The Reconfigurable Culture of Contemporary Music: An Interview with Aram Sinnreich (Part One)

This week marks the release of a new book, Aram Sinnreich's Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture, which should be of interest to many of my regular blog readers. Mashed Up is the result of many extensive interviews with high profile DJs, attorneys, and music industry executives about the issues surrounding sampling, file sharing, and the emergence of new forms of musical production. The book deftly deals with the contradictory ways we think about the legal and aesthetic status of music which builds on borrowed materials, the ways that musicians are making sense of their indeptedness to earlier works, and the ways that audiences are making sense of the emerging practices of music production and distribution in a digital era.

The book's core insights will not only be interested in those who study popular music but also those interested more generally with contemporary forms of cultural production. I learned a lot here, for example, which may be of use in making sense of fan cultural production practices, especially those around Vidding, and my final question here is intended to open up a space of dialogue between fan studies and the kinds of work which Sinnreich does in this book.

Let's start with the book's title. What do you mean by "Configurable Culture"? How does this concept link your discussion of music and technology to larger considerations of cultural change?

Like many cultural scholars, I believe that our societies are constituted largely through the act of collective imagination - and therefore, that the metaphors we employ to understand our relationship to one another have an influence on the kinds of societies we build. These metaphors, in turn, are shaped by the limits and the capacities of the communication technologies at our disposal. In other words, what we make of our culture is largely influenced by how we make our culture.

This has been true for a long time. In oral cultures, for example, the universe was often believed to be created by the voice of God. This is central to Judaic, Egyptian and Hindu origin stories. Literacy brought the metaphor of God-as-author, and with it the codification of laws by state rulers, beginning with Hammurabi. The mechanical age was characterized by the metaphor of universe-as-machine, and by complex, class-based societies, in which each member was assigned a specialized role. These are sweeping generalizations, of course, but even a more nuanced review would demonstrate that each epoch in communication technology corresponds to a complementary set of foundational principles, social metaphors and institutional structures.

Today, our dominant metaphors are all based on industrialized modes of production and mass media, much as they have been for roughly two centuries. In the book, I discuss the many ways in which this "modern framework" both reinforces and is reinforced by our reigning social institutions, from our economic system to our legal system to our educational system. This interdependency between the way we think and the way we organize makes it very difficult for change to happen on a macro-structural level. Yet every once in a while such a change does happen, often in the wake of a seismic shift in the technological or political landscape that renders the old metaphors untenable.

The premise of "configurable culture" is that we are currently in the midst of just such a seismic shift. The collection of new technologies that we generally refer to as "digital" or "new media" have given us an unprecedented power to capture, archive, share, and above all, edit and re-edit many of the elements of human expression. Just as material science was reborn once we could create molecules from their constituent atoms, and much as genetic science is now allowing us to sequence and construct genomes from scratch, cultural expression has flowered in a million unforeseeable ways in the short time since these tools became broadly available.

Because the distinguishing feature of this new communications landscape is our ability to combine and sequence these atoms of expression at our will, I call this "configurability" or "configurable culture." The central question of the book is: Can the old set of metaphors and institutions survive this shift in cultural production, or will we require a new set of operating assumptions? And if the latter is the case, what might these new social structures look like?

(I will address music's role in the next question.)

You start the book by quoting Plato as saying that "The musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of the city's laws." And you end with a concession that Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) is at least partially right to be worried that "democratizing" cultural production may "undermine cultural institutions." What does your book have to tell us about the disruptive nature of cultural change and its relationship to changes in the legal, economic and political structure?

As a musician, Plato's claim in The Republic about the power of music to change the shape of society (which I first encountered as a teen via a Fugs song) has always struck me as both tantalizing and frustrating. Tantalizing, because music's power over my own mind and body was so consuming, and the promise of channeling that power into social change had such allure. Frustrating, because it always seemed to me that music's power was simultaneously monopolized and denigrated by big business, squandered in the interest of making a quick buck.

While I was writing the book, I was interested in seeing how seriously governments and other social institutions had taken Plato's threat over the years, what role their regulations and prohibitions have had in shaping musical culture, and whether the resistance to these regulations has played a role as well. I was also interested in finding out whether there's any substance to Plato's claims--anything actually worth fighting over--and, if so, what mechanism would allow a few mathematically related vibrations in air to ripple throughout the material and institutional structures that bind society together.

I discovered that music has essentially been treated as a controlled substance in a broad variety of societies throughout history, from pre-Hellenic Egypt to dynastic China to America's antebellum south. Although political states, churches, industries and other social institutions have consistently regulated musical aesthetics, practices and technologies, there has always been resistance from the citizens, worshippers and consumers being regulated. Sometimes this simply takes the form of flouting the rules; at other times, the music is cleverly morphed or assimilated so as to evade the eyes and ears of the regulators. Ironically, this cat-and-mouse process has been responsible for a great deal of musical innovation over the years.

As to the veracity of Plato's claims, there is a growing body of research demonstrating the unique role that music plays in a broad range of cognitive, psychological and social processes, from memory to identity to collective self-organization. Historically, philosophers of art have puzzled over the fact that, unlike most other creative media, music lacks a representative function: you can paint, sculpt or write about a tree, but you can't play one on a saxophone. I argue that music is, in fact, representative. But its subject isn't the external world; rather, it serves as a sonic map of our minds and perceptual apparatuses themselves. To put it another way, music is like a schematic or operating system for consciousness--we perceive the tree differently depending on who is playing the saxophone, and on which scales, rhythms and timbres they happen to use.

If we think of society as a network of nervous systems, themselves networks of cognitive and psychological subsystems with different evolutionary origins and functions, we can understand music as a patterned set of instructions that organizes thought, emotion and action at any scale, from the subconscious to the macro-social. This helps to explain why social institutions so often attempt to control the shape and flow of musical expression: it is simply a case of one regulatory mechanism absorbing and exploiting another.

Given this perspective, and my earlier comments about the role of technology and metaphor in bounding cultural and social processes, the fears of Andrew Keen and his ilk have a certain degree of legitimacy. There is little question in my mind that configurable culture, especially new musical aesthetics and practices, betoken a new consciousness and a new set of social operating instructions. Our reigning institutions are built on the once-firm ground of an atomistic, hierarchical society that seemed natural and inevitable to many or most of its members. But, based on my extensive interviews with DJs and surveys of Americans at large, it seems as though a more modular and collective ethic inheres to the new communications framework, and that the metaphorical ground beneath our government, economy, and schools has eroded considerably in just a few short years.

Where Keen errs is in believing that this process is, in his words, "undermining truth" and "souring civic discourse." What's actually being undermined is a system that reserves the power to determine what is true and false for a privileged few. And it is difficult for me to believe that the discourse we witness on Fox News or CNN could be made any more sour or less civic by the inclusion of a few million new voices to the conversation.

You come to this project with a background as both a musician and an industry consultant. How did those experiences impact the stance you've taken in this book?

I'm not sure why, but from earliest childhood, I've always been simultaneously enthralled by music itself, and utterly awed by its power over me. I'm one of those people who has trouble screening music out of my field of attention, and I have the annoying habit of commenting on and analyzing whatever tune is ostensibly playing in background of the elevator, restaurant, or public space where I happen to be. I know I'm not alone, because I married someone exactly like me in this respect. In fact, you could say that this tendency or obsession has shaped nearly all of my major life decisions, from marriage to career choices to the use of my discretionary time and income to naming and raising my children.

As a result of these decisions, I've had the opportunity to experience, produce, discuss and research music in a broad variety of contexts. I can geek out on modal variations with the jazz-heads, swap industry data and gossip with record execs, compare the finer points of MP3 vs. OGG with digital music aficionados, and argue about the merits of Lady Gaga's postmodern self-critique with my fellow academics.

I think this intimacy with music has given me a little bit of critical distance. I've gotten past the giddy romance of it, and am able to listen to it without rose-colored earphones. And understanding how it can mean so many different things to different people in different contexts has given me respect for its beguiling complexity. Music is, and is not, a commercial product, a religious ritual, a language, a psychobiological phenomenon, a performative act, a communications medium, a piece of property. The fact that it can serve each of these functions and more testifies not only to its infinite plasticity but also to its central role in the human experience.

One of my goals in this book was to attempt to reconcile the many faces of music, and to tell a story about it that would ring equally true for each of these musical communities in which I claim membership. Equally important was the desire to dispel some of the enduring myths about music that I believe keep it behind bars and undermine its emancipatory, transcendent, revolutionary potential. If we persist in saying that music is A and not B, then it's neither. How can we possibly understand peer-to-peer file sharing if we only focus on its purported economic costs to record sellers? How can we understand the implications of hip-hop and mashups--and the essential differences between these forms--if we only focus on the question of whether sampling is "theft" or not? What are the social implications of music market dominance by the likes of Apple, Clear Channel, Sony and Viacom, beyond questions of industrial concentration and economic monopolization? I can hardly claim to have laid these questions to rest, but hopefully my book will add some entertaining and illuminating new elements to the conversation.

Aram Sinnreich is a writer, speaker and analyst covering the media and entertainment industries, with a special focus on music. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutger's School of Communications and Information. Named an "Innovator and Influencer" by InformationWeek, Sinnreich as written about music and the media industry for publications including The New York Times, Billboard, and Wired News, as well as academic journal American Quarterly. Sinnreich is the co-founder, with Marissa Gluck, of Radar Research LLC, a Los Angeles-based consultancy firm aimed at the nexus of media, technology and culture. As a Senior Analyst at Jupiter Research in New York for over five years (1997-2002), he produced research reports covering the online music and media industries and provided hands-on strategic consulting to companies ranging from Time Warner to Microsoft to Heineken. Sinnreich also writes and performs music, as bassist for groups including seminal ska-punk band Agent 99 (Shanachie Records) and dancehall reggae queen Ari Up (former lead singer of The Slits), and as a co-founder of NYC soul group Brave New Girl, jazz band MK4, and LA dub-and-bass band Dubistry. Sinnreich earned his B.A. in English at Wesleyan University, an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University, and an M.A.and Ph.D in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles.

Comics and the City: An Interview with Jorn Ahrens

In 2007, I attended a really exciting conference in Berlin which brought together comics scholars from the United States and Europe to talk about the intersections between comics and the city. Here's a blog post that I wrote about the conference at the time. More recently, the conference organizers Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling have published a book, Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence which builds upon the conference, including many of the key papers presented as well as some edited for the collection. My own work on Retrofuturism in the comics of Dean Motter was included in the book in a slightly different form that the version I shared with readers of this blog. The book is organized around five key themes: History, comics and the city; Retrofuturistic and nostalgic cities; Superhero cities; Locations of crime; and the City-Comic as a Mode of reflection. I have really been enjoying reading some of the other contributions to the book. Among the comics and artists represented in the collection are The Yellow Kid, Jason Lute's Berlin, the works of Eurocomics masters such as Francois Schuiten and Jacques Tardi, Batman's Gotham City, Ex Machina, Promethea, Spider-man's New York, Will Eisner, From Hell, 100 Bullets, Carl Barks, and Enki Bilal.

Hoping to call attention to this collection, I reached out to Jorn Ahrens, who teaches Cultural Sociology at the University of Giessen, to share some of his own thinking about the intersection of comics and urban studies. Here's what he had to share.

A central premise of the book is that comics have played a key role in producing and reproducing images of the city. Why is there such a close connection between this medium and the urban imagination?

Joern: The medium itself stems from the emergence of urban culture, especially from a mass media that can not be imagined without the urban environments of modernity. That way, from the beginning, comics can be seen as a medium in and by which a modern urban culture reflects itself by establishing certain narratives and images that help to clarify the self-understanding concerning in which "reality" people might be living apart from their nearest life-world. Comics can do that so profoundly, because they are the first medium that successfully combines the elements of word and image which means that they create a double representation of the world. Word and image both reflect on the social world they are produced in and they may also comment each other. With regard to those very new and unconvenient urban environments they massively participate in the construction of specific imagologies of the contemporary, which is: images of the cultural reality that, although they remain being images, help create access to reality and its perception.

Are there specific ideas about the city which originate with comics or do you see comics as primarily replicating ideas which are in broader circulation?

Joern: I see primarily the coincidence of the historical emergance of an environment of mass society, most clearly accentuated in modern urbanity with its implementation of the modern self, speed, a stone-born-nature, etc. and new types of mass media of which the comic is one. This coincidence, in my view, feeds a very particular and reflexive relation between the comic and the city. The film, too, is involved in this development. However, I see the comic being special here when its frozen sequentiality also corresponds with the frozen architecture of the sublime that the modern city contunally tries to realize.

What have comics added to our understanding of what it means to live in the city?

Joern: Especially they added a kind of commonly shared iconography of the city. Comics made the city readable. The city as social realm strongly refers to communication via images. Comics help turning these images into cultural narratives and aesthetics and to create outstanding icons of modern identity, landmarks of our self-understanding that are, by definition, not bound to specific cities or nations.

Your book cuts across some key divides which shape how comics get discussed, discussing commercial and art comics, American and European comics, historical and contemporary comics side by side. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of adopting such an inclusive approach?

Joern: The greatest disadvantage is, of course, that the field is too broad--you will always miss something. The nice advantage of the approach is that we are able to offer a sort of panorama that covers all these aspects that you are mentioning and in which combination only you might get that kind of overview we had in mind.

Yet, you also made a decision not to include Japanese comics in your mix. Why? What might such comics have told us about the nature of the urban imagination in comics?

Joern: Well, that's kind of an odd story that tells you more about the adventures of editing a book than of conceptualizing it. The answer to this question is far off from intellectuality. As you know, the idea to realize the book based on a conference we held in Berlin in 2007--and that involved a manga section for we, of course, believe manga to be one of the aesthetic and narrative core genres to presently approach urbanity in comics. Unfortunately, we have been victims of some evil curse that, one by one, took away from us any manga author after we grasped him or her. One disagreed with the book's concept, one was depressive, one was moving house, two just vanished and never answered e-mails again. It's a pity. If ever one or two manga scholars would show up who don't vanish again after two seconds, I'd plea for a special supplemental printing.

Some of the comics you discuss deal with specific real world cities while other cities are the projection of the author's imagination. How do these different strategies allow reflection on the urban experience?

Joern: The urban experience is a genuinely imaginative one. It comes up as a dreamworld or as "cities of the fantastic" to put it with the comics by Schuiten and Peeters. Take Berlin, City of Stones, for example--there you can find out that the dealings with the real, historically accurately depicted city are always involved into discourses of imagination about the city and its reality. On the other hand, truly imaginated cities, used as parables or simply as topographies unlimited to the author's imagination, like in the works of Marc-Antoine Mathieu, might give room to communicate deep insight about the nature and concept of the modern city in general. Of course, the modern city is a diverse thing, nevertheless there seem to be some core principles that can be elegantly stated by the means of "graphic literature".

Are different genres of comics apt to lend themselves to utopian or dystopian conceptions of the city?

Joern: I wouldn't put it that way. In my view it is rather the city that creates a utopian or dystopian notion to the use of genre. The use and representation of the city itself, may it be in graphics or plot, determines what the genre communicates its readers.

Joern, you focused your essay on 100 Bullets. Can you explain to readers who may not be familiar with this independent title why you think it is especially significant in understanding the themes of the book?

Joern: What fascinates me in 100 Bullets is that this series creates a kind of double imagination of contemporary urban society and culture. So, firstly, we have quite a decent documentary-like approach that presents highly realistic depictions of the urban life from the far upper class down to homeless people. But at the same time this comic is fully aware of its artificiality (as any media product is one) which it shows by its emphasization of aesthetic stylization and narrative cliché. That way 100 Bullets aptly crosses out the distinction of seemingly reality and creates a double representation of the cultural and social environment it is set in that covers both documentation and deconstructing reflection. Hence, in my view 100 Bullets comes up as one of the most fascinating examples for the immanent capacity of popular culture to unfold complex meditations on the medium and society while it still provides a greatly entertaining narrative and exciting artwork. So, with which subject can that be done better than by covering the presently floating images of the modern city and its characters?

The book brings together comics scholars from Europe and North America. What did you see as the differences in the status and approach of comics research in these two contexts? Where do you see common ground between the researchers?

Joern: I think, the main difference still is the divide in the formal canon. European and North American scholars still often refer to quite a different collection of works stemming from the two quite different traditions in comic culture (and Europe, of course, is far from being a homogeneous comic topography itself). This is not banal or only a problem of data overview. Hence, the different approaches in style, format, and narration also produce a different understanding of the medium and its intellectual reflection. Comics here and there are absolutely not the same and yet--they are. Common ground, then, can definitely be seen in the goodbye to the concept of high culture as much as to the struggle between high and low in general. Research in comics stems from a wide understanding of culture that does not doubt the legitimacy and productivity of mass culture. This is the comic studies' advantage in comparison to film studies. Comics never really had their cinephilia that desparately made them try to be acknowledged as art, too, as we still have to face it in film studies. So, I'd say that comic studies are lustily participating in entering a new self-understanding of modern culture.

Jorn Ahrens is Stand-In Professor in Cultural Sociology at the University of Giessen. His research focuses on cultural theory, popular media, questions of the self, violence and myth. His publications include "How to Save the Unsaved World?: Visiting the Self in 12 Monkeys, Terminator 2, and The Matrix," in A. Holba and K. Hart (eds.) Media and the Appocalypse (2009) and "Der Mensch als Beute. Narrationen anthropologischer Angst im Science Fiction-Film" in Zeitschrift fur Kulture-und Medienforschung (2009). Ahrens was a visting scholar with the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT.

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: Interview with Paul Booth (Part Three)

As I read your discussion of "database" narratives, I was reminded of Otaku: Database Animals which was recently translated into English from the original Japanese and has a number of key arguments to make about the way the model of the database is impacting fan creative expression. Do you know this work? If so, how would you position your arguments in relation to its core claims about the encyclopedic nature of Otaku culture?

I hadn't heard of Otaku: Database Animals until I saw your question, but after reading it, I can definitely see the connection between Hiroki Azuma's work with database cultures and my own work with database narratives. I think there are some truly interesting parallels as well as some differences between my thinking and Azuma's which elucidate some of the more conceptual ideas in both. For Azuma, Otaku culture seems to reside in a similar place in society as does fan culture: "those who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines, and so on" (p. 3). But I think what intrigues me most about his analysis of Otaku is the way it plays so heavily into cultural theory.

Namely, the shift from modernist culture to postmodernist culture in Japan can be chartered, according to Azuma, through the relationship Otaku have to the media texts they enjoy. This philosophical sea change represents a shift from a mode of fan action based on narrative to a mode of fan action based on the database. I hate to simplify the complex philosophical argumentation and the wealth of examples Azuma brings to the table; but in brief, modernist media texts maintain a "grand narrative" behind the tale - that is, we watch to try and figure out the "deep inner layer" of the story. Each individual mode of narrative - television show, action figure, video game, etc. - represents a minute glimpse into this grand narrative, and by piecing them together, we can find the "truth" behind the complex narrative. In contrast, the postmodernist media text has no "grand narrative," and instead each individual media text exists solely in relation to other media texts, forming a database of information. From this database, Otaku can construct any number of individual narratives. Thus, for Azuma, even derivative works (what I would call fan-created texts) have equal value in this model, for these derivative works contribute equally to this database.

I agree that fan-created texts can, indeed, have equal value for fans as do extant texts. However, while Azuma focuses his work on the move from narrative culture to database culture, I tend to look more at the relationship between the database and the narrative in fans' digital texts. Indeed, I look at how fans represent the linear causality of narrative within the inherently non-linear structure of the database. For example, Azuma describes the encyclopediazation of characters from Otaku culture into massive online databases that allow Otaku to create their own characters from common attributes (TINAMI searches). He writes that this database culture is opposed to narrative, even describing it as "non-narrative." In contrast, I describe the way wikis promote modes of fan expression that use and play with narrative form, like narrative re-purposing and textual spoiling.

For example, I examine Lostpedia as a fan-created wiki that reconceptualizes narrative from a linear model to a hypertextual model. Delving into narrative theory, I argue that fans read the discourse of Lost, re-write the story, and then re-present that story in a new context on the wiki, thus transferring the temporality of Lost into a spatial reconstruction of the narrative events. Ultimately, like in Otaku: Database Animals, this argument presents a postmodern view of media texts as divorced from definitive authorship, but one that emphasizes the connection between narrative and database.

You talk in the book about "ludicity." Can you explain what you mean by this word and what it might suggest about the relationship between fan expression and play?

Ludicity is related to one key concept that I return to again and again throughout the book: a particular "philosophy of playfulness" that seems to inhabit contemporary media use. By using the word "ludic," I don't necessarily mean that all media are games, or even game-like, but rather that the manner in which contemporary audiences use media is playful, fun and exuberant. We don't watch YouTube, for example - we interact with it, play with it, and search for clips that match the mood we may be in. Today's media are certainly interactive, but the manner of that interaction simulates more closely the way one might play with a game rather than the way one might watch a film.

This playfulness is one reason I believe the Alternate Reality Game features heavily as a metaphor for contemporary media. To "play" an ARG is a vastly different experience from "playing" a board or video game. For one, playing an ARG relies on not knowing whether you are playing or not - the "magic circle" defined by Johan Huizinga envelopes all media. To play an ARG hinges on making all media interactions playful, for a player may never know if an interaction is part of the game or merely real. In contrast to traditional games, therefore, ARGs are boundless.

For fans, this philosophy of playfulness emerges in their interactions with the extant media text. One can often read a sly "wink wink/nudge nudge" feeling from fan-created texts, one that playfully remarks upon the intertextual relationship between fan worlds. I call this feeling "ludicity" in the book, poaching the term from Tom Brown's "The DVD of Attractions'?: The Lion King and the Digital Theme Park." I use the term "ludicity" to refer to the playfulness - silliness, even - with which contemporary media audiences can engage with media texts. For fans, the playfulness of the fan content indicates a close, lively relationship with the text. For example, fans seem to assert this ludicity in the way they articulate the illegality of their fan fiction in their disclaimers. One fan text remarked, "Yes, I blatantly stole ideas from both Battlestar Galactica and Return of the Jedi ... please don't sue me for doing it. This is for amusement and nothing more." The author here understands copyright ("I blatantly stole ideas") and the necessity for acknowledgment ("This is for amusement and nothing more"), but playfully skirts the issue of legality/illegality ("please don't sue me") with a humorous comment.

Ludicity as a concept of (and in) media studies helps to acknowledge that, despite the seriousness with which we examine fans and other media audiences, it is often matched with a converse silliness - which simply makes studying fans much more interesting.

Some critics might argue that your book is drawn towards the fan boy cannon, focusing on such works as Heroes, Lost, Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica. Is there something specifically masculine about the forms of fan productivity you are discussing? What would your argument look like if you applied it to shows, such as Supernatural, White Collar, or True Blood, which have a stronger female fan following?

I think it's important to note, though, that just because a show may be weighted masculine, that doesn't mean the fan culture that surrounds it is. While there may be a more masculine bent towards the fan objects I examine, I'm not entirely convinced that a show necessarily geared "feminine" or "masculine" plays out that way in fan discussion. Especially in the cases of Doctor Who and Heroes, I see many female fans participating in online discussions and fandom (and of course both BSG and Lost have many female fans).

But your larger question is quite intriguing - is there something specifically masculine about the fan creativity I discuss in the book? To be honest, I don't think there is. One of the conceptual guides I use to describe fan content creation throughout the book is the "Web Commons," or a conception of the web as a source for community and communal action. To conceptualize the web as a commons (and I am far from the first to do so: Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons is instructive here, as is Yochai Benkler's in-depth The Wealth of Networks) is to see its primary function as facilitating communities. My research on fans looks at fans from this angle - not as primarily producers but as members of a community. If anything, I would gender this emphasis on community as a more feminine-style discourse; but I'm cautious to do so because I don't think fans in the Web Commons can be so essentialized. Ultimately, I think that fans do what we all do - join communities, discuss their passions, and find commonalities with others which they can share.

An interesting concern here is the attempt to link work on the narrative complexity of contemporary television (such as the work of Jason Mittell) on the complex practices which fans deploy in processing those narratives. Do the new complex narratives depend on the kinds of participatory infrastructure fandom expands? If so, do they rise and fall with their fan bases?

I'm really interested in complex narratives and how they function within our culture of decaying attention spans. We are often warned that we live in a multi-tasking society, where students spend more time on Facebook than they do writing papers, that we are faced with so many screens we can't focus, and that our attention span is atrophying. But the success of shows like Lost, Heroes, The Sopranos, and other long-form complex narratives seems to indicate that at least some portion of the population embraces complexity. Even contemporary cinema provides a glimpse into this tension: Christopher Nolen's Inception is one of the most complex narratives from Hollywood in a long time, and it's also been incredibly popular this summer, raking in nearly 150 million dollars in its first two weeks. It has also led to hundreds, if not thousands, of online discussions.

I think that there is a link between the complexity of a narrative and the fan practices that accompany it. If there wasn't an audience for complexity, these types of narratives wouldn't get made. But success is not always guaranteed. The case of FlashForward is a good example, as on the surface it would seem to be a textbook case of narrative complexity: a serial narrative, an expansive cast of character, multiple (global) locations, deep mysteries and mythic undertones. Yet, the show never truly caught on, and lost viewers nearly every week. Perhaps with some more time, the show would have succeeded - a second season may have saved FlashForward. But the networks seem to want television that hits that perfect storm of complexity and clarity - a tall order given that many complex narratives deliberately take time to understand. For every Lost there are loads of Happy Towns.

Of course there are a multitude of factors that play into whether or not a show succeeds, not least of which is the quality of the writing (a fault that is difficult to forgive in today's market). But fan participation does, I think, have a major factor on shows that air. The work of fans to keep Star Trek alive and thriving is well documented, and other shows have had similar help: Roswell, Jericho, Firefly, Family Guy, and Futurama, just to name a few. But I think, just as Sharon Ross does in Beyond the Box and Jonathan Gray does in Show Sold Separately, that it's also the indirect work that has a great effect on whether shows survive or not. What I mean is that fans can actively petition a network to keep a show on the air, and/or they can participate online to keep communication about the show alive. By keeping a show in the popular discourse, by creating spreadable media that can be shared among fans and non-fans alike, fans can have a grassroots effect on media, and I think this is where the Internet and digital texts have the greatest power.

Along these same lines, fans also demonstrate that our society's attention span isn't necessarily atrophying - it's simply moving onto different texts than what we've concentrated on before. We are intrigued by complexity, narratives, and games - playful texts that challenge as well as entertain. By using the lessons learned from studying complex (fictional) narratives, we can experiment with new ways to harness this attention. Games such as World without Oil or Ghosts of a Chance tell stories in ways that connect with the types of complexity that we do concentrate on, but also harness that storytelling for social good and educational purposes.

You offer a fascinating rethinking of the gift economy in relation to digital media: "The new gift, the digital gift, is a gift without an obligation to reciprocate. Instead of reciprocity, what the gift in the digital age requires for 'membership' into the fan community, is merely an obligation to reply." Can you explain the distinction you are making here between reciprocation and response? Does the obligation to reply create as strong a set of social ties as the obligation to reciprocate?

This is one of the key assertions of the book: that the gift economy itself functions differently in a digital space than it does in traditional spaces. The reason for this difference is, I think, due to the fact that it has to be situated complementary to the commodity economy. The mashup of the two, the "Digi-Gratis" economy, isn't just about the interaction between the gift and the commodity, but is also about the way each changes the other through that interaction. In traditional gift economies, of the type originally described by Marcel Mauss, there is a three-part structure that governs gift exchange: the giving of the gift, the receiving of the gift, and the reciprocation of the gift. Mauss is quite direct about this third obligation: "The obligation to reciprocate worthily is imperative. One does lose face for ever if one does not reciprocate, or if one does not carry out destruction of equal value. The punishment for failure to reciprocate is slavery for debt" (p. 54).

To envision the digital economy as a type of gift economy, as Rheingold's The Virtual Community does, means a change in the type of interaction presented both by the communities and by the technologies involved. Instead of reciprocation, which implies equality in interchange, I argue that digital environments instead embrace the reply. That is, instead of giving back equally, as would participants in a traditional gift economies, fans in the Digi-Gratis economy need merely respond to the "gifts" they've been given. For example, posting a video on YouTube may garner a few video responses, but to participate in the community formed from this content-creation, one need only respond with a comment. To "give" a blog fan fiction post to a community does not mean that the author wants the community members to each write their own story, but rather to comment on the original post. To create a MySpace profile of a character from Gilmore Girls or Doctor Who doesn't mean that everyone must create a profile, but that fans should reply through accepting a friend request.

In traditional gift economies, the power of the gift resided in its tangibility and transferability. That is, it was valuable because once it was given, the owner no longer possessed it. In the digital, unlike in a traditional gift economy, the gift does not disappear after the giving. When one "gives" a blog fan fiction entry, it is public and universal, and one does not lose it. To reciprocate is therefore unnecessary - one acknowledges the presence of the blog gift (usually with positive reinforcement or constructive criticism) through a response, but does not have to fill the void the gift left.

While I think the social ties created by replying instead of reciprocating are different, I don't think they're any less valued in the fan community. The community lies at the heart of the fan practices I observed for the book, and both the gift and the reply function to cohere that community. It's not that members of the community necessarily fit into prescribed roles. Many repliers also write their own fan-texts and similarly await their requisite replies. But at least in the fan communities I observed, the heart of the interaction remained the strength of the community that was formed by the social ties. In that respect, at least, the gift and the reply seemed to form a more consubstantial relationship with each other - that is, they go hand-in-hand in constructing a digital community.

Paul Booth, Assistant Professor of new media and technology at DePaul University, is a passionate follower of new technological trends, memes, the viral nature of communication on the web, and popular culture (especially film, television and new media). He studies the interaction between traditional media and new media and the participation of fans with media texts. He received his Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Paul teaches classes in communication and technology, popular culture, science fiction, fandom, new media, and the history of technology. His book Digital Fandom: New Media Studies investigates how fans are using "web 2.0" participation technology to create new texts online, and how their works fits into our contemporary media culture. He has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Culture, Narrative Inquiry, The Journal of Narrative Theory, American Communication Journal, and in the book Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy. He explores topics in video games, science fiction, social media, politics, philosophy and narrative theory. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: An Interview with Paul Booth (Part Two)

You describe the role which British fans have played in helping to reconstruct and restore missing episodes of Doctor Who. Can you describe the situation for us and tell us what it suggests about possible collaborations between media companies and their consumers?

The case of the missing Doctor Who episode is, I think, one of the clearest cases of the "Digi-Gratis" economy, and particularly instructive in the way media companies and media audiences can reciprocally empower one another. During the early years of Doctor Who, the BBC erased many of the recordings of the show in order to save tape (this was a common practice at the time and not considered unusual at all). Richard Molesworth has written an extensive history of the production of Doctor Who that describes the multitude of reasons why this erasure occurred. One of the most pivotal early serials, "The Invasion" (1968), came from the sixth season of Doctor Who - and the BBC did, in fact, erase episode one and portions of episode four. They simply did not exist.

Or so the BBC thought. It turns out that many fans of Doctor Who, especially in the early years of the show before the invention of the VCR, collected bootlegged audio recordings of the episodes. These fans would hold microphones connected to cassette recorders up to the television speakers and audio record entire episodes as they were broadcast. Some kept these recordings for years, tucked away in shoe boxes under beds or carted from one home to the next.

When the BBC started to release DVD collections of Doctor Who serials, the erasure of the tapes became an issue: how to release an "authorized" collection if huge portions were missing? The short answer is that some of these audio recording fans of Doctor Who collaborated with the BBC and an animation studio called Cosgrove Hall to present an authorized animation of the missing episode that included a remastered original audio track culled from the scores of illegally bootlegged recordings from forty years previous. By combining the audio tracks from these recordings, the BBC created a master-track that was then animated by Cosgrove Hall to re-present the missing footage.

To me, it is a perfect representation of how the "Digi-Gratis" economy functions. For the commodity economy, the BBC was able to sell its DVD and finance the restoration. For the gift economy, the fans were able to respond to the positive emotion they had gotten from Doctor Who by giving back to the show. To look at this interaction as only one or the other is to limit that interaction: it is more meaningful to the fans that they participated and more meaningful to the BBC that they were able to create a product to sell. Both groups benefited; neither one at the others' particular detriment. I think it's particularly instructive for both media companies and audiences to see this interaction as a lesson. Doctor Who has a strong emotional resonance with fans, much stronger than many shows on the air. It would have been just as easy - and probably cheaper - for the BBC to link the episodes with voice-over, or had actors re-create the script. But by respecting the work and energy of fans, the BBC ultimately created a more robust product that acknowledged those fans' illegal practices.

(The story of Cosgrove Hall and the re-making of the serial can be found in the documentary Love Off-Air, produced by James Goss and Rob Francis, for the DVD of Doctor Who: The Invasion.)

Throughout the book, you draw heavily on a novel called Club Dumas. What new insights does this book offer for those of us working in fan studies?

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas tells the story of Lucas Corso, an expert antique book collector, who uncovers a literary conspiracy among the world's elite book collectors. What fascinates me about this book is the way it specifically details two different popular conceptions of fans. On the one hand, Corso is an active reader of classic literature, who is able to piece together clues that have been inserted into various books throughout the ages to assemble a vast meta-narrative of literature. On the other hand, the evil literati in the book represent the opposite conception: the popular image of fans as fanatical, anti-social, and limited in human encounters.

While an interesting yarn in its own right, Pérez-Reverte's novel also demonstrates something that Roberta Pearson pointed out in her chapter of Fandom: namely, while we associate fan studies most strongly with genre fiction (mainly sci-fi, horror, romance, mystery, etc.), one can truly be a fan of anything - including, in the case of the characters in The Club Dumas, even ancient occult manuscripts. By opening up fandom to outlet, we universalize fandom. Fan scholars can apply the tenets of fan studies in a variety of cultural arenas, to explore new dimensions in cultural studies.

Indeed, good fiction can often spark relevant cultural studies arguments in new and exciting ways. For example, the Footage in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition is a direct and prescient representation of both spreadable media and what I call database narratives. In the novel, Cayce and other Footage followers have to reconstruct a meta-narrative from individual units of the film presented to them as narrative information. Published in 2003, though, Pattern Recognition helps us in 2010 recognize different ways media is spread - this fiction has become useful for analyzing contemporary cultural endeavors.

You examine Star Wars Uncut as offering an alternative model of fan authorship. Explain. How does it resemble or differ from the forms of fan fiction which other accounts have explored?

It seems that empirical data about fans can really only come from one of two sources. We can either ethnographically study fan communities, by joining fan groups, participating in fan discussions, or otherwise involving ourselves with fans; or, we can analyze fan-created texts that populate fan culture. In the ethnographic study, we can easily look at groups of fans - at fandoms - and see how the interaction between fans helps to stimulate interest in the objects of study. In the textual analysis, we can easily look at the creations of individual fans to form inductive conclusions about fandom. It is relatively easy to study either communities or texts, but it is relatively difficult to do both at once.

Star Wars Uncut is, in my opinion, a way of tying the two objectives together: at once, it is a textual analysis of a fan community and a study of a fandom-created text. According to its website, the creator of Star Wars Uncut, Casey Pugh "became interested in using the internet as a tool for crowdsourcing user content. Star Wars was a natural choice to explore the dynamics of community creation on the web - the response from fans has been overwhelming worldwide and the resulting movie is incredibly fun to watch." In practicality, individuals choose a 15-second clip from the original Star Wars (Episode IV, thank you very much) and remake it however they want as long as they follow the timing of the original precisely. Fans have submitted animated scenes, scenes filmed in restaurants or garages, and even one "acted" by the fans' dogs. The 15-second clip is then uploaded to the Star Wars Uncut server where the original music and dialogue from the film are inserted. All the clips are reassembled in the "Star Wars" order. The finished movie is thus the collaboration of literally hundreds of fans, each creating one moment out hundreds for the finished product.

To see Star Wars Uncut as a fan-authored text is slightly erroneous - not only is it the product of a collective, but it's also so completely adherent to the original Star Wars (the timing has to be perfect) -- it can hardly be called fan fiction. Instead, I like to think of this as a form of "Digi-Gratis Fandom." It's not fan fiction because it's the work of a collective (a fandom), and it's representative of this mashup between the commodity economy (Star Wars) and the gift economy (individual submission to Star Wars Uncut).

I think it's also telling that other groups have started to emulate the Star Wars Uncut model. For example, David Seger is crowdsourcing Footloose as Our Footloose Remake, and noted filmmakers Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald are making "Life in a Day" by compiling hundreds of YouTube videos. More ecologically-minded participants may also be interested in projects like "One Day One Earth," which similarly documents one day in the world's history via YouTube. To study fandom presents a useful way of examining these new crowdsourcing initiatives.

Throughout the book, you are exploring new forms of fan productivity and creativity which have emerged in response to the emerging affordances of the wiki, the blog, and other web 2.0 platforms. What do you see as some of the most promising experiments in fan expression? Why have fans been such early adapters and innovators of new media platforms?

In my opinion, one of the delights of studying fans and fan-created texts lies in observing how fan expression can be applied in areas outside fandom. As new technologies have emerged in our digital culture, we tend to examine them using traditional media descriptions; so, for example, when we talk about blogs we're mainly talking about blog entries and we tend to slight the important contribution of the blog comments (the important work of Roger Ebert in this discussion is a valuable exception). In my analysis of Battlestar Galactica fan blogs, for instance, I observed that the fiction itself functioned differently from what we might expect: that is, the blog entry (which was the main fiction story) served as a starting-off point for many complicated and intricate discussions about the meaning of that entry in the comment section of the blog. The community of fans, actualized through the comments, seems to be the focus of the blog in its entirety. The entry presupposes the comments, in a Derridean reversal of sorts.

Ultimately, the way fans interact with new technologies presents new forms of expression online. Another example I look at in the book is the wiki. Fans who contribute to Lostpedia, for instance, rework the confusingly multi-linear narrative of Lost into an inherently linear story on the wiki. But the way fans do this is through intense interaction and group collaboration. Like with Star Wars Uncut, the crowdsourcing inherent in Lostpedia indicates a shift in the manner of textual creation by fans.

One danger that I faced while writing this book was in mythologizing fans. Fandom, it must be noted, is not a panacea that cures all that ails media. At the risk of waxing lyrical about fandom, though, fans do seem to populate the extremes of media use, and many early adaptors of technology do seem to be fans of one sort or another. One thing that I've noticed about fans is that there seems to be a desire to delve incredibly deeply into whatever text they're examining: it's not enough to understand the plot as we see it, but we have to understand character motivations, subconscious desires, etc. Perhaps this intense commitment to the text extends to technology as well: the desire to learn everything about a technology may lead fans to greater and more rapid adoption of new technology?

You write of two competing pulls on all forms of fan writing - "one connecting it to a larger corpus of work and the other building a more cohesive document." What are some of the strategies fans deploy to try to resolve these competing tensions?

At its most basic, fan writing lies at the intersection of a palpable tension. On the one hand, fan writers must somehow link their writing to the extant text. Whether it's a relatively weak connection (setting the action in the same universe), or a strong connection (filling in the gaps between moments on screen, perhaps), the effect is the same: there must be some sort of intertextual link between the fan writing and the main text. On the other hand, though, fan writers must also create a work that stands on its own, that becomes its own text. To be too subservient to the extant text is to rely too heavily on unoriginal material. Fans must put their own spin on the larger corpus, but must also create a document unique unto itself. In order to do this, fans have to reference internally unique moments in the fan text - an "intra-textual" reference. Even an inherently derivative work - Star Wars Uncut - has to make itself somewhat unique to stand out and be noticed (hence the self-conscious nature of many of the clips).

These competing pulls, it should be noted, are not entirely unique to fandom. Mikhail M. Bakhtin described a similar type of tension inherent in language in his "Discourse in the Novel." For Bakhtin, language has two distinct pulls. One, the centripetal, pulls all language to a single, unified language, a correct way of speaking. The other, the centrifugal, pulls language away from a central discourse, towards a constructed view where language mutates and adapts to changes in culture. For Bakhtin, every utterance exists between these two pulls: one, trying to tie the utterance to a larger, unified discourse and the other trying to find alternate meanings and themes within the utterance.

To resolve these tensions, speakers of a language must make sense of a slew of material, much of it intuitively. Through context, genre, and other methods of cultural organization, the "proper" form of language becomes apparent. For example, we train children in school to write in the "correct" way, which is often vastly different (and may not be applicable in) their "real world" lives. To teach grammar and "proper" English is to take a decidedly monolithic look at language - yet the language students use on Facebook or in text messaging is decidedly different. SMS shorthand, Leetspeak, or Netlingo are not incorrect, given their situational context.

One of the interesting things that I found in my exploration of fan fiction on blogs is that the resolution of this intertextual/intra-textual tension resides in the dual nature of the blog form. Since fan blogs are made up of both fiction entry and non-fiction comments, the blog form as a technology helps to solidify this tension - one half of the blog document can refer back to the extant text (intertextually) while the other half can refer to the blog itself (intra-textually). The technology complements the writing. Taken as a whole, then, fan writing online uses technology in a new way to resolve old tensions.

Paul Booth, Assistant Professor of new media and technology at DePaul University, is a passionate follower of new technological trends, memes, the viral nature of communication on the web, and popular culture (especially film, television and new media). He studies the interaction between traditional media and new media and the participation of fans with media texts. He received his Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Paul teaches classes in communication and technology, popular culture, science fiction, fandom, new media, and the history of technology. His book Digital Fandom: New Media Studies investigates how fans are using "web 2.0" participation technology to create new texts online, and how their works fits into our contemporary media culture. He has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Culture, Narrative Inquiry, The Journal of Narrative Theory, American Communication Journal, and in the book Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy. He explores topics in video games, science fiction, social media, politics, philosophy and narrative theory. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: An Interview with Paul Booth (Part One)

This week marks the official release date for a new book, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, which makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of a range of topics which run through this blog. It's author, Paul Booth, has consented to give me an interview where we talk together about the ways that he thinks Alternate Reality Games can shed light on the practices of online fandom, about how we might push beyond the opposition between producer and consumer, about how we might better understand the interplay of the commercial and gift economy as it effects fandom, and about new forms of expression which have emerged as fans work together through social networking sites.

His responses here only sample the richness of this particular book, which draws heavily on digital and literary theory, to encourage us to rethink some of the classic paradigms in fan studies. The work is cutting edge both conceptually and in terms of its range of examples (which include various forms of crowd-sourced and wiki-based forms of fan collaboration that have received limited attention elsewhere.)

The central metaphor for understanding digital fan culture comes from the world of Alternate Reality Games. What can ARGs teach us about new media platforms and processes? What do you see as the similarities and differences between fans and gamers?

To me, Alternate Reality Games are an incredible synthesis of media texts, platforms and outlets. Constructed through a variety of technologies, ARGs are paradoxical: they seem to be ubiquitous and yet they are also fleeting and ethereal. As such, it's very difficult to point to a particular space and say "this is an ARG." They seem to exist in a sort of "space between" media; that is, they are only visible through the contrast with what they are not. They seem to thrive through media camouflage. I'm reminded of the David Fincher film The Game (1997), where Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is caught up in a game that he can't tell from reality. Events that occur in the narrative may or may not be authentic interactions, and he is never sure whether he's playing a game or actually caught up in a series of dangerous adventures.

By viewing the ARG in this liminal state, we can begin to see connections to the way new media platforms and processes function in a converged media environment. That is, ARGs, like new media texts, function precisely because they exist as transmedia entities. Similarly, we're beginning to see media texts that transmediate: shows like Lost and Heroes, which tell much of their stories outside of the television; Webkinz, which takes real-world plush toys and lets children play with them in a web environment; or YA book series like The 39 Clues, which ask participants to read the book and investigate clues online.

These examples, of course, bring up another similarity between ARGs and contemporary media: the economics of them. Many ARGs exist to promote or advertise a product, as "ilovebees" promoted Halo and "The Beast" promoted the film A.I. As we embark upon a more mediatized culture, so too do we find ourselves immersed in a more commercialized culture as well.

It is this connection to contemporary digital media that provides a link between ARGs and fan culture as well. I don't mean to suggest that only fans play ARGs, or that only ARGs cater to a fan base; rather, the connection is more symbolic. Fans of contemporary media and players of ARGs both interact with their requisite text in similar fashions. Fans make explicit the implicit active reading we all do when we pick up a book, watch a television show, or experience some form of media. Similarly, ARG players have to actively participate in the construction of the game itself, often uncovering hidden facets of the game, or participating in the development of narrative elements. Both for fans and for players of ARGs, the contemporary transmedia environment facilitates and encourages playfulness and engagement with many different media.

You are trying to push back on metaphors based on "market or commodity economics." What do you see as the key limits of such metaphors and how does your focus on ARGs seek to transform them?

So much of our discussion about media is based on these metaphors that we often forget that they are, indeed metaphors at all. For example, when we talk about "consumers" and "producers" of media, we're engaging in a discourse that uses gastronomic language to describe commodity economics. In other words, we talk about media in the same way that we talk about food. And the natural end result of this metaphor certainly portrays fans (and other active audiences) in a rather negative light: if media companies "produce" and audiences "consume," then what fans create through rewriting or remixing is "garbage" (or worse: a very nasty metaphor indeed). I think this metaphor ultimately limits the conversation, so even if one talks about "productive consumption," one still remains mired in this commodity mindset.

I think that while there is value in seeing media companies as "producers" and audiences as "consumers," a great deal of excellent work has also recently problematized this conception. I'm thinking of your work in Convergence Culture, Axel Bruns' research in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second life, and Beyond, and Lawrence Lessig's excellent Remix. What these books have done, and what I've tried to do in my book, is to look at the metaphors we use to describe media creation and media reception in different ways.

One of the main paths I follow in the book to re-look at these metaphors is to see how a different economic model - the gift economy - could work to establish a new way of describing fandom in the digital age. Both Lewis Hyde's The Gift and your blog post about the gift economy were quite influential to my thinking in this respect. In contrast to a traditional commodity economy, a gift economy values the social relationships the exchange of gifts brings. I think that if we re-examine the media creation process from a gift economy point of view, what we find is that the categories of "producer" and "consumer" simply don't function in the same way anymore. Instead of media "products" being made for "consumers," content "gifts" are exchanged between both creators and receivers. The media text is a gift, which the receiver can reciprocate through attention, feedback, fandom, or even purchasing advertised products. A gift economy metaphor implies a stronger relationship between content creators and content receivers, with more potent feedback implied between the groups. There is also a greater collaborative potential between audiences and creators, and a more fluid dynamic between the two. I certainly don't deny the economic imperative behind media consumption in general, but I think that in concert with a commodity economy metaphor, the gift economy helps create a more complete picture.

To me, ARGs represent an amalgam of the gift and the commodity economies. I've already mentioned that ARGs are often marketing campaigns, which is a strongly commoditized cultural activity. But I think it's crucial to mention that participants in ARGs can devote hours and hours of time and energy to completing the ARG without ever once purchasing the product or watching the media text the ARG advertises. When I mention I study ARGs, the most common question I receive is, "why would someone invest so much time, for free, on a game"? And I think that's a commodity way of looking at ARGs. Instead, if we look at them as gifts, we can argue that players and participants are using their time and energy to respond to the pleasures they experience in the game. The gift and the commodity economies are not enemies; but rather mutually react with each other. This union of the gift and the commodity is what I call the Digi-Gratis economy.

You discuss the emergence of a "Digi-gratis" culture which operates as a "mashup" between market and gift economies. Explain. How is this different from the hybrid economy Lawrence Lessig has discussed in some of his work?

The "Digi-Gratis" economy is a term that I use to describe the mutually beneficial relationship between the gift and the market economies within contemporary media and culture. As I was saying above, it is difficult to see either the commodity metaphor or the gift metaphor as the ultimate metaphor for understanding the relationship between media audiences and media creators. But through a lens which ties both metaphors together, we can more fully appreciate the extent of contemporary content creation.

The term "mashup" is particularly instructive here, because it implies that neither metaphor dominates the relationship. We typically think of a mashup as a sample from one text remixed with a sample from another text to form a third text. Importantly, a mashup relies on the knowledge of both requisite texts that the audience brings with it: for example, in Mark Vidler's "Carpenter's Wonderwall," the music of The Carpenters is remixed with the music of Oasis to form a unique entity, the power of which comes from that particular interaction. We have to know The Carpenters' and Oasis' original songs in order to fully appreciate Vidler's masterful mashup.

I believe that the concept of the mashup can be instructive for understanding more than media issues, and in fact can describe cultural concerns as well. The "Digi-Gratis" economy is one such mashup. As the name implies, it becomes most relevant in observing the way audiences and creators interact in digital environments. The "Digi-Gratis" economy thrives because neither the gift nor the commodity economy outweighs the other. Instead, through mutual reciprocity, their mashup forms a third type of encounter - the "Digi-Gratis." In many ways, it is similar to Lessig's conception of the hybrid economy, insofar as it does describe an interaction between two different economic styles, and that this interaction blossoms through digital technology.

But one crucial difference between the hybrid and the "Digi-Gratis" economies is that issue of the mashup metaphor. For Lessig, the hybrid emerges in spaces where one economy must dominate over the other. In turn, this dominance implies a focus on one end of the production/consumption dynamic. As Lessig says in Remix, the hybrid economy "is either a commercial entity that aims to leverage value from a sharing economy, or it is a sharing economy that builds a commercial entity to better support its sharing aims" (177). One always dominates.

Alternately, the "Digi-Gratis" implies a mutual relationship between the two economies, and places no emphasis between production and consumption: both are weighted equally. To give a recent example, Old Spice's use of viewer questions and the Old Spice man's (Isaiah Mustafa) answers has been a web hit on YouTube, Reddit, Twitter and other social media. To look at the interaction solely through a commodity metaphor limits the range of complex meanings available to the audience/viewers/responders. Audiences have had a powerful role to play not just in the creation of content, but in the focus of their attention as well. The "Digi-Gratis" metaphor offers a chance to view these interactions as meaningful in and of themselves, while not ignoring the complex interactions between commodities and gifts.

Biography

Paul Booth, Assistant Professor of new media and technology at DePaul University, is a passionate follower of new technological trends, memes, the viral nature of communication on the web, and popular culture (especially film, television and new media). He studies the interaction between traditional media and new media and the participation of fans with media texts. He received his Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Paul teaches classes in communication and technology, popular culture, science fiction, fandom, new media, and the history of technology. His book Digital Fandom: New Media Studies investigates how fans are using "web 2.0" participation technology to create new texts online, and how their works fits into our contemporary media culture. He has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Culture, Narrative Inquiry, The Journal of Narrative Theory, American Communication Journal, and in the book Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy. He explores topics in video games, science fiction, social media, politics, philosophy and narrative theory. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

On Mad Men, Aca-Fandom, and the Goals of Cultural Criticism

A few weeks ago, Jason Mittell published a provocative essay on his blog, Just TV, which sought to explain why he dislikes Mad Men, an essay which he framed through reference to the concept of the Aca-fan as cultural critic. The fact that Jason dislikes Mad Men and I like the series is not that significant in and of itself, but Jason uses the essay to challenge some preconceptions about how taste formations work and to trace the trajectory of his relationship to the series. Here are a few excerpts from what he had to say:

Mad Men is lodged squarely within my habitus: along with other cable series from channels like HBO, Showtime and FX, it's part of the wave of "quality television" serial dramas that has raised the medium's cultural value in the 2000s (as Lynne Joyrich discusses in this volume), and served as the object of much of my own scholarly research and personal fandom over the decade (see Mittell 2006). The show is steeped in cultural references that resonate with my own background as a media scholar, flattering my otherwise esoteric knowledge of U.S. advertising and media history. Nearly every television scholar and critic with whom I interact loves the show, making it required viewing for people in my professional and personal taste circles - in fact while I was writing this essay, Facebook encouraged me to become a fan of the show, noting that 61 of my friends had publicly declared their allegiance. In short, it's a show seemingly designed for me to love, and I have tried to fulfill that prediction by giving myself over to it.

Why did this predicted affection fail to take hold? In exploring this question, I highlight my own aesthetic response to shed some light on the mechanics of taste and televisual pleasure. In looking closely at Mad Men, I'm trying to avoid becoming an anti-fan, as I respect too many people who like the show to actively lobby against or condemn their pleasures. As Jonathan Gray has explored, anti-fans are affectively invested in their own dislike of a cultural object and enjoy sparring with its fans, rather than passively ignoring the existence of the object of their distaste (Gray 2003). Yet simply by expressing and explaining a negative attitude toward something beloved by some, fans often rise to defend their tastes and attempt to argue against critics. In discussing my own reactions with my many Mad Men-loving friends, we quickly engaged in arguments as to whose experience and judgement was more valid and true to the show, and typically ended in an awkward and unsatisfying détente of agreeing to disagree.

I found Mittell's essay enormously valuable -- both in sorting out my own complex and often unsettling relationship to the AMC drama and in terms of raising important questions about the place of the autobiographical and subjective in academic criticism. Game designer and theorist Ian Bogost, on the other hand, was disappointed with the essay, seeing it as illustrative of bigger problems he has with the stance of the Aca-Fan in debates about culture. (I should note in passing that I consider both Jason and Ian to be gifted critics and good friends.) Here's part of what he wrote at his blog:

A critic's job, in part, is to explain and justify his own tastes, and to act as a steward for those tastes on behalf of a constituency of readers. People tend to circle around the critics we respect and, more so, agree with because we come to trust their taste. There are pros and cons to such a tendency, the most obvious downside being that we can avoid stretching our minds by surrounding ourselves with only like-minded ideas.

But for the academic critic, I think the stakes are higher. One can like or dislike something, but we scholars, particularly of popular media, have a special obligation to explain something new about the works we discuss. There are plenty of fans of The Wire and Mad Men and Halo and World of Warcraft out there. The world doesn't really need any more of them. What it does need is skeptics, and the scholarly role is fundamentally one of skepticism.

Thus, the only thing that disappoints me about Jason's essay is that I didn't learn anything new about Mad Men.

Both Jason's original post and Ian's critique of it have sparked extensive discussion and comments, involving many of the top thinkers in the space of fan studies and cult media, and if you did not follow them, you probably should take a look. As often happens, the discussions devolved a little as they went forward with side issues taking over from the central concerns, but there was still much at both forums that should spark thoughts about criticisms.

I weighed in enough at Ian's blog that I don't need to repeat all of my thoughts here. I should note that I was engaging there with the larger issue of aca-fan criticism and had not at the time had a chance to read Jason's essay fully.

Having done so, I must say that I disagree with Ian's central claim that the essay is too self absorbed and doesn't teach us much about the series. The discussion the piece generated at Jason's blog suggests otherwise. Many people there found themselves testing their own embrace of the series against Jason's critique in a way which helped them to better understand their own relationship to the series. Much of the discussion centers on how we are supposed to feel about these characters and thus what kinds of pleasures one derives from the series.

Much like Vic (on The Shield) or Tony (on The Sopranos), I find my feelings towards Don Draper and the other characters shifting almost scene by scene. One scene may cause me to admire Don for his creative vision and intuitive understanding of the culture around him, the next may lead me to despise him for his lack of self-consciousness about how he treats the people in his life. He charms me and he repulses me. Part of that fascination has to do with how closed off he is from intimate emotional expression.

Much of my own interest in the show comes in trying to make sense of my parent's generation. I was born in 1958 and was a child, about the age of the Draper offspring, at the time the events depicted on the series took place. My life was deeply shaped by the cultural forces the series tries to capture, including the shifting values around race, gender, and sexuality, which represent the most loaded moments on the series. I respond to the series often as if I was eavesdropping on adult conversations after they thought I had gone to bed. My father couldn't have been more different from Don Draper on so many levels and yet, I do recognize the forces of emotional containment and stoicism that shape this character in my relations with my father (now deceased.) So, as I watch the series, I find myself drawn into both a search for traces of my parents and their friends in the program's character and in a search for signs of the dramatic changes which the culture underwent in the 1960s. Read in this way, I do not have to have sympathy for a particular character or even for any of the characters in order to be emotionally engaged by the series. For one thing, the characters are drawn with sufficient complexity and nuance that I find myself drawn towards them or repelled almost scene by scene. For another, I have enough affection for the people from Don's generation who have touched my life that I will watch the series out of respect for them and out of a desire to cut through the emotional wall that sometimes blocked me from fully knowing why they felt and acted the ways that they did.

Of course, I recognize that the series represents an interpretation of those times, one seen through a modern lens, but the references to smoking early in the series aside, I don't think the point is simply to express the superiority of our current values but rather to understand the values and behaviors as part of a social system. The series has a strong sense of the ways characters are performing for each other, suggesting how the set of values and practices were mutually reinforcing and thus extraordinarily difficult to change.

Yet, I do see in some of the characters the potential for growth as they respond to the changing cultural environment around them. And that's why, for me, it is very important to watch more than one season of the series in order to understand the evolving nature of the characters (as well as to see the brittleness of some of the characters, such as Roger, who seem charming and dominant in the beginning but show limited capacity for growth.) That said, one of the more interesting strands on Jason's blog has to do with how much of a series one must watch in order to be able to cast a judgment about it, given the almost impossible challenge of doing justice to the complexity of a long form drama such as Mad Men, as well as the obligations of the critic in relation to works they do not like.

In the course of the discussion at Ian's blog, I referenced the manifesto which Tara McPherson, Jane Shattuc, and I wrote as the introduction to our book, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, "The Culture That Sticks to Your Skin." When we published this book in 2002, we saw it as building the case for newer perspectives in cultural studies -- including but not restricted to those coming from the then emerging aca-fan community. We used the introduction to sketch out the defining traits of this new mode of cultural criticism and then used the thirty something essays published there as illustrations of these approaches in action. I will say that I would have been proud to have included Mittell's Mad Men essay in the collection because it speaks to many of the central concerns of that book and the current debate seems to me to suggest that the issues Hop on Pop posed are far from resolved.

I wanted to sketch here briefly the traits we saw as identifying this alternative cultural perspective, since I think they might provide a vocabulary which could inform some of these discussions:

We began the essay with reference to the Cyberpunk movement and Bruce Sterling's suggestion that they were writing in response to a shift from monumental technological achievements to technology that was everyday and intimate, that "stuck to your skin." We drew an analogy between that and the position of a generation that had grown up in a world where writing about popular culture had gained a certain degree of academic acceptability and we had the freedom to write about forms of cultural expression which were central to who we were and how we saw the world.

"Like the cyberpunks, we are interested in the everyday, the intimate, the immediate; we reject the monumentalism of canon formation and the distant authority of traditional academic writing. We engage with popular culture as the culture that 'sticks to the skin,' that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. Like the cyberpunks, we confront that popular culture with a profound ambivalence, our pleasures tempered by a volatile mixture of fears, disappointments, and disgust. Just as the cyberpunks intervened at the point where science fiction was beginning to achieve unquestioned cultural respectability, we are the first generation of cultural scholars to be able to take for granted that popular culture can be studied on its own terms, who can operate inside an academic discpline of cultural studies....The hard fights of the past have won us space to reexamine our own relationship to the popular, to rethink our own ties to the general public, and to experiment with new vocabularies for expressing our critical insights."

We then outlined a series of identifying traits of this "emergent perspective" in cultural studies:

1.Immediacy -- a trait we associate with "intensification (the exaggeration of everyday emotions to provoke strong feelings or a release from normal perception), identification (strong attachments to fictional characters and celebrities), and intimacy (an embedding of popular culture into the fabric of our daily lives, into the ways we think about ourselves and the world around us.)" We offered these trait as a critique of "objective" or "distance" scholarship as blinding us to many defining characteristics of popular culture.

"The challenge from our emergent perspective is to write about our own multiple (and often contradictory) involvements, participations, engagements, and identifications with popular culture -- without denying, rationalizing, and distorting them....We can draw on our personal experiences and subjective understandings to critique the popular as well as to embrace it. Even fans are far from uncritical in their relations to cultural producers."

We linked this concept to shifts in women's studies and queer studies that had embraced the "intimate critique" or "writing from a standpoint," which acknowledged the subjective in exploring cultural issues.

2. Multivalence -- Here, we were arguing against either-or perspectives, insisting on writing that acknowledged the complexity of the popular. We noted, for example, that for some groups which have been consistently marginalized in our culture, they may not be able to describe themselves as fans of dominant cultural productions.

"Their engagement with popular culture cannot be dispassionate, disinterested, or distanced. The stakes are simply too high. Their writing acknowledges the pleasures they have derived from engaging with popular culture as well as their rage and frustration about its silences, exclusions and assualts on their lives. These writers express contradictory responses to the materials of everyday culture and their own dual status as avid consumers and angry critics."

While I have chosen to frame my own perspective of culture in terms of being an aca-fan, because the fan communities within which I have participated for almost 40 years have helped to define how I see the world, and while I often embrace others who share my vantage point, this discussion was intended to signal the validity of many different vantage points from which to frame cultural critique. It simply insists that the writer be honest both about their stakes in their object of study and about the contradictions that they see within the works they are examining. For me, there is nothing "comfortable" or indulgent about taking seriously these two demands. And Mittell's essay demonstrates an ongoing process of self-reflection and self-questioning, exploring contradictions in the text and in his own relation to it, while offering respect for those who differ with his perspective. Not everything written under the "aca-fan" banner does so, to be sure, and so I see Bogost's critiques as a challenge to re-examine our own critical practices and theoretical positions.

While these two traits arose in the course of the discussion at his blog, the remaining traits we identified did not and they also help to round out our expectations about what would constitute quality scholarship in this tradition:

3. Accessability -- We challenged our fellow scholars to take the steps needed to open up their cultural analysis and critiques to a wider public, recognizing that academics are not the only ones who are concerned with the place of popular culture in their lives and suggesting that there is a political stakes in creating resources that are valuable to readers beyond the ivory tower. In a sense, both Mittell and Bogost, along with many other academic bloggers, embody this challenge to expand the address of cultural criticism so that it might engage with fans, policy makers, journalists, industry insiders, artists, and a range of other publics. I am proud of how much progress our field has made along these lines over the past eight years.

4. Particularity -- We summed this up quickly as "details matter" and went on to explain why overly generalized criticism and the sweeping dismissals of whole sets of cultural practices of the previous generation was no longer adequate to the new contexts in which popular culture was produced, circulated, and consumed. We saw the push away from broad theory and towards specific case studies (and within that, case studies that were attentive to as many details as possible) as embodying this shift in the nature of criticism.

5.Contextualism -- Here, we sought to counterbalance our focus on meaningful details with a recognition of how they illustrated and embodied large trends in our culture. As we wrote,"

we view popular texts not as discrete entities that stand alone but instead exist in relation to a broad range of other discourses, placing media production and consumptions witihin a social and cultural configuration of competing voices and positions. Rather than cannonize a text for its intrinsic or inherent value, we try to understand and articulate more fully the framework within which individual texts are produced, circulated, and consumed."

6. Situationalism -- Basically, this trait calls for attention to the contexts within which we are writing, recognizing that we write from a perspective of local knowledge and within our own historical moment, rather than seeking criticism which is universal and timeless.

I am not doing justice to the complexities of this essay, which examines a broad array of different scholarly, critical, and intellectual projects, and would urge you to track down the book and look through its contents. There are many essays there which illustrate the complexities and challenges of creating this kind of criticism. Many of them, I suspect, would embody the kinds of cultural criticism that Bogost has called for at various points during this exchange. These traits set exacting standards which we impose upon ourselves as critics. I don't always meet these standards in my own work, either on the blog or in my publications, but these are the criteria by which I judge my own performance and by which I measure the quality of other people's writing.

Like Bogost, I'd love to see more ongoing discussions about the goals and roles for cultural criticism in the 21st century. If nothing else, Jason's Mad Man essay has helped open up such a conversation and that's more than it's reasonable to expect from any given piece of critical writing. Thanks, Jason and Ian, for the provocation. I am going to be traveling this week and so my ability to respond will be circumscribed, but I would be happy if this post might serve as a fresh start to get out of the entanglements caused by competing understandings of what a fan is and to focus instead on competing ideas about how and why academics should write about popular culture. We received surprisingly few reactions to our own 2002 provocations along those lines, so I would be happy if we could restart the conversation now.

Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part Two)

One goal of the book is to help identify design principles that encourage game designers and players to reflect more deeply on their ethical choices. What would a designer learn from studying the contents of this book?

COLLEEN: You ask the question I'm super invested in and excited about! On one hand, I think we have to be careful about what we mean by ethical choices in the context of designing and playing. Both design and play are inherently transgressive (if they are any good). They push against the boundaries of rules and norms to create new experiences. At least, this is what many of us (designers and players) aspire to. I think what's really exciting about the collection of essays in the book is how each author defines ethics on their own terms, but also in complementary ways. I think the book gives designers the freedom to consider ethics not just as a property of games (to shoot or not to shoot?), but as an active engagement with players, context, and culture. Considering ethical choices as a way of thinking about game design and where and how games take form expands the boundaries of what we think about when we consider a game. The playing field extends beyond the game itself to the social context and the rhetorical perspectives (intentional or otherwise) of its creators (to borrow from Ian Bogost's model of persuasive games).

Do ethical concerns emerge differently in single-player and multi-player games? If so, how are the social dimensions of games being harnessed to encourage greater ethical reflection?

MIGUEL: Even though much of my work is focused on single-player games (as I understand them being the singularity that allows us a deeper understanding of games as ethical systems), I think the right answer to this questions is to say that we, scholars and sometimes developers, don't often think about ethics and multiplayer, and how to harness the social for creating this kind of meaningful play. I mean, the social is always moral (and political), so I guess we are taking it for granted, and focusing much more on this solitary experience (clearly influenced by other media that some could understand operate this way, even though careful reading of say Brecht shows that even epic theatre understood the audience as a social body, even though the experience of the play was individual - but I digress). In other words: we tend to forget multiplayer, and social dynamics, when thinking about the design of ethical gameplay, and we focus too much on either single player, or how the rules/mechanics of a system will affect a single player, even in a multiplayer game.

I think there is much work to be done regarding multiplayer ethical gameplay design. I feel that games like Diplomacy, or Defcon, or even RPGs (specially the swedish school of "jeepen games") have understood how to design particular multiplayer mechanics that generate ethical gameplay. Of course, backstabbing is one: but how does it work? Does it always generate ethical gameplay? How about harnessing empathy, solidarity, other values that are at play in multiplayer contexts? This question you're asking points us, I think, in the right direction: how to include the social, that which cannot be proceduralized, into the design of ethical gameplay?

My answer? By understanding how does a game system operate when creating ethical experiences (high abstract order), and then trying to think about mechanics that translate that into player-to-player behavior. I think the "Fragile Alliance" multiplayer mode in Kane and Lynch does this very well, for example: being a traitor is fun, but it's also a moral decision, one that is recognized so by both the game system and the game players, both reacting to a particular ethical choice.

COLLEEN: Adding another real person into the equation certainly changes the game. Interacting with unpredictable real people demands dynamic ethical choice-making from the start. You can't really grief an NPC! I think, however, it's more difficult to for designers to harness ethical choice-making in these social situations. In MMORPGs to grief or not to grief is really a player choice - like bluffing in human-human poker - these are not "designed" ethical choice moments. They are emergent aspects of play which designers don't always anticipate. This unpredictability is the magic of games and I think it's also where ethical play is more complicated and interesting. The complexity of emergent play - particularly in social play - can't always be harnessed, but it can be sought after. I think the flip-side to this fairly optimistic view of social and ethical dimensions is where we see social games designed around behaviorist concepts to

generate responses like addictive play, social coercion, and perhaps the worst evil of all, spam. I think there are definitely some ethics to consider here. Do we need a game design code of ethics?

Several of the writers note that all games are in some sense "ethical systems." Yet, certain games recur across many of the essays, suggesting that there may already be a canon of "ethical" games within this new field. What are these games doing which makes them such rich examples for research?

MIGUEL: Well, what the games I tend to analyze do right is to think about ethical gameplay beyond the basic consequentialist dilemma posing in a black-and-white moral universe. When we think about ethical gameplay, we immediately fall prey of the binary dilemmas, of the clashes between right or wrong, or between greater and lesser evils. Which I think it's often both too ethically coarse and a waste of time. Games can contribute to fostering our moral values, but they can only do so inasmuch as they first address us, players, as moral beings, then challenging our values and forcing us to reflect about our very notion of morality.

Binary dilemmas just help us corroborate our values - we don't need to challenge them, we act by them. The canon of "good" ethical games presents us with challenges beyond choices, a way in which we can use play to learn, develop and evaluate our own morality, both as players and as citizens. The games I find the most interesting are those in

which either there are no choices (Shadow of the Colossus) or the choices have effects I cannot easily predict by trying to understand the algorithms behind the game, therefore effectively making me develop ethical, and not instrumental strategies (Fallout 3).

KAREN: There are quite a few games that were mentioned regularly throughout the book collection and across multiple authors--games that could be considered part of a growing canon. These were typically games that attempted to include some type of ethical components or questions, or game play that ascribed some type of morality points to how you behave in the game. Some of these games, such as Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, and Fallout 3, incorporated a system (which varied from being transparent to opaque), where depending on your choices (e.g., actions in the game, or your dialogue selections), your avatar would be placed on a scale that was related to his or her ever-changing honor, ethics or morality. As a result, different options or interactions would open up due to your avatar's status on this scale. Other games did not use an ethical lever as part of describing your avatar, but offered an ethical choice that had certain direct outcomes, such as in Bioshock I/II. There are also some games that bring up specific ethical issues or concerns through their game content, narrative or other mechanics, such as Super Columbine

Massacre RPG or the Grand Theft Auto series. Thus, many of the authors in this collection analyzed the extent to which these games truly support ethical thinking, and provide the ability to experiment with one's own ethics and values, as well as which types of principles might better support this. I am personally interested in the moments in games when players have difficulty deciding what is right or appropriate to do, and how they think through those decisions.

On the other hand, I believe that all games (and any type of artistic expression) to some extent embody and express values--from everything through their modes of production and distribution, their mechanics and rules, to their cultural touch points and the ways subcultures form around them. For example, how a game is staffed or advertised may

have ethical implications, and there are values embedded in the way a particular game's world is designed. Again, while many games mentioned in the books more directly present ethical content and mechanics around ethics, potentially any game could be a site of interest because of the ways they were used, written about, or played with other people. For example, what is the function of using cheat codes in games?; how do players negotiate with each other in a given game, particularly ones that require social interaction?; and what are the rules around play? Any game can be a beneficial site for exploring ethical issues.

Interestingly, I've noticed that in the past few years, many games, particularly RPGs, have had more direct ethical components and have been quite popular. I believe this may be because games enable you to experience a new perspective--a new role--and one's ethical identity is an important part of this perspective. Being able to access diverse

ethical perspectives is perhaps even necessary for fully appreciating humanity. Through play, we are able to access new ways to experience the world, understand humankind, reflect on our identities, our destinies, our pasts and our mysteries. We may never fully answer these questions, but hopefully games can help us approach them.

Other essays describe so-called "serious" or "educational" games which are created specifically to foster ethical reflection. What are these games doing that's different from those already on the market?

COLLEEN: I'm not sure these games are doing anything different on a formal level, but they are certainly coming out of different development contexts from AAA titles, or "mainstream" videogames. Many of the games referenced in the book are the result of a different economic model: research funding and university/not-for-profit labs. In the last 5-10 years some exciting models have taken form in New York (I have heard it referred to as "The New York School") where there's lots of cross-pollination between academia and industry, enabling lots of low-risk experimentation and new funding possibilities/models. Out there in Cali you guys have some very exciting things happening as well, particularly at your institution, Henry! I think in order to build games that take risks with content and gameplay, there needs to be these kinds of alternative spaces and collaborations to experiment and learn.

The market is definitely changing and diversifying as well. Over the last month console sales dropped and mobile game sales skyrocketed. More distribution platforms for all kinds of games will definitely also help "serious" and "educational" games reach wider audiences, and exist across different platforms and in different contexts.

Games encourage what James Paul Gee describes as "projective identification." How is this concept linked to notions of "empathy"? What role does "empathy" play in fostering ethical reflection through play?

MIGUEL: As a Virtue Ethicist, I would argue that empathy is one of the core virtues that needs to be fostered in order to achieve the good life. However, in games, empathy presents itself in a different way. Let me start with a question - what or who do we feel empathy for in games? In the case of multiplayer games, the answer is easy: other players. Therefore, any game that includes some kind of systemic reward for behaviors that are empathetic will foster that value, and hence maybe not provoke ethical reflection, but have an ethical outcome.

In single player games, though, what is the object of empathy? AI researchers aspire to create empathy for artificial agents, but I am not certain we are there yet. We do feel empathy though for characters and locations, that is, not for the way a particular agent behaves, but for the role a particular agent plays in the game narrative or fiction. So using this instinctive care for the plot (if you wish to call it so - there is no story requirement, and open-world games also foster care for the place), developers can create engaging ethical

experiences based on one of the values that are cardinal to fulfilling the good life. Play, then, becomes valuable.

COLLEEN: I love how you connect empathy to Gee's concept, because in many ways I think Gee has developed a more nuanced - and realistic - model for empathy in games. The role of empathy is key to ethical thinking, since ethical possibilities are always in flux and specific to the situation and people/entities involved. Gee's concept of projective identification goes beyond just trying to understand another person through reflection or thought, it's a verb - learning how to think like someone else by playing them - and by practicing them. That said, I think bridging these experiences between the game and the real world is where the reflection is potentially more potent. The game is a practice space, but it is inherently limited. In many cases, players are not just identifying with the roles they are playing, they are trying to understand what the game - or the game's designers - will reward and they'll play accordingly. In "trw" (the real world) there

are many more possibilities and while stuff learned in the game can be tried out, it will likely produce very different results.

KAREN: This question is of particular interest to me, as I am currently

writing my dissertation on the relationship among play, empathy and ethical thinking! It was also an integral part of the game I co-designed, called Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony? I outlined the design process for this game in one of the chapters in the book, called, "Using Mission U.S. For Crown or Colony? to Develop Historical Empathy and Nurture Ethical Thinking." Mission U.S. is developed by Channel 13/WNET, Electric Funstuff, historians from CUNY and researchers from EDC. It is an adventure game that teaches historical thinking skills to Middle School students. The game, which centers around the Revolutionary War and Boston Massacre, invites the player to explore 1770 Boston as printer's apprentice, Nat. We argue that through playing the game, the player and avatar form a new avatar-self relationship that embodies both the social conventions of 1770 Boston and the modern-day knowledge of the player. In a sense, we can argue, the player projects his or her identity onto this avatar, thereby

strengthening the ability to see through the eyes of Nat, and empathizing with Nat's 1770 context.

So, although I'm still thinking through this complicated question, my hypothesis (and gut reaction) is that empathy plays a strong role in fostering ethical reflection and reasoning (in games and outside games), because it enables a person to take on a new role, project

one's self into that role, and to perceive the world through those new eyes and from within a new ethical system. Similarly, empathizing with another person in any context allows one to think through their perspective, and start to consider other's points of view, which is

helpful when deciding what is right and wrong in a given situation. In the practice of argumentation, for example, it's one thing to tell your side, but it's a stronger argument if you know what the other side is thinking, and how to incorporate that into your thesis. People are really good at stating their opinion, but not as good as considering other's opinions and building an argument that predicts and addresses contrary opinions. Yet, as citizens in a democracy, it is absolutely necessary to be able to empathize with others so we can judge ethical issues more holistically, argue our opinions more substantially, and decide the best solution to complex issues. From my experience with Mission U.S. and beyond, I think that games have the potential for helping support "projective identification" and empathy,which in turn can help people become better ethical thinkers--and more

engaged citizens.

Karen, the American Revolution was the subject of both your thesis project at MIT and your new initiative, described in the book. What lessons did you learn from your student work that has informed your new project? Why do you think the American Revolution is especially rich as a context for exploring the kinds of historical questioning that have been at the center of these projects?

KAREN:Yes! How lucky was I to work on two interesting history-focused

projects?! Working on my MIT Comparative Media Studies masters thesis project, Reliving the Revolution, was definitely a strong impetus for developing this book collection. It also helped me to shape the game design for Mission U.S, a game that teaches kids historical and ethical thinking skills. Reliving the Revolution is a location-based GPS-enabled game that lets players to step into the shoes of historic figures involved in the Battle of Lexington, and relive the events leading up to and after the battle, so they can figure out together who fired the first shot. To do this, the players explore present-day real-world Lexington, MA, and also interact with virtual historic figures and objects accessed through a mobile device. The purpose of my project was, in part, to help students start to realize that historic moments are interpretable, and that there were many perspectives on what happened during this specific moment. Likewise, I believe all moments--both past, present, and future--are interpretable. I believe that being able to critically analyze these moments, and consider other's perspectives, helps us be better at deciding what is right or wrong in a given context.

History is a great way to practice interpretation, analysis, multiple perspectives and empathy--all important components of understanding complex social and ethical issues. Some may balk, but historical thinking and ethical thinking are, to me, not very different. History just adds another dimension to a moment--time--which affects how you

analyze a particular context. To be a good historian, you need to embody a historical time period, and its unique values, morals and norms. I would argue that historians could (and do) readily apply their skills to current and future moments. When playtesting Reliving the Revolution with Middle School students, I was pleased to see how

naturally the students translated their skills to thinking about current events, and wondering how, for example, the War in Iraq would be written about differently in textbooks there versus here.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to apply my experience to a new game, Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony, which was developed as part of a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant, and as I mentioned earlier, designed by Channel 13/WNET, Electric Funstuff, historians at CUNY, and EDC. The climax of Mission U.S. is the Boston Massacre, which the player, in the role of a printer's apprentice named Nat,

experiences first-hand. Yet instead of showing one version of the event, we built the game so that each student in a class could potentially see totally different versions of what happened. To do this, we created eight different vignettes about the Massacre, some

that displayed the Loyalist/British take on what happened, and some that leaned more to the Patriot perspective. The choice of vignettes that are presented are randomized for each player. After playing the Boston Massacre module of the game, the students then have the opportunity to discuss with their peers why there were multiple interpretations and perspectives on the event. Later, they also have the ability in the game to participate in a deposition where they could tell an officer what they think happened at the event--their testimony even has consequences on their game play. I know it sounds

crazy, but even just the idea that there can be other points of view on the past--and that kids can be active arbiters of historic moments--is an epiphany for many young students. Most students just get fed history facts from a textbook! But being critical thinkers of past

and present moments is necessary for developing engaged citizens in a democracy and a globally interconnected world. No one opinion or interpretation is enough, so we all need to be responsible for considering many points of view and appropriately expressing our own.

I hope this collection will inspire everyone to find ways--perhaps through games and play--to teach these important skills to young people (and adults, too!).

Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning lab), a lab focused on developing new games, simulations, and play experiences for experimental learning and social issues. Projects range from a curriculum in game design for the Boys and Girls Club, a card game for the Red Cross Climate Centre, and big games such as Re:Activism and the sport Budgetball. In addition to work in social games and interactive media, her research focuses on the social aspects of the design and prototyping process. In this vein, she is working with the Social Science Research Council on a prototyping approach to creating innovative mobile learning spaces with youth, public schools and cultural institutions, with funding through the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Member of the game design collectives Local No. 12 (see backchattergame.com) and The Leisure Society. India China Institute Fellow (2006-2007). Interactive work shown at Come Out and Play, SoundLab, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time. BFA, Media Arts Pratt Institute, graduate studies in Computer Science, CUNY and International Affairs, The New School.

Miguel Sicart is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book, The Ethics of Computer Games, which is based on his doctoral work, was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.

Karen Schrier is a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she is finishing her dissertation on ethics and games. She also currently works full-time as the Director of Interactive Media at ESI Design, an experience design firm in New York City. Her first co-edited book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, was published last March by IGI Global; the next book in the collection will be published in early 2011. Previously, she worked as a portfolio manager and executive producer at Scholastic, where she spearheaded digital initiatives for the Corporate and International divisions. She has also worked at Nickelodeon, BrainPOP and Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes. Karen was the Games Program co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in 2008 and 2009, currently serves on the advisory boards of the Computer Game Education Review (CGER), and is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School. Karen has spoken on games and learning at numerous conferences, including GDC, SIGGRAPH, AERA, Games for Change, NECC, and SITE. She also helped develop numerous games and digital properties, such as Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?; Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, and Scholastic.com; and Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect. Her digital and non-digital games have been featured in festivals such as Come Out and Play. Karen holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.

Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part One)

A year or so ago, Karen Shrier, an alumna from the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, asked me to contribute a forward to a book she was co-editing on Ethics and Games with David Gibson. The opening of the piece I wrote for her book gives some sense of how I personally think about these issues:

What a videogame does at heart is teach you how, in the midst of utter chaos, to know what is important, what is not and act on that" -- Colonel Casey Wardynski

"I'm reviewing the situation. Can a fellow be a villain all his life?" or so asks Fagin, the scheming and ruthless mastermind of an army of thieving young boys, at a key moment in Oliver!, the musical based on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Fagin's "situation" may be an odd place to start in thinking about the potential role of games in providing ethical and moral instruction--after all, Dickens used Fagin to embody the negative influences which besieged young men when society turned their backs on them--but bear with me.

In Oliver!, through the song, "Reviewing the Situation," we have a character digging deep into his own goals, values, and place in the world, and openly proclaiming that his experiences as a "villain" make him ill-suited to most of the trappings of a "normal life." Fagin's self-reflection leads him to construct and test a series of scenarios (marrying, joining respectable society, getting a job, living alone, freeing the young men in his employee, reaching old age), each embodying an alternative version of himself. Fagin plays out their consequences as a series of thought experiments, before pulling back and deciding to "think it out again." In the course of "Reviewing the Situation," Fagin engages in a range of different cognitive processes--projecting alternative versions of himself, and speculating about possible choices and anticipating their consequences--all in a particular kind of mental space that has no immediate consequences for his current social situation, though it has the potential to reshape the way he sees himself and his place in the world. Here, for example, he explores what it would be like to work for a living: "Is it such a humiliation for a robber to perform an honest job? So a job I'm getting, possibly, I wonder who my boss'll be? I wonder if he'll take to me...? What bonuses he'll make to me...? I'll start at eight and finish late, At normal rate, and all..but wait! ...I think I'd better think it out again."

Now consider a typical adolescent, seated in front of her computer screen, beginning to construct a character for a role playing game, and facing the same range of questions about her potential identities and goals. Should she join the dark horde, embrace a life as a villain, commit atrocities on other players, and in the process, begin to experiment with and potentially exorcise the darker side of her own personality? Or, should she become one of the good ones, going out to do heroic deeds, sharing the loot with others in her party, rescuing those in distress and helping newbies learn to play, and developing a sense of responsibility and accountability to others in her guild? Should she design an avatar that reflects the way she sees herself or should she embrace a fantasy radically different from her real world personality or situation and in so doing, see what it might be like to walk in a different set of moccasins?

Like Fagin, she can try on different personas, test different scenarios, and imagine alternative moral codes through which she might navigate the challenges of her day-to-day existence. She has the option of taking risks, dying, rebooting, and exploring another course of action: "I think I'd better think it out again." While young people have often found it difficult to anticipate the future consequences of their current actions, the game offers her a powerful tool through which to accelerate life processes and thus play out in the course of an afternoon several different scenarios and their consequences. And through in-game cameras that allow players to record and replay their actions, she can literally review the situation, going back to key choice points and retrospectively evaluate where she went wrong and how bad decisions led to negative consequences. Seen in this way, the computer game constitutes an incredible resource for self-reflection and personal exploration, one with rich potentials for moral and ethical education. No other current art form allows such an intense focus on choices and their consequences; no other art form allows us this same degree of agency to make our own decisions and then live through their outcomes.

Over time, Karen's project expanded into two edited collections, the first of which is already out in the market, the second of which will appear late this year or in early 2011. If you want to buy the first book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play, Karen's publisher is generously offering readers a chance to buy a copy at half price if they follow this link. You can see the table of contents for the collection here. The second book will be called Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques, and Frameworks.

Taken together, the two books bring together an impressive array of game designers, theorists, and critics, representing a mix of people working on mainstream commercial and alternative "serious" games production, a global community of people trying to think through the core issues implied by the books' titles. I read the first volume with great interest (and no small amount of pride at seeing my former student at the center of such an effort): the topic is one which deserves more attention than it has and the book offers us some important ways to complicate the typical arguments around games and media effects. These books are important not only to those deeply invested in games but to the growing community of people invested in new media literacies and education, given the centrality of games to the cultural lives of young people and the importance of encouraging self reflection and ethical skills.

In the hopes of calling more attention to this project, I asked Karen if she would do an interview for this blog. The interview has grown into a conversation between Karen and two of her contributors, Miguel Sicart (IT University of Copenhagen) and Colleen Macklin (Parsons The New School), which explores games (in many forms) as ethical systems and as vehicles for shaping the empathy and identification of their players.

As the book's preface suggests, ethics and games is an "emerging field of study." What role do you see this collection playing in generating interest and awareness around this topic?

Karen: A major goal of my co-edited collection, Ethics and Game Design:Teaching Values through Play is to bring together the diverse and growing community of voices and begin to define the field of ethics and games, identify its primary challenges and questions, and establish the current state of the discipline. To start to unpack this, I brought together experts from a variety of perspectives--such as computer science, art history, education, philosophy, law, game design, management, media studies, and psychology. These designers, practitioners, educators and researchers wrote almost 40 chapters on everything from the ethics of Farmville's game mechanics; to a case study on designing Train, a non-digital game about the Holocaust; to the types of ethical play styles of teenagers. Our goal is to encourage game designers to think through and address ethical questions and issues in their designs; to motivate educators to seek new ways to support ethical thinking and reflection through play; and to inspire researchers to develop relevant frameworks and methodologies, design principles and theories for understanding this complex field. Attention to this field is essential for developing citizens who can think deeply about ethics; fully engage with complex issues; reflect on their values; and decide what is right for them, their families, their societies and the world.

My hope is that the collection will provide the foundation to start an engaged, rigorous dialogue around games, play, and ethics. The book collection, however, is just the first step in building a larger community of researchers, policy makers, journalists, educators, game players, and designers who are interested in moving the question beyond whether games are inherently good or bad, to how games and play can support ethics and citizenship skills.

And wow, it was a lot of work putting this collection together, but it was totally worth it.

Games and play are fundamental to all human societies and have historically been used explicitly and implicitly to teach values. What lessons can we learn from thinking about pre-digital games as "ethical systems"?''

MIGUEL: First of all, I am not sure we should make a pre-digital/digital divide without mentioning what makes digital games so unique. It may be possible to argue that in fact, there is nothing unique to digital games, and therefore what we learn from thinking about non-digital games is also valid for digital games.

In the case of ethics and games, I'd argue that there are at least two unique elements in digital games that differentiate it from the past: one, the possibility of single player games, and more importantly, of solitary play. Digital games have afforded single player games that make players engage alone with the game system. Two, the black-box effect (rules are invisible to players and have to deduct them from play - and they are not discussable/easily modifiable) is stronger in games. Of course, there are mod communities and hackers, but still, the access to rules and their configuration is much more complicated than in non-digital games.

In terms of thinking about morality, this implies that there are significant differences with the non-digital world. Essentially, I'd claim that morally interesting non-digital games make it complicated to claim that games can be understood as ethical systems, since the role of the social (which is, in my opinion, always bringing in the political and the moral) is deeply intertwined with the systems design. In other words: how much of the ethical analysis of a non-digital game can argue for the morality embedded in the system, and how much can it refer to the moral social play? With digital games, specially with single-player games, we can have an optimal sample: from the rules, through the player, we can deduct the values, and given the black-boxing of the system, we can claim that those values are inscripted there by designers.

So, after this digression (apologies!), what I want to say is that maybe we can learn from digital games how to look at non-digital games as ethical systems, without the role of the social. And therefore, what we can learn from pre-digital games is that multiplayer is always ethically interesting, and that negotiation of rules, sportsmanship and player-to-player behavior, that is, many of those elements external to a systems-centric understanding of games, are fundamental for the ethics of play. Because what pre-digital games tell us is precisely that: play is moral (regardless of Huizinga's claims), not only because there are many players, but also because the systems are of ethical interest.

I guess I haven't much answered the question as rephrased it and answered what I actually wanted to answer. I'll give a shot at a short answer then: pre-digital games can help us trace the history of play as a moral activity, as one used to teach, educate and promote a number of values in our society by means of systems designed to embody

and foster a number of values.

COLLEEN:I think we can learn a lot. From a cultural perspective, looking at

the historic trajectory of games engaging with social and political issues is pretty exciting. I am thinking here of Situationist Games, The New Games Movement, Buckminster Fuller's World Game and the recent surge of "big games" fostered by festivals like Come Out and Play and (for the first time this year) IndieCade. In fact, many big games bridge pre and post digital games, gaming in and with the real world, which might happen to include and use computers (i.e. mobile devices). These kinds of games take place out in the streets actively blurring the edges of the magic circle and raising all kinds of interesting questions about what happens when public space and game space, game rules and social norms collide. If an ethics is a dynamic negotiation between people and/or entities, I think this kind of negotiation between spaces - inside and outside the game, digital and nondigital - is a productive place to start thinking about "ethical systems."

In the chapter I contributed, I talk about the design of a big game called Re:Activism, which so happens to have "serious" content, but that's not the part that is so interesting to me on an ethical level. What I think is interesting are the complex relationships between the designer, the player and the publics that encountered the game.

Much of the debate about video game violence would assume that games as a rule exert a negative moral and ethical influence on players. How might the essays in this book complicate such an understanding of their impact on players?

MIGUEL: Even though this is something Karen should answer, since she's the editor, let me chip in: I think this collection helps describing why players are moral beings, arguing strongly against the implicit discourse of the computer game player as a moral zombie that is so ubiquitous in popular press and anti-videogame literature. Players are ethical agents, and they have moral fail-safe systems that help them engage with the ethical complexities of computer game play.

KAREN: Again, the purpose of this book is to move the conversation away from simply demonizing games as violent or inappropriate, to really understanding why games are so controversial, and determining the potential (and limits) of games to help us think about and reflect on ethical issues and complex social dynamics. Building on what [one Ethics and Games collection contributor] Nick Fortugno said at a talk a few years ago, there are books that embody what many would consider negative ethics (e.g., Mein Kampf) and books that embody positive values (e.g., The Bible), but we should not deem books themselves as evil or good as a result. As we have seen throughout history, the introduction of each new medium incites fear that it will negatively affect our youth. This happened even during the movement from orality to the written word, where educators were worried that writing things down, rather than memorizing all texts by rote, would destroy young minds. We need to be open about what games can do, rather than focusing on some specific content in a few particular games. Or, at least let's talk about why certain violent content bugs us, or let's reflect on what types of cultural dynamics are at work when some people strive to ban all games.

Thus, many of the authors in this book start to complicate ethics surrounding games, and investigate the nuances of the player and game relationship. For example, Erin Hoffman takes a philosophical approach to understanding the purpose of death in games, and how violence and death may serve to help us contemplate the human experience. J. Alison Bryant and Jordana Drell take a more educational approach and investigate how families play video games together to see how to better foster dialogue about values through group play. Just like ethics themselves, no one feels these issues are black or white, but something to be discussed and deliberated.

Moreover, I want to make it clear that in editing this collection, or designing games, I personally do not seek to decide for someone else what is right or wrong, morally appropriate, or socially acceptable. Rather, I believe there is a need to equip young citizens with the ability to reflect on their values, consider other perspectives, make

complex arguments, and decide what is right in a given context. After all, values are constantly shifting from offline to online, transnationally, and across peer groups and social contexts. How you act at work is different from how you would act on an online parenting discussion group. What is appropriate in one country may not be relevant in another, and what you on the playground may be interpreted differently than in the boardroom. The way we individually and collectively vote on issues today may be different to how we cast our ballot in twenty years. We need to be our own arbiters of right and wrong during complex moments and shifting contexts.

I do feel that games provide a unique opportunity to practice these types of skills.

Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning lab), a lab focused on developing new games, simulations, and play experiences for experimental learning and social issues. Projects range from a curriculum in game design for the Boys and Girls Club, a card game for the Red Cross Climate Centre, and big games such as Re:Activism and the sport Budgetball. In addition to work in social games and interactive media, her research focuses on the social aspects of the design and prototyping process. In this vein, she is working with the Social Science Research Council on a prototyping approach to creating innovative mobile learning spaces with youth, public schools and cultural institutions, with funding through the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Member of the game design collectives Local No. 12 (see backchattergame.com) and The Leisure Society. India China Institute Fellow (2006-2007). Interactive work shown at Come Out and Play, SoundLab, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time. BFA, Media Arts Pratt Institute, graduate studies in Computer Science, CUNY and International Affairs, The New School.

Miguel Sicart is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book, The Ethics of Computer Games, which is based on his doctoral work, was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.

Karen Schrier is a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she is finishing her dissertation on ethics and games. She also currently works full-time as the Director of Interactive Media at ESI Design, an experience design firm in New York City. Her first co-edited book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, was published last March by IGI Global; the next book in the collection will be published in early 2011. Previously, she worked as a portfolio manager and executive producer at Scholastic, where she spearheaded digital initiatives for the Corporate and International divisions. She has also worked at Nickelodeon, BrainPOP and Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes. Karen was the Games Program co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in 2008 and 2009, currently serves on the advisory boards of the Computer Game Education Review (CGER), and is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School. Karen has spoken on games and learning at numerous conferences, including GDC, SIGGRAPH, AERA, Games for Change, NECC, and SITE. She also helped develop numerous games and digital properties, such as Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?; Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, and Scholastic.com; and Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect. Her digital and non-digital games have been featured in festivals such as Come Out and Play. Karen holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Four)

If Project Superior pulls the superhero genre into the space of independent comics, then a range of recent Marvel and DC projects have pulled the independent and avant garde comics artists into the realm of mainstream comics publishing, again via the figure of the superhero. Here, again, they seek to motivate the experimentation through appeals to character psychology. In this case, DC invites us to imagine what its superhero sagas would look like if they were produced by the denizens of the Bizarro World, noted for their confusion and often reversal of the norms of human society.

Matt Groenig (The Simpsons) shows the Justice League characters as being blown out of the pipe of Bizarro Superman, helping to set up the premise of the collection as a whole. If Project Superior is drawn towards forms of abstraction, the Bizarro comics have more room for the ugly realism that we associate with certain strands of indie comics, a tendency to deflate the heroic pretensions of the characters through various forms of the grotesque, as in this image by Tony Millionaire,

or the everyday, as in these images by Dave Cooper,

Danny Hellman

and Leela Corman.

These superheros are very down-to-earth, their human faults and foibles on full display; the heroes are often shown off-duty doing the kinds of things their readers regularly do. These images depend on our pre-existing relationship with the superheros for much of their pleasures. Project Superior depended on generic versions of the superhero, while these stories work with Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the others, with the artists incorporating just enough of the familiar iconography and color palette to make it easy to recognize which characters are being evoked and spoofed.

Anyone who has read a Batman comic will no doubt recognize much of the debris in the Bat Cave depicted in this drawing by Kylie Baker, yet his cartoonish style is very different from what we would expect to see within the Batman franchise itself. This Jason Little page depicts the superheroes as bath toys, suggesting that they only come alive in the imagination of the child who is playing with them.

Mack himself relies on the image of superhero action figures, in this case of Marvel characters, in Wake Up, as another way into the tortured imagination of his young protagonist.

Mack's work involves a fascinating blurring of the distinction between graphic novels and artist books. Artist books are artworks which are intended to explore the nature of the book as a genre. Sometimes, they are printed in limited editions. More often, they are one of a kind items. They play with the shape, texture, and format of the book in ways that are idiosyncratic to the individual artists. They often are focused on the materiality of print culture rather than on the content of the book.

Nothing could contrast more totally with the cheaply printed, mass produced and circulated comic book. Historically, the art work which went into producing the comic was presumed to have no value and was often discarded once the book has been printed, much as we might toss the manuscript once the words have been set into type.

Yet, Mack is very interested in creating pages which are artworks on their own terms. He deploys innovative techniques and unexpected pigments (such as coffee grinds) to construct his images. Often, he layers physical and material objects onto the page so it is not a flat representation but something with its own shape and feel. Mack publishes books which remove these images from their context in the unfolding stories of his graphic novels and call attention to them on their own terms as artist's constructions, often describing and documenting the techniques which went into their production. His process has been documented in a film called The Alchemy of Art, which shows him creating some of the images contained within Vision-Quest and includes his comments on the process. Here, the printed comic becomes almost a byproduct of his creative process which is concentrated on the production of beautiful one-of-a-kind pages.

Throughout Vision-Quest, Mack calls attention to the often invisible but always important framelines and buffers in his layout by using physical materials rather than drawn lines to separate out his panels. In other instances, he glues objects such as leaves or bird's wings directly onto the page in what amounts to the graphic novel equivalent of Stan Brakhage's Mothlight.

In other cases, he creates designs which play with the orientation of the page, demanding that we physically turn the book around in order to follow the text or the action.

In his own graphic novel series, Kabuki, he plays with the notion of origami -- encouraging the reader to think of the page as something which can be folded and sculpted rather than simply part of the printed book.

In each of these cases, Mack builds on practices associated with the art book movement, but deploys them in relation to mass produced artifacts. He wants us to remain conscious that we are holding a printed object in our hands that has particular properties and expects particular behaviors from us. Here, again, he has both built upon and broken out of the visual language of mainstream superhero comics.

This is not what a superhero comic is "supposed to look like", even if it is telling the kind of story which might be readily accepted if communicated through a different style or mode of representation. Exploring the ways that Mack pushes against these expectations even as he operates at the heart of one of Marvel's cash cow franchises is what helps us to understand the "bounds of difference." And in the process, it helps us to understand how diversity operates within a genre which has otherwise come to dominate the comics medium.

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Three)

Last time, I explored some of the ways that David Mack's visual style defines itself outside of the mainstream conventions of superhero comics. Today, I want to start with a recognition that Mack is not the only experimental comic artist who has sought to engage with the superhero genre. In so far as it defines the expectations of what a comic book is, at least in the American comic book, artists often seek to define themselves and their work through contrast with the superhero genre.

Daniel Clowes' The Death Ray is a thorough deconstruction of the superhero myth, depicted through multiple genres, though most often read in relation to our stereotypes about serial killers and school shooters. Note here Clowes' self conscious use of primary colors -- red and yellow -- to set up the lurid quality of the more fantastical sequences in the book, often standing in contrast with the more muted colors of realistically rendered scenes.

Project Superior is a recent anthology of superhero comics drawn by some of the rising stars in the independent comic worlds, resulting in work which further defamiliarizes the conventions of the genre.

I particularly admire a series of red, yellow, and blue images created by Ragnar which reduce the superhero saga to its basic building blocks. There is no story here, only the elements which get repeated across stories. This Doug Frasser story is clearly intended to suggest Daredevil though not in ways that would illicit a legal response from Marvel.

This one by Rob Ullman which combines a play with iconic elements and a much more mundane sense what kinds of work superheroes perform.

Here, Chris Pitzer further abstracts the characters into a series of geometrical shapes with capes, while following the basic narrative formulas to the letter.

These experiments are interesting because they explore the potentials for abstraction or realism which exist on the margins of the mainstream industry. There is also a great pleasure in watching these gifted cartoonists use the codes of mainstream companies as resources for their own expressive play.

We can see similar forms of abstraction in Mack's work in the Daredevil franchise. So, for example, this page from Wake Up is as fascinated with the color red as anything found in Project Superior.

And we see throughout Vision Quest Mack's fascination with reading the central characters through various forms of abstraction, often involving pastiches of the work of particular modernist artists.

This play with abstraction can be understood as part of the process by which Echo wrestles with her own identity, especially given the many overlays of other's performance she has absorbed through the years as she has exploited her powers on Kingpen's behalf.

Or consider the various ways that Mack deconstructs Wolverine, one of the more iconic characters in the Marvel universe and thus one which will remain recognizable even in a highly abstracted form.

Mack is interested especially in three aspects of Wolverine's persona -- his animal like ferocity, his claws, and his metal-enhanced skeleton -- which become, in the end, all that remain of the character in some of these images. Wolverine becomes a set of claws without a man much as the Cheshire Cat becomes a grin without a cat.

Note how Mack uses the frame lines to pick up the shape and impact of the claws or how he incorporates photorealistic renderings of animal bones to remind us of the skeletal structure which gives the character his strength and endurance. By this final panel, Mack uses Exacto blades to suggest Wolverine's claws and shows us only the human bones beneath his skin. Here, the abstraction serves the purpose of creating ambiguity since as we read this story it is not meant to be clear whether Echo met the actual superhero or whether this Wolverine is a projection of her shamanistic vision.

Mack's collaboration with Brian Bendis seems to rely heavily on his capacity for abstraction. For Wake Up, Mack is asked to depict the world of the superhero as seen through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed child who has watched his father -- the Frog -- die at the hands of Daredevil and who has struggled to process what he saw.

Here, Mack's movements between highly realistic and more abstracted images are meant to convey objective and subjective perspectives on the action. The child endlessly draws images of superhero battles and as the story progresses, we learn how to sequence those images to match the voices he hears in his head. Needless to say, there are clear parallels to be drawn to the movement from single images to sequences of images which constitutes the art of comic book design. As with Vison-Quest, the story refocuses on a secondary character -- Ben Urich -- with Daredevil seen only in terms of his impact on their lives. We can see the focus on the subjective experience of an emotionally disturbed character as a historic way that modernist style gets rationalized in more mainstream projects -- starting perhaps with the ways The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari frames German expressionism in terms of the world as seen through the eyes of a patient in an insaine asylum or for that matter, how Hitchcock absorbed aspects of Salvador Dali's surrealism into Spellbound, another film set at a mental hospital.

The Final Part Comes on Friday.

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Two)

This is part two of a four part series exploring how David Mack's visual style challenges the conventions of the superhero comic.

Mack helped to introduce Echo (Maya Lopez) as a character in Parts of a Hole. Her backstory is classic superhero comics stuff. Here's how her backstory gets described in the Marvel Universe Character Wiki:

When she was a small girl, Maya Lopez's father, a Cheyenne gangster, was killed by his partner in crime, the Kingpin. The last wish of her father was that Fisk raise the child well, a wish the Kingpin honored, caring for her as if she was his own. Believed to be mentally handicapped, Maya was sent to an expensive school for people with learning disabilities. There, she managed to completely replicate a song on the piano. After that, she was sent to another expensive school for prodigies. She grew into a gifted and talented woman. Upon visiting her father's grave with Fisk, she asked how he died. Fisk told her that Daredevil had killed him.

Maya was sent by the Kingpin to Matt Murdock to prove Matt's weakness. He told her that Matt believed he was a bad person, and that she was the only way to prove him wrong. (As Maya believed him, it would not appear to be a lie when she told Matt.)

Matt Murdock and Maya soon fell in love. She later took on the guise of Echo, hunting Daredevil down. Having watched videos of Bullseye and Daredevil fighting, she proved more than a match for Daredevil. She took him down and nearly killed him, refusing only when she found out Matt and Daredevil were one and the same. Matt managed to correct the Kingpin's lies. In revenge, Echo confronted Fisk and shot him in the face, blinding him and starting the chain of events that would lead to his eventual downfall.

All of this provides the backdrop for Vision Quest. As the title suggests, Maya goes out on her own to try to heal her wounds and think through what has happened to her. The result is a character study told in stream of consciousness, which circles through her memories and her visions, often depicted in a highly iconic manner. This, for example, is how Quesada depicts the moment where Kingpen kills Maya's father in Parts of a Hole.

Now consider the way this same event gets depicted early in VisionQuest.

Mack's page combines multiple modality -- multiple ways of depicting the world -- with highly iconic and abstract images existing alongside hyper-realistic images of the same characters. This radical mixing of style is a hallmark of Mack's work, constantly forcing us to think about how things are being represented rather than simply what is being represented. Consider this abstract rendering of the key events -- Fisk is reduced to his big feet and legs, much as he might be seen as a child, while the breakup become Matt and Maya is rendered by the figure of the child ripping a picture of the two of them in half.

We are operating here within the theater of Maya's mind, yet she is also presenting these events to us with an open acknowledgment that as readers we need to have her explain what is taking place.

Once the book has established these rich icons, they can be recycled and remixed for emotional impact. This image builds on the first in several ways. Mack juxtaposes a more mature version of Maya with her child self here and the childlike drawings are repeated to again represent key emotional moments in her life. While Mack repeats the purple of the earlier image, the dominant color that we associate with Maya on this page is red, a color which captures her passion and rage. She has moved from a vulnerable child victim into someone who has the capacity to strike back at those who have caused her pain.

Let's pull back for a moment and try to establish some baselines for thinking about what may constitute "zero-degree style" in the superhero tradition. While his work was considered bold and experimental at the time, Frank Miller's run on Daredevil has helped to establish the stylistic expectations for this particular franchise. Miller's style was hyperbolic -- though nowhere near as much so as in his later works, including The Dark Knight Returns, 300, and Sin City. Yet, he also allows us to see some of the ways that superhero style orientates the reader to the action. The goal is to intensify our feelings by strengthening our identification with the superhero and with other key supporting characters. For this to happen, the pages need to be instantly legible. We need to know who the characters are and what's going on at all times, even if you can use minor breaks in conventional style in order to amplify our emotional responses to the action.

One of the most basic ways that superhero comics do this is through the color coding of key characters, especially the hero and villain, who are depicted in colors that will pop off the page and be distinctive from each other. Electra was designed to in many ways compliment and extend Daredevil so it is no surprise that she is depicted here with the same shade of red.

On the other hand, the highly codified colors of the Marvel universe allow us to instantly recognize the Hulk on this cover simply through the image of his arm and the contrasting red and green prepares us for the power struggle which will unfold in this issue.

A second set of conventions center on the depiction of action and the construction of space through framing. Miller was especially strong in creating highly kinetic compositions which intensify the movement of the characters.

In this first page, we see Daredevil falling away from us into the city scape below, while in the second Miller uses extremely narrow, vertical panels set against a strong horizontal panel to show the superhero's movements through space.

Both of these pages break with the classic grid which is the baseline in these comics, but their exaggerated framing works towards clearly defined narrative goals. This next page breaks with our expectations that each panel captures a single moment in time by showing multiple images of the Daredevil in a way intended to convey a complex series of actions.

while here we seem to be looking straight down on the action in the top panel and subsequent panels are conveyed in silhouette, though again, there is such a strong emphasis on character motivation and action that we never feel confused about what is actually happening here.

This next image shows other kinds of formal experiments which still fall squarely within the mainstream of the superhero genre -- notice how the text becomes an active element in the composition and notice how the falling character seems to break out of the frame, both ways of underlying the intensity of the action.

Now, let's contrast the layering of text here with the ways that Mack deploys text in Vision-Quest.

Notice for example the ways Mack deploys several different kinds of texts -- printed fonts, handwritten, and the Scrabble tiles each convey some aspects of the meaning of the scene. We have to work to figure out the relationship between these different kinds of texts, which suggest different layers of subjectivity that are competing for our attention. When I first read this book, I was especially moved by the ways that the hand print on Echo's face -- which elsewhere in the book is simply another marker of her supervillain identity -- here becomes a metaphor for the last time her father touched her, moments before his death, and the sense memory it left on her, an especially potent metaphor when we consider the ways that the character is alligned with hypersensitivity and a powerful "body memory" which allows her to replicate physically anything she has ever felt or seen. While the sounds and dialogue emerge from the action in the case of Frank Miller's pages, they are layered onto the depicted events in Mack's design, part of what gives the page the quality of a scrapbook, recounting something that has already happened, rather than thrusting us into the center of the action.

The key elements of Miller's style come through here -- the use of color to separate out the characters, dynamic compositions which emphasize character action, repeated images of the character within the same frame, flamboyant use of text, and the bursting through of the frame, all combine to make this a particularly intense page.

Where most superhero artists seek to covey this sense of intense action in almost every frame, Mack seeks to empty the frame of suggestions of action, seeming to suspend time. Consider this depiction of Daredevil battling Echo from Quesada's work for Pieces of a Hole.

The splash page traditionally either indicates a particularly significant action or a highly detailed image, both moments of heightened spectacle. Mack, on the other hand, often empties this splash pages so we are focusing on the character's emotional state rather than on any physical action.

Having established these conventions of representation, the mainstream comic may tolerate a range of different visual styles as different artists try their hand on the character, often working, more or less, within the same continuity. So, we can see here how Tim Sale plays with color to convey the character's identity even through fragmented images which focus on one or another detail of Daredevil's body.

Or here we see how Alex Maleev creates a much more muted palette and a scratchy/grainy image which marks his own muted version of the hyperbolic representations of the character in earlier Daredevil titles.

The mainstream comics allow some room for bolder formal experiments but most often these come through the cover designs rather in the panel by panel unfolding of the action.

Mack's artwork functions this way in relation to Bendis's Alias, where he was asked to design covers that did not look like conventional superhero covers and that might be seen as more female-friendly, reflecting the genre bursting nature of the series content which operates on the very fringes of Marvel's superhero universe.

The tension between genres is especially visible on this later cover from the series which shows how its protagonist is and is not what we expect from women in a superhero comic.

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part One)

Last fall, I delivered one of the keynote talks at the Understanding Superheroes conference hosted at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The conference was a fascinating snapshot of the current state of comics studies in North America. It was organized by Ben Sanders to accompany a remarkable exhibit of comic art hosted at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art -- "Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of a Superhero," . The exhibit consisted of original panels scanned the entire history of the superhero genre - from its roots in the adventure comics strips through the Golden and Silver age to much more contemporary work. The conference attracted a mix of old time fan boys whose interests were in capturing the history of the medium and younger scholars who applied a range of post-modern and post-structuralist theory to understanding comics as a medium. In between were several generations of superhero comic writers and artists who brought an industry perspective to the mix. Charles Hatfield delivered a remarkable keynote address talking about the technical sublime in the work of Jack Kirby and my keynote centered on the fusion of mainstream and experimental comics techniques in the work which David Mack did for Daredevil.

The presentation was really more of a talk than a paper so it's taken me some time to get around to writing this up, but I had promised some of my readers (not to mention Mack) that I would try to share some of the key ideas from the talk through my blog. A number of readers have asked about this piece so I appreciate their patience and encouragement. In honor of Comic-Con, where I am, as you read this, I am finally sharing with you my thoughts about David Mack's Daredevil comics.

Images from Mack's work here are reproduced by permission of the artist. Other images are reproduced under Fair Use and I am willing to remove them upon request from the artists involved.

This paper is part of an ongoing project which seeks to understand what a closer look at superhero comics might contribute to our understanding of genre theory. Several other installments of this project have appeared in this blog including my discussion of superheroes after 9/11 and my discussion of the concept of multiplicity within superhero comics.

At the heart of this research is a simple idea: What if we stopped protesting that comics as a medium go well beyond "men in capes" and include works of many different genres? No one believes us anyway. And on a certain level, it is more or less the case that the primary publishers of comics publish very little that does not fall into the Superhero genre and almost all of the top selling comics, at least as sold through specialty shops, now fall into the superhero genre. It was not always the case but it has been the case long enough now that we might well accept it as the state of the American comics industry. So, what if we used this to ask some interesting questions about the relationship between a medium and its dominant genre? What happens when a single genre more or less takes over a medium and defines the way that medium is perceived by its public - at least in the American context?

One thing that happens, I've argued, is that the superhero comic starts to absorb a broad range of other genres - from comedy to romance, from mystery to science fiction - which play out within the constraints of the superhero narrative. We can study how Jack Kirby's interests in science fiction inflects The Fantastic Four and other Marvel superhero comics in certain directions. We can ask why it matters that Batman emerged in Detective Comics, Superman in Action Comics, and Spider-Man in Astounding Stories.

But second, we can explore how the Superhero comic becomes a site of aesthetic experimentation, absorbing energies which in another medium might be associated with independent or even avant garde practices. And that's where my interest in David Mack comes from, since he is an artist who works both in independent comics (where he is associated with some pretty radical formal experiments in his Kabuki series) and in mainstream comics (where he has made a range of different kinds of contributions to the Daredevil franchise for Marvel.)

Certainly, most comic books fans understand a distinction between underground/independent comics and mainstream comics but there is surprisingly fluid boundaries between the two. In many ways, independent or underground comics were often defined as "not superhero" comics and therefore still defined by the genre even if in the negative. Throughout this essay, I am going to circle around a range of experiments which seek to merge aspects of independent comics with the superhero genre.

My primary goal here is to map what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristen Thompson describe in Classical Hollywood Cinema as "the bounds of difference." Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson draw on concepts from Russian formalism to talk about the norms which shape artistic practice and the ways they get encoded into modes of production. By norms, we mean general ways of structuring artistic works, not rigid rules or codes. Norms grow through experimentation and innovation. There is no great penalty for violating norms. Indeed, the best art seeks to defamiliarize conventions - to break the rules in creative and meaningful ways and in the process teach us new ways of seeing.

Genres are thus a complex balance between the encrusted conventions, understood by artists and consumers alike, built up through time, and the localized innovations which make any given work fresh and original. The norms thus are elastic - they can encompass a range of different practices - but they also have a breaking point beyond which they can not bend. This breaking point is what Bordwell and Thompson describe as "the bounds of difference." They have generally been interested in the conservative force of these norms, showing how even works which at first look like they fall outside the norms are often still under their influence. They have shown how the classical system has dominated Hollywood practice since the 1910s and continues to shape most commercial films made today.

In my work, I have been more interested in exploring the edge cases, especially looking at the transition that occurs when an alien aesthetic gets absorbed into the classical system. This was a primary focus of my first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetics and it's a topic to which I have returned at various points throughout my career. In this talk, I want to use David Mack's work for Marvel to help us to map "the bounds of difference" as they impact mainstream superhero comics.

We can get a better sense of why Mack's work represents such an interesting limit case by sampling some of the reviews for Daredevil: Echo - Vision Quest from Amazon contributors, each of whom has to do a complex job of situating this work in relation to our expectations about what a mainstream superhero book looks like:

If you'd like to see Daredevil swinging through New York City beating up bad guys, this is not the comic for you. Although this is technically Volume 8 of the recent Daredevil run, it isn't exactly part of the regular continuity. The five issues that make up this volume were going to be a separate miniseries, but when Bendis and Maleev needed a break from Daredevil (after the Issue 50 battle with the Kingpin), the Echo mini was published under the Daredevil title instead.

This has led to an unfairly bad reputation for this beautifully painted, dream-like exploration of identity and willingness to fight for a cause. Daredevil subscribers expected more of the plot and action that had filled the series to that point, and this meditative break was frustrating, particularly considering the point that Bendis had halted the main plot.

If you are a fan of Alias (the comic) or Kabuki, this is for you. If you would like to gaze in awe at the poetic writing, beautiful painting and stunning mixed-media art of one of the most creative men in comics, buy this comic. You won't regret it.

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I think if this had come out as a graphic novel, or as a seperate mini, I may have enjoyed it more. But imagine being engrossed in an intelligent, gritty fast-paced work and then being forcefed an elaborate, artsy character study on a relatively minor character. ... This should have been a seperate mini or graphic novel. Instead we get the equivalent of a documentary on Van Gogh between Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2.

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This book is a sadistic deviation from thier storyline and is writen and draw by David Mack. This is a (...) crap fest about a very minor character and her hippie like journey to discover her past. ...He then further expresses his impotency in the field by using chicken scratch drawings and paintings to move the story along with hardly ANY dialog. THis book is an artsy load of crap that should not be affiliated with Daredevil or Marvel.

Each of these responses struggles with an aesthetic paradox: Mack's approach to the story does not align with their expectations about what a superhero comic looks like or how it is most likely structured - yet, and this is key, the book in question appears in the main continuity of a Marvel flagship character. There is much greater tolerance as several of the readers note for works which appears on the fringes of the continuity - works which is present as in some senses an alternative, "what if?" or "elseworlds" story, works which more strongly flag themselves as site of auteurist experimentation.

There is even space there for the moral inversion involved in telling the story from the point of view of the villain rather than the superhero: witness the popularity of Brian Azzarello's graphic novels about Lex Luther and The Joker. But Mack applies his more experimental approach at the very heart of the Marvel superhero franchise and as a consequence, the book was met with considerable backlash from hardcore fans who are often among the most conservative at policing "the bounds of difference." Vision Quest is not Mack's only venture into the Daredevil universe: David Mack wrote Parts of a Hole which was illustrated by veteran Marvel artist Joe Quesada; David Mack then contributed art to Wake Up, written by Brian Michael Bendis, perhaps the most popular superhero script-writer of recent memory. In both cases, then, Mack's experimental aesthetic was coupled with someone who fit much more in the mainstream of contemporary superhero comics. The result was a style which fit much more comfortably within audience expectations about the genre and franchise.

We can see the difference in these two images, the first drawn by Quesada for a Mack Script, the second as drawn by Mack based on his own conception. Both combine multiple levels of texts to convey the fragmented perspective of Echo, the protagonist, as she confronts her sometimes lover, sometimes foe Daredevil. The use of bold primary color and the style of drawing in Quesada's version pulls him that much closer to mainstream expectations, while the deployment of pastels and of a collage-like aesthetic falls outside our sense of what a superhero comic looks like. The subject matter is more or less the same; the mode of representation radically different and in comics, these stylistic differences help to establish our expectations as readers.

Reinventing Cinema: An Interview with Chuck Tryon (Part Two)

Below is the second installment of my interview with Chuck Tryon, author of em> Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence
Your chapter on digital distribution has much to say about Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, especially about their model of organizing house parties around viewing of their progressive documentaries. What does digital distribution offer such filmmakers? Greenwald is increasingly moving from the distribution of full length documentaries to the much more rapid dispersal of short videos via YouTube and Facebook. How might this shift reflect changes in the way independent and documentary filmmakers are relating to digital distribution?

Robert Greenwald has been a brilliant innovator when it comes to skillfully using social media for political purposes, and I find his work fascinating because he has typically managed to navigate between detailed, but accessible, policy analyses and using available social media tools, from email lists to blogs and web video, to build an audience for his work (and for Brave New Films in general).

To some extent, I think his initial success grew out of the alienation and anger felt by many on the left at the beginning of the Iraq War and, later, after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, so he was able to build an impressive infrastructure using the "house party" model, but at some point, I think it became difficult to sustain the sense that these new documentaries were unique events, so I've been impressed with his attempts to craft shorter and more timely responses to ongoing events, such as the war in Afghanistan and more recently, the oil spill in the Gulf. These videos can circulate quickly and can often have a more immediate impact through tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and because new videos are available on a daily basis, it can encourage the people who watch and share his videos to see political participation as an ongoing, daily process, rather than an occasional activity.

Although I think these rapid responses are incredibly powerful, other independent and documentary filmmakers still focus on creating special events, using tools such as OpenIndie and similar tools to invite audiences to request that a film play at a local theater. One of the most successful films to use the OpenIndie model was Franny Armstrong's environmental documentary, The Age of Stupid, which used the service to build demand for simultaneous screenings in over 500 theaters in at least 45 countries. Thus, in addition to building and sustaining an audience online through short videos, many filmmakers are seeking to turn their screenings into unique experiences where audiences will feel more like participants than viewers

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In the book, you describe a splintering of independent films with South by Southwest becoming the key festival for filmmakers who do not wish or are not able to compete at Sundance. What can you tell us about the current status of these "mumblecore" filmmakers?

The mumblecore label was always somewhat amorphous, but it illustrated the power of collaboration in an era democratized media production. This sense of collaboration, or incestuousness, depending on your perspective, is illustrated in a series of charts designed by mumblecore filmmaker Aaron Hillis, showing the degree to which these filmmakers have cooperated with--and learned from--each other.

Some of my favorite filmmakers from the movement, including Andrew Bujalski, continue to produce engaging work outside of the Hollywood system, while others, such as the Duplass brothers, have had films, including Baghead and Cyrus, distributed by studio specialty divisions such as Picturehouse and Sony Pictures Classics. Arin Crumley, one of the filmmakers behind Four Eyed Monsters, has joined forces with Lance Weiler to participate in the creation of tools that will help independent filmmakers promote and exhibit their films. But one of the more significant compliments to mumblecore's influence came from New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott, who argued that mumblecore actress, Greta Geriwg, might be one of the most significant actresses of this generation in his assessment of her "naturalistic" performance in the Ben Stiller film, Greenberg. So, even though the mumblecore label is less widely used, many of the filmmakers in the movement have been able to develop successful careers either within Hollywood or as independent filmmakers.

Much has been written about the fact that there is no longer a Pauline Kael among film critics. Instead, our most well known critic today is Roger Ebert, who has moved from television to the blogs and Twitter as platforms for sharing his views on film. Behind Ebert, there is an army of film bloggers who are sharing their thoughts about cinema. Is the result a stronger or weaker film culture? What do you see as the strengths and limitations of these two configurations of film criticism?

To some extent, I think it's easy to romanticize the past and the contributions of critics such as Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Susan Sontag, especially when so many newspapers and magazines are either firing their film critics or relying upon freelance writers for their reviews. But this nostalgia for an earlier form of film criticism obscures some of the ways in which film blogs are helping to reinvent film culture.

Because of my own experiences as a film blogger, I'm probably biased on this point, but I think that film blogs have strengthened film culture immensely, in part because those critics are now held accountable by the bloggers who read and respond to their reviews in highly public ways. But although there may be thousands of dedicated film bloggers, I think the blogosphere is structured in such a way that a small number of critics still wield a huge influence, such as Roger Ebert, A.O. Scott, and Harry Knowles. Similarly, many film bloggers, such as Karina Longworth and Matt Zoller Seitz, are often incorporated into more mainstream venues. At the same time, bloggers such as David Hudson aggregate the most significant film news on the web, directing the attention of readers to the most significant film news of the day, ensuring that most film critics and cinephiles will continue to have access to significant ideas about film as they are unfolding.

Ebert's remarkable transformation through social media is fascinating. Ebert has always been engaged with his audience, though his "Answer Man" column, but blogging and Twitter have deepened that engagement. One recent example of this engagement is Ebert's recent column (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html) in which he rethought an earlier column where he claimed that video games, by definition, cannot be art. His original column provoked thousands of comments, many of them offering sophisticated arguments about the definition of art or about video game aesthetics, challenging Ebert to at least acknowledge some of the limitations of his original argument

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As you note, many of those producing short films for YouTube see them as "calling cards," which they hope will open doors for them inside the film industry. Five years into its history, how well has YouTube functioned as a pipeline for promoting and developing new filmmaking talent?

I'm probably not as attentive to these "calling card" stories as I ought to be, but I've been able to trace a small number of filmmakers who have been able to use YouTube as a means of opening doors inside the film industry. One of the more famous examples is a Uruguayan visual effects specialist, Fede Alvarez, who created a short, Panic Attack, that has generated nearly 5 million views and, along with it, an agreement from Mandate Pictures to back a $30 million film.

Other success stories would certainly include Paranormal Activity, where a group of do-it-yourself filmmakers succeeded in developing grassroots enthusiasm for their movie online before seeing the film get picked up by Paramount, initially with the purpose of remaking it, before realizing that the filmmakers had already succeeded in creating enormous demand for their film.

Some of the more successful YouTube "calling cards" rely on humor, including parody of more familiar texts, in order to build an audience familiar with the original. One of the best examples here is High School Sucks The Musical, which was picked up for distribution by Lakeshore Entertainment after the filmmakers were able to generate interest in the film through their YouTube channel.

A number of other filmmakers, many of them living outside the US, have managed to raise some funding for their films online, operating outside of the Hollywood industry with the hope of securing some combination of theatrical, DVD, and television distribution. The Finnish filmmakers behind the satirical Star Wreck web series have used their web popularity to raise funding for their Iron Sky film, while the Madrid-based Riot Cinema Collective is working on The Cosmonaut. Many of these filmmakers invite viewers to support in a film project by buying a CD of songs "inspired by" the film or a t-shirt featuring the film's logo, encouraging those audiences not only to become "invested" in the film's success but also to become participants in a word-of-mouth campaign to get others to watch it.

There are certainly other cases that I'm forgetting, but these are a few that have crossed my radar. These cases seem to show that YouTube (or any other video sharing site) can be used to develop and promote a wide range of new talent.

Cineastes worry about young people who are watching films on their iPod, iPhone, and we presume now, their iPad. To what degree is this a red herring? What do we know about the consumption of films on such mobile devices?

From what I can tell, the alarmism over youthful audiences consuming movies on mobile devices is considerably exaggerated. Certainly people, including many adults, will sometimes watch movies on mobile devices during times of enforced waiting, such as a long plane trip (note the presence of Redbox kiosks in airport terminals), but I'm pretty skeptical of arguments such as those by older critics, who depict today's youth as enthralled by watching movies on their iPods. In fact, according to a recent study by the Kaiser Foundation, TV consumption on an iPod represents only a small slice of overall media consumption. Further, teens and young adults remain avid moviegoers, as a quick visit to a local multiplex will confirm, and there is some evidence, including a recent study by the Nielsen Company, that teen media consumption may be more traditional than we typically assume. Many of these assumptions about teen media practices seem related to a combination of fears about youth and about new technologies.

The Pew Internet and American Life studies also do an excellent job of tracking practices of online video viewing habits, but at this point, the perception that people are dropping cable TV for online video seems overstated, part of what NewTeeVee refers to as the "cord-cutting myth". While this may change thanks to Hulu Plus and other online TV subscription services, it seems clear that people will continue to consume media on multiple platforms.

What new platforms or practices do you see as having the most likelyhood of "reinventing cinema" in the next few years?

I typically shy away from predicting future trends, and in some ways, I think we will continue to see some forms of stability within the film industry: people will still go to blockbuster films at local multiplexes or watch movies on whatever home screens are available. And fans will still blog about and remix those movies in order to participate in a wider cultural conversation. I have been fascinated by the degree to which Redbox initially placed the industry in turmoil through its dollar-per-day rentals, but it appears that the industry response to Redbox is now relatively settled, but I do think that Redbox is symptomatic of a declining emphasis on collecting or owning DVDs, especially among casual movie fans who are seeking a night's entertainment. Redbox also illustrates the fact that residual technologies such as the DVD may have a longer future than we might have initially predicted.

I'm also interested in the streaming video service, Mubi, which initially marketed itself toward a globalized cinephile culture by distributing a number of American indie and international art house movies online in high-quality streaming versions. They have recently contracted with Playstation to stream movies through their PS3 game console and seem to be positioning themselves as a go-to site for socially-networked cinephiles. Both of these phenomena point to the ways in which non-theatrical audiences are consuming movies in new ways. Rather than collecting DVDs that may only be viewed a couple of times, if at all, Redbox and Mubi illustrate an ongoing trend towards temporary access to a movie.

I am optimistic that DIY and independent filmmakers will continue to build a more effective distribution network through the technologies and tools available to them, whether through crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter or sites such as OpenIndie that allow filmmakers to map the location of their audience in order to schedule theatrical screenings. The best filmmakers will find creative ways to use transmedia storytelling techniques to build an engaged audience. Film bloggers will continue to serve a curatorial function, identifying movies that their readers will find interesting or entertaining. Rather than a single dramatic change, the medium of film will continue to evolve as filmmakers, scholars, critics, and fans continue to engage with social and technological change.

Chuck Tryon is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Fayetteville State University, where his teaching and research has focused on various aspects of film, television, and convergent media, including digital cinema, documentary studies, political video, and on using technology in the language arts classroom. He is the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers UP, 2009). He has also written several essays on the role of YouTube in the 2008 election, including "Political Video Mashups as Allegories of Citizen Empowerment (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2617/2305)" (with Richard L. Edwards) for First Monday, and "Pop Politics: Online Parody Videos, Intertextuality, and Political Participation" for Popular Communication.

He has also written about Twitter for AlterNet and published an early essay on using blogs in the first-year composition classroom for the journal Pedagogy . He frequently writes about film and media at The Chutry Experiment where he has been blogging since 2003.

Reinventing Cinema: An Interview with Chuck Tryon (Part One)

I first discovered the gifted film and digital media scholar, Chuck Tryon, through his blog, The Chutry Experiment. Tyron was an early adapter of blogs as a vehicle for academics to comment on contemporary developments in media and has made the relationship of digital technologies and film production a particular area of emphasis in his work. As I am writing this header, his blog is engaging actively with the debates about the artistic merits of computer games, sparked by the latest set of comments by Roger Ebert, while other recent posts have dealt with transmedia entertainment (in response to Jonathan Gray) and Do It Yourself Filmmaking (in conversation with filmmaker Chris Hansen). His book, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence, is ground-breaking in its attention to the many different forms of "digital cinema," from the use of digital technologies for production, distribution and exhibition to the ways DVD commentary tracks are reshaping the public's appreciation of cinema and the ways that film-related blogs are reconfiguring the nature of film criticism. He has so much to say there that is of interest to the readers of this blog that it was inevitable that I would do an interview with him for this site. If you are not reading his blog or his book yet, you need to do something about that right away. Throughout the book, you address a range of "crisis scenarios," predictions that in one way or another digital media is going to bring about the "death" of cinema as we know it. Why are such scenarios so persistent? What do they tell us about the ways that the film community is responding to technological change?

I'm fascinated by the crisis narratives about the "death" of cinema, in part because they are so deeply interlinked with debates about the nature of the film industry and about the definition of film as a medium. I think these narratives are so persistent, in part, because these definitional questions are important for both scholars and filmmakers alike. They also speak to debates about the role of technological change in everyday life. These questions have become even more acute with the introduction of digital media. After all, what is film when you no longer use digital technologies to record, produce, and project movies? And what happens when these tools become democratized so that "anyone" has access to tools that allow them to make professional-quality films?

Within the broader film industry, I think the response has been a perpetual cycle of adjustment and innovation. Studios have succeeded by promoting new films in terms of spectacle and visual novelty, as we saw with the success of James Cameron's Avatar and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, while also seeking to exploit all of the new platforms where films can be viewed. These moments of crisis have been treated in a variety of ways and have been the subject of intense debate within the independent film community. Most famously, at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival, Mark Gill, a former president of Miramax, worried that digital cinema was leading to a glut of "flat-out awful" films competing for limited screen space, while adding that social media tools have the potential to sabotage a studio's marketing efforts, arguing that in an age of texting, "good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster." Others, however, including indie film producer Ted Hope, have celebrated the democratizing potential of digital tools by defining cinema as an experience. Some studios and entertainment journalists have expressed concern about the power of social media in spreading "bad buzz" about a film. In particular, there was a brief discussion of a "Twitter effect" that was helping to amplify negative word-of-mouth about some poorly-performing films. But for the most part, there seems to be widespread acceptance of the role of social media in shaping how audiences consume films.

Your book title talks of "Reinventing Cinema." In what ways is cinema reinventing itself to take advantage of the affordances of digital media? How will cinema be different a decade from now than it was ten years ago?

When I first coined the book's title, I'd hoped to inflect it with a grain of skepticism. In many ways, I think there are a number of continuities between past and present. After all, movie theaters still play a vital cultural role, with teens and young adults continuing to see movies in significant numbers. The excitement over the Twilight films, to focus on the most recent example, shows that audiences still crave the opportunity to share in a significant experience with a wider moviegoing public.

But there is a clear sense that some things are changing. Although I am reluctant to predict all of the changes, I think a few of the following are likely: we will continue to see the window of time between the theatrical debut and the DVD (or streaming video) release of a movie, with the dual hope of curtailing piracy and of increasing DVD sales. Within a few years, Hollywood films may even follow the logic of many independent filmmakers in releasing their films available theatrically and online simultaneously. DVD sales will likely continue to decline as consumers become more selective about the movies they buy, in part due to the cheap availability of streaming video. And we will continue to see cases of filmmakers and studios experimenting with versions of transmedia storytelling. We will see occasional cases of crowdsourced or crowdfunded films break through into theatrical distribution, even if those instances are relatively rare. And this is probably obvious, but I think we will continue to see an incredibly vibrant fan culture expressed via blogs, YouTube, and other social media tools.

You speak of DVDs as producing "new regimes of cinematic knowledge." What do you mean? Can you give us some examples?

To some extent, I was building upon an observation by former New York Times film critic, Elvis Mitchell, who provided an early and astute assessment of the ways in which DVDs were being promoted and marketed as offering behind-the-scenes access to how films are produced, a phenomenon he described (favorably) as "the rise of the film geek." Although DVDs could easily be promoted in terms of superior image quality, audiences also embraced the "extras," such as commentary tracks and making-of documentaries that offered behind-the-scenes descriptions of how movies were made or what might have motivated a specific decision by a director.

Of course, there is a long history of fans having access to additional knowledge about the films they consume. Criterion pioneered many of the "extras" in the laser disc format in the 1980s and '90s, but the novelty of the DVD is that this cinematic knowledge is now being mass-marketed, creating the emergence of the "film geek" that Mitchell described.

Certainly the DVDs for the Lord of the Rings films are a tremendous example of the encyclopedic knowledge that fans can gain from watching these supplemental features, as Kristin Thompson details in her book, The Frodo Franchise. But you could also look at the use of commentary tracks by film critics and scholars, including Roger Ebert's glowing commentary track for Alex Proyas's tech-noir film, Dark City, which helped turn the film from a box-office disappointment into a critically-appreciated film. Criterion has helped to cultivate a wider culture of film appreciation through its detailed extras, including contributions from film scholars, such as Dana Polan's commentary track for The Third Man.

There is a persistent anxiety that special effects may blur our perceptions, confusing us about what is real and what isn't. Yet, as you note, special effects are also always on display, inviting our awareness of the manipulations being performed and our appreciation of how the effects are achieved. Will there be a point when these contemporary digital effects are so "naturalized" and "normalized" that they will start to become an invisible aspect of film production?

I think we will likely continue to be fascinated by how special effects are produced, even while many of those effects are relatively seamlessly integrated into the film. Although some shots use digital effects seamlessly, many films are marketed on the strength of innovative special effects, a contradiction that played out in the promotional materials for James Cameron's Avatar, a film that itself was billed as "reinventing cinema." Promotional articles emphasized Cameron's attempts to create a fully immersive environment not only through digital effects but also through his use of linguists to create the Na'vi language and botanists to help imagine the plant life of Pandora, knowledge that might make us conscious of the sheer amount of labor required to create such a believable "illusion." Because novelty is one of the strongest marketing hooks a film can have, I think there will continue to be some form of tension between producing seamless effects and promoting those effects in order to cultivate our appreciation of them.

As you note in your book, digital projection has been closely tied to the rise of 3D. This may be the one area where change has been most dramatic since your book was published. What would you want to add about the recent push for 3D if you were revising the chapter now?

I feel like I could write another chapter on 3D based just on what has happened in the last year. When I was writing the book, 3D was really just on the horizon. Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf adaptation had made a minor splash, and it seemed clear that 3D films would play a major role in enticing movie theaters to switch from using film projectors to using digital projection, even though Beowulf itself was a relatively awful film with murky images and cheesy effects, so I've been fascinated to follow some of the recent changes in 3D projection and I'm hoping to write about them in a future project. With DVD sales declining, studios seemed to be embracing 3D as a means of attracting audiences back into the theater, and a number of high-profile directors, including James Cameron, saw 3D as potentially offering deeper immersion into cinematic narrative.

Certainly the huge financial success of Avatar initially inspired increased curiosity about digital 3D, with many viewers reportedly seeing the film multiple times so that they could "upgrade" their viewing experience from 2D to 3D or even IMAX 3D, and the initial novelty regarding 3D also likely helped Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which was converted to 3D in post-production, to find a wider-than-expected audience.

More recently, however, there appears to a critical and audience backlash developing against 3D, especially for "fake 3D" movies such as Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender that were converted to 3D in post-production, a backlash that was exacerbated when a number of theaters significantly increased ticket prices for 3D films, making it more expensive for a family of four to go out for a night at the movies.

Chuck Tryon is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Fayetteville State University, where his teaching and research has focused on various aspects of film, television, and convergent media, including digital cinema, documentary studies, political video, and on using technology in the language arts classroom. He is the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers UP, 2009). He has also written several essays on the role of YouTube in the 2008 election, including "Political Video Mashups as Allegories of Citizen Empowerment (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2617/2305)" (with Richard L. Edwards) for First Monday, and "Pop Politics: Online Parody Videos, Intertextuality, and Political Participation" for Popular Communication.

He has also written about Twitter for AlterNet and published an early essay on using blogs in the first-year composition classroom for the journal Pedagogy . He frequently writes about film and media at The Chutry Experiment where he has been blogging since 2003.

John Fiske: Now and The Future

Last week, I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers at the Fiske Matters conference which was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Fiske has been and continues to be one of the most important intellectual influences on my work. His strong defense of popular culture as offering a series of resources through which active audiences struggled over meaning was a foundation for my ongoing investigation of participatory culture and new media literacy. His work was controversial at the time he introduced it - in part because he challenged the tendency of left academics towards cultural pessimism which had motivated so much of American cultural theory in the late 20th century. Fiske struggled to get us to look closer at the lives of ordinary people and the ways that they struggled to assert aspects of their own needs and desires through their relationship with mass produced culture. For Fiske, mass culture was culture produced by commercial industries, while popular culture was culture at the moment it became a resource for ordinary people through the process of consumption. Fiske retired more than a decade ago, just as the digital revolution was helping to make the agency of grassroots cultural producers and consumers much more visible than it had been before. To some degree, the shock of the culture war which surrounded Fiske's works had left many of us uncertain how to carry that tradition forward. We had lost his mentorship and intellectual leadership; we didn't know how to face down his critics; and we didn't want the backlash to cripple our own professional development.

But this conference represented a rallying of the troops, a gathering of the tribes. It felt like a homecoming party or a family reunion for a particular strand of cultural studies that had made such a difference for each of us in the room. For a good recap of the event, read this blog post by Bill Kirkpatrick who delivered an eye-opening talk about what Fiske's ideas have and could contribute to debates about media policy.

We were honored that Fiske came out of retirement to share one last lecture with his students - in this case, a talk about how shifts in social consciousness were reflected in the material culture of the 16th and 17th century, which in the end turned out to also be a provocation to think about how our own relationship with self and community were changing in the digital age. This was a talk by a man who had spent the last decade of his life running an antique shop in Vermont and who was clear he was no longer reading cultural theory still managing to share some insights to scholars very much confronting the challenges of understanding his own time. Fiske suggested that antiques were physical reminders that people had thought and live differently in the past and that they had often done so in ways which were meaningful and satisfying to him; it was a suggestion that there were always alternatives to the current configuration of culture and power and thus, if things had changed in the past, they could and would change in the future. We hung on every word, reminded of his lively wit, his provocative personality, his attention to each phrase, and his systematic development of thought.

And as the weekend continued, we learned more about how he had impacted each of us - through his teaching inside and outside the classroom, through his writing, and through his work as an editor and leader in the field. He stitched together through his travels a network of people which scanned across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the Americas. And we saw how his students had taken his ideas to Asia and Africa as well. We saw Fiske's own students and contemporaries as well as the next generation - our students can be seen as Fiske's intellectual grandchildren, those who had found his writings through our own teaching and scholarship, all of whom still saw Fiske's ideas as a living presence in our thinking. Fiske made clear that he saw his legacy not in the continued circulation of his ideas, which he had seen as contributions to contemporary debates and conversations about culture and politics, but through the minds and personalities he had influenced. I certainly know that I channel Fiske all the time in both conscious and unconscious ways. It felt liberating to be able to talk with others about the importance of this man and his work.

I was asked by Routledge to write a general introduction to Fiske's scholarship which will accompany the reissue of some of his key books later this year. I also helped to pull together roundtable discussions of his former students around each of the books, feeling that it was far better to represent his works through conversations and colloquiums rather than lectures. I wanted to give just a little taste of this material here - part of my discussion of Fiske's relationship to technology and politics:

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"The technology needed for them [The Right] to establish the total surveillance upon which to base their moral totalism is already available. Fear will increase the likelihood of that technology's use and the probability of right-wing forces being in power to use it. It is, therefore, in their interests to confine as many of us as they can to our cultural and geographic enclaves. Is this what we want?" -- John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, 1994 (MM, 253)

The above four sentences constitute the final words in John Fiske's final book before his retirement. It is telling that Fiske ends the book on a provocation -- "Is this what we want?" No matter how dark his vision of the society had become, Fiske believed we have a choice, that we have the capacity to change our social conditions , and he called upon academics to deploy their expertise and institutional power in the service of social change.

He asks explicitly: Is this what we want?

He asks implicitly: if not, what are we going to do about it?

The question culminates in a chapter devoted to what Fiske describes as "technostruggles," one of the few places where Fiske wrote extensively about technology as an agent of cultural change. Fiske wrote about arcade games, well before his contemporaries, in Reading the Popular (1989). He discussed the ways people were using channel changers to exert greater control over television in Television Culture (1988). And he described how the widespread deployment of photocopiers were causing anxieties about copyright regulation, even as copying television programs and music was becoming more "socially acceptable" [TC 311]. In each case, his arguments were ultimately less about the technology than about its popular uses. In such passages, Fiske suggested the complex interplay between technological and cultural change, but he never developed a theory of oppositional use of technology until the final chapters of Media Matters.

Fiske's relative disinterest in technology (and often, in media ownership) drew sharp criticism from political economists, who felt that he underestimated the structuring power of entrenched capital. He explains in Understanding Popular Culture that his theoretical perspective is "essentially optimistic, for it finds in the vigor and vitality of the people evidence both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation to drive it." [UPC,21] We've heard so much over the past decade and a half about the democratic potential of new media technologies and practices that it is easy to forget that Fiske saw the Internet as simply another battleground through which ongoing struggles over meaning, pleasure, knowledge, and power would be conducted. But he also did not accept a model which saw certain media technologies as forces for cultural domination:

"Information technology is highly political, but its politics are not directed by its technological features alone. It is, for instance, a technical feature of the surveillance camera that enables it to identify a person's race more clearly than his or her class or religion, but it is a racist society that transforms that information into knowledge." [MM 219]

The affordances of new media could be deployed towards certain ends, but ultimately, how they were used reflected their cultural context.

Fiske saw the promises of a digital revolution but did not declare a premature victory over mass media:

"New technologies cannot in themselves produce social change, though they can and do facilitate it." [MM 115]

"Power is social, not just technological, and it is through institutional and economic control that technology is directed." [MM 137]

"We can make our society one that is rich in diverse knowledges, but only if people strive to produce and circulate them. Technology will always be involved and, if its potential is exploited, its proliferation may make the control over knowledge less, not more, efficient." [MM 238]

"Technology is proliferating, but not equally: its low-tech and high-tech forms still reproduce older hierarchies, and although it may extend the terrain of struggle and introduce new weapons into it, it changes neither the lineup of forces nor the imbalance in the resources they command." [MM 239]

"The multiplication of communication and information technologies extend the terrains of struggle, modifies the forms struggle may take, and makes it even more imperative that people grasp the opportunities for struggle that the multiplying of technologies offers." [MM 240]

Yes, Fiske tells us, media matters, but media change does not overcome other social, cultural, political, and economic factors.....

When I brought John Fiske to MIT shortly after Media Matters was published, I remember the disappointment and frustration some of my students felt that Fiske was "not ready" to embrace the promise of the digital, because at the epicenter of the digital revolution, we were full of hopes that the new media would lower the barriers to entry into cultural production and distribution, allowing many more voices to be heard and putting greater power (political, economic, cultural) in the hands of "the people." I was surrounded by early adopters for whom the transformative capacity of new media was an article of faith. In this context, I often had to work hard to resist technological determinist arguments and to insist, as John had taught us, that cultural and social factors shape technology far more than technology shapes culture....

Confronted with the assertion that the wide availability of new tools would enable greater public participation, Fiske wrote, "In premodern Europe,... everyone had a larynx, but few were able to speak in public and political life." [MM 238] Technological access was not sufficient in the absence of efforts to overcome those social and cultural factors which blocked full participation -- what we now would call "the participation gap."

Fiske typically followed claims about grassroots resistance with an acknowledgment of the powerful forces which were stacked against us. For example, Fiske was interested in the unequal status of high tech and low tech uses of communication technology, contrasting the "videohigh" of the broadcast industry with the "videolow" of citizen camcorder activism, a contrast which paves the way to a consideration of how broadcast and grassroots media competes with each other for attention and credibility. Fiske wrote "technostruggles" in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial. As Fiske notes, the original video showing the Los Angeles police beating suspect Rodney King, captured via a home movie camera by a passerby George Holliday, possessed high credibility because it displayed so little technological sophistication:

"George Holliday owned a camera, but not a computer enhancer; he could produce and replay an electronic image, but could not slow it, reverse it, freeze it, or write upon it, and his videolow appeared so authentic to so many precisely because he could not." [MM 223]

The LAPD's defense attorneys deployed a range of technical and rhetorical tricks to reframe the King video and change how it was understood, at least by the jury, if not by the general public. For Fiske, this struggle over the tape's meaning suggested what was to come -- an ongoing competition between those who have access to low-tech, everyday forms of cultural production and those who had access to high-tech communication systems. If new media technologies were expanding the resources available to those who have previously seemed powerless, they were also expanding the capacities of the powerful.

In Media Matters, Fiske's embrace of participatory media practices was suggested by his enthusiasm for low-bandwidth "pirate" radio stations within the African-American community. At the same time, Fiske was quick to link networked computing with institutions of government surveillance. Fiske warned that the same practices deployed by companies to construct a "consumer profile" could be applied by governments to construct a "political profile": "The magazines we subscribe to, the causes we donate to, the university courses we register for, the books we purchase and the ones we borrow from the library are all recorded, and recorded information is always potentially available." [MM 219] Fiske predicted that conservatives might intensify the power of the government in response to their "fear" as America became a minority-majority country in the coming decades. Fiske anticipated that increased controversy around racial conflict would be embodied through "media events" such as the Rodney King tape and the LA Riots, the battle between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and the murder trial and acquittal of O.J. Simpson. A decade plus later, we are more apt to ascribe the growth of surveillance culture to the "terror" produced by 9/11 and its aftermath, though Fiske would have pushed us to consider the ways the War on Terror is linked to racial profiling and may mask other kinds of conflicts.

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

What do you say to an educator or parent who feels that making music remix videos, say, has nothing to do with literacy? In what senses are you describing such forms of expression as literacy practices?

The common sense view of literacy is that it refers to reading and writing alphabetic print and that to be literate is simply a matter of knowing how to encode and decode printed text; that is, to recognise the letters and convert them into words and sequences of words as a reader or a writer. According to this view, literacy is the same thing for everyone. It is the same tool, or the same skill using that tool. Some people might be faster at it and others slower; some may spell better than others, and some may be better at applying text comprehension strategies than others; but at the end of the day, the common sense view is that literacy one single thing, and it is the same for everyone.

This view is flawed, however, and on a number of levels. It's a bit like saying that computing is the same for everyone, just that some are more fluent with it or more skilled. But in the hands of different people who have different purposes and different understandings of what can be done with computers, and so on, computing takes on many different forms. There are many different practices of computing, such that you could give two people what look like the same tool, but what you see going on subsequently might be so very different that you can't really even begin to see them as doing "the same thing" or using the same tool. The example may be even better made by reference to "telephoning." To say that a person calling the dentist on their landline to make an appointment is doing the same thing, using the same tool, employing the same skill - telephoning - as a person in 2010 who uses their mobile phone to video an eyewitness account of what goes on to become a major news event, then uses the phone to upload the video to a social news discussion site along with an explanatory written commentary, and to check back regularly to see what comments have been left by others as well as to track how news of the event itself is playing out across the internet and broadcast media, is to miss the point. What looks like "the same kind of machine" is taken up in very different ways by different people, and has very different meanings for different people. It is to all intents and purposes a "very different thing" in the hands of different people; not the same thing at all.

So it is with literacy, and that is why we think it is best to talk about literacies in the plural rather than literacy in the singular. The singular form focuses our attention on the wrong thing - on thinking that the all-important thing is managing alphabetic text. This is important, but it's only a part of it.

There are two key points to make here. The first is to recognize what is most important about literacy as a social phenomenon, which is that it enables people to do what cannot be done by orality alone. Literacy enables human beings to communicate and share meanings in ways that go beyond the use of voice within face-to-face settings (which is orality). Literacy checks in when the conditions of everyday life are such that people need more than the use of voice alone to get the meaning-making work done that needs to get done for life to go on. The bottom line for literacy is that it enables meaning-making to occur or "travel" across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded texts of one kind or another. Encoded texts "freeze" or "capture" thought and language in ways that free them from their immediate context of production so that they are "transportable." Unencoded texts like speech and hand signs "expire" at the point of production other than to the extent that they can live on - fallibly - in the memories of whoever was there at the time. Encoded texts give (semi) permanence and transcendence to thought and language in the sense that they can "travel" without requiring particular people to transport them. Literacies can involve any kind of codification that "captures" language and thought in this sense. Literacy includes letteracy (the alphabet bits), but goes far beyond that. Speech recorded on tape or digitally is frozen and counts as encoded language and thought. The same applies to still and moving images. It is not that memory and speech alone cannot sustain considerable meaning making across distance and contexts. It is just that this is exponentially enabled and facilitated by literacy as encodification, which permits all kinds of procedures and institutions and practices that would be impossible, or impossibly cumbersome, without encoded thought and language.

During the centuries of mass print, following the invention of the printing press, the dominance of print as the paradigm of encoded texts has made it "natural" to associate literacy with alphabetic text. But this is really just an historical contingency. Many centuries prior to that humans used pictorial inscriptions of one kind or another (as well as other markings) to encode language and thought independently of voice. As new ways of encoding come and go, encoding system paradigms change. And right now we are at a point where the dominance - previously, almost the monopoly - of the print paradigm is being challenged by the ease of digital encoding that can combine multiple modes and mixes of multiple modes. Where it is more effective to use alternative sign systems from alphabetic text to mediate meaning-making within mainstream everyday interactions, the alternatives will be used. And people's ideas about literacy will change accordingly.

The second key point is that literacies vary with contexts. What we mean by context has to do with who the people are within a particular setting, what they are aiming to do, how they are trying to do it, what they are trying to do it with, and who they are or are trying to be within that context. So, if we think about something as obvious as reading a particular text, it is clear that different people, coming from different cultural spaces and possessing different cultural knowledge may read the same text in very different ways and make different meanings from it. For example, during the 1980s, many liberation theology priests who worked with Latin American peasants in ways they hoped would encourage them to mobilise to demand a better share of social wealth interpreted key biblical passages very differently to how conservative urban priests who identified with the existing social order interpreted them. Moreover, both groups worked with biblical texts in different ways and in different settings; liberationists would pore over the texts with peasants within settings where evidence of poverty was immediate, and would encourage the group to think about the meaning in relation to a change agenda. By contrast, other priests would read at large anonymous assemblies, making the interpretation amidst ornate decorative milieux that often dripped gold and spoke to divine rather than popular power. Same text, different people, different purposes, different procedures, different knowledge informing the meaning making and, indeed, a different technology. A bible being read by one person set apart from the listeners is utterly different from a bible being pored over, passed from person to person, and being used to stimulate thought intended to guide political action. Within Latin American settings both of these "ways" of "reading bibles" have been common - along with many other variations we can think of.

Now the point is that these kinds of differences in "ways with encoded texts" can be multiplied many times over. In a famous example, Shirley Brice Heath showed how different social groups within a region of the United States "did bedtime reading" in very different ways. Experts on the philosophy of Kant read and discuss Kant's works in very different ways from first year philosophy students, and (can) make very different meanings from them. That is why philosophers try to induct philosophy students into sophisticated reading practices, of which following letters and words across a page is only a tiny (albeit very important) part. The expert philosophers are trying to recruit the students to a new social practice, and this involves having to teach them how to read and write philosophically (which involves a lot more than just eyes and texts). Jim Gee uses the word Discourse (with a capital "D") to signify the idea that there are all different kinds of combinations of types of people and kinds of purposes and goals, and ways of setting about them, and ways of using language within them, and ways of dressing (liberationists in outdoor garb and metropolitan priests in ornate robes) and so on. We can say that different Discourses tend to involve different literacies, and will often involve different (forms of) technologies or tools, and different ways of using them, and so on. And participants in these different Discourses will make different meanings from what look like the same resources, and they will use what look like the same resources (think: computer, phone, bible) in very different ways.

So if we put all of these ideas together (along with others there is not space to mention here) it suddenly becomes very obvious why we would think of making remix music videos as having everything to do with literacy, rather than having nothing to do with literacy. It is one of a very large number of literacies that exist (not to mention new ones that are emerging all the time). That is, when we think of literacies in terms of "so many socially recognized ways in which people who are participating in particular Discourses generate, communicate and negotiate meanings through the medium of encoded texts," it's perfectly natural to think of people who are producing and sharing and interacting with remix music videos as engaging in (a) literacy. They are decoding and encoding sophisticated multimedia texts, with a view to communicating and sharing and negotiating meanings with others of their ilk (other members of their Discourse). They set about this in ways that others recognize as appropriate to doing this literacy well. They are freezing thought and "language" so that it can travel and be experienced and negotiated within practices of giving and taking meaning.

When we look at things from this perspective it is the people who cannot see remix music video in terms of literacy that have the problem; not those for whom it is self-evidently a legitimate, pleasurable, widely-practised, and potentially incredibly powerful literacy.

In my Afterword, I raise the question about the value of learning these skills as an isolated set of practices rather than as part of a more diverse affinity space. In other words, is there a difference between learning to make a remix video and learning to be an Otaku (who happens to display his or her skills and knowledge through contributing remix videos to a larger fan culture)?

Yes, there certainly is a difference, although learning to make something like a remix video can - and often does - lead to becoming a fan of something one previously was not a fan of, and to becoming more the kind of fan who happens to display their skills and knowledge through contributing artifacts to a larger fan culture and through other characteristically Otaku practices. Indeed, this is precisely the route that Matt, the co-author of our chapter on AMV remix in the book, took. We came across Matt's anime music video remixes via YouTube, where his "Konoha Memory Book" video at the time had over half a million views (take-down notices unfortunately mean the video is no longer on YouTube). Half a million views is a significant marker of popularity online, and so we interviewed him about his anime music video production process, and his involvement in remixing AMVs. He was 17 years old at the time, and he explained that he'd started creating AMVs two years earlier. It turns out that prior to that, he hadn't been a fan of anime or manga or anything like that at all. What happened was that a mate showed him "Narutrix" (an AMV faux movie trailer parodying the Matrix movies) which got Matt interested in watching the Naruto anime series in particular, and then anime in general. It didn't take him long to start tinkering around with creating his own AMVs, even before he became what could be described a full participant in anime culture. He's subsequently gone on to become such an avid anime fan that not only does he create AMVs which he posts to AMV.org and YouTube, submit AMVs to convention contests (and for which he regularly wins awards), draw his own original manga figures and comics which he posts online at DeviantArt.org, maintain a blog about his anime interests, contribute to anime dicussion boards, write generous reviews of and comments' on others' AMVs, but he spends his weekends cosplaying a rich range of anime characters, and organizes cosplay chess games for different anime conventions as well. He's now--thanks to his initial interest in AMVs as an expressive form in their own right--most definitely an Otaku!

Other ideas arise here, however, which are relevant to questions about the relationships between identity and practices and to ideas and ideals of learning. For example, it may not be that a person learns DIY media practices as an isolated set of skills but, rather, as skills and knowledges and values and mastery of systems and the like as part of becoming a kind of person that just happens not to be a fan. Hence, a person who identifies as the kind of person who practises the ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible might learn a particular skill and knowledge set under this kind of motivation (e.g., knowing how to sew clothes; knowing how to preserve or can home-grown fruit; knowing how to make solar-powered things). Moreover, we often find a paradox associated with self-sufficiency: people who identify with being self-sufficient often are closely linked with like minded people and inter-relate with them, sharing points of view, solidarity, and resources and so on. But they do this under a much more diffuse kind of identity than members of specific affinity groups. When people who are into "self-sufficiency" interact with one another their specific interests and things they create may have little or no overlap whatsoever, other than as expressions of participating in a general ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible.

Alternatively, the kind of audience we have for this book is of people who might want to get some experience of DIY creativity and production as part of how they see themselves becoming a more effective teacher or, perhaps, a more in touch parent. Here again, the skills and knowledge being learned would not be "isolated". They might be a long way, at least initially, from Otaku culture or other avid fan cultures, but, equally, they may not at all be isolated but connected to something that is very important to them. In fact, isolation would actually be very difficult to sustain in the context of learning some digital DIY media. The very process tends to put people very quickly into the realm of affinity spaces and, as Matt's case indicates, from there anything can happen - including the development of full-fledged fan affinities and approximations to Otaku ways of doing and being.

At the same time, there are some important differences and distinctions at stake. One is the difference between a more instrumental orientation to practice and a more intrinsic orientation. There is all the difference in the world between dropping in on a Linux forum to get some help with a problem, leaving feedback, making the information available to others and maybe making a Paypal contribution to an open source software fund, on one hand, and being a full-on contributor who helps code open source software and build the open source movement, on the other. In the first case the relationship is instrumental: minimal participation as a means to an end. In the second, it is intrinsic; one is a devotee of open source ideals and practices and, in effect, becomes a steward of those ideals and practices. Lawrence Eng's classic statement about fanship and stewardship is a supreme expression of the intrinsic orientation that defines many Otaku identities. Explaining why he proactively sought out other fans of Sasami from the Tenchi Muyo anime and developed the Sasami Appreciation Society as an affinity space, Eng said "it's our devotion to Sasami ... we're dedicated to bringing her the fanship that she deserves" (as cited by Mimi Ito). This is activity as an end in itself rather than to some further end. It is done for its own sake, as an expression of devotion, rather than as a means to producing an artifact, getting a reputation, or reaping other personal benefits. These may occur, of course, but they are not the point and purpose of the engagement within an intrinsic orientation. Of course, one can learn an incredible amount along the way, but even this is not the motivation to participate.

There is much that is important and valuable about this kind of orientation and way of being. In many ways it constitutes an ideal of active citizenship - of being committed to building something because one believes in it, and of putting that first, and of dedicating one's activity to contributing to its fullest realisation. At its best, this is what communities of academic practice become, and if we need any reminders of how valuable this ideal can be we need only think of negative examples that are always available of academics who are largely or mainly there for "career prospects", and of the ugliness that can so quickly surface in the form of academic jealousies, back-biting practices, resentment, clique formation and turf battles and so on. Apart from the quality of learning that can occur within bona fide affinity practices, the fact is that there is much of human beauty to be found there: selflessness, promotion of the greater good, humility, stewardship, generosity, reciprocity and so on. Anyone who doesn't think we need as much as we can get of such values has not looked outside in a while.

This said, however, it is worth making a couple of cautionary observations about the "structure" of participation and learning within affinity spaces. While we have identified the qualities of stewardship, humility, commitment to a greater (assumed) good, and the priority of intrinsic worth to fan practices, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that humans can be(come) fans of anything, and for these qualities to remain intact and yet, potentially, have regrettable consequences. While becoming a fan of many popular culture practices and icons, as with becoming a fan of environmental science, or mathematics, or democracy might typically be expected to have more or less benign and positive outcomes, the same might not apply to becoming a fan of the Third Reich or Pol Pot or any number of contemporary examples that could be named, where people do in fact become fans (although "bad" fans are often called, fanatics), and do pursue intrinsic goods (as they see them), practice stewardship, collaborate, share, put other people and ideals before themselves and so on. To be a fan has no limits so far as objects of affinity are concerned, and while we may limit the word "Otaku" to some specific range of fanships it may be more difficult to so limit the general concept and its deep grammar. Hence, the "good" of displaying skills and knowledge through contributing to a larger (fan) culture will always be to some extent contingent.

A related point here concerns the structure of learning within practice affinities or, as they are often called, communities of practice. The New Work Order (1996) argues that communities of practice seed values without these values needing some apparent central controlling agency to insist upon them or maintain them: "Immersion into a community of practice [an affinity] can allow individuals or units to internalize values and goals - often without a great deal of negotiation or conscious reflection and without the exercise of very much top-down authority" (p. 65). Participants collaborate, participate, share, reciprocate, "scaffold" and support, for all they are worth, and the net effect of this is building the practice and the community. But it does not necessarily transcend what Kevin Harris (1979), many years ago, referred to as "supportive rhetoric". It can, and usually does, support critical scrutiny that is internal to the practice/community, but at the same time this critique insulates participants against possibilities of external critique. The more a person invests in an affinity the less space there is for countenancing alternatives. The learning is, to be sure, often "deep," and deeply social. But "learning works best - it is most enculturating, but (alas) also most indoctrinating - when it is done inside the social practices of a Discourse" such as a fan affinity practice (New Work Order p. 15). It is not for nothing that many "fast capitalist" enterprises have encouraged the development of fandoms around their products, seeding the core values and leaving it to fan collaboration, participation and celebration to build the community (and the profits).

For us, the important thing is trying to keep the baby with the bathwater, in the sense of encouraging multiple fandoms - memberships of multiple affinities - and multiple orders of affinities, such that we strive for Otaku-like membership of practices that embrace intrinsic ends linked to distribution of material social goods as well as to pleasures. Becoming fans of understanding how social practices work for better and for worse so far as contributing materially to promoting long-term human good is concerned seems to us to be of the utmost importance.

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

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

Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0: Some Basic Distinctions

The following is excerpted from the Afterword I wrote for the recently published book, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Next time, I will begin an extended interview with the book's editors about their views about DIY Media, Informal Learning, New Media Literacies, and Otaku Culture. Do It Yourself rarely means Do It Alone. For example, much of what youth learn through game playing emerges from "meta-gaming," the conversations about the game play. Trading advice often forces participants to spell out their core assumptions as more experienced players pass along what they've learned to newcomers. This "meta-gaming" has many of the dimensions of peer-to-peer teaching or "Social Learning." As John Seeley Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) explain, "social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions."To call this "learning by doing" is too simple, since we will not learn as much if we separate what we are doing -- making a podcast, modding a game, mastering a level -- from the social context in which we are doing it.

I have always felt uncomfortable with the phrase, "Do It Yourself," to label the practices described in this book. "Do It Yourself" is too easy to assimilate back into some vague and comfortable notion of "personal expression" or "individual voice" that Americans can assimilate into long-standing beliefs in "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." Yet, what may be radical about the DIY ethos is that learning relies on these mutual support networks, creativity is understood as a trait of communities, and expression occurs through collaboration. Given these circumstances, phrases like "Do It Ourselves" or "Do It Together" better capture collective enterprises within networked publics. This is why I am drawn towards concepts such as "participatory culture," (Jenkins et a, 2009l) "Affinity Spaces," (Gee, 2007) "Genres of Participation," (Ito et al, 2009) "networked publics," (Varnelis, 2008) "Collective Intelligence," (Levy, 1999) or "Communities of Practice," (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

While each reflects somewhat different pedalogical models, each captures the sense of a shared space or collective enterprise which shapes the experience of individual participants/learners. Each offers us a model of peer-to-peer education: we learn from each other in the process of working together to achieve shared goals. Many of these models emphasize the diverse roles played by various participants in this process. It is not that all participants know the same things (as has been the expectation in school); success rests on multiple forms of expertise the group can deploy "just in time" responding to shifting circumstances and emerging problems. It is not that all participants do the same things; rather, these practices depend on the ad hoc coordination of diverse skills and actions towards shared interests.

We need to understand the specific practices discussed here as informed by norms and values that emerge from their community of participants. We see different things if we focus on the practices or on the communities that deploy them, and in my remarks here, I hope to shift the lens onto the communities. Focusing on practices first, the editors write in this book's introduction, "Podcasting, for example, involves using particular kinds of tools, techniques and technologies to achieve the goals and purposes that podcasters aim to achieve, and to use them in the ways that people known as podcasters recognize as appropriate to their endeavor in terms of their goals and values." While saying something important about the nature of these practices, this description assumes that the operative identity here is that of the podcaster and that podcasters enjoy a shared identity as parts of a community of practice regardless of the content and functions of their podcasts. And this may be true for some, especially at the moment they are first learning how to podcast or are passing those skills and practices along to others, but for many, podcasting is a means to an end.

OTAKU, FANS, HIP HOPPERS AND GAMERS

On the ground, these practices get embedded in a range of different interest-driven networks and what motivates these activities may be less a desire to make a podcast than an urge to create a shared space where, for example, fans can discuss their mutual interests in Severius Snape or where church members can hold prayer circles or where comic book buffs can interview writers and artists or... The Digital Youth Project (Ito et al) drew a useful distinction between "messing around," tinkering with new tools and techniques to see what they can do, and "geeking out," going deep into a particular interest that may in turn lead you to engage with a range of social networks and production practices. There is some risk that as educators organize class projects around the production of podcasts, they risk divorcing these practices from the larger cultural contexts in which they operate.

We might think about different interest-driven networks as mobilizing somewhat different clusters of interlocking and mutually reinforcing practices. Consider, for example, Mimi Ito's (2005) description of the literacy skills within Otaku culture, the fan community around anime and manga:

"Anime otaku are media connoisseurs, activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content from a far away land and organize their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works. Otaku translate and subtitle all major anime works, they create web sites with hundreds and thousands of members, stay in touch 24/7 on hundreds of IRC channels, and create fan fiction, fan art, and anime music videos that rework the original works into sometimes brilliantly creative and often subversive alternative frames of reference.... To support their media obsessions otaku acquire challenging language skills and media production crafts of scripting, editing, animating, drawing, and writing. And they mobilize socially to create their own communities of interest and working groups to engage in collaborative media production and distribution. Otaku use visual media as their source material for crafting their own identities, and as the coin of the realm for their social networks. Engaging with and reinterpreting professionally produced media is one stepping stone towards critical media analysis and alternative media production."

Certainly, within Otaku culture, one can gain an identity as a fan-subber, a vidder, a fan fiction author, a community organizer, or an illustrator, but these practice-based identities do not supersede one's larger identity as an Otaku.

What Ito observes about Otaku culture is consistent with what researchers have observed in a range of other subcultures. Consider this description from my field work on female-centered science fiction fandom in the early 1990s (Jenkins, 1992):

"Four Quantum Leap fans gather every few weeks in a Madison, Wisconsin apartment to write. The women spread out across the living room, each with their own typewriter or laptop, each working diligently on their own stories about Al and Sam. Two sit at the dining room table, a third sprawls on the floor, a fourth balances her computer on the coffee table. The clatter of the keyboards and the sounds of a filktape are interrupted periodically by conversation. Linda wants to insure that nothing in the program contradicts her speculations about Sam's past. Mary has introduced a southern character and consults Georgia-born Signe for advice about her background. Kate reviews her notes on Riptide, having spent the week rewatching favorite scenes so she can create a 'crossover' story which speculates that Sam may have known Murray during his years at MIT. Mary scrutinizes her collection of 'telepics' (photographs shot from the television image), trying to find the right words to capture the suggestion of a smile that flits across his face....Kate passes around a letter she has received commenting on her recently published fanzine....Each of the group members offers supportive comments on a scene Linda has just finished, all independently expressing glee over a particularly telling line. As the day wears on, writing gives way to conversation, dinner, and the viewing of fan videos (including the one that Mary made a few weeks before)....For the fan observer, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about this encounter. I have spent similar afternoons with other groups of fans, collating and binding zines, telling stories, and debating the backgrounds of favorite characters....For the 'mundane' observer, what is perhaps most striking about this scene is the ease and fluidity with which these fans move from watching a television program to engaging in alternative forms of cultural production: the women are all writing their own stories; Kate edits and publishes her own zines she prints on a photocopy machine she keeps in a spare bedroom and the group helps to assemble them for distribution. Linda and Kate are also fan artists who exhibit and sell their work at conventions; Mary is venturing into fan video making and gives other fans tips on how to shoot better telepics. Almost as striking is how writing becomes a social activity for these fans, functioning simultaneously as a form of personal expression and as a source of collective identity (part of what it means to be a fan). Each of them has something potentially interesting to contribute; the group encourages them to develop their talents fully, taking pride in their accomplishments, be they long-time fan writers and editors like Kate or relative novices like Signe."

At the time, I was interested in what this scene told us about how fans read television and how they deployed its contents as raw materials for their own expressive activities. Rereading the passage today, I am struck by how fully the description captures the strengths of a DIY culture as a site for informal learning. Sometimes the women are working on individual, self-defined projects and sometimes they are working together on mutual projects but always they are drawing moral support from their membership in an interest-driven network. Each plays multiple roles: sometimes the author, sometimes the reader; sometimes the teacher, sometimes the student; sometimes the editor, sometimes the researcher, sometimes the illustrator. They move fluidly from role to role as needed, interupting their own creative activity to lend skills and knowledge to someone else. Their creative interests straddle multiple media practices: they write stories, they take telepics, they edit videos, they publish zines, each of which constitutes a complex cultural practice combining technical skills and cultural expertise. Leadership, as Gee tells us, is "porous": the space is Signe's apartment; Kate is editing the zine to which they are each contributing; and Mary has the expertise in fan video production which she shares with her circle in hopes of getting more of them vidding. And we see here a conception of culture as a series of "processes" rather than a set of "products." Fan work is always open to revision, expansion, and elaboration, rather than locked down and closed off from other's contributions. As a more recent account of fan cultural practices (Busse and Helleckson, 2006) explains:

"Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet completed....The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the ways... it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community.....In most cases, the resulting story is part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced...When the story is finally complete and published, likely online but perhaps in print, the work in progress among the creators shifts to the work in progress among the readers."

Similarly, Kevin Driscoll (2009) has discussed how Hip Hop's diverse practices around music, dance, the graphic arts, video production, and entrepreneurship associated with Hip Hop encourage participants to master a range of cultural and technological skills. He describes, for example, the different participatory practices that got mobilized around the circulation of a single song:

"

As the figurehead of 2007's "Crank Dat" phenomenon, Atlanta teenager Soulja Boy exploited social-networking and media-sharing websites to encourage a widespread dance craze that afforded him a level of visibility typically only available to artists working within the pop industry. "Crank Dat" ... began as a single commodity but grew into a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon.... Within just a few months of the first "Crank Dat" music video, fans had posted countless custom revisions of "Crank Dat" to media-sharing sites like YouTube, SoundClick, imeem, and MySpace. In each case, the participants altered the original video in a different manner. They changed the dance steps, altered the lyrics, created new instrumental beats, wore costumes, and performed in groups. Some created remix videos that borrowed footage from popular TV programs and movies...."Crank Dat" welcomed diverse modes of participation but every production required considerable technical expertise. Even a cursory exploration of the various "Crank Dat" iterations available on YouTube provides evidence of many different media production tools and techniques. The most basic homemade dance videos required operation of a video camera, post-production preparation of compressed digital video, and a successful upload to YouTube. For some of the participants in "Crank Dat", the dance craze provided an impetus for their first media projects. This lively media culture is representative of a spirit of innovation that traverses hip-hop history."

As a former classroom teacher who worked with inner city and minority youth, Driscoll directs attention towards the technical proficency of these Hip Hop fans, to challenge assumptions that often position African-American males on the wrong side of the digital divide, assuming that they have limited capacity and interest for entering STEM subjects. Rather, he argues that educators need to better understand the ways that their cultural attachments to Hip Hop often motivate them to embrace new technologies and adopt new cultural practices, many of which could provide gateways into technical expertise.

Or consider what James Paul Gee (2007) tells us about the "affinity spaces" around on-line gaming:

" A portal like AoM [Age of Mythologies] Heaven, and the AoM space as a whole, allows people to achieve status, if they want it (and they may not), in many different ways. Different people can be good at different things or gain repute in a number of different ways. Of course, playing the game well can gain one status, but so can organizing forum parties, putting out guides, working to stop hackers from cheating in the multi-player game, posting to any of a number of different forums, or a great many other things."

Indeed, for Gee, the idea of multiple forms of participation and status are part of what makes these affinity spaces such rich environments for informal learning. Unlike schools, where everyone is expected to do (and be good at) the same things, these participatory cultures allow each person to set their own goals, learn at their own pace, come and go as they please, and yet they are also motivated by the responses of others, often spending more time engaged with the activities because of a sense of responsibility to their guild or fandom. They enable a ballance between self-expression and collaborative learning which may be the sweet spot for DIY learning.

These examples represent four very different communities, each with their own governing assumptions about what it means to participate and about what kinds of cultural practices and identities are meaningful. Yet, all of them embody the pedagogical principles I have identified within participatory culture:

"A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another." (Jenkins et al, 2006)

CHALLENGING THE "LEARNING 2.0" FORMULATION

There has been a growing tendency to describe the application of these participatory culture principles to the classroom as "education 2.0" and as we do so, to take the highly visible corporate "web 2.0" portals not simply as our ideal model, but also as the source for these new participatory practices. Look at the way Brown and Adler's (2008) influential formulation of "Learning 2.0" ascribes agency to corporate platforms and technologies rather than to communities of participants:

"The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources-- such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities-- have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multple modes of learning."

The DIY ethos, which emerged as a critique of consumer culture and a celebration of making things ourselves, is being transformed into a new form of consumer culture, a product or service that is sold to us by media companies rather than something that emerged from grassroots practices.

For this reason, I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users. "Web 2.0" is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model. Unlike projects like Wikipedia that have emerged from nonprofit organizations, the Open Courseware movement from educational institutions, and the Free Software movement from voluntary and unpaid affiliations, the Web 2.0 companies follow a commercial imperative, however much they may also wish to facilitate the needs and interests of their consumer base. The more time we spend interacting with Facebook, YouTube, or Live Journal, the clearer it becomes that there are real gaps between the interests of management and consumers. Academic theorists (Terranova,2004; Green and Jenkins, 2009) have offered cogent critiques of what they describe as the "free labor" provided by those who chose to contribute their time and effort to creating content which can be shared through such sites, while consumers and fans have offered their own blistering responses to shifts in the terms of service which devalue their contributions or claim ownership over the content they produced. Many Web 2.0 sites provide far less scaffolding and mentorship than offered by more grassroots forms of participatory culture. Despite a rhetoric of collaboration and community, they often still conceive of their users as autonomous individuals whose primary relationship is to the company that provides them services and not to each other. There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process.

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

You are now writing professional novels surrounding Thunderbirds. Many Americans may not know this franchise. What can you tell them about the series which might prompt their interest?

I was watching the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson productions (starting with Supercar) before Star Trek came on the air. The premise of Thunderbirds is that Jeff Tracy and his five adult sons and associates have a secret base on a South Pacific island. They call their organization International Rescue, and they're dedicated to helping people in danger who are otherwise unable to be reached by traditional first responders. They have aircraft and equipment which is years ahead of their contemporaries: Thunderbird 1, a rocket-reconnaissance vessel; Thunderbird 2, a heavy-rescue aircraft; Thunderbird 3, a rocket used for space rescues; Thunderbird 4, a submarine for underwater rescues; and Thunderbird 5, their communications satellite.

Each of my Thunderbirds novels is written so that readers don't have to know anything about International Rescue in order to follow it. I have had many readers coming to these novels with no knowledge of the TV series who have enjoyed them immensely.

Thunderbirds dates back to the mid-1960s, roughly the same time period as Star Trek. What similarities and differences do you see between the two? Has Thunderbirds maintained a continuing presence in British culture over the years between?

Thunderbirds is similar to Roddenberry's Star Trek in that it has an optimistic vision of the future. Thunderbirds is set in the 2060s, and the speed of light has not been exceeded, so they're limited in missions on Earth and within the solar system. As with Star Trek, Thunderbirds features a lot of futuristic technology and innovation, and the consequences of such developments (that is, new technology sometimes works great, and other times, new technology causes new problems that the characters have to deal with). In both series, the characters often wrestle with the ethics and consequences of what they're doing, debate as to what the correct approach to the situation is, and regularly have to make more than one attempt before achieving their objectives. Both series have elements of drama and humor, and in both series, each character seems to have a unique following among the fans. So there's a similar subtext as well as a similar futuristic outlook.

In Great Britain, Thunderbirds has been on the air constantly since the 1960s (much as Star Trek has been in the U.S.). Its characters are featured in commercials all the time. (I viewed 2 of them last year on YouTube.) As with Star Trek in the U.S., there are ongoing cultural references, as well. (I have seen a "Photoshopped" photo of Prime Minister Gordon Brown dressed in an International Rescue uniform, for instance, and have been told that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had the Thunderbirds theme played when he took office.)

Thunderbirds is popular in many places around the world, as well. For instance, when she was on the International Space Station, NASA played the Thunderbirds introduction as a "wake-up call" for Canadian Astronaut Julie Payette, who is a Thunderbirds fan.

I've read that Gerry Anderson is planning a new Thunderbirds series, substituting computer animation for the original puppetry. What factors suggest there may be a new potential audience out there for this franchise?

Gerry Anderson definitely wants to produce a new Thunderbirds series with CGI, similar to what he did with New Captain Scarlet, which was based on his 1960s series with marionettes. I think that CGI is the way to go, since the most common dismissal one hears of Thunderbirds is that it's "just a puppet show." For some, it seems that the marionettes distract attention from the characters and the stories.

I found, when I bought the DVD set back in 2003, and was able to study Thunderbirds at length and in depth, is that the scripts were more sophisticated than a lot of people give them credit for. The Thunderbirds TV series was written both for children and adults (which is what I also try to do with my novels). While the series can be enjoyed on a superficial level, there's an undercurrent of substance that adults can relate to as well. In seeing and reacting to "just puppets," I think a lot of people miss that subtext.

My opinion is that in order to re-create a series in any form (movie, television, novels, etc.), it's essential to have a grasp of the original text, as well as the original subtext. Yes, any re-creation of the original will be controversial among fans, because fans have so many different approaches to the original it's impossible to please them all, but a superficial approach to the original will result in pleasing no one, because it will seem "fake," even to those who have no knowledge of the original concept. In contrast, when a series seems "genuine," it appears to attract a more favorable response, even among those who aren't aware of the original series. That's the reason I think the franchise can draw a new audience.

Sheenagh Pugh has argued that fan fiction is written from a desire for "more of" and "more from" the original text. The same is often true of professional extensions. Which is the urge which led you to write these novels and how do they satisfy your fannish interest in the property?

I agree that the desire for "more" is a strong motivation. The original Thunderbirds lasted only one and a half seasons. I felt there were a lot more stories to tell, and a lot of potential that had been left untapped.

Writing officially licensed Thunderbirds novels is very satisfying for me as a fan, because I can spend time with the characters that I love and the alternate universe that is Thunderbirds, which I find very attractive. As is the case with Star Trek, Thunderbirds shows a future that I would be happy to live in.

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

What Reality Television Tells Us About the Arab World: An Interview with Marwan Kraidy (Part One)

Reality television is often depicted as the trivialization or tabloidization of American culture. I can't tell you how many people I know have told me with a sneer that more Americans voted in the most recent American Idol than voted in the last presidential election. It turns out to be a myth -- since people can vote as many times as they want for American Idol, there's no way to translate the number of votes cast into the number of people participating, and my bet is that if we could have voted for the candidate of our choice on speed dial in the last election, the numbers there would have looked much more impressive. Yet, the comment suggests the ways that reality television is often depicted as a distraction for democratic citizenship. This is one of many reasons I was so interested in Marwan Kraidy's new book, Reality Television and Reality Politics, published earlier this year, which argues that reality television has been a key vehicle through which the Arab world has been negotiating a range of social, cultural, political, economic, and technological changes and has become a springboard for significant debates about nationalism and the future of citizenship. The books offers vivid case studies over how the international formats of reality television -- especially those around Big Brother and Pop Idol -- have become the vehicles through which the Arab public has worked through contradictions surrounding modernity. Kraidy sees these formats not simply as another symptom of western cultural imperialism, but through the localization process, as ways that the Arab world takes measure of its own cultural practices and political traditions. These formats, and localized responses to them, force certain issues into the forefront of the popular imagination, but they also suggest a much more diverse set of worldviews at place in Middle Eastern culture than typically emerge in western representations of this region.

In this interview, Kraidy talks through some of the insights one gains into Arab cultural politics by looking at how the reality television genre is being absorbed into their broadcast practices and by looking at both the content and responses to these programs. What follows will challenge your preconceptions about both reality television and the Arab world.

Your book opens with a quotation from Fatima Mernissi: "Reality and the representation of reality are always far apart. But the gap between the two reaches a breaking point when a society experiences a deep crisis in which individuals don't have enough time to formulate discourses to explain to themselves what they are doing." What does this passage suggest about the place of reality television in the contemporary Arab world?

Reality television crystallized a festering Arab malaise exacerbated by the Iraq War, Abu Ghrayb, the Danish Cartoons, the plight of the Palestinians, and an existential crisis whose scope is truly all-encompassing--ideological, social, political, economic, religious, etc. Clearly, reality television did not trigger all the above on its own, but the intense controversy it created, because it was public, transnational, and involved many sectors of society, gave many Arabs a language and a platform to voice their anger, fears and aspirations. Reality television's claim to represent the real fomented the polemic by compelling many social groups to advance multiple Arab realities. Some said: "This (young men and women living together for four months and competing for viewers' text-messaged votes) is not our reality. It is a reality imposed by the West." This prompted other Arabs to say: "In fact, some aspects of our reality are much more similar to the social interactions we see on reality shows than the reality that you--conservatives speaking in the name of religion--are in fact trying to impose on all of us."

Reality television has been deeply political in many parts of the world. HBO recently ran a documentary about Afghan Star. Aswin Punathambekar has been writing lately about the politics around Pop Idol in India. John Hartley has described how a star search program in China became immersed in democracy movements there. Yet most American critics see reality as a distraction from "real politics." Do you have any thoughts about why the U.S. response has been relatively apolitical when compared with the kinds of examples you discuss in your book?

Part of the answer may be that the ethos of reality television--cutthroat individualism, conspicuous self-improvement, ostentatious meritocracy-- reflect, in exaggerated form, what are broadly perceived to be elements of the U.S. ethos. Many writers about reality television in the US-UK nexus argued that these ideolects underpin the growth of self-governing citizens under neoliberalism. This is true to a large extent in the US and the UK where the state has ceded many aspects of social life to the private sector. But this issue is not as salient in many parts of the world, where some of the most heated debates are about what we could call basic liberal values--individual autonomy, equal gender relations, representative government, etc. This difference became manifest in a symposium about the global politics of reality television that I-along with Katherine Sender--organized at Penn last year. Aswin Punathambekar made a comment then that summarizes my thoughts on this: "neoliberalism is not distributed equally around the world."

As to the belief that entertainment and popular culture is apolitical, it seems to me it is a faith-based argument, whose proponents cling to in the face of overwhelming evidence presented by researchers in the humanities and social sciences. This is true globally, even if local manifestations of it are dissimilar. So John Stewart is political in the US context in different ways than Star Academy is in Saudi Arabia.

We can look at this from another venture, which is the contested project of modernity. Clearly, what it means to be modern is vigorously contested in the Arab world, a fraught debate animated by memories of colonialism, contemporary geopolitics, and internal social transformations alike. So when something as popular and polemical as reality television enters the scene, it provides a concrete pivot where old ideological battles are waged one more time about Arab-Western relations, gender issues, cultural authenticity, religion in public life, etc. This does not mean that modernity is not contested in the US, as the Tea Party movement (and other peculiarities of American society and politics) suggests. However, it seems to me that these debates are more heated in the Arab world because of the relatively limited avenues of participation and contestation in public life.

You suggest that the discourse around reality programs in the Arab world informed "street politics" and "chamber politics." Can you share some examples of each and reflect a bit on what connections exist between them in the Arab context?

The 2005 street demonstrations in central Beirut featured vivid reminders of the implications of reality television for street politics. Fan activities metamorphosed into political activism: like reality television fans, young demonstrators used mobile phones to mobilize and offer real time tactical information that they exploited ruthlessly. Hence the story of a group of demonstrators locating one of the army checkpoint--surrounding downtown Beirut to prevent popular rallies from coalescing there--whose commanding officer was sympathetic to the demonstrators' cause. A mobile phone blast informed hundreds of activists who converged at that checkpoint and were able to gather in the city center.

In the book I also show a picture of a demonstrator carrying a hand-made sign proclaiming "Lahoud, Nominee, Vote 1559." The young man brandishing the sign nominated Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese president allied with Syria and reviled by the demonstrators, to be voted off the show/island/politics. 1559 refers to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559, which called for, among other things, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. Reality television was clearly involved in Arab "street politics."

In Kuwait, a small country known for a robust press and feisty legislative debates that regularly force politicians in the executive branch to resign, reality television animated "chamber politics" for several years. Contemporary Kuwaiti politics pit a powerful Salafi-Islamist parliamentary block against liberal groups including merchant families, professionals, and women's groups. When Lebanese reality shows grabbed ratings and headlines in the country, and when a concert promoter--a woman--wanted to bring Superstar finalists to Kuwait for a concert, Islamists "grilled" the sitting Minister of Information in parliament--who when not in the government teaches mass communication at Kuwait University--forcing him to resign. But they could not control the debate, and several prominent Kuwaiti feminists and liberals attacked the Islamists in op-eds and letters to the editor, as a poll in the liberal daily al-Qabas demonstrated reality television's vast popularity in the country.

Reality television has been at the center of the exchange of formats around the world. As you note, many of these reality show formats come from the west but get localized in the Arab context. Can you describe this localization process? To what degree is their western origins central to their political impact?

The localization process underpins the book's main argument that the Arab reality television controversies are best understood as a social laboratory where various versions of modernity are tested. The formats' western origins were never directly important. In the early years of Arab reality television, 2003 and 2004, critics leveled the charge that the reality television wave was another episode in a western cultural conquest trying to impose an alien reality on Arabs and Muslims.

Localization occurred in several ways.

One was a gradual take over by conservative forces. Consider the case of Algeria, where state television initially aired the Lebanese Star Academy. After opposition from Islamists, the Algerian president himself is said to have ordered it off the air, replacing it with a locally-made, ostensibly more conservative version. One season later, and the same slot was filled by a Qoranic recitation show, reality style--nominees, fan mobilization, viewer voting.

Hissa Helal, Saudi Poet who challenged harshly conservative clerics in her country on a poetry-themed reality show on Abu Dhabi TV, 2010

Two poetry reality shows epitomize another, and to me far more interesting, process of localization. Poetry enjoys a status in Arab culture that it is to my knowledge not accorded anywhere else in the world. Since pre-Islamic times, poetry is at once art form, political platform and entertainment. Numerous Arab television channels today have talk-shows dedicated to poetry, and poets show up on all kinds of talk-shows for women, youth, etc. A well-known poet in the Arab world is treated like a rock star. So here comes Abu Dhabi Television, supported by state financing, with the brilliant idea of launching poetry competitions, reality television style. The two shows, one dedicated to Arab poetry at large, the other focused on Gulf poetry, were major hits. Followers of your blog may have read recently the story of Hissa Helal, the Saudi woman who reached the finale of one of these shows, with a poem (in the semi-final) that attacked the reactionary clerics in her country, a gutsy move that was made partly possible by the venue--a public, popular poetry competition.

Marwan M. Kraidy is Associate Professor of Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent books include Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Arab Television Industries (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Previously he published Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2003, co-edited with Patrik Murphy) and Hybridity, or, The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple University Press, 2005, single-authored). The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2010, co-edited with Katherine Sender) is in press. His current book projects are Global Media Studies (co-authored with Toby Miller, under contract with Polity), and Music Videos and Arab Public Life.

Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part Two)

Often, the teaching of the new media literacies is understood as either the domain of a specific digital specialist or as the work of language arts or arts instructors. Yet you offer many examples of how and why this approach should impact other disciplinary domains. Why should these skills and knowledge be integrated across the curriculum?

Erin:

If you look at these three words, New + Media + Literacies ...there are different ways to interpret them. You could read it as "New Media" Literacies or "New" Media Literacies. Either way, there is no wrong answer.

"New" Media Literacies does build upon the media literacy movement where we move from being empowered by media to critically analyze the media we consume through asking important reflective questions to now being producers of media ourselves. And in this new role as producer, there are new questions to ask and new ways to think and act on how to be an integral part of shaping and contributing my perception of the world.

But also, "New Media" Literacies is a new form of literacy and helps teachers understand that our students are reading and writing in new ways. Reading and writing was once relegated to reading books and writing papers, but now we write into meaning through new media such as video, audio or even construction of physical objects.

A possible hypothesis is that the educational system has not caught up with the shifting landscape of participatory culture where there are new ways to read, write, and compute numbers.

PAST PRESENT

Reading a Book Reading a Transmedia Story

Writing Alone Networked Writing

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This shift changes the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement where creativity and active participation are the hallmark. And it makes it increasingly important to understand and be competent in the skills of citizenship, art, and expression of social connectivity. These are the skills identified in our white paper as the New Media Literacies and ones we need to foster as we think about education.

We are in a paradigm shift in the classroom where educators need to work in the gap between life and school. You only have to observe your students outside of the classroom for a few hours to see that they are immersed in this digital culture. This is not a "special treat if they're good" sort of immersion but a complete shift. It's their way of life. Incorporating participatory practices into the classroom -- such as remixing, Wikipedia, SNS, or even mobile -- allows for a blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning and harnesses the power of digital technologies for students to reflect on the participatory culture that they live in.

This provides teachers an opportunity to offer learning objectives in their classrooms in a new way, while at the same time offering students opportunities to read and write their cultural practices that are central to their own everyday experience.

You point to a kind of generation gap around Wikipedia where students love it and teachers are wary. What do you see as meaningful steps forward in addressing these different perceptions of the value of Wikipedia? Are there examples of teachers who are effectively integrating Wikipedia into their teaching?

Jessica:

A first step is for our educational community to view Wikipedia as a collaborative learning environment. At first glance Wikipedia is perceived as simply an online encyclopedia--it's a product. Our community should look beyond the surface and focus on Wikipedia as a venue for contributing, editing and the sharing of one's expertise. For me, educators can learn a lot by creating low-risk environments in which making mistakes and struggling to come to an answer are the norm. Although someone can delete my additions to a Wikipedia entry, I can engage in a conversation around why this happened. I am part of a larger discussion around the creation and sharing of knowledge rather than being told I am incorrect and here is the right answer. Engaging a student can depend on whether or not she believes her input matters. Yet an engaged student must also be open to negotiation, revision, and change as these are inherent to the learning process. I learn from my mistakes just as I learn from my accomplishments.

I also think that Wikipedia should not be banned in schools (although there are issues of determining the appropriateness of content). I think it is an excellent starting point for research--as long as both teachers and students understand its strengths and weaknesses. And this means that all teachers need to teach what it means to research something in their disciplines. The act of researching is an act of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and assessing information as well as its source. These skills are vital to our digital media age and get at the heart of bias, perspective, objectivity/subjectivity.

Erin:

The first meaningful step to recommend is for school administrators and teachers to better understand Wikipedia's practice and the importance of the new media literacies that are gained in its practice.

Wikipedia was a predominant activity we encouraged in NML's pilot studies last year. However, this activity had numerous road-blocks. We had one teacher comment, "When I've looked at pages in Wikipedia, I've found that some are not very accurate or complete. I'll use it in my classroom, when they go in and fix it." This shows that we need to help teachers understand that "they" is the community of users and that community could include the teacher and her students. We also found that Wikipedia was often blocked at the schools we piloted our resources in, and had to go to measures to get it unblocked in order to use it for the class period.

One of the most valuable segments of Wikipedia's use was observing Global Kids' Media Masters program create the Prospect Heights Campus Wikipedia Project, which spanned five weeks. The Wikipedia page about the Prospect Heights Campus was a place for students to document information about the campus, its schools, history, and whatever else the students decided was important to include in an entry - and a place for them to do so publicly and neutrally. There are many examples of a structured learning environment of wikis or wiki pages being created; however, Global Kids chose to use Wikipedia and not develop a pbwiki or something similar for just their group of students to view.

Trying to replicate Wikipedia through pbwiki, or some other wiki software, certainly has its benefits. It is what might be termed a "walled garden" approach, allowing students to tinker with wiki software and yet not be exposed to the potentially disruptive larger Internet. However, choosing a walled garden approach also has many costs. Students who already use the internet know very well what is actually "out there," and the walled garden runs the risk of losing their interest - because, after all, a walled garden isn't the "real world." Even if students are unfamiliar with the Internet, using a walled garden approach precludes the possibility of emergent learning.

If a teacher develops a project in a walled garden, that is where it stays. It cannot become part of the information ecology of the web, and students cannot thereby learn about community participation. Nor can they be convinced that their work has any greater significance than "something I had to do to get a grade." They know very well that their work will never receive any attention from people who are not in their class.

In Global Kids' Media Masters class, however, the students were energized by the knowledge that 1) they were filling a real need on Wikipedia, and 2) their work was going to become part of the great online knowledge base. The students prepared their page, but when it came time to copy and paste it into Wikipedia, they were nervous, excited, and thrilled. The act of pushing the "submit" button - that is, the act of submitting their classwork to their teacher - was suddenly pregnant with significance. They weren't just turning in homework. They were putting themselves out there and helping shape the way the public would see their high school - would see them.

You make a strong case for the value of remix practices for learning, yet many teachers are stuck back at square one, expressing concerns about plagerism and wondering whether remix really does foster creativity. How can you speak to this long-standing concern of educators? Are they wrong to worry about issues of ownership and authorship in the new digital age or are there important differences between remix and plagerism?

Erin:

Right now, technology, new social norms and economics are all going through radical change and history has shown that at this point of convergence, moral structures break down and need to be re-built (E. P. Thompson).

It's a known fact that probably every teacher reading this has seen in the classroom a form of plagiarism facilitated by digital media. Existing laws on copyright may not match social norms and this crossroads is predicated even more with the rise of remix culture and the ability to meaningfully sample content and create new pieces of work. Shephard Fairey's Hope poster of Barack Obama is a perfect example of one of the most powerful images ever created that captured the moment of political change being foreground now with the legal battle of messiness where people are taking sides as to where they stand on Fair Use. Even artists are at a crossroads.

Through all of this though - teens are still remixing. You only have to go to YouTube to see the latest remix posted. Should we leave our students alone to wade through this muckiness themselves or is it our responsibility to mentor them in their process?

Encouraging remix in the classroom provides new venues of learning and interacting with our students. Teachers can guide youth to better reflect on these new forms of creation and know the difference between plagiarism and appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. We can help students to support their argument for their creative expression and identify other works that inspired them during their process. We can provide opportunities to explore how we author new creations with regards to point of view, character, themes, etc. and give practice to understanding copyright protection and a broader sense of authorial responsibility.

So yes, there is concern for this but the question to ask yourself is, "Are you going to blame new media as the problem or are you going to look to it as a possible solution?" Perhaps this moment in history gives us pause to rethink what are the projects we ask of our students to do? Is an essay the only way your learning objective can be met? Are their other creative practices that provide new forms of reflection and learning?

Your book's contributors involve both academic researchers and practicing educators. What do you see as the most important points or contact or divergence between the ways these two contributors approached the concerns the book raises?

Jessica:

Classroom teachers are often voicing their concerns about a lack of opportunity to sit down with their colleagues and discuss important issues; time is not allocated for them to be part of a learning community. I have had similar experiences as a professor in academia. In both realms, there is a tendency to work extremely hard in isolation. My hope is that this book can serve as a conduit for academic researchers and practicing educators to talk about their findings, their experiences, and their hopes for new and different teaching and learning environments. We must remember that there is always something to learn about our disciplines by looking outside of them.

What I find wonderful about the contributors to the book is that researchers like danah boyd would welcome an opportunity to sit down with classroom teachers and talk about the ethics of social networks and what it means to be part of a network, just as English teacher Amy Crawford would jump at a chance to talk to researchers about her students as textual borrowers--as remixers and media makers in her classroom. There are many points of interest here and, to be frank, we must be open to these kinds of trans-academic connections and discussions because we need each other as allies to move forward in rethinking learning, literacy, and technology integration.

Much of the book tries to help teachers overcome their anxieties about working with new media technologies and practices. So, let me ask, which concerns do you think are valid? Where should teachers and schools go slowly in embracing these new media?

Maryanne:

With regard to embracing technology, I think that teachers need think through the consequences of implementing any innovation. For example if a teacher hosts a blog where students post satiric pieces about the school, the administration might feel that some of the postings conflict with the image of the school they wish to project to the community. In any social network there are going to be "in-house" jokes that might puzzle or even offend outsiders. Teachers need to take a clear look at new media practices and consider how they will change when they are employed in school settings. With the ability to broadcast thoughts, ideas and products, also comes the responsibility for considering who the audience will be and how they might respond.

Any time a teacher is asking students to perform activities in a virtual environment, be it posting on a website, or interacting in an immersive setting, she must consider her duties to guide, protect and mentor her students. Teacher need to think the way they do when they take students on field trips and make clear guidelines regarding their expectations. It is not foolish to be cautious; it would only be foolish to miss out on incredible opportunities for learning simply because teachers were not willing to plan and prepare for the excursion.

Jessica:

Technology can be a scary proposition for some teachers. For both novice and veteran technology users, integrating this element into their curriculum and feeling the need to be knowledgeable can be intimidating and anxiety inducing. Additionally, teachers rarely have time to pursue their own professional development (e.g. PD that isn't mandated by the school/district), which would allow them to bring something new to their curriculum. The anxiety comes from feeling like there is too much technology to learn, too little time to learn it, and not enough of the right support from employers to really grapple with it. One option is to utilize the knowledge of the classroom: no one knows everything about technology so who knows how to do what? Is there an opportunity for students, parents, or community members to step up in a technological role? Even though this shift in thinking may challenge our notions of authority and expertise within a classroom, it opens up the possibility to create a community of learners made up of both teachers and students working toward a common goal.

Since we know that time and anxiety are key issues for teachers, then let's change the culture of professional development: let's view PD not as a one-day affair with an "expert" but as an ongoing project with a group of educators dedicated to learning, creating, discussing, experimenting, and reflecting on their philosophy of technology and its integration.

You have created this book to spark conversations with teachers. What steps have you taken to continue this dialogue once the book is published?

Jessica:

It seemed illogical to invite classroom teachers to join a discussion without offering an online space to help promote and nurture such a discussion. I created this social network (http://teachingtechsavvykids.com) in the hopes that both researchers and practicing educators could connect and discuss issues important to them as well as the issues the book addresses. I view the site as a way to collaborate, share stories of hope, frustration, and change, and tackle some of the tough questions of this profound moment. Ann Lauriks, a middle school counselor who contributed to the book, has already promised to write another piece to share with the new online community. In addition, some of the researchers who contributed to the book along with other colleagues have expressed interest in sharing their ideas and personal experiences within this space. I am excited to see the enthusiasm and ongoing commitment to continue this discussion and collaboration and I hope all educators will feel inclined to participate.

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.