal learning as well (consider widely available classes on knitting, oenophilia and game design). On the other side, if you didn't go to a class from a recognized institution, if you didn't have some sort of certificate/credit statement of completing, then by the mid 20th century people came to question the legitimacy of your learning. This double-movement of expansion and legitimation came to define learning in terms of schooling.

The digital media era began to call this definition into question. The inertia of maturing institutions meant that early design decisions got locked in place, and it became more difficult for schools to change core assumptions. Digital media provides a path to personalizing and customizing learning that is often at odds with the batch processing model of, especially, K-12 schooling. This has meant that digitally literate young people have come to understand that there are at least two living channels for learning - 1) an institutional channel, and 2) a peer-driven, interest-driven, and unregulated digital media channel. The bifurcation of learning experiences for young people is bound to call the institutional identification of schooling and learning into question in the coming years. We don't yet know the consequences of how this shift will play out, but unless schools figure out how to adapt to digital media our children may end up hearing their fathers say "remember when we went to school for an education?"

You open the book with the provocative statement, "There are deep incompatibilities between technology and schooling." Explain. Are these incompatibilities insurmountable? If so, what is going to change -- schooling or technology?

Our statement about the incompatibilities of schooling and technology was stated with a historical perspective in mind. There was a time, in the early 20th century, when schools were developed in concert with the most innovative technological advances. Schools grew up around the mass publication and dissemination of texts and the widespread availability of writing tools. More importantly, schools took full advantage of cutting-edge bureaucratic technologies. Although we now look back in horror at the eagerness with which early schools adopted industrial production and efficiency models, these then-innovative ideas provided important organizational techniques for delivering services at the scale required for the successful implementation of public schooling. It is difficult for us to remember just how daunting the task of mass schooling was for early school designers, who grew up with personalized pedagogies, one-room schoolhouses and agricultural-based school calendars. Early public schools took full advantage of cutting-edge technologies to gain quick and sure foothold in the American psyche.

Schools that emerged at the advent of the 21st century were, in a sense, victims of the success of the prior generation's technology, and found it very difficult to adapt to new models of information production and exchange sparked by the Internet. Technological developments later in the century, such as computing and digital media, provided a level of individualization that ran directly counter to the mass-production technologies from earlier in the century. The new information technologies that have been easiest to adapt to prior industrial models, such as standardized testing, have made the most headway into established school practices. The technologies that called on schools to alter the basic classroom relationships between teaching, learning and curriculum have met with the most difficulty. The conclusion we want to draw is that schooling and technology are not necessarily opposed, but instead are necessarily related. When considered over time, we can see the effects of institutional resistance are a consequence of the embrace of prior technologies, rather than a simple opposition of stodgy old schools to hot new technologies.

Our current educational system emerged gradually overtime in response to the pressures of the industrial revolution. What parallels can we draw between the ways the current structure took shape and the prospects of transforming education to reflect the information/knowledge revolution your book describes?

We propose that the "seeds of a new system" are already emerging as pieces of an alternative approach to education. Home schooling, for example, provides a technologically-driven alternative to institutional schooling. Distance education and your idea of participatory cultures organized around a transmedia complex provide powerful alternative visions for education. The main difference between the eras is that the 1800s system seeds such as kindergarten, common schools, textbooks and land-grant universities, converged in an era without a monolithic institution already in place. It is a much different problem to define than to redefine an institution.

We feel that digital media will continue to spark alternative forms of learning environments and to push for change in traditional learning institutions. We must not underestimate the tenacity of our collective belief in the transformative power of education. Without a civil religion, common belief in education is as close as Americans come to a common creed. If we come to feel that digital media need to be a core aspect of the learning experience of our youth, then we will re-make our institutions accordingly. As a culture, though, we seem to carry ambiguous feelings about the value of digital media for learning. For every advocate who extols the potential of media production, programming, game design or social networking, concerned citizens highlight the dangers of porn, digital bullying, appropriate use policies, child predation and, of course, GTA. This split in the perception of the value of digital media and culture may, in the mean time, create a new kind of digital divide along cultural, rather than demographic, lines. Further, locating these alternative, digital-based approaches to learning outside of public education means that families with the interest and wherewithal will access new forms of learning will, and those who won't or can't will not.

Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of education and social policy at

Northwestern University and formerly co-director of the U.S. Department

of Education's Center for Technology in Education.

Richard Halverson is an associate professor of educational leadership

and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is

co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.

On Brian Eno and Barry Lyndon: An Interview With Geeta Dayal (Part Two)

Eno seems to have been interested in cybernetics from a very early age. How did this interest impact his work?

Many artists, particularly in Britain, were interested in cybernetics. A lot of this can be traced to Roy Ascott's infamous "Groundcourse" at various art schools in Britain in the 1960s. Pete Townshend of The Who underwent the "Groundcourse," and so did Eno, and so did many others who would go on to be major names in their fields. Ascott's curriculum was a systems-based approach to learning, inspired by cybernetics.

Most people associate cybernetics with Norbert Wiener, but what I found even more interesting was the British wave of cybernetics theorists that came a bit later on -- people like W. Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, and Stafford Beer. Beer's book The Brain of the Firm, especially, was a major touchstone for Eno. Beer applied cybernetics to management, and Eno applied Beer's management theories to the studio environment

.

Eno is most often associated with Ambient music. Can you share with us something of his understanding of this concept and where it came from?

Ambient music often has no discernible beats or melodies. It is music, as Eno once said, that is "as ignorable as it is interesting." Eno is the prime exponent of ambient music, but the concept has been around for a long time. The concept was established in the modern era by the composer Erik Satie, via his idea of "furniture music" -- music that would mingle with the sounds of forks and knives at dinner, as he described it.

You have a great deal to tell us about Eno's process, including how he thought of his collaborators, their tools and technologies, and even the space of the studio as "instruments" through which he created his music. What does this expansive concept of "instrument" tell us about Eno's approach as a composer?

"Expansive" is a good word to use to describe Eno in general. Eno is not a traditional composer by any standard. Nor is he a trained musician. As I write in my book, he uses the "non-musician" label to his advantage. He doesn't play by the rules and conventions of music theory, because he doesn't really know the rules. But he has incredible intuition, and a lot of natural talent for music. And, as Eno's frequent collaborator Robert Fripp told me, Eno's playfulness in the studio is key. If an air compressor makes an interesting sound, why shouldn't it be an instrument?

Think of how creative children are. When you were a small child, you didn't know that pots and pans weren't real instruments; you just played with them anyway because they make interesting noises when you hit them. Then you get older, and you learn that a piano is a real instrument and pots and pans aren't, and you stop banging on pots and pans.

Part of the idea of the Oblique Strategies cards is to put you back into a playful environment. To drop the inhibitions of rigid classifications, strict hierarchies, and what's "wrong" and what's "right."

You compare Eno's music at one point to the work of Stanley Kubrick --especially in Barry Lyndon. What makes this analogy appropriate andinformative?

I read somewhere that Barry Lyndon was one of Eno's favorite films. I wondered why. Then I watched the film closely a few times, and I started to understand. There were a few interesting coincidences between Barry Lyndon and Another Green World. One was that Barry Lyndon and Another Green World came out the same year -- they both came out in 1975. Barry Lyndon doesn't look like many other films out there. It looks very organic and natural, as if it's shot with natural light alone, but Kubrick actually used the most advanced technology available at the time. In a similar way, Another Green World is full of imagery from the natural world -- the album title alone seems to suggest lush, pastoral landscapes -- but it was made using some of the most cutting-edge studio techniques, and lots of synthesizers and other electronic gear.

For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick searched the world for the the most high-tech lenses possible -- lenses that would be capable of, say, photographing a scene in a dark castle lit with candles. No one else in the industry was using these super-fast lenses; Kubrick had to have them custom-built according to his crazy specifications. Kubrick also used custom lenses for A Clockwork Orange, but Barry Lyndon took the technology a step further. Instead of the stark visual effects you see in A Clockwork Orange -- that dystopian, futuristic feel, which seems to suggest cutting-edge technology -- Barry Lyndon is the exact opposite. It's full of sweeping views of the Irish countryside, this gorgeous natural imagery. You almost feel as if

you could step right into the film; it feels so real.

I was struck by the phrase, "music as immersion," in the book. What kinds of immersive experience did Eno try to create through his work?

There are a few ways. One of the tricks Eno uses, which I write about in my book, is long fade-ins and fade-outs, to make you feel as if the music is part of a larger continuum -- as if you're stepping into a scene that's still happening when you leave it. In the classic U2 album The Joshua Tree, which Eno produced, the first song, "Where the Streets Have No Name," fades in very slowly. The song takes a long time to start. That's

on purpose. You're stepping into a world; you become immersed in the album. It doesn't start abruptly, like most rock albums do; it lures you in. You can hear the same thing in the classic David Bowie album Low, which Eno also produced; the first song, "Speed of Life," takes a long time to fade in.

Another immersive technique Eno uses is that his ambient music often sounds like a slice taken from a larger whole -- there's no beginning/middle/end or traditional verse-chorus-verse song structure. It's an ocean of sound, omnidirectional. This is interesting to me for

several reasons. There's the feminine aspect -- it's quite the opposite of, say, the Rolling Stones, with a macho frontman shouting loud lyrics and a band bashing out the tunes.

And then there's the textural aspect -- Eno's music is about textures, layers, timbres. Eno has a flair for a good melody, but his music isn't about melody per se, nor is it necessarily about rhythm either. Some great German bands in the 1970s, like Can and Neu!, did a similar thing with their music, concentrating on texture.

Throughout, you describe Eno as an artist drawn towards both experimental and popular music. How was he able to find a balance between the two impulses and how have this merging of distinctive kinds of cultural production shape how critics and fans have responded to his work?

Eno's great talent is in being able to travel both worlds. U2 once famously said that they didn't go to art school; they went to Brian Eno. There's some truth to that. Eno's interest in experimental music started very early on, when he was a teenager. He started booking experimental musicians as a student in art school; he performed with avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. This was all before Roxy Music, and before his solo career.

But the pop mentality started early on, too. Eno grew up listening to American doo-wop records, and his first favorite band was The Who. Eno was more successful than a lot of others at merging experimental ideas with a pop aesthetic. That's why so many bands go to him when they want to do something unexpected. You don't go to Eno to get the best-sounding, best-engineered record on planet Earth. You go to get something interesting. To go somewhere you haven't gone before. And at its heart, that's what experimental music is all about -- experimenting.

Geeta Dayal is an arts journalist and critic who writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology. Her book Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is the recent recipient of major funding from Creative Capital / The Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Grant Program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Print, and Wired. She maintains a blog at www.theoriginalsoundtrack.com.

On Brian Eno and Barry Lyndon: An Interview With Geeta Dayal (Part One)

I don't write much on this blog about popular music. I have always said music and sports were my real blind spots when it comes to researching contemporary popular culture. So, I have the utmost respect when I find a writer who can take me inside the music and help me understand why a particular album matters for the culture. I am all the more delighted to find such a person in my own backyard. In this case, I do mean this more less literally -- in my own backyard. More acurately, I discovered that Geeta Dayal, one of the students who used to live in Senior House, the dorm where Cynthia and I were housemasters for fourteen years, has become a top notch music critic. Geeta was an undergraduate student in the Comparative Media Studies Program, she was one of the leaders in Senior House culture, and for a short while, she worked for me as we were launching the Center for Future Civic Media. But when she wasn't hanging out in our dorm, she was studying journalism at Columbia, writing for the Village Voice and a host of other publications, and working on a book about Brian Eno or more exactly a book about one of Eno's best albums, Another Green World, which shows us the many different layers on which his music works and situating it within the context of his life and his times.

I read the book with both pride in what my former student has accomplished and fascination with what she had to teach me about an artist who ranks very highly on my personal list of music preferences. I often use Eno's music as a backdrop when I am writing and I like to listen to this strangely familiar (and I do mean strange) music when I have trouble relaxing in strangely familiar hotel rooms while traveling. I knew I liked Eno, but I didn't have a language to explain why. I had to share my excitement about this book with my readers.

In this interview Dayal helps us to see the links between Eno's sounds, his early experience as a painter, his fascination with cybernetics, his collaborations with other artists, his fannish engagement with Stanley Kubrick's films, especially Barry Lyndon, and his ability to move fluidly between high and pop culture.

First, let's go through some of the choices which shaped this book. Why Brian Eno? Can you tell us something about his importance to contemporary music and about your own interest in the subject?

I find Eno to be an endlessly fascinating figure. He has so many varied interests -- creating ambient music, producing rock music, making video art, mixing up his own perfumes, gardening, cogitating about evolutionary biology and cybernetics, inventing iPhone apps -- the list goes on.

I identified personally with Eno's sprawling scope. When I was a student at MIT in the 1990s, I ran a magazine, had a radio show, organized protests, made dozens of short films, did neuroscience research, established a 24-hour video art telethon on the MIT cable channel, booked bands, taught high school students, and did about a million other things besides. It's a miracle I graduated on time, and with two degrees at that.

Over the past decade, I focused myself on being a writer, because writing was a safe space to explore my wide range of interests, from visual art to science. Writing gave me focus and discipline, and a set of practical constraints to work within, which I found useful. But writing never restrained me creatively; if anything, writing a book helped my imagination to grow. Eno is very focused, too, with an almost laser-like intensity. But he is, as he likes to call himself, a "non-musician." He uses music as a way to test out new ideas, with a sense of playfulness and an all-embracing perspective. Sometimes I joke and say I'm a "non-journalist."

And why Another Green World? What made this particular album a key focal point for structuring your examination of his work?

I thought pretty seriously about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album Eno made with David Byrne in 1981. But Another Green World told a better story. It signified a major transition in Eno's aesthetic direction. The album was a bridge to Eno's ambient works. It was composed almost entirely within the studio environment, which I thought was a very intriguing story to tell. It was made at around the same time as Discreet Music, an album that also had a great story behind it. And Another Green World was the first album to be composed with the help of the Oblique Strategies, and I found the Oblique Strategies cards to be a very interesting thing to talk about, as well.

The Oblique Strategies cards become a central motif running through this book and also played an interesting role in your writing process. What can you tell us about them? What do they show about Eno's particular flavor of creativity? And how did they guide your own journey as a writer?

I find the Oblique Strategies cards to be extraordinarily useful; I've been using them for years. I keep a deck on my desk at all times. When I get stuck while writing -- which is often -- I pick a card. "Are there sections? Consider transitions," a card might advise. "Use a different color." Sometimes this advice is not useful at all, but it always makes me laugh, rearranges my perspective, and helps to shakes me out of my rut. Each

chapter in my book is named after an Oblique Strategy -- "Honor thy error as a hidden intention," for example. "The tape is now the music." It seemed natural to use the Oblique Strategies cards to write the book; I was often stuck while writing this book. My book is a short one, but it was an extremely ambitious project. I was trying to distill a lot of research, and a lot of ideas from the last forty years, into a very short

space. Some of these ideas were very challenging ones, and I really tried hard to explain them in as clear terms as possible.

I think the Oblique Strategies cards tell you a lot about Eno's quirky sense of humor, and also about his approach to making music -- both in his sense of play, and his faith in the artistic process. But the Oblique Strategies didn't emerge out of a vacuum. In my book, I write about many other creative techniques that were similar to the Oblique Strategies -- from John Cage's use of the I Ching, to the Fluxus movement's inventive use of cards, to Marshall McLuhan's "Distant Early Warning" cards. The late artist Peter Schmidt developed the Oblique Strategies cards with Eno; Schmidt was making paintings based on hexagrams from the I Ching in the late

1960s. There was a lot of interest in chance at around that time, and in systems. The Oblique Strategies cards, in their own way, were a systems-based approach to creativity.

How much access did you have to Eno and his collaborators in developing this book?

One way to write this book would have been to do an extended interview with Eno, and base the book solely around his observations. But Another Green World was made quite a long time ago, now -- 35 years ago! -- and Eno is a bit exhausted with talking about his work in the 1970s, and doesn't remember much about the ins and outs of the making of Another Green World, anyway. I don't blame him. And Eno always surrounds himself with interesting people, and works with so many people. So it made sense to talk to them.

Part of what made the book interesting, I think, was that I didn't base the book around a big interview with Eno. Instead, I did a lot of archival research; I read thousands of pages of interviews and reviews. I read dozens of books, from topics ranging from the history of cybernetics to gardening to visual art to British experimental music. I spoke to a lot of Eno's friends and collaborators, past and present, who were very open in talking with me. I wanted to meet everyone, not just his collaborators onAnother Green World. I wanted to talk to people along the entire spectrum of Eno's life. I was interested in collaborators, assistant engineers, ex-girlfriends, friends. In that way, you create an outline of the person that might be more nuanced and surprising than just going straight to the source.

I had experience with doing a lot of digging. When I was starting out as an arts journalist, almost ten years ago, I spent a year working as the research assistant to Simon Reynolds for his book Rip it Up and Start Again, a major history of post-punk music. An incredible amount of research went into that book: around 125 new interviews, plus hundreds of archival interviews, cut out from old press clippings, and rare zines and so on. Simon taught me how to research and write a non-fiction book, based on original research. It's a painstaking and sometimes painful process,

but I think the results are worth it.

I was interested to learn that Eno started out hoping to be a painter and only later turned his attention to music. What led to the change? Is there a way in which we can describe Eno's music as "painterly"?

I think that painting and music are interrelated. Kandinsky, for instance, had huge ties to the music of his time; he was very inspired by composers like Schoenberg, and expressed this in his work. And many musicians were into painting; composers like Scriabin were deeply synaesthetic, and described their music in terms of colors and so on. Messiaen, the famed composer, once walked out on a performance of Beethoven because he felt that the purple colors on the stage clashed horribly with G major!

Eno's first favorite painter was Mondrian; he had a small book of Mondrian prints as a child, and became fascinated with it. For Eno, the shift to music happened in art school -- and as I write in my book, art school in Britain in the 1960s was an incubator, of sorts, for many of the leading rock musicians of the time, from The Who to Roxy Music. It was a safe environment to test out new ideas. Painting seemed to be stagnating a bit, compared to the huge explosion of ideas in painting in the first half of the 20th century. But here was rock music, in the late 1960s in Britain; of course a young, creative person would want a piece of that. Even Andy Warhol, the coolest painter in New York, was aligning himself with rock and roll, and hanging out with the Velvet Underground.

Geeta Dayal is an arts journalist and critic who writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology. Her book Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is the recent recipient of major funding from Creative Capital / The Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Grant Program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Print, and Wired. She maintains a blog at www.theoriginalsoundtrack.com.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part Three of Three)

Would it be possible to do what the Computer Clubhouses do in the context of more formalized educational structures? Why or why not?

YASMIN: We have many examples of schools that adopt the premise of self-directed work for students who with assistance of teachers and other peers dig deeply into projects rather than to follow textbooks. Schools and classrooms like these think about themselves as communities of learners rather than as a collection of individuals. Examples are the recently opened "Quest to Learn" school in New York City; here in Philadelphia, I know of the Science Leadership Academy.

But to become a school like this requires some fundamental changes in how we organize learning in general, what the roles of students and teachers are, and what the role of technology is - how it's being used for research, exchange and production. The Computer Clubhouse also reconceptualized the role of the coordinator. We conducted many interviews with coordinators, community organizers and network administrators to get a better sense on what a job description for clubhouse coordinator would be like - part social worker, youth support, art teacher, mentor - it's not a traditional role when you're there to support youth in creative endeavors. I think the same would apply to teachers, principals, and administrators who want to adopt the principles of the Computer Clubhouse model in their schools.

You write, "The Computer Clubhouse is not a computer lab." Explain the difference.

YASMIN: Actually Gail Breslow, the director of the Computer Clubhouse Network made this statement in an interview that we conducted with her. The picture that people have of a computer lab is one with rows of computers facing walls and students not interacting with each other as they're running programs. The picture of a Computer Clubhouse is very different: computers in clusters so that youth can talk to the person right next to them and see what they're doing and a green table in the middle with no computers on it that serves as play and meeting space.

ROBBIN: Computer labs provide an invaluable service by making digital technologies available to its clients. These labs, however, are not designed to generate a learning community and to respond to needs and situations outside of the use of computer equipment and computer resources. The Clubhouse provides access to digital technology, but that is just the beginning. In fact, the Clubhouse is primarily a learning community, both for learning to use technology for creative expression and becoming a lifelong learner.

You place a strong emphasis on helping young people to learn how to program. What do you see as the value of programming, as opposed to other kinds of digital skills, such as networking or storytelling?

KYLIE: It's not really an either/or proposition. Certainly, social networking and digital storytelling are important skills in the 21st Century. Learning to computer program is really about learning the language of the computer. Now, I'm an artist and not a programmer by trade, so it's probably surprising that I would see the value in learning to program. By championing programming as a critical skill for today's youth, I'm not advocating for a generation of hackers insomuch as I'm seeing programming as a key step in moving youth from consumers to producers, and learning to program provides transparency into how software and computers operate and give youth some degree of control over their interactions with the computer. Casey Reas and others have called this "software literacy" because at the heart of using the computer as a creative medium is learning how to manipulate it and to create your own software in a sense. You really don't need to look far to see how people are taking up this type of literacy on a widespread scale--The iPhone app phenomenon is one example where everyday people are creating their own apps. This is also catching on in youth communities. It's not as hard to do as it might seem--As the book illuminates, the field has produced several shortcut tools (see for example Scratch or Processing) that allow youth (and adults alike) to use programming concepts in a way that is more user-friendly to novices. As evidenced by burgeoning online communities of tween/teen game designers, animators and digital artists, learning to code creatively is becoming to today's generation what learning to read and write was to those growing up in the 20th Century. Furthermore, media projects (like the Scratch projects described in the book) emphasize graphic, music and video -- media at the core of youths' technology interests and thus provide new opportunities to broaden participation of under-represented groups in the design and invention of new technologies.

ROBBIN: Programming constructs can be viewed as another instance of Papert's "gears." In Papert's case, his play with gears gave him insight into more powerful mathematical ideas of differentials, etc. Programming can give learners insights into more powerful ideas such as convergence, iteration, etc. However, I disagree with the phrasing of your question, as it presupposes storytelling is not as important an activity at the Clubhouse as programming. Storytelling, or more specifically, being able to tell a good story, is important whether you're a researcher telling the story of your data or a Clubhouse member telling the story of your learning. Storytelling embodies many powerful ideas, including non-determinism. Storytelling also engages learners in various modes of critical reflection.

You write that when the Clubhouses started in 1993, 70 percent of your visitors had never used a mouse before. How have the users of the Clubhouses changed over this time and what shifts have you needed to make to keep pace with the nature of your learners?

ROBBIN: Members come into the Clubhouse with a greater familiarity and comfort with computer technologies. There are regional variances, of course. As a result, members can dive right in to using the equipment. At the Clubhouse, it is important that mentors support the members starting "where they are" along the user spectrum. What is unique about the Clubhouse experience is members are challenged to create and be expressive with rather than just use technology. If a member wants to play computer games, she must first create a computer game to play.

What processes have you built into the Computer Clubhouses to insure that participants reflect on their own practices and share what they have learned with others?

ROBBIN: At the Flagship Clubhouse, members use software called, Pearls of Wisdom, to share their meta-learning and creative experiences around their project development. There are also project showcases and presentations that take place at the Clubhouse. Additionally, the Clubhouse-2-College/Clubhouse-2-Career program provides opportunities for members to reflect on how their Clubhouse learning can leads to job and education opportunities beyond the Clubhouse itself.

How have you been able to tap the international network of Clubhouses to help foster greater global consciousness in your participants?

KYLIE: One experience that really stands out in my mind is the Teen Summit in Boston in 2006. I attended this summit along with several of the youth from the Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. Computer Clubhouse in South Los Angeles. To give you a bit of background, the Computer Clubhouse Network hosts a teen summit every couple of years. Every Clubhouse is able to send a couple of their top members (15 years and older) to the event as well as one or two members of their staff to help with supervision. The youth come from across the globe and speak a variety of languages. Keep in mind that Clubhouses are mostly located in very low-income areas by design, so this is the first time that most of the youth have been outside of their city, let alone on a plane to another country or state. The youth coming from the Los Angeles Clubhouse really blossomed as a result of this experience and met youth from South America and elsewhere. Like with most similar experiences for teens, the intense amount of time spent together day and night forge deep bonds that were made deeper as they engaged in meaningful collaborative work during the workshops. Participating youth signed up for a range of workshops to explore new types of software and project ideas, including video workshops where they learned interview and editing techniques, Adobe Photoshop workshops, robotics labs, social network analyses labs and the list goes on and on. All of the youth participated in multiple workshops and were also able to visit local college campuses, museums, and stay in campus dorms. Some of the groups made videos about their darkest fears or learned new programming skills to put the latest Chris Brown dance video together. When the youth returned to Los Angeles, you could see their horizons had expanded and they worked hard to remain in contact with their new friends. The book highlights many other examples, including how a traveling puppet named Cosmo, which was based on the Flat Stanley books, moved between Clubhouses worldwide, bringing together youth from all over the world to create a collective narrative about the puppet's journeys in each country. Youth's stories were well documented on the intranet and new chapters (as well as Cosmo's arrival) were much anticipated by the youth. Additionally, in countries like Israel, there are Clubhouses in the Israeli and Palestinian areas of the country, which are geographically close to one another. Coordinators use creative projects to bring youth together and foster cross-cultural tolerance in meaningful ways through creating musical compositions or fostering meaningful dialogues among participants.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part Two of Three)

What do you see as the biggest impact the Computer Clubhouse movement has made on our current pedagogies around new media?

ROBBIN: When I think of pedagogies and new media one thought is that new media can serve as a powerful amplifier of human sociality, in this case around learning. Such new media pedagogies should catalyze, facilitate, and propagate individual and collective learning and teaching experiences. The Clubhouse has been a test bed for exploring how learners and mentors can engage learning from each other through digital media. One outcome has been how members and mentors come to view digital media as a material for expressing their ideas about learning and their community.

The MacArthur Foundation will be hosting an upcoming conference on Diversifying Participation. What lessons might we take from the Computer Clubhouses about how to support diversity in access and engagement with digital media?

KYLIE: The Clubhouse definitely serves as a great model for successful scale-up across diverse contexts, including across racial, gender, religious and national boundaries. One of the programs that the Network has adopted to foster diversity within the Clubhouses is "Girls Day". Girls Day sets aside particular times and days where the Clubhouse is an all-girls site, where girls can feel comfortable learning new skills and trying out new projects in a safe space. As a result, the Computer Clubhouse Network has historically appealed equally to both boys and girls, which is uncommon in technology-rich settings.

It also seems to me that Clubhouse's emphasis on creative production allows for both local adaptability and the ability to make something personally meaningful. The tools that are available at the Clubhouse sites have been chosen precisely because they allow youth to design their own projects and give them flexibility in the process. For example, at the LA Clubhouse site, a popular activity was to manipulate digital pictures of expensive cars, inserting a picture of yourself next to "your" ride. A young bi-racial African-American and Latino youth named Dwight extended this practice by creating a culture of "Low Rida" interactive Scratch projects. A Low Rida (or lowrider) is a customized car associated principally with the Mexican American community that first emerged amongst migrant workers during World War II. Lowrider art is now an established art form where youth draw or depict lowriders and is featured in magazines, like Lowrider magazine, along with pictures of customized cars, political reports, and advertisements for parts and accessories. In one of Dwight's first projects, "Low Low," the viewer controls the hydraulics on two cars using arrow and letter keys. Dwight's contribution to the Clubhouse was to expand the genres of work in Scratch and incorporate new genres that are inclusive of his social practices. This resonated with others in the Clubhouse community, eventually drawing in several first-time users of Scratch who may have not otherwise engaged in this type of creative production. Low Ridas represent a conscientious and literate practice that stands in opposition to the pressure to assimilate into the American mainstream culture. In sum, the Clubhouse's emphasis on design and tools for design seems to facilitate the ability to adapt to local contexts more so than, say, games that are by nature more embedded in the culture that produced them.

Early in the book, you describe your goal as to "inspire youth to think about themselves as competent, creative, and critical learners and citizens." Break that down for us.

ROBBIN: Clubhouse member self-identification as critical thinkers is a product of their experiences in deep learning activities such as debugging, critical reflection, etc., and their exchanges with others learners in the Clubhouse. There are many ways to practice these skills, whether utilizing software (Pearls of Wisdom, for example), hardware (robotics, Legos, etc.), and people (working on team projects, exchanging ideas with other leaders, reacting to project feedback from other learners, etc.).

While the Clubhouse supports young people pursuing their own interests and projects, you also see adults as playing a strong role in the process. You describe these adults as "mentors" and not "teachers." How do you characterize the distinction?

KYLIE: While there is considerable overlap, the distinction is important with regard to two factors: the nature of afterschool learning environments and support for the constructionist philosophy of the Clubhouse. On the first point, when we think of the role of a "teacher", we're envisioning the type of direct instruction that is common in schools. While direct instruction has merit, there are numerous characteristics of afterschool learning spaces that don't look like those of your typical classroom--youth moving freely between activities in the Clubhouse, sporadic attendance, and the often irregular times that parents drop in to pick up their kids are a few of these factors. As a result, using a direct instruction model for projects that youth work on for a few days or weeks doesn't really work. The second, and perhaps more important, factor in this distinction between our view of a "teacher" and a "mentor" is the role of a mentor as a muse, someone who supports the kids on self-directed projects, even if the mentor has very little expertise in the area. Being a mentor extends way beyond helping members to debug their projects; it's about social networking and connecting youth with resources outside the Clubhouse; it's about listening, advice giving and supporting; and it's about co-creating with the youth. Some of the times that were most exciting for me at the Clubhouse in South LA were the times when neither of us (the member or me) knew the answer to a given problem. At one point, I was working with a youth that wanted to make a side-scrolling video game using Scratch. I had absolutely no idea how we were going to do this! We each came up with several ideas - none of them really worked, but he seemed to build some confidence in the fact that I didn't know what I was doing either and I was getting a Ph.D. at UCLA at the time. That evening he continued to work after I left. The next day, he was soooo excited to show me the solution that he had come up with - one that neither of us had originally thought of. You could see it in his eyes that he was beaming with pride and shortly thereafter he told me that he wanted to be a professional game designer. These types of experiences made me realize that you really don't need to know how to do everything in order for kids to discover new things. Being open to exploring the materials alongside youth is equally, if not more, valuable.

ROBBIN: I view the exceptional mentoring that takes place at the Clubhouse as a function of four core mentor "strengths;" mentor as model, cultivator, peer and network. While it is rare for a single individual to embody all these strengths, it is the combination and distribution of these attributes that determine the "feel" of a Clubhouse and the breadth and depth of the learning activities that take place. The "mentor as model" represents mentoring behaviors that expose members to how the adult goes about problem solving, learning new things, and how they articulate their meta-learning experiences. Members tend to be particularly drawn to mentors that exhibit this strength. The "mentor as cultivator" speaks to how mentors seed many of the "firsts" members discover during their time at the Clubhouse, including expectations of going to college, involved community citizenship, and connecting Clubhouse lessons to their dreams and aspiration. The "mentor as peer" is the person who encourages members to teach what they know to other Clubhouse members. These mentors tend also to encourage members to problem-solve and provide moral support while the member navigates this process. The members are then encouraged to share their understanding of meta-learning with their peers. Finally, the "mentor as network" refers to the mentor as a key resource, to people and ideas previously unavailable to the member through his or her personal networks. Exposure to a "larger world" than that experienced in their local neighborhood is a critical part of the learning and teaching that occurs at the Clubhouse.

You talk about the Computer Clubhouse as a "community of learners." How important is it that they function as communities rather than provide services to individual learners?

KYLIE: This question is really at the heart of what makes the Computer Clubhouse unique. During one of our interviews for the book, one of the Clubhouse Coordinators put it in terms that really resonated with me. He was someone who had made quite a bit of money in a former career as a computer engineer in the .com era but was increasingly dissatisfied with his former job. As a result, he quit his job and started working at a local Computer Clubhouse, sharing his knowledge about computer programming and engineering with the Clubhouse youth. His daughter, on the other hand, was still attending a wealthy private school. He noted that despite having access to all of the same equipment at home and at school, the crucial ingredient that was missing was the community of learners engaged in shared activity. Even learning about technologies en masse in a computer class in school doesn't provide the same arena for the development of personal interests, nor the amount of time to work in depth on your projects, using these technologies. Without it, he argued youth didn't have the support from adults and peers to creatively engage with the technologies as youth have at the Clubhouse. It's really not about the technologies, the communities and practices that emerge around the technologies are what are most important for meaningful and continued long-term engagement, which ironically is not part of technology programs even in wealthy and more well-off neighborhoods.

ROBBIN: A defining characteristic of a vibrant, productive community is its resiliency and strength. Such communities are themselves the "safety net" that protects its members and ensures their personal and professional development. Service providers may provide various safety net functions; however in most cases this requires the person being serviced to fit within a framework particular to the service provider. Clients must use the programs and services in particular ways that are determined by the service provider. The Clubhouse, as a learning community, provides a safety net without an excess of program constraints. Kids are members of the Clubhouse community. The resources of the Clubhouse belong to them and are their responsibility. They have a say in how their Clubhouse manages itself and how it grows. The Clubhouse is the launch point for new, future opportunities, including higher education and creative, successful careers based on the learning lessons of the Clubhouse. Also, the Clubhouse community is more than a group of learners and is deeply connected. Members and mentors develop lifelong relationships.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part One of Three)

The Computer Clubhouse is a worldwide network of digital literacy programs in after-school settings. The first clubhouse program started in 1993 at the Boston Computer Museum, an outgrowth of the work being done at the MIT Media Lab by Mitchel Resnick and Natalie Rusk. By 2007, there were more than one hundred clubhouses world wide. I I have long admired the extraordinary impact of the Computer Clubhouse movement, having had the privilege to get to know Resnick and others associated with the project during my many years at MIT. Few other programs have had this kind of impact on learning all over this planet, getting countless young people more engaged with the worlds of programming and digital design through an open-ended, constructionist practice, which respects each learner's goals and interests. A new book, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities, pays tribute to the fifteen year plus history of the movement, sharing some of its key successes, and offering key insights into what has made the Clubhouses so successful. The highly readable book, addressed to educators of all kinds who want to make a difference in addressing the digital divide and the participation gap, was produced for the Teacher's College Press by some key veterans of the movement -- Yasmin B. Kafai, Kylie A. Peppler, and Robbin N. Chapman. I know this book is going to be of great interest to many of you who follow this blog because of your interest in new media literacies. The publisher was nice enough to arrange an interview with the editors for this blog and I will be sharing their perspectives over the next three installments. In this installment, they share something of the goals and history of the clubhouse movement. In future installments, we will dig deeper into its global impact and its governing pedagogical assumptions.

Kalfai's work will already be familiar to regular readers, since she participated in an interview I did a year or so back with the editors of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming.

How would you describe the vision behind the Computer Clubhouse movement? What factors led to the creation of the first Computer Clubhouse?

YASMIN: It all started out in the Computer Museum. Yes, in the late 80's there was a museum with a walk-through computer in Boston (it has since then moved into the Museum of Science). Coincidentally it was right next to the Children's Museum with the mission to make information technology more accessible to the public. Many of the exhibits in the museum allowed visitors to take a closer look at the inner working of a computer and some even asked them to make things, like robots. Those turned out to be the really popular exhibits with kids; so popular that some kids would come back and sneak past admissions into the museum in order to play with the computers. Remember, computers at home or in school were rare in those days. This led Natalie Rusk, the education director at the computer museum, to talk with Mitchel Resnick and Stina Cooke to propose an after school space to which youth could come independent from the museum with a special focus on creating things with technology.

The idea was to provide access to the tools professionals actually used to make graphics, robots or games. There is a great paper titled "Access is not enough" that recounts this history in more detail as does a chapter in the book. What's important here is though that the focus was not just on giving access to computers but on promoting creative uses -- the very ones kids found so intriguing that they came back voluntarily (!) to the museum. All of this was a really bold proposal in the early 90's - that kids would actually be interested in designing technology, in making things. But we had ample evidence that indeed they were interested in challenging activities.

At the time, I was working in a local elementary school where hundreds of students were designing video games to learn about programming and mathematics and science and writing stories and advertisements. They were spending months on it. We knew that these kinds of creative activities with computers were popular with kids not just in school but also in museums and after school clubs.

ROBBIN: The vision of the Clubhouse can be described as a response to the need for space where equity, opportunity, and learning community membership become resources for young people. I often express this idea as the function, Clubhouse Vision = f{equity(learning, creativity) + opportunity(self-development, new areas for growth) + learning community(participation, citizenship)}

Can you define constructivism? How has this philosophy shaped the work of the computer clubhouses?

ROBBIN: Constructionism is project-based learning that occurs through the building and rebuilding of projects that you share with others. I view constructionism as an organic learning model because it grows in depth and breadth as it is expressed different local learning environments. This ability to adapt keeps the model regionally relevant and robust.

YASMIN: Seymour Papert who coined the term 'Constructionism' clearly distinguished it from 'Constructivism' that emphasizes the construction of knowledge by learners. Papert emphasized that indeed learners construct their own knowledge but they do so best by making things of social significance. In the end, you're constructing knowledge by constructing artifacts - be it a computer program, robot, or games - that represent your thinking. Equally important is the idea of 'social significance' that means that you do so with others and for others. I believe these two aspects, the artifacts and the social context, are what make constructionism a pedagogy of the 21st century. Today, we take it for granted that people socially interact and contribute via technology but twenty years ago this was a bold assertion.

Give us a sense of the scale of the Computer Clubhouse movement. What has allowed this project to achieve this level of scalability and sustainability?

KYLIE: Currently, the Computer Clubhouse Network is an international community of over 100 Computer Clubhouses located across 21 different countries around the world. The whole movement started with the opening of the Flagship Clubhouse in Boston in 1993 and grew with support from the Intel Foundation and several others to reach the point that it's at now. In my opinion, there are three crucial ingredients that led to the success of Computer Clubhouse movement.

First, the model establishes new Clubhouses within existing community organizations. This is helpful not just for management and advertisement in the local community, but also helps with long-term planning and additional funding support for the new Clubhouses. There are some challenges with this model of expansion, however. Primarily, local staff need training and support to adhere to the Clubhouse philosophy, which can be challenging for people coming from more traditional ways of thinking about informal learning spaces as "computer labs". Instead, Clubhouses are more like digital studios, and have a wide array of tools available for youth beyond just computers. Of course, there are other issues of coordinators gaining the technical expertise to run the Clubhouse but, as the coordinators will tell you, you can learn those skills on the job. Helping coordinators to uphold the ideals of the Clubhouse is an active central Network in Boston that provides ongoing support in the form of training for new Clubhouse staff, in-person visits from Network staff, and a cutting-edge intranet that connects all of the Clubhouses and coordinators.

The Clubhouse intranet provides a worldwide social network to share ideas, projects, host social events, and share insights on how to run a successful Clubhouse. Of course, what really sets Clubhouses apart is that these spaces are really youth-organized and run. At local Clubhouses, the youth run for executive offices and oftentimes take on leadership roles in the local community. If youth didn't find the Clubhouses to be engaging, the Network would cease to exist. Youth really drive the Clubhouses and return even after they graduate to help mentor future generations of members - another key sign of their commitment to the long-term success of these programs.

ROBBIN: The core principles of the Clubhouse model, with its grounding in the constructionist learning framework, are important because various mechanisms can be wrapped around the model to facilitate learning. In the case of the Clubhouse, digital technology is one layer. Other layers include local customs, materials, and modes of engagement. The model doesn't exist because of the technology; instead the technology is another material being used by the model. Because of this layering characteristic, the model is very adaptable to local needs and resources.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.

Writing Between the Cracks: An Interview with Interfiction 2 Contributors

This is the last installment in my series about the release of Interfictions 2. Today, I interview some of the authors who contributed short stories to the collection. Once again, the focus is on the complex and contradictory role of genre in contemporary popular fiction. (By the way, I am taking Friday off to spend time with my family so see you next week.) Do you consider yourself an interstitial artist?

Carlos Hernandez -- Definitely. I think there are two general impulses for the artist: the desire to innovate and the desire to communicate. Communication is vital, of course: art can't happen without it. But since communication requires a certain quorum of similarity between writer and reader -- e.g. a shared language -- it tends to be the more conservative impulse. Innovation, by contrast, is where genius lives. It is the only legitimate reason to make new art. Otherwise, we should all simply go and enjoy old art exclusively. For me, writers who cleave too closely to a genre -- and I would most definitely include "literary fiction" as a genre -- are favoring communication over innovation: to the point where they are neglecting the most important reason for this new art to exist.

Jeffrey Ford -- This has always been one of my problems with the term interstitial. I don't believe that artists are interstitial or not. I only believe that works of art can be interstitial. An artist should, of course, always be willing to go anywhere and do or say anything necessary for the creation of a work of art. Sometimes it's as daring to create something in a "traditional" structure and mode as it is to make something that could be labeled interstitial. Artists are artists -- sometimes their art is interstitial. Besides, it's the interaction of the materials and influences as they come together or play off each other in a work of art, not the artist. When artists operate in the marchland between genres or where media coincide it can be as lame and stale as traditional approaches to creation. I think there is great potential energy in these places, but if one were to strart out with the idea of, "OK, now I'm going to get interstitial." That's not following an idiosyncratic vision -- which for me, is what art's about. You shouldn't know something is going to be interstitial before it reveals itself.

Alaya Johnson -- I think I probably do a lot of work in interstitial spaces. I definitely see Jeff Ford's point, though, about it being tricky to identify the artist as interstitial, as opposed to the art. And to some extent, perhaps one could argue that all art is interstitial in some way. The difference might be that in more conventional work, the interstices are narrower gradations of sub (or sub-sub) genres. For example: a novel about chain-smoking biker elves who fight vampires is pretty unequivocally interstitial, but the genres it straddles are so commonplace and predictable that it wouldn't be particularly innovative. (And now I'm going to negate the forgoing entirely, and say that if you do something with enough intelligence and self-awareness, even the tritest plot line can be made into something innovative.)

What motivated your participation in this project?

Carlos Hernandez -- I had written a strange story that I loved, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Cue the Interfictions II call for submissions. I nearly swooned for pleasure. The philosophy of the project was not only in line with this particular story's aesthetic, but with pretty much everything I believe about art. The arrival of that call in my life, just when I needed it: it's enough to make you believe in Flying Spaghetti Monsters.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- That's essentially what happened to me, too. I'd written a strange, fractured story I had a hard time finding a home for, and then I saw that Interfictions was doing a second anthology. I jumped with joy-- especially when they bought it!

Brian Slattery: Like Jeff, I'd written my story before I knew that Interfictions 2 was coming out, and I knew I liked it (which is unusual for me regarding my own stuff) but didn't know what to do with it, because I also knew that it was, well, kind of weird. Meanwhile, I'd read the first Interfictions collection and really enjoyed it; reading the stories, I had the sense that these were my people. So I was delighted to learn

that Interfictions 2 was happening, and of course I'm even more delighted to be a part of it.

Jeffrey Ford -- I'd written the story before I'd heard that there was going to be an interfictions 2 anthology. I made some cursory attempts to publish this story, but had no luck. It was too wacky. I liked it, though. I thought it had something going for it, so when I heard about Interfictions I gave it a shot. The fact that the editors of this anthology accepted it gave me great encouragment to believe in the fiction I feel a personal connection to, even if it is perceived as too different by others.

Do you see the interstitial as a way of cutting across genres or escaping them all together?

Carlos Hernandez -- I don't think we ever escape genre. Genre is deeper than what our publishing industry has defined for us. I can meaningfully oppose the "personal essay" to a work of journalism because we all recognize that the different ways each has of producing truth and beauty. But I can cut across those genres, remix them, mash them up: I can write gonzo journalism or creative nonfiction or a hundred different other flavors of nonfiction subgenres. And fiction is, and should be, even slipperier, because fiction always begins with the following premise: "What I am about to tell you is a l

ALAYA JOHNSON -- I'm with Carlos-- I don't think genre is something anyone can escape (even literary artists who pretend they don't work in one). It's very fundamental to how humans perceive the world, I think: categories and taxonomies are how we structure information. It's crucial to our creative process. I see the purpose of defining the cross-genre impulse as "interstitial" as largely one of pollination. Of getting out of the constantly rehashed and well-plowed ideas in our most comfortable categories and exploring how others see things. My story cross-pollinates with a great deal of non-fiction, mostly of the political, polemical variety. I could never have written that story four years ago, before I started reading that sort of work. I became so immersed in it that, eventually, that story became something that I not only could write, but felt utterly compelled to create.I realize that my answer to this question is annoying, but here goes.

Brian Slattery: First off, I don't have nearly enough of a sense of the breadth of

literature these days to make a sweeping generalization about any genre. And second, the question of genre seems more important to critics and marketing folks--who need them for very good reasons--but I'm not a critic or a marketing guy. From where I stand as a dude who writes stuff, the genres aren't really well-defined enough to be cut across or escaped. The borders are so fuzzy that they aren't really borders at all. In the past, I've used the analogy of genres as

neighborhoods in a city with no walls between them. But here's another one: If the genres were countries, they'd be sort of quasi-failed states. The capital cities might be under control, but the farther from the seat of government you get, the less governed (governable?) the territory becomes. And there are wide stretches of land that are disputed, argued over, but never claimed outright; no genre has the power to assert its dominion over the others.

I understand the idea of genre better when it comes to certain types of plot or plot devices, character archetypes, or certain styles of writing, but even in that case, if I'm writing something, I see genre choices more as tools in a toolbox than as a series of constraints that one must work to stay within or break out of. Which is probably why the label "interstitial" applies so well to what I do.

Jeffrey Ford -- Again, for me, the interstitial is not a method but only a product. I guess it can cut across genres. I don't really know enough about genre to know if it can be escaped. I know about it, and many would say I've worked in specific genres for years, but genre has many facets and secrets, and if you were to escape genre, would your work then be in the genre of works that escaped genre?

Have you worked in genre fiction previously? If so, what had been your experience?

Carlos Hernandez -- Yes, I've published several short stories in genre magazines and anthologies. But again, I think the question is tricky, since I think we are never outside of genre. The experience of writing genre fiction and of working with editors to publish my genre fiction have easily been the best writing experiences of my life. Never have I learned more, nor felt more like a writer doing honest work, than I have when working with an editor on a story. Also, let me add that genre editors are, to my mind, the best readers a body could ask for. They tend to be these prose-devouring polymaths who deal equally well in the nuances of art and the practicalities of production. It takes a kind of double-genius to do the job of editor well -- a genius of both left brain and right -- and I've been very lucky to meet and work with some of them.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- If by "in genre fiction" you mean, "outside of the literary genre" then yes, that's largely where I've found myself working. The tropes of fantasy (and, to a lesser extent, Science Fiction) speak to me most powerfully of all the various literary forms. Every once in a while, I contemplate stories that lie firmly in what we call "literary" but they never feel as compelling as the ones that cross more boundaries.

Brian Slattery: Yes. My first short story was published in Glimmer Train, and probably by anyone's generic definition, it was an example of straight-up

literary fiction. At the time, I had given myself the assignment of seeing if I could cram a typical literary fiction novel's story arc into the shortest story I could write. I have no idea if I succeeded,

but I was completely psyched that Glimmer Train's editors saw fit to publish the result, and am still grateful to them today.

When I finished my first book, though, I really had no idea what I had written. It was either a science-fiction novel with literary-fiction stylings, or a literary-fiction novel with lots of science-fictional elements in it, and I was in no position to make the call. So I figured I'd let someone else decide, and submitted it to a few different places. The feedback I got taught me a lot. The

literary-fiction people I talked to seemed to like the quality of the writing (which was nice), but were very confused by the plot, number of characters, and other things that science-fiction readers don't get thrown by. The science-fiction people, meanwhile, seemed to just like the book. So I figured that I'd written a science-fiction novel and didn't think all that much more about it. My second book came out as even more clearly science fiction, which delights me. But in the

future? Who knows?

Can we produce works which appeal to popular readers without falling into genre formulas?

Carlos Hernandez -- This is a deceptively difficult question, because it calls on action from both writers and readers. I feel that, in the United States at least, the media conglomerates and mega-bookstores that have taken over the publishing world have taught the American public to narrowly define genres and, more importantly, to narrowly enjoy works of specific genres. Readers now will often check the spine of a book to make sure it is of a genre they will enjoy -- "if it doesn't say 'mystery' on the spine, I won't like it, because it's not a mystery." I know people speak disparagingly of Oprah's Book Club, but c'mon people! She got millions of folks to read Beloved, which is not only one of the greatest books of the 20th century, but as interstitial a work of art as we could ask for. What's unfortunate is that it takes a decree from Oprah to give popular readers the confidence and motivation to try something outside of their comfort zone. So, solutions? 1) Get publishers and mega-bookstores to stop insisting on narrowly-defined genres (near-impossible); 2) Get Oprah to endorse a lot more interstitial art (not exactly a reliable method); 3) Get writers to keep trying to write innovative work that eschews pretension while at the same time challenges readers -- and hope for the best.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- I agree that the issue of connecting readers to fiction has a great deal more to do with the juggernaut of the industry behind books than the works actual readers might enjoy if they could find them. Why else, for example, would book stores ghettoize literature by black writers in the "African American" or "urban" section of the book store? Not necessarily because white readers won't buy these books, but because segregation is how the industry has constructed itself. I've had the experience of hunting through the Science Fiction section for a single Octavia Butler novel, finding none present, and eventually discovering them shelved next to True to the Game III or whatever in Urban Lit. In the latter example, the segregation is based on race, but it's the same principle that means those readers who enjoy Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will never find Sherri Tepper's Grass without venturing into a completely different section of the bookstore. The ostensible reason for this segregation is that it makes it easier for readers to find works they like, but as in both examples, it also makes it harder for readers to find works they like. So, to answer your question, I don't think "genre formulas" are the culprit here so much as an industry that makes it financially and practically impossible to look outside your own genre.

What kind of emotional experience do you think your story offers readers?

Carlos Hernandez -- I picked up a term from a collection of medieval words and phrases called: "merry-go-sorry." That phrase encapsulates my entire philosophy in three words: life is merry-go-sorry-go-merry-go-sorry-go-etc. Round and round we go, from moment to moment -- life is bewildering, awful at times but also awe-ful, a relentless dogpile of bathos and pathos. So what do we make of it? What can we say about an existence like that? If my story offers any answers, they are emotional ones, because I take the word "fiction" very seriously. I lie like hell all the way through.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- I'm not sure, really. I suppose I would hope a cathartic one, because issues of grief, guilt, redemption and eventual catharsis seem to run through most of my work. But because I have constructed it in such a way that the reader has to really work to find the story inside, it's entirely possible that readers could find the experience of reading it rather emotionally cold or clinical. It's hard to tell how people will react to things, especially when I as a writer have very deliberately eschewed most of the techniques in the writer's arsenal for heightening pathos (the equivalent, in my mind, of sweeping strings and roiling storm clouds in, say, a Steven Spielberg movie).

What was the biggest challenge in writing interfiction?

Carlos Hernandez -- Writing a relatable story that in its own small way tries to innovate. In short, writing a story that's good.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- One of the purpose of genres, and taxonomies and categories in general, is that it provides an in-group/out-group structure. It, by virtue of exclusion, creates a community and a community creates a shared language. Many science fiction writers, for example, have had the experience of writing a story that is perfectly comprehensible to their in-group of SF readers, and utterly enigmatic to those familiar with other communities and literary languages. So the greatest challenge of truly interstitial writing, I'd argue, is that you both need to have mastered the various languages of the genres you want to straddle while making the foreign tropes comprehensible to all parties. Out of the labor of this communication, though, comes particularly gratifying rewards.

Carlos Hernandez is a writer and English professor living in New York City. He was the co-author of Abecedarium.

Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy won The World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for 1997 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Ford has since finished the other two books of the trilogy, Memoranda (99 NY Times Notable Book of the Year) and The Beyond (2001).

Alaya Dawn Johnson's novels include Racing the Dark and The Burning City, the first two installments of The Spirit Binders trilogy and the forthcoming Moonshine, a vampire saga set in the 1920s.

Brian Slattery's novels include Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America and Spaceman Blues: A Love Song .

Editing Interfiction 2: An Interview with Delia Sherman

Last week, I shared with you the introduction I wrote for Interfiction 2, a collection of interstitial literature. The piece offered some reflections on the value and limits of genre categories in shaping our relationship with popular fictions. Today, I am offering an interview with the editor of that collection -- Delia Sherman, who is best known as a fantasy author, but who has been consistently pushing to create a space for diversity, experimentation, and innovation within popular literature. I have considered Delia and her oft-time partner in crime Ellen Kushner good friends for a long time so it is a great pleasure to be able to share her thoughts and her current project with my readers. Next time, I will share some thoughts from some of the contributors to the collection, rounding out my multi-part focus on the concept of "interstitial art."
How would you define "interstitial art"?

DELIA: For me, interstitial art is anything that frustrates genre expectations, turns my ideas of genre on their heads, and teaches me how it works as I interact with it. It's art that is hard to categorize easily, hard to describe, impossible to generate an accurate elevator pitch for.

Does the interstitial primarily refer to works which cross genres or might they also cross media or cultural hiearchies (high, popular) or audiences?

DELIA: Because the IAF started with a bunch of writers talking about cross-genre fiction, that's where our discussion of interstitiality necessarily started. Now, as more artists from different communities and disciplines join the conversation, it's perfectly obvious that you can't talk about crossing artistic boundaries without talking about crossing media, cultural hierarchies, and even media platforms. Jewelry that responds to and comments on fiction [currently available in the Interfictions Auction: http://iafauctions.com/]; websites that bridge information, entertainment, art, and networking; performances that blend music and art and words and movement in unexpected ways (or even unexpected venues)--these are interstitial, too.

What are your goals for the Interfictions collection?

DELIA: We began Interfictions simply as a concrete answer to the question, "What do you mean by interstitial fiction?"--and as an outlet for authors who had been writing fiction that was too popular for literary markets, too literary for popular markets, or simply too odd to find a comfortable home in any genre. What we hoped (and continue to hope) is that the stories we publish will provide a sense of the directions in which short fiction is developing, giving readers and academics and writers new texts to discuss, analyze, and be inspired by.

What do you see as the limitations of the current market for popular fiction?

DELIA: Historically, hard times tend to foster conservatism in the arts. And the uncertainty of how the internet is going to impact the publishing and music industries is making it even worse. If a big company doesn't know how to market something, they won't buy it. Which leads to endless iterations of teen vampire romances, mystical conspiracy thrillers, heroic fantasies, and chick lit novels with pink covers. It also leads to worthy fiction that is none of these things being packaged as if it were, which leads to puzzled and often hostile reviews, and to readers who don't know where to look for the kind of fiction they like--especially if they like fiction that doesn't hew to the most popular forms and conventions. In this market, Shakespeare probably wouldn't be able to get a play produced, nor Franz Kafka sell a story to a major magazine.

What roles does the Interstitial Arts Foundation play in promoting the concept of interfiction?

DELIA: We make it available, of course. And we call attention to the fact that these stories are different, a fact that other markets might prefer to elide in the hopes that nobody notices. And I hope that we open a conversation among our readers, in which they argue with our choices and definitions, and go on to make their own, and even create stories that are completely different again, which maybe they'll send to whoever is editing Interfictions at that time, taking the conversation to the next step.

How were you able to locate authors who wanted to produce interstitial works?

DELIA: We put the word out on every writing list-serve we knew about. We wrote authors whose works we thought tended to the interstitial, and asked them to spread the word. We mentioned it to writers we met at conferences, random parties, cafes, and the subway. We blogged on social networking sites, like Live Journal and FaceBook, and asked our readers to spread the word. We got a lot of highly literary fantasy, SF, horror, and one Western. But we also got more genuinely strange and self-defining work than I would have believed-- that is, if I hadn't already edited the first Interfictions anthology in 2007 and seen then that there was a lot of it out there. And of course, people knowing about the first anthology helped the second one.

You faced a challenge in designing a cover for a book of fiction which defies most categories. How did you develop the cover art and what does it communicate about the book's project?

DELIA: We didn't develop the cover art. We discovered it. One of our board members suggested that we start a Flickr pool where any artist could post work to be considered for the cover. We got lots of beautiful, if not especially interstitial, photographs, a certain number of definitely interstitial pieces that were too busy, too dark, too three-dimensional, or too distracting to make good cover art, and a solid handful of pieces that fit our purposes perfectly. The piece we ended up choosing (after many emails and discussions with the Cover Committee) is by Alex Myers. It's part of a series painted in gouache on torn-apart cereal boxes, destined to degrade with the cardboard, which struck us as being kind of interstitial in and of itself. The image references popular culture, advertising, science, and politics, and (coincidentally) seems to echo themes and images of several of the stories we'd already bought. And it has a natural space for a title, even though it wasn't painted as a cover. All of which makes it an ideal introduction to the kind of fiction it is introducing to the world: unexpected, puzzling, beautifully executed, appealing (to the kind of audience it appeals to, of course), and finally, evanescent. Because the interstitial story of today is very likely to be the genre-establishing seminal work of next year, as Terri Windling's punk elf Bordertown anthologies back in the 80's planted the seeds of the current Urban Fantasy craze.

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City. She has spent a lot of time in schools of one kind or another: Vassar College for undergrad, then Brown University where she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. While she was writing her dissertation, she started teaching, first at Boston University, where she taught Freshman Composition and Fantasy as Literature, and then at Northeastern University, where she was a Lecturer in Composition. She also worked in a bookstore for a while, and her short fiction appeared in WeirdBook and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

While she was still teaching, she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror, which led to a 1990 nomination for the Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer. Her second novel, the historical The Porcelain Dove, was listed in The New York Times Notable Books, and won the Mythopoeic Award in 1994.

Delia also publishes short fiction for adults, most recently in Realms of Fantasy and Poe. Her short stories for younger readers have appeared in numerous anthologies. "CATNYP," a story of a magical New York Between, inspired her first novel for children, Changeling. The sequel, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen followed in 2009. The Freedom Maze, a time-travel fantasy set in Louisiana, will be published by Big Mouth Press in 2010.

As an editor of books and anthologies, Delia's continuing quest is to get more of the kind of fantasy she likes out to readers. She has worked as a contributing editor for Tor Books and has co-edited the fantasy anthology The Horns of Elfland with Ellen Kushner and Donald G. Keller, as well as The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling. She had co-edited two anthologies of Interstitial fiction: Interficitons 1, with Theodora Goss, and Interfictions 2, with Christopher Barzak.

Delia lives with fellow author and fantasist Ellen Kushner in a rambling apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City.

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part Two)

Most current academic thinking dismisses the idea that genres are stable and essential categories, that we can determine what genre a work belongs to once and for all, and that doing so tells us all we need to know about the example in question. Instead, this new scholarship talks about what genres do rather than what genres are and describes the processes by which works get classified and reclassified over time.

When these categories are deployed as a system for regulating the production and distribution of culture, The publishing industry is misusing genre theory. As music critic Simon Frith notes, "genre maps change according to who they're for... A committed music fan will soon find, for example, that she's interested in sounds that fit into several categories at once and that different shops therefore shelve the same record under different labels.... It's as if a silent conversation is going on between the consumer, who knows roughly what she wants, and the shopkeeper, who is laboriously working out the pattern of shifting demands. What's certain is that I, like most other consumers, would feel quite lost to go to the store one day and find the labels gone – just a floor of CDS, arranged alphabetically."

So, for Frith, genre categories have some temporary use value in helping consumers find the music they want to hear. But those categories are also subject to recall and modification without notice and are often deployed in idiosyncratic ways, reflecting the personalities of the owners of different record shops or even the whims of the clerks who shelve particular titles. If you print the genres on the book jacket, you automatically limit their shelf life by restricting your ability to shuffle the pieces to reflect changing tastes and perceptions. The result will be as much bad business as bad art.

Of course, on the consumption side, we all adopt very idiosyncratic systems for shelving our books anyway: that's the pleasure of reading someone else's bookshelves as a map of their mind, displaying what things interest them and the perceived relationships between the parts.

You might think that this "shelving" metaphor for thinking about the cultural work of genres would break down quickly in a world where fewer and fewer books are purchased in brick-and-mortar bookshops and more and more of them are being bought online, where listings can be easily reconfigured, where the same book can be listed in an infinite number of categories.

Paradoxically, though, genres have had a tighter hold on our imagination in recent years as the range of cultural choice has broadened and audiences have fragmented. Film historian Rick Altman tells us that far from imposing rigid boundaries between genres, the old studio system depended on the idea that the same film could appeal to multiple audience segments at a time when pretty much everyone in the country went to the movies once or twice a week. Hollywood films rarely fit into some narrowly composed category: the same film had to appeal to men as well as women, the young as well as the old, by signaling different entertainment elements ("Comedy. Romance. Action. Exotic Locales. Singing. Dancing....")

Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers. These more rigid and precise subgenres are the product of a more general tendency towards what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls "specification." Subcultures break down into smaller subcultures, niches become smaller niches in an eternal dance between our desire to differentiate ourselves from and affiliate ourselves with others who share our tastes. There are more different categories of books, records, and films than ever before; all that diversity produces an anxiety that is being met by more aggressive policing of boundaries. Using more sophisticated tools, media consumers are trying to find the "perfect choice," rather than taking for granted that a work designed for a general audience is going to contain some things we like and some things we don't.

And where the market doesn't impose such specifications, we add them ourselves. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that the best fan fiction is "unpublishable" in the sense that it operates across the genre categories, aesthetic norms, and ideological constraints that shape commercial publishing. Fans self-publish in order to step outside those filters. Yet, the fan community also imposes its own categories, which help readers find the "right story" through author's notes that tell us, for example, which "ships" (relationships between specified pairs of characters) are being explored, offer a rough sense of their sexual explicitness or emotional tone, warn us about vexing themes, and so forth. And if you read the letters of comment, there's enormous anger directed at any writer who asks a reader to read a story that doesn't deliver what was promised and, even worse, gives them something they didn't ask for.

All of this focus on using genres to classify and shelve works assumes that we know where one genre ends and another begins and that genre works stay where we put them. Genres may be optical illusions, which come and go like mirages, depending on the ways we look at the texts in question.

In one formulation, genre classifications offer reading hypothesis: we start a book with the assumption that it will follow a certain path; we read it "as" a mystery or as a romance or as a fantasy, and as we do so, we look for those elements that match our expectations: depending on our starting point, we may notice some things or ignore them, make certain predictions or avoid them, value or reject certain elements, form or dismiss certain interpretations. Start from a different hypothesis and you will have a different experience.

Some critics are rereading familiar texts through alternative logics: so, for example, queer cultural critic Alex Doty has made the case for The Wizard of Oz as a power struggle between butch and femme lesbians, Jason Mittell has read the HBO series The Wire as a video game, and Linda Williams reads pornography in relation to Hollywood musicals. Might we see such essays as interstitial criticism?

For some readers, there is a certain pleasure in playing a game where all the parts match our templates (much as a sparrow feels more like a bird than an ostrich does). For other readers, there may be a pleasure in the unanticipated or the indeterminate. Let's hear it for the duck-billed platypus!

Tzvetan Todorov has talked about the "fantastic" as playing with this uncertainty about classification. For instance, most ghost stories create a special pleasure from our uncertainty about whether we are supposed to believe there really are ghosts or whether we are to come up with a natural, logical, real-world explanation for the events. The pleasure, he says, is in toggling between multiple interpretations, not knowing what kind of story we are reading: there was a ghost; the narrator was crazy; or in the Scooby-Doo version, it was all a scheme by the guy who runs the old amusement park.

Even when we kinda knew where the ghost story was going, the process of hiding and unveiling can be as much darn fun as a good old fashion striptease. What if we were to imagine the interstitial as another kind of indeterminacy, one that flits between genres in the same way that the fantastic flickers between levels of reality. Maybe this is what Heinz Insu Fenkel is getting at when he writes, "Interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader's world larger, more interesting, more meaningful, and perhaps even more comprehensible. The reader, who has been seeing black-and-white, suddenly begins not only to see color, but to learn how to see other colors."

Just as there are systems of cultural production where audiences express confusion if a work straddles genres, there are others where artists thrive upon and audiences anticipate mixing and matching genre elements. Take for example the so-called "masala films" that come out of the Bollywood film industry in India and are popular across Asia, Africa, and increasingly the west. The same film might move between historical and contemporary settings, might mix comedy and melodrama, might follow an intense (and disturbing) action sequence with a musical number, might mix the most sudsy romance with social uplift and political reform, and might acknowledge both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The descriptor "masala" refers to a mixture of spices used in Indian cooking. Just as one would be disappointed if an Indian dish only contained one spice, the Bollywood spectator would be disappointed if a Hindi film contained only one genre.

We are seeing greater cultural churn as more and more works move across national borders, get picked up by new artists and audiences, get combined in new ways, paving the way for nouvelle culture in the same way that the global availability of spices and ingredients has led many of our best chiefs to experiment with radical departures from and reinventions of traditional cuisines. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has contrasted a classic understanding of cultures as so many exhibits in an ethnographic museum with a more contemporary notion of cultures as garage sales, where people push, pull, and paw over other people's used stuff before taking it home, trying it on for size, and altering it to suit their needs.

Many young American consumers are using the web in search of Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Latin American telenovelas, or Bollywood films, anything that takes them outside the parochialism of their own culture. The result really does defy any classification: look at something like Tears of the Black Tiger which starts as a classic Thai novel, throws in a little opera, adds a much more intense color palette, and tells the man's story as a western and the woman's story as a '50s style melodrama to suggest that the two protagonists are living in different worlds.

Globalization is simply one of a number of forces which are breaking down the tyranny of genre classifications and paving the way for experimentation within popular storytelling. In his book Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson makes the argument that the most popular forms of entertainment today are popular because they make demands on our attention and cognition. For example, a television show like Lost, one of the top ratings successes of the past decade, demonstrates a level of complexity that would have been unimaginable on American television a few decades ago; with its large scale ensemble casts of characters, its flashes forwards and backwards in time, its complex sets of puzzles and enigmas, its moral ambiguities and shifting alliances, but also its uncertain and unpredictable relationship to existing television genres.

If we knew what the operative genre model was, we might figure out what's really happening on the island, but without such a clear mapping, we remain pleasurably lost. Such dramas thrive in part because they support robust internet communities where readers gather online to compare notes, debate interpretations, trace references, and otherwise have fun talking with each other. Its interstitial qualities are essential to Lost's success, even as they account for why other viewers got frustrated and gave up on the series convinced that it was never going to add up to anything anyway.

Lost illustrates another tendency in contemporary popular culture towards what I call transmedia storytelling. Lost is not simply a story or even a television series; Lost is a world that can support many different characters and many different stories that unfold across multiple media platforms. As these stories move across media platforms, Lost also often moves across genres: not unlike early novels, which might be constituted through mock letters, journals, and diaries, these new stories may mock e-mail correspondence, interviews, documents, websites, news magazine stories, advertisements, computer games, puzzles, cyphers, and a range of other materials which help make its world feel more real to the reader. These transmedia works will add a whole new meaning to the concept of interstitial arts.

So, to borrow from Charles Dickens (who borrowed from everyone else in his own time), this is the best of times and the worst of times for the interstitial arts. In such a world, the interstitial thrives and it withers. It finds receptive audiences and harsh critics. It gratifies and grates. It inspires and confuses. Above all, it gives us something to talk about. It opens us up to a world where nothing is what it seems and where little belongs, at least in the narrow sense of the term. We're going Out There!

What happens next is in your hands. Read. Enjoy. Debate. Tell your friends. But also create. Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform. Just leave your cookie cutters and jelly molds at home. We can figure out what shelf this belongs on later.

Bibliography

Ellen Kushner, "The Interstitial Arts Foundation: An Introduction," in Nebula Awards® Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann (ROC/PenguinPutnam, March 2005), http://www.interstitialarts.org/essays/kushner_iaf_an_introduction.php

Delia Sherman, "An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/intro_toIA.html

Susan Stinson, "Cracks," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionStinson.html

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas, 1982).

Heinz Insu Fenkl, "The Interstitial DMZ," http://www.interstitialarts.org/why/the_interstitial_dmz_1.html

Barth Anderson, "The Prickly, Tricky, Ornery Multiverse of Interstitial Art," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionAnderson.html

Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Rick Altman, Film/Genre (British Film Institute, 1999).

Grant McCracken, Plenitude 2.0: Culture by Commotion (Periph: Fluide, 1998).

Catherine Tossenberger, Potterotics: Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the Internet, Dissertation, University of Florida, 2007.

Alex Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000).

Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic," in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (MIT Press, 2009).

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (University of California Press, 1999).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cornell University Press, 1975).

Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Reworking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press, 1993).

Charles Vess, "Interstitial Visual Arts: An Impossible Marriage of Materials," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/marriage_of_materials.html

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You (Riverhead, 2006).

Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1988).

John Caughie, Theories of Authorship: A Reader (Routledge, 1981).

Peter J. Rabinowitz, "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy," Critical Inquiry, March 1985.

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part One)

Last January, I wrote the following essay to run as the foreword for a recently published collection of short fiction -- Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing -- which was edited by an old friend, Delia Sherman. The essay offers my explanation of what we mean by "interstitial writing" and my exploration of the deforming and informing value of genre in contemporary storytelling. Over the next installments, I will also be featuring an interview with Delia about her goals for the book and an interview with some of the contributors about their relationship to the genre conventions of popular fiction. I am hoping that this series of posts will serve to introduce readers of this blog to the work of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, a really wonderful group of writers and thinkers, who are on the frontiers of contemporary popular fiction. This pendant, inspired by my introductory essay, was produced by artist Mia Nutick as part of an auction being organized around the book. For more, see http://iafauctions.com/

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging

Henry Jenkins, 2009

(Note: The following essay appeared as the introduction to Interfictions 2, the recently-released anthology of interstitial fiction from the Interstitial Arts Foundation.)

"Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

– Groucho Marx

Let's start with some basic premises:

1. I do not belong in this book.
2. The contributors also do not belong.
3. You, like Groucho Marx, wouldn't want to belong even if you could. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have picked up this book in the first place.

Let me explain. The editors of most anthologies seek stories which "fit" within prescribed themes, genres, and topics; the editors of this book have gone the opposite direction – seeking stories that don't fit anywhere else, stories that are as different from each other as possible. And that's really cool if the interstitial is the kind of thing you are into.

At the heart of the interstitial arts movement (too formal), community (too exclusive), idea (too idealistic?), there is the simple search for stories that don't rest comfortably in the cubbyholes we traditionally use to organize our cultural experiences. As Ellen Kushner puts it, "We're living in an age of category, of ghettoization – the Balkanization of Art! We should do something." That "something" is, among the other projects of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, the book you now hold in your hands.

Asked to define interstitial arts, many writers fall back on spatial metaphors, talking about "the wilderness between genres" (Delia Sherman), "art that falls between the cracks" (Susan Simpson), or "a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war" (Heinz Insu Fenkel). Underlying these spatial metaphors is the fantasy of artists and writers crawling out from the boxes which so many (their publishers, agents, readers, marketers, the adolescent with the piercings who works at the local Borders) want to trap them inside. Such efforts to define art also deform the imagination, not simply of authors, but also of their readers.

All genre categories presume ideal readers, people who know the conventions and secret codes, people who read them in the "right way." Many of us – female fans of male action shows, adult fans of children's books, male fans of soap operas – read and enjoy things we aren't supposed to and we read them for our own reasons, not those proposed by marketers. We don't like people snatching books from our hands and telling us we aren't supposed to be reading them.

One of the reasons I don't belong in this book is that I'm an academic, not a creative artist, and let's face it, historically, academics have been the teachers and enforcers of genre rules. The minute I tell you that I have spent the last twenty years in a Literature department, you immediately flash on a chalkboard outline of Aristotle's Poetics or a red pen correcting your muddled essay on the four-act structure. Throughout the twentieth century, many of us academic types were engaged in a prolonged project of categorizing and classifying the creative process, transforming it to satisfy our needs to generate lecture notes, issue paper topics, and grade exam questions. After all, academics are trapped in our own imposed categories ("disciplines" rather than "genres") which often constrain what we can see, what we can say, and who we can say it to. Academics are "disciplined" through our education, our hiring process, our need to 'publish or perish', and our tenure and promotion reviews. Most academics read or think little outside their field of study. As Will Rogers explained, "there's nothing so foolish as an educated man once you take him out of the field he was educated in."

I may gain a little sympathy from you, dear reader, if I note that for those twenty years, I was a cuckoo's egg – a media and popular culture scholar in a literature department – and that I am finally flying the coop, taking up an interdisciplinary position at a different institution, because I could never figure out the rules shaping my literature colleagues' behavior.

Many literature professors may hold "genre fiction" in contempt as "rule driven" or "formula-based" yet they ruthlessly enforce their own genre conventions: look at how science fiction gets taught, keeping only those authors already in the canon (Mary Shelly, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon), adding a few more who look like what we call "literature" (William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick), and then, running like hell as far as possible from any writer whose work still smells of "pulp fiction." Here, "literature" is simply another genre or cluster of genres (the academic mid-life crisis, the coming of age story, the identity politics narrative), one defined every bit as narrowly as the category of films which might get considered for a Best Picture nomination. I never had much patience with the criteria by which my colleagues decided which works belonged in the classroom and which didn't.

What I love about the folks who have embraced interstitial arts is that some of them do comics, some publish romances, some compose music, some write fantasy or science fiction, but all of them are perfectly comfortable thinking about things other than their areas of specialization. In that sense, I do very much belong in this collection as a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, both phrases that signal someone who does and does not fit into some larger movement. Maybe we can go to each other's un-birthday parties and not belong together.

To be sure, academics are not, as Buffy would put it, "the big bad." We may have gotten inside your head but with a little mental discipline, you can shove us right back out again. Most interstitial artists ritually burned their old course notebooks years ago. They started to write the stories they wanted to be able to read, only to be told by their publisher that their book would sell much more quickly if it could be positioned into this publishing category for this intended audience and to achieve that you just need to cut back on this, expand on that, and add a little more of this other thing. I often picture James Stewart in Vertigo gradually redressing, restyling, and redesigning Kim Novak's entire identity, all the while creepily asserting that it really shouldn't make that much difference to her. That's the process those of us who sympathize with the concept of interstitial arts are trying to battle back into submission or at least push back long enough so that we can demonstrate that there are readers out there, a few of us, who want the stuff that doesn't really fit into fixed genres, though it may bear some faint family resemblance to several of them at once. Viva the mutts and the mongrels! Long live the horses of a different color!

So, you are now about to enter the Twilight Zone, where nothing your freshmen literature teacher taught you applies, where we eat with the wrong forks and wear white shoes after Labor Day. But it doesn't mean that academic genre theory has nothing to contribute to our efforts as readers and writers to step across the ice floes and navigate the shifting sands of the interstitial. For the next few pages, I will be proposing a more contemporary account of how genre works in an era where so many of us are mixing and matching our preferences and defying established categories. The work of genre is changing as we speak – in some ways becoming more constraining, in others more liberating – and genre theorists are rethinking old assumptions to reflect the flux in the way culture operates.

To start with Genre Theory 101, all creative expression involves an unstable balance between invention and convention. If a work is pure invention, it will be incomprehensible – like writing a novel without using any recognizable language. Don't worry: a work that is pure invention is only a theoretical possibility. None of us, in the end, is all that original; we borrow (often undigested) bits and pieces from the already written and the already read; we all construct new works through appropriation and transformation of existing materials. As Michel Bakhtin explains, we don't take our words out of the dictionary; we rip them from other people's mouths and they come to us covered with the saliva of where they've already been spoken before. Sharing stories is swapping spit.

However, If a work is pure convention, it will bore everyone. While most of us feel gratified when a work sometimes meets our expectations and most of us feel somewhat frustrated when a work fails to deliver those particular pleasures we associate with a favored formula, none of us wants to read a book that is predictable down to the last detail. All artists fall naturally somewhere on the continuum, in some ways following the dictates of their genres, in other ways breaking with them. And most readers pick up a new book or video expecting to be surprised (by invention) and gratified (by convention).

As they seek to satisfy our desires for surprise and gratification, genre conventions are both constraints (like strait jackets) and enabling mechanisms (like life vests). They are constraints in so far as they foreclose certain creative possibilities, and they are enabling mechanisms in so far as they allow us to focus the reader's attention on novel elements. In the Russian formalist tradition that shaped my own early graduate education, we didn't speak of "rules"; we spoke of "norms," with the understanding that a work only achieved its fullest potential when it, in some way, "defamiliarized" our normal ways of seeing the world and ordering our experience. Or in another familiar paradigm, the auteur critics embraced those filmmakers who were "at war with their materials," that is, who followed the expectations of genre just enough to continue to be employed by the Hollywood studio system but also sought to impose their own distinctive personality by breaking as many of those rules as possible.

Now, let's consider how some of the writers featured on the Interstitial Arts Foundation website are confronting these competing pulls towards convention and invention as they think about their work. Some are seeking to break with the conventions of genre more dramatically than others; they each lay claim to different positions on the continuum between convention and invention.

Here, for example, is Barth Anderson: "If the work comforts, satisfies, or generally meets the expectations that viewers might carry of a genre in question, then the work is genre. This might even apply to works attempting to redefine genre or works which introduce alien elements and disciplines into the genre mix... Interstitial art should be prickly, tricky, ornery. It should defy expectations, work against them, and in so doing, maintain a relationship to one or more genres, albeit contentiously.... Interstitial art is often upsetting. It rocks worldviews, political assumptions, sacred cows, as well as bookstore shelves." Anderson values surprise and sees genre primarily as a constraint.

Susan Stinson, by contrast, sees the artist as moving between the pleasures of operating within genres and the freedom of escaping their borders: "The gifts of being in a genre – reading the same essays and stories; seeking out the same mentors; publishing with the same magazines and presses; writing books that share shelf space; gathering at workshops, retreats, and conferences often enough to know each other – create a common language... I've felt both embraced and constricted by the conventions of those worlds.... The interstitial idea of thriving in cracks and crevices feels like [another] kind of home. Nurturing active, creative, receptive, demanding relationships and institutions that welcome genre-bending and respect a wide range of sources, traditions, and affinities sounds so good that it scares me. The expanded possibilities for joy are worth the risks." Stinson acknowledges the gratifications of consuming genre entertainment and understands genre formulas as both enabling mechanisms and constraints.

Anderson speaks about the interstitial as "prickly, tricky, ornery," while Stinson sees it as welcoming, "nurturing," joyous, and "receptive." One stresses radical breaks from the genre system, while the other is negotiating a space for singular passions within the system.

MORE TO COME

Cordwainer Smith Imagined Convergence Culture (and Viral Media) in 1964

Science fiction writers do not so much invent the future as they inform it. I mean inform here in two ways - first, they give us the information we need to process issues in the present moment and to therefore anticipate some likely consequences of the choices we face as a society and second, having given a vivid picture of a possible future, they inspire scientists, policy makers, and others to reshape reality to conform to their depiction.

How many contemporary technological developments emerged from designers whose imagination was incited by some science fiction novel or television series? Without Star Trek, would we have flip phones? Without Snow Crash would we have had Second Life?

I have been pondering this relationship between science fiction and reality a lot this week having recent taught some short stories by Cordwainer Smith in my transmedia entertainment and storytelling class at USC.

If you just mumbled, "Cordwainer who?," you are not alone. Smith's works are rarely cited today. Smith wrote short stories rather than novels, scattered them across a range of publications, and published many of them after his death. Even hardcore science fiction fans may know him only for his first published story, "Scanners Live in Vane," which is included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology which is often deployed in science fiction classes. The New England Science Fiction Association collected and republished his stories several years ago as The Rediscovery of Man. Maybe it's time for the rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith.

When I first read "Scanners Live in Vain" some years ago, I was stunned. The writing is challenging and vaguely modernist, especially when compared to the hard edged realism and classicism of his 1950s era contemporaries like Robert Heinlein or Issac Asimov. He thrusts you into the world of the story without much preliminaries; he relished the strange and unfamiliar elements which are dealt with it ways that are at once defamiliarizing (in that they break from our world) and familiarizing (in that they treat these strange elements as if they were perfectly normal, even banal.) In many ways, the story's focus on the fusion of man and machine, which gets depicted with ambivalence rather than dread, helped pave the way for similar representations in the early cyberpunk movement.

As I've read more of his work, I've become fascinated with the ways that he prefigured science fictions fascination with media change - digital media primarily in the case of the Cyberpunks but something very close to what I call Convergence Culture in the case of Cordwainer Smith. Consider, for example, this passage from "The Dead Woman of Clown Town" which seems to anticipate the concept of viral media:

"A bad idea can spread like a mutated germ. If it is at all interesting, it can leap from one mind to another halfway across the universe before it has a stop put to it. Look at the ruinous fads and foolish fashions which have nuisanced mankind even in the ages of the highest orderliness."

Here, Smith tries to capture the perspective of a totalitarian regime which seeks to manipulate the flow of information in order to prevent a shift in public sentiment towards the underpeople, a permanent underculture which exists of half-human/half-animals. Smith warns after a particularly empassioned speech on human rights of the need to reframe what is being said lest it undermine the established order:

"The dog-girl was making points which had some verbal validity. If they were left in the form of mere words without proper context, they might affect heedless or impressionable minds."

Published in 1964, "Dead Woman of Clown Town," can be easily read as an allegory for the civil disobedience and nonviolent protest which shaped not only the then-contemporary protests of Martin Luther King, but also a range of protest movements across Asia during the struggle against colonialism. In the story, the human, Elaine, and the dog-girl, D'Joan, lead an army of underpeople on a march which brings them into the face of armed guards, who obligingly shoot them down or in D'Joan's case, torches her alive, forcing them to confront the brutal consequences of their own discriminatory policies.

Smith's depiction is particularly concerned with the psychological experience of subordination and oppression, using for example the figure of C'Mell, the cat-woman and professional "girly-girl" (escort) in "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" to deal with the ways that the enslaved must develop much greater knowledge of the dominant group than the other way around:

"She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the women by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study. She was a girl by profession; she was human by assimilation; she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature....Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did."

Key scenes occur at the moment when the human characters are forced to experience something of the subjective experience of the lower castes, as occurs when Elaine gets linked to D'Joan through telepathy, which is understood here as a kind of radicalization process, a shift in sympathy not unlike that experienced by many white liberals in the Civil Rights era who were motivated by the burning of black churches and the slaughter of black children to rethink a lifetime of segregationist practice.

Smith's interest in the concept of information war-fare and media as a resource for political transformation can be explained by his own fascinating life story. Here's some of the details as presented by Wikipedia:

Cordwainer Smith - pronounced CORDwainer[1] - was the pseudonym used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913-August 6, 1966) for his science fiction works. Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare...

Linebarger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was Paul M. W. Linebarger, a lawyer and political activist with close ties to the leaders of the Chinese revolution of 1911. As a result of those connections, Linebarger's godfather was Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of Chinese nationalism. As a child, Linebarger was blinded in his right eye; the vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection. When he later pursued his father's interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. His father moved his family to France and then Germany while Sun Yat-sen was struggling against contentious warlords in China. As a result, Linebarger was familiar with six languages by adulthood.

At the age of 23, he received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs. While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, he began serving as a second lieutenant of the United States Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the Army's first psychological warfare section. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major....

In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies. He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), which is regarded by many in the field as a classic text. He eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves. He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War. While he was known to call himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in Vietnam, but is known to have done undocumented work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and was called upon to advise then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

In short, Smith was the consummate political insider both to global politics and to the emergence of what Eisenhower called "the military-industry complex." He brought to science fiction complex theories of communication, psychology, and political change and at the same time, grafted them onto story traditions he had absorbed from classical Chinese literature and he had learned through his global travels. Underlying his almost surreal stories, then, is a deeper understanding of the nature of power and how governments seek to shape the subjective experience of their populations.

Smith's relevance for a transmedia class is two-fold. First, Smith was a consummate world builder. All of his 32 short stories and his novel, Norstrilia, take place within a single timeline which spans more than 16000 years of future history and play out across the interconnected history of many different worlds. He depicts a future which emerges from Earth's past as our cultural traditions are revived, reproduced, forgotten, and reperformed until they have lost much of their meaning, becoming mere formalisms. In this world, he shows an acute understanding of how cultural change impacts the ways we treat each other and how we structure labor and governance. Here, for example, is a vivid passage from "The Story of Lost C'Mell," another key work in his depiction of the undermen:

"Ever since mankind had gone through the Rediscovery of Man, bringing back governments, money, newspapers, national languages, sickness and occassional death, there had been the problem of the underpeople -- people who were not human but merely humanly shaped from the stock of Earth animals. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, love and die; but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as 'homunculi' and gave them a legal status close to animals or robots. Real people from off-world were always called 'hominads.' Most of the underpeople did their jobs and accepted their half-slave status without question.... Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the lords of the Instrumentality had decreed that underpeople -- derived from animal stock -- should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their posessions and the education of their children. If they became bankrupt, they went to the poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas. It was evident that humanity, having settled all of its own basic problems, was not quite ready to let Earth animals, no matter how much they might be changed, assume a full equality with man."

As this opening passage suggests, Smith treats his readers not as outsiders to whom such worlds must be explained but rather as insiders for whom these worlds are already well known. Consider the opening paragraph of "Dead Woman" which refers not only to some of Smith's other tales but also seeks to debunk existing representations of the events depicted in (yet fabricated for) his story:

"You already know the end -- the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'Mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'Joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story -- the one behind D'Joan. This story is sometimes mentioned, as the matter of the 'nameless witch,' which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was 'Elaine,' an ancient and forbidden one."

Throughout the story, Smith offers many passages which refer outward from the current narration to discuss how the same story was told across many years, across many different media. Here are just a few examples:

"Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'Joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'Joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions."

"There are many famous painting of that scene. Most of the paintings show Elaine in rags with the distorted, suffering face of a witch. This is strictly unhistorical. She was wearing her everyday culottes, blouse and twin over-the-shoulder purses when she went in the other end of Clown Town. This was the usual dress on Fomalhaut III at that time...."

"On the actual stage the actors cannot do much with the scene of the interlude, where Joan was cooked in a single night from the size of a child five years old to the tallness of a miss fifteen or sixteen. The biological machine did work well, though at the risk of her life. It made her into a vital, robust yung person, without changing her mind at all. This is hard for any actress to portray. The storyboxes have the advantage. They can show the machine with all sorts of improvements -- flashing lights, bits of lightning, mysterious rays. Actually, it looked like a bathtub full of boiling brown jelly, completely covering Joan."

"This is the scene which we all remember, the first authentic picture tape of the entire incident."

"You all know about the trial, so there is no need to linger over it. There is another picture of San Shigonanda, the one from his conventional period, which shows it very plainly....This is all clear from the painting, and from the wonderful way that San Shigonanda has of forming them in informal ranks and letting the calm blue light of day shine down on their handsome, hopeless features. With the underpeople, the artist performs real wonders."

"And you have the real view-tapes, too, if you want to go to a museum. The reality is not as dramatic as the famous painting, but it has value of its own. The voice of Joan, dead these many centuries, is still strangely moving....The words of the trial, they too have survived. Many of them have became famous, all across the worlds."

"We know what the Lords Femtiosex and Limanono thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order and they were putting it on tape. The minds of men can live together only if the basic ideas are communicated. Nobody has, even now, found a way of recording telepathy directly into an instrument. We get pieces and snatches and wild jumbles, but we never get a satisfactory record of what one of the great ones was transmitting to another. The two male chiefs were trying to put on record all those things about the episode which would teahc careless people not to play with the lives of the underpeople. They were trying to make underpeople understand the rules and designs by virtue of which they had been transformed from animals into the highest servants of man. This would have been hard to do, given the bewildering events of the last few hours, even from one chief of the Instrumentality to another; for the general public, it was almost impossible."

Smith, thus, depicts a world where the most important stories flow across all available media franchises, get retold many times for many different audiences, with some details being encoded through cultural conventions and others distorted over time. Consider, for example, this description of a gesture which has become more cyptic as it has moved from real-world events to multiple media representations:

"The records show his appearance. He comes in at the right side of the scene, bows respectfully to the four Chiefs and lifts his right hand in the traditional sign for 'beg to interrupt,' an odd twist of the elevated hand which the actors had found it very difficult to copy when they tried to put the whole story of Joan and Elaine into a single drama. (In fact, he had no more idea that future ages would be studying his casual appearance than did the others. The whole episode was characterized by haste and precipitateness, in light of what we now know.)"

Smith's version, then, becomes not the point of origin for the story but rather a debunking of conventional versions.

Not only does he imagine the event as retold many times after they occur, Smith also depicts the events as predetermined because the figures have already become encrusted in mythology. A human intelligence embedded in a computer has run a range of simulations to try to determine how the underpeople can escape their brutal fate at the hands of the human, how they might avoid death. Out of all of the possibilities, she has discovered one which leads to the best possible outcome and she has sought to prepare her followers for that eventuality. Generations have named their children "D'Joan" and have rehearsed the particulars of their mythology so they can play the roles that are required of them. When Elaine, the witch, wonders into their warren by accident, she must be instructed in her expected role and actions, and must be continually reminded her function within the prescripted narrative whenever she seeks to exert free will. Like many of the other scenarios, this script results in the death of its key participants, yet it has the chance of forcing the issue upon the oppressors and forcing them to experience powerful emotions - the pangs of conscience and consciousness - which might lead ultimately to political change.

As we enter the climax of his story, Smith describes not only what happens but how it gets transmitted to subsequent generations, discussing what events were captured by cameras (and in some cases, from what angles) and describing which are preserved in archives, which have been subject to competing interpretations, and which have been restaged and commerated through paintings, video dramas, stage plays, songs, and prose. Such descriptions look forward to our own time when something isn't real until it has been transmitted through all available media channels:

"Fisi, in the pictures, stands back, his face sullen. In that particular frame of scenes, one can see some of the spectators going away. It was time for lunch and they had become hungry; they had no idea that they were going to miss the greatest atrocity in history, about which a thousand and more grand operas would be written."

Smith's writings, thus, anticipate our present transmedia moment and at the same time, offer a critical perspective on how stories flow across media. His own background as an expert on psychological warfare and as an adviser to the intelligence community allows him to anticipate how the spread of information can be manipulated by governments or shaped by dissent movements. In that sense, his references to alternative media presentation of his fictional events represents not simply a formal acknowlegement of the intertextual connections across all of his works but also as a critique of convergence, one written almost fifty years ago.

We might read Smith's fiction as a letter sent from his generation to ours. Too bad so few of us are reading his remarkable stories. Check them out.

To learn more about this remarkable writer, read Karen L. Helleckson's The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

Is Facebook a Gated Community?: An Interview With S. Craig Watkins (Part Two)

Today, I am sharing the second part of my interview with sociologist S. Craig Watkins about his recently released book The Young & The Digital. From the moment I read his manuscript, I knew that his chapter, "Digital Gates: How Race and Class Distinctions Are Shaping the Digital World" would be the one which generated a lot of the heat and the controversy here. Those of us who see the web as key to our vision of a more participatory culture have to be concerned with the obstacles which block many from full involvement. And those of us who celebrate the "virtual community" being achieved through digital media need to be especially concerned with the various forms of exclusion running through our online lives. Indeed, one could argue that for many, going digital involves a kind of "white flight" as they escape the "dangers" of their real world communities by seeking out other like-minded people in cyberspace. Watkins joins a growing number of writers who are asking in what ways our social networks online replicate -- for better and for worse -- our friendship networks offline, networks we know are shaped by continued segregation.

I was struck by a chart Watkins offers showing the language people use to describe and distinguish between Facebook and MySpace, language with long historical associations to our assumptions about race and class in the American context.

MySpace is described as "crowded, trashy, creepy, uneducated, immature, predators, crazy" while Facebook was praised as "selective, clean, trustworthy, educated, authentic, college, private." In other words, MySpace takes on values we associate with inner city slums, while Facebook is tied to the values one might associate with a gated community.

In this installment, I ask Watkins to reflect on these findings and how they might add another layer to our understanding of race in America; I also ask him to discuss the relationship between this new project on youth's digital lives and his earlier work on hip hop culture.

What challenges are educators facing as they try to teach the generation which has come of age in the era of web 2.0?

This is a fascinating question and, I believe, one of many that we are just beginning to reckon with as educators, researchers, and society. Part of my research included spending some time in the classroom and talking with teachers and school administrators.

What I soon discovered is that they are on the front lines of the move to digital. Teachers face a generation of students armed with more personal media than any other generation. Most teachers will tell you that the trend of permitting students to bring mobile phones, iPods, and other devices to school is a big mistake. Just think. The idea that I would have been permitted to bring a personal media device to school would have been out of the question. But it reveals how our values, behavior, and culture are shifting in the digital age.

The main concern among teachers is the degree of distraction these devices encourage in the classroom. It turns out that parents insist that their children carry mobile phones--easier to communicate and coordinate family schedules that are growing more challenging.

In The Young and the Digital I deal with some of the learning and educational challenges/opportunities posed by digital media. There are two kinds of technologies in today's classroom-- technologies that pull students away from the classroom, and technologies that pull students into the classroom. I give some examples of both.

But I am also interested in the social and behavioral challenges educators face in regards to technology. These include issues like citizenship, community, and helping students and educators make smart decisions regarding their engagement with digital media.

Most schools are being forced to deal with student conflicts that occur online and away from school. More and more, administrators are having to contend with issues like cyberbullying or the circulation of photos that reveal some sort of misconduct. These kinds of issues raise questions about privacy and authority (i.e., when is a student's behavior away from school an administrator's concern?) Their are no rule books or precedence for what is happening in the digital world and online lives students build.

I was surprised to learn that many principals are struggling not only with the online behaviors of students but of teachers also. A growing number of teachers and practically all recent college grads going into the profession maintain a personal profile. As you can imagine this raises many questions about the conduct of teachers away from school. Some teachers "friend" their students in places like MySpace and Facebook while others vehemently reject the idea. Like the rest of society schools and the people who run them are learning what it means to "be digital."

Building on work by danah boyd and others, you argue that Facebook has operated not unlike a "gated community" and may directly contribute to racial and class segregation in the online world. How can scholarship on race in the physical world help us to better understand how race operates in the virtual world? What steps should be taken to combat segregation in the online world?

It is easy to get caught up in the wonders of what scholars have variously referred to as "being digital," 'life behind the screen," or the "second self". But as the Web has become a more common experience it has also become a more local experience. That is, we use the World Wide Web to communicate most frequently with our friends, work colleagues, and acquaintances--that is, people we know, like, and trust. To use Putnam's language regarding social capital we use the Web to "bond" more than "bridge." This is certainly true with race.

When danah distributed her blog commentary about the class divisions in MySpace and Facebook, it struck me as a reasonable even predictable outcome, especially if you understand that what happens in our lives online is intimately connected to our lives offline. Some Web enthusiasts, however, were either surprised or annoyed by her claims.

But as your work and that of others show there is still a real "participation divide" that creates varying degrees of Internet engagement. No matter if we are talking about virtual worlds, mobile technologies, or social network sites race matters in the digital world. Most of the movers and shakers in the branding and marketing of the current generation Web show little, if any, interest in the social divisions that still mark the digital world. Mentioning the social divisions that are a part of the social Web is a kind of inconvenient truth. We learned a lot while studying young collegians embrace of Facebook. In reality, most of us use Facebook to connect to people that we know--we "friend" friends not strangers in our computer-mediated social networks. And who our friends are is usually influenced by race, class, education, and geography.

In examining the hundreds of surveys and one-on-one interviews we collected my grad assistant and I noticed a strong preference for Facebook among young white collegians and students more generally with a middle class orientation. It was more than a casual preference; it was also an intense rejection of MySpace. Our research found an interesting "racialization" of MySpace and Facebook among young people.

I began reading some of the research on the rise of gated communities in America and found some interesting parallels in the language used by residents living in physical world gated communities and young white collegians who preferred Facebook (a kind of virtual gated community) over MySpace. They both use words like "safe," "clean," "private," and "neat" to describe attachment to their communities. They both practice what cultural anthropologists call "gating," that is, the tendency to build physical/virtual, social, and cultural walls that are exclusive.

I also turned to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work. I've used his work before to think about the kinds of cultural capital that young people accumulate, especially in the places that they create and inhabit, and how it works as a source of power, pleasure, and mobility. But in this case I was interested in what Bourdieu refers to as the "distinctions", that is, matters of taste, aesthetics, and values that middle class communities reproduce to maintain social and even physical separation between them and those that they view as below their own social status and class position.

When we began our work it was common to see college students switch from MySpace to Facebook. Among other things, the switch was also a bid for a social status upgrade, a move up the digital ladder. Today, middle class students in middle and high school are moving straight to Facebook. Social class distinctions like everything else in the digital age are trickling down to younger and younger users.

I was also intrigued by Bill Bishop's "Big Sort" argument. In short, Bishop argues that starting around the 1970s Americans underwent a massive social experiment that changed one of the most basic features of everyday life--where and with whom we live. The change in geography, Bishop maintains, is really a sorting by lifestyle. Racial and class segregation have been a fact of American life since the early 20th century (see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's work on residential segregation). But Bishop argues that American neighborhoods are now being stratified along ideological and lifestyle lines--not simply "red" and "blue" states but even more carefully sorted and homogenous neighborhoods. There are some interesting parallels in the digital world.

I'm a trained sociologists so I find it quite natural and instructive to look at wider sociological trends to understand what is happening in the online world. I simply can not separate the two.

Finally, social network sites do not cause racial divisions or the desire for homogenous online communities. Insofar as what we do online is intimately connected to the lives we lead offline the fact that a kind of digital sorting is happening is not that terribly surprising. Still, it is striking that among a generation that played a key role in electing America's first Black president race plays a crucial role in their use of social network sites and who they bond with online.

Tell us about the group you call "Four Pack." What did they help you to understand about the social dimensions of gaming?

The four pack is a group of young gamers I got to know quite well while working on the book. I first met Derrick. I interviewed him about his use of social network sites. During our conversation it was clear that most of his media time is spent playing games. I asked Derrick to identify a handful of his peers to join a panel of gamers I wanted to put together. The idea was to get to know them and follow them for a period of time to learn more about their experiences with games. Several young men in Derrick's peer group responded to my inquiry and I eventually settled on four of them.

I affectionately began calling the group the "four-pack." I visited them in their residential hall and established a rapport with them that lasted about six months. The four-pack provided me with what amounts to a life-history of their engagement with interactive media. Every two weeks I issued them questions via email to address in the media journals that they agreed to keep. One week the diaries, for example, may have been devoted to games, and the next week, to television. The diaries were honest, rich in detail, and provided intimate access to a group of young men who embody the rising generation of gamers. Each of the diary entries were followed up with one-on-one conversations.

I learned a lot from the four-pack--their thoughts about addiction, virtual worlds, and the appeal of games. I witnessed up close what many game scholars and industry insiders refer to as "social gaming."

Gaming among the four-pack and their peers was mainly a social experience. Rarely, if ever, did they play games alone. Often games were a way to have fun and also spend time with friends. In their own unique way, each member of the four-pack talked a lot about games as both a social lubricant and a social glue. The former refers to how games can make it easier to strike up conversations with new acquaintances, while the latter is a reference to how games give established friends a fun way to grow closer to each other. Games, it turns out, are the common denominator in their strongest and most meaningful social ties.

Some of your earlier work dealt with hip hop culture. What similarities and differences do you see between the technological and social practices of the hip hop culture and that you've found in your work on digital youth culture?

I've spent all of my academic career studying young people's relationship to media industries and technologies. The work I'm doing on digital youth culture is greatly informed by my earlier work on hip hop culture.

As you know their has been a substantial change in the way scholars examine the cultural practices and identities young people produce. Hip hop, like digital culture, is participatory and performative. Hip hop, like the social media practices of youth today, has always been about young people expressing themselves, building community, while also finding places of leisure, pleasure, and empowerment.

In my last book, Hip Hop Matters, I wrote a chapter titled "The Digital Underground." It was really an attempt to understand how the Web has become the new town square in hip hop culture--the place to find relevant and urgent dialogue about a host of issues facing young hip hoppers. To engage a community of young hip hop enthusiasts about a host of important social issues today you don't turn on corporate radio or read a corporate run magazine. You go online.

The innovative use of technology has been a part of hip hop's story from the beginning. That's how everything from graffiti art to mix tapes has been produced bearing a striking resemblance to the DIY culture of social media today.

My work has maintained a steady focus on understanding the world young people create and inhabit. It's clear that if you want to understand that world today you have to dig deep into the digital practices, identities, and communities young people are building. Writing The Young and the Digital gave me an up-close look at this world. The book and the blog we will be building is an effort to share what we are learning.

S. Craig Watkins teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon) explores young people's dynamic engagement with social media, online games, and mobile phones. Craig participated in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Youth, Digital Media and Learning. His work on this ground breaking project focuses on race, learning, and the growing culture of gaming. He has been invited to be a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).

Currently, Craig is launching a new digital media research initiative that focuses on the use and evolution of social media platforms. For updates on these and other projects visit theyoungandthedigital.com.

Is Facebook a Gated Community?: An Interview With S. Craig Watkins (Part One)

Earlier this year, I was asked to write a blurb for `S. Craig Watkins's book, The Young & The Digital: What the Migration To Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means For Our Future. The book was an eye-opener as Watkins brings a sociological perspective to the kinds of social lives young people are building for themselves through their deployment of a range of new technologies and emerging cultural practices. Here's what I ended up writing about the book:

Why does Facebook have the same appeal as gated communities? Is distraction more concerning than addiction? How do video games like World of Warcraft value friendship? Bracing yet reassuring, often surprising, and always substantive, Craig Watkins acts as an honest broker, testing the contradictory claims often made about young people's digital lives against sophisticated fieldwork.

I don't agree with everything the book says -- that's probably what "bracing" means here -- but it shook up some of my own preconceptions and has stayed with me since I first read it.

We are seeing an explosion of significant new books on young people's digital lives -- in part inspired by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiatives, in part by the pervasiveness of digital culture all around us. I am trying to feature as many of these books and resources as they come out through the blog.

Watkins's book ranks among the best I've read on this topic. The Young & The Digital especially stands out for his close attention to the perspective of teachers as they grapple with the ways new media change how young people learn and to the perspective of young people who may not have the economic and social capital to fully participate in the digital and mobile realm inhabited by their more affluent and priviledged counterparts.

Watkins does not simply celebrate the "democratizing" impact of new media; he also looks at it as a space of social exclusions and in doing so, he calls attention to those factors which make it harder for some to participate more fully in the new media landscape. That's why I have chosen to highlight this interview as part of my contribution to this year's One Web Day with its theme -- "One Web. For All." And that's why I chose to include this book on the syllabus for the graduate course on New Media Literacies I am teaching at USC this fall.

In this installment, he takes on one of the senior figures in the sociological study of media, Robert Putnam, describing the ways that online participation may be paving the way for greater civic engagement, but he also ponders whether the online world may be making us "too social" for our own good, again striking a balance between utopian and dystopian arguments about the impact of digital media on young people's lives.

The Young and the Digital complicates in some important ways the arguments which Robert Putnam makes in Bowling Alone about the impact of electronic media on our social lives. Why did your field work lead you to reappraise Putnam's arguments?

The fieldwork did force me to reconsider some of the more enduring arguments about media and, especially, the well-traveled "Bowling Alone" thesis by Putnam. From the very beginning of the Web as an everyday tool, researchers have openly speculated about its influence in our social lives. Does the growing amount of time we spend in front of a screen make us more or less social, more or less interested in our friends, neighbors, and the world around us? Putnam's most compelling evidence regarding this questions is based on television. Among researchers who study TV as a leisure activity, the medium's greatest legacy is how it influences our connection, or lack thereof, to our neighbors, communities, and civic life. Putnam argues that TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, resulting in the erosion of social capital--a sense of neighborliness, mutual trust, and reciprocity that binds people and communities together. The big fear, of course, is that we will all retreat into our own media fortresses, forgoing any valuable social interaction with friends and acquaintances. While I understand the concern, the research evidence simply does not support it. This was certainly true in our research.

As we began talking with young people and combing through our survey results it became clear that their engagement with technology is first and foremost, a social activity. Conventional wisdom contends that time spent at home with TV is time spent away from friends and public life. But computer and mobile phone screens represent very different kinds of experiences than the ones traditionally offered by TV. Among the teens and young adults that we talk to, time spent in front of a computer or mobile screen is rarely, if ever, considered time spent alone. Screen time, increasingly, is time to connect with friends and acquaintances.

It's true, connecting via a mobile or Facebook is a different way of bonding, but, as I argue in the book, these practices are expressions of intimacy and community. We tend to get caught up on how much time young people spend with their computers and mobile phones. But what I came to understand is that their true interest is not in the technology per se, but rather the people and the relationships the technology provides access to.

Finally, I believe that young people's move online is also forcing us to reconsider another argument made by Putnam's regarding decreasing political participation. The final chapter of the book considers how young people's use of social and mobile media appears to be reversing some of the disturbing trends Putnam documents regarding a once decisive shift among Americans from political participation--for instance, attending political events, signing petitions, or writing an editor or politician. While establishing their support for President Obama, young people used Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube, and digital cameras to essentially redefine what electoral politics will look like in the future. Their use of digital media was social, communal, and in its own distinct way, political.

Throughout the book, you have a good deal to say about the ways digital media is reshaping young people's relations to traditional media (newspapers, television). What insight can you offer people working in the television industry about their prospects of attracting or holding the attention of younger Americans?

I'm glad you asked me about television. My interests in young people's engagement with the social Web is driven, in part, by a desire to understand the shift from television to screens that are more social, mobile, and personal. It's a historic shift and one that breaks from a more than fifty year cultural institution and experience--television as the first and most dominant screen in our lives.

Our research indicates that among persons ages thirty and under television is not the first or most preferred screen in their lives. They are just as likely to view their laptop or mobile phone as their "go to" screen. Young people still watch television but in ways that are quite distinct from previous generations--they watch it while media multitasking, on the go, and online. Moreover, kids are being socialized to engage TV in ways that are distinct from the generations that grew up in TV-centric households. These and other changes have forced a group of executives accustom to the dominance of TV in the household to rethink their business and programming models.

The television industry is diligently struggling to avoid what has happened to the pop music and newspaper industry. The TV business is struggling with what most of the corporate media world is struggling with and that is the question, "who will control content?" It's a hard lesson to learn but the rules of engagement really are changing.

It will be really interesting to see what network television looks like in about ten years. There is no doubt that it will look different but it will largely be outside forces--the ways our viewing and media behaviors shift--that will provoke change. Everything from rethinking the prime time schedule (NBC's decision to decrease scripted dramas and the impending Leno experiment) to the scaling back of the up-front presentations that once defined the industry's premium status among media buyers.

The biggest thing that the industry has to realize is that they can no longer control content or our viewing habits like they did in the past. It took a while but they began putting their shows online and making them available as downloads. Hulu-- a network response to the rise of YouTube--has shown signs of early success for long-format online video. But there is still a debate within the industry regarding this question of control. That is, should the network partners in Hulu make their content exclusive or, as some contend, make it available everywhere. I think it's clear that if network TV is to have a meaningful future it will have to permit its audience to not only access content across multiple platforms but also encourage audiences to shape and influence content, too.

You question the argument that digital media has had an anti-social impact on young people. Are there ways that these new media technologies and practices have made us "too social"?

I think so. Still, I realize that the idea of being "too social" is peculiar. Here is what I mean. The assertion that the Web and mobile phones are making us less social, caring, and involved with others is baffling when you consider the preponderance of evidence that actually compels a substantially different question: is today's "always-on" environment making us too social, too connected, and too involved in other people's lives?

In an "always on" world we are constantly communicating with each other via social network sites and mobile phones. It was interesting to learn that part of the initial appeal of Facebook among college students, for example, was the opportunity for constant status updates as well as the chance to gaze into the backstage world of friends and acquaintances. Young college students consistently made references to what they called, "e-stalking," that is the degree to which their peers frequently use social-network sites to track people's lives, activities, and relationships. Twitter and this idea of what Clive Thompson refers to as "ambient awareness" is another example of a technology that promotes a desire to be in constant connection with others.

In the digital age the idea of being out of touch or disconnected from family and friends is practically obsolete. No matter where we are--in class, at work, driving, or on vacation--the idea of being connected to our social networks is now a constant opportunity and, quite frankly, a constant challenge.

Rather than worrying about the likelihood of becoming anti-social I wonder if the reverse outcome--being too social--is a more legitimate concern. Talk to teachers in high school and you will learn that students are constantly connecting via their mobile phones while sitting in the classroom. Talk to university professors and there is a growing belief that students are constantly connecting with each other via platforms like Facebook while sitting in class. Again, it's the idea that we are using these emerging technologies in ways that are inventively social and dare I say excessively social.

S. Craig Watkins teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon) explores young people's dynamic engagement with social media, online games, and mobile phones. Craig participated in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Youth, Digital Media and Learning. His work on this ground breaking project focuses on race, learning, and the growing culture of gaming. He has been invited to be a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).

Currently, Craig is launching a new digital media research initiative that focuses on the use and evolution of social media platforms. For updates on these and other projects visit theyoungandthedigital.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UCLA Faculty Rally to Support Endangered Arts Library

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

She shared with me this description of the situation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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