A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part One)

This week, I am sharing an extended conversation with Richard Grusin, co-author of Remediation and author of Premediation:Affect and Mediality After 9/11 about the relationship between our work.

If this sparks your interest in learning more about Transmedia Entertainment, check out Transmedia Hollywood II conference coming up at UCLA on April 8. Tickets are still available.

Getting Started

HJ: Richard, you wrote to me a few weeks ago responding to the interview I did with Frank Rose about his new book, The Art of Immersion. That interview tried to clarify the relationship between Rose's concept of "deep media" and my concept of "transmedia entertainment." You raised the interesting question of how these two concepts might relate to the work that you and Jay David Bolter did in Remediation, another book which sought to develop a vocabulary for thinking about the relations between media, and your more recent book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Since both books are widely taught, it seemed to me useful for us to try to tease out together the points of contact and divergence between these two models.

At the time you wrote Remediation, many of us were very excited about the kind of multimedia expression which was possible within cd-roms, a short lived technology, which never-the-less became the focus of a good deal of scholarly interest. So, we might start by thinking about the relationship between the multimedia (envisioned within the cd-rom) and the transmedia (now being realized via digital networks). For me, the difference can be summed up as inside the box - outside the box. That is, multimedia sought to organize a series of different kinds of media experiences inside a curated and bounded text. There might be movies and audio files and illustrations and texts, but they were all inside the cd-rom itself.

By contrast, the elements of a transmedia experience are dispersed -- they are spread across multiple media channels -- with the expectation that the consumers will tap into digital and social networks to track down the elements. Part of the pleasure is what I would call "hunting and gathering" and what Rose calls "foraging." Alternate Reality Games make tracking down, exchanging, deciphering, and mapping the dispersed media elements the central play mechanic. And insofar as we are doing this activity within fan communities or as "collective detectives" to use an old term from the ARG world, these mechanisms support social interactions with other readers. Part of what allows this to become a viable form of publicity for media franchises is our tendency to want to brag about our discoveries and share them with others with whom we have common goals and interests.

The rise of the iPad seems to suggest a return to a multimedia model -- witness the promotional video for Sports Illustrated on the iPad which sparked so much excitement in the publishing world at the time the platform was introduced. Here, we again see all of the media elements brought together into a single ordered, curated experience. This design will make these kinds of experiences more accessible to casual readers who want to simply click through an experience, but they may take away from the social mechanics that have grown up around "foraging" or "hunting and gathering."

It occurs to me that the Sports Illustrated video might be a good starting point for us to compare notes. What do you see going on here when you read it through your core concepts?

RG:

Thanks, Henry, for suggesting this. I think it's a great idea, and after reading your initial paragraphs I think there is plenty of room both for clarification and divergence. I will confess that at first I was a bit puzzled by your identification of remediation with the multimedia cd-rom--especially insofar our account of the double logic of remediation at the end of the 20th century takes up so many other media artifacts including muds and moos, the world wide web, and hypermediated space. But in light of your concept of transmedia storytelling I can see why the contrast with an apparently self-contained multimedia artifact like the cd-rom would be important for you.

For me, however, remediation argues precisely against the idea that any medium (multimedia or not) could be self-contained. In defining a medium as that which remediates we set out from the position that all media were hybrid or mixed, that all media refashion other media. The contradictory but coherent logics of transparent immediacy and hypermediacy which operated at the end of the twentieth century still persist (although in different forms) today.

In other words, because remediation invariably involves the relationship between at least two media, all media from our perspective could in some non-trivial sense be seen as transmedia. Transmedia storytelling as I understand it would seem from the perspective of Grusin and Bolter to be one of the forms in which remediation manifests itself in the 21st century, particularly in what have come to be called the "infotainment" industries. In my own post-remediation work I have developed a similar idea, most relevantly in the concept of distributed media that I trace out under the rubric of a "cinema of interactions."

As to describing the Sports Illustrated promotional video through the key concepts of remediation, I suppose I would begin by highlighting the double logic of remediation informing the iPad promo. The use of interactive video in the magazine's new interactive format simultaneously provides a perceptual immediacy and operates as an element of the journal's hypermediacy. But I also see this video as an example of what I have more recently called "premediation," especially as it markets both iPad and Sports Illustrated by premediating digital media formats that do not yet exist but which we can anticipate in the near future. I would be interested in your sense of how transmedia might relate to this reading of the video.

HJ:

I certainly did not mean to restrict your book's argument to a focus on multimedia - it has enormous historical scope and media diversity. I only associate the time of the book's publication with a particular enthusiasm about cd-roms which was sweeping digital studies, and thus I came to understand some of your principles initially in relation to that particular form of remediation.

RG:

Right. I remember in fact when Jay and I presented remediation at a conference you organized at MIT that you were working on a cd-rom film "textbook" with embedded video clips. And when we started our MS in Information Design and Technology at Georgia Tech in the early 1990s, our goal was to train multimedia cd-rom designers. By the time we wrote Remediation, however, our enthusiasm had begun to broaden to networked and distributed forms of mediation, though not yet to your useful concept of transmedia.

From Remediation to Premediation

HJ:

I would agree with you that both multimedia and transmedia represent strategies of remediation, which are particularly vivid in their foregrounding of the relations between media. The Sports Illustrated example, for the most part, stays within the box -- though the segment about playing a game on the ipad while watching the game on television points to ways that even this basic app straddles between platforms rather than operating entirely within them. What interested me here was the way that the video as an act of "premediation," (I like that concept), invites us to re-imagine the medium of the print magazine through expanding its affordances, blurring the line between still and moving images, say, adding sound effects and gestural interfaces that change what it means to read and so forth. Insofar as we read the magazine in relation to the television and live versions of sports, it may well constitute a form of transmedia -- that is, we as consumers bring the pieces together to make sense of a phenomenon which unfolds across platforms. Yet, there's also a sense that the iPad is promising to organize all of those varied media experiences for us in ways that decreases our need to search out new content. This becomes a matter of preprogrammed interactivity rather than open ended participation.

RG:

Yes, I see that this question of participation, what you refer to above as "foraging" or "hunting and gathering," is one that is crucial to you, particularly in regard to your extensive body of work on and continued interest in fan culture. In some sense, of course, this, too, is a product of the media formation of the 1990s, which has in the socially networked 21st century become such a part of our media everyday that it could be seen as no longer unusual. Yet your worry about preprogrammed interactivity supplanting open-ended participation is one that is shared by many. Because I have always had some reservations about the degree to which participatory media could be open-ended or liberatory, I am less troubled by the preprogrammed nature of many of our current forms of interactivity. I have been more concerned, both in Remediation and in my subsequent work, to underscore the preprogrammed or premediated nature of all of our media interactions. So the Sports Illustrated or iPad is less troubling for me.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and four books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999) and most recently Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010).

The Political Lives of Black Youth: An Interview with Cathy Cohen (Part Two)

You write near the end of the book, "While the Obama Administration and other black officials are attempting to avoid discussions of race, members of the Republican Party and the Far Right have escalated their racial and racist talks and attacks. These contrasting trends have meant that racial discouse is increasingly being shaped by, or at least framed by, the right wing." Clearly, you have in mind something like the Tea Party movement. How would you explain the expanding support that the Tea Party has received? What impact do you think such a movement has on the political lives of the black youth you've studied?

I don't think it is a coincidence that recent polls show that only about 17 percent of black youth support the Tea Party, compared to 34 percent of white youth and 15 percent of Latino youth. Black youth understand that the policies advanced by Tea Party candidates and members will mean a more limited role for the government in the lives of everyday Americans. And while many believe that the reach of the government has extended too far, black youth realize that many of the opportunities secured by the mobilization of Blacks and others from the Civil Rights Movement through the election of President Obama have only been implemented and protected by an activist and expanded federal government.

Thus, a significant part of the Tea Party agenda, that which would repeal recently won health reform or pursue deficit reduction by slashing needed safety net programs or reduce funding for public education, or generally reduce and constrain the work of the government, would detrimentally impact the lives of black youth, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Beyond the specific policies of the Tea Party, I believe that their exaggerated discourse, especially as it targets President Obama and attacks him not on the terms of just his policies but also engages in a racial baiting, will reinforce the idea held among black youth that racism remains a major issue in this country and that black people are treated as second-class citizens in the political community. These young people have watched as the Tea Party held rallies in which President Obama has been demeaned and depicted as other, an unspeakable evil on par with Adolph Hitler. They believe that while some of the objections to President Obama are based on the political agenda he has pursued, other motivations for their challenge to President Obama has everything to do with the fact that he is black.

In response to such actions on the part of some members of the Tea Party, it seems that President Obama and his team has made a decision to try and stay above the fray of racial politics, adopting or letting stand a color-blind approach to race in the United States. My concern as you quote in the question is that the absence of leadership by President Obama on the topic of race and racism has allowed the right wing and some more extreme Tea Party types to step into the gap and promote their decidedly pre-civil rights movement view of the ideal racial order.

In contrast to the continued activity of the right on questions of race and racism, those public officials that might traditionally be mobilized to fight for and articulate a political agenda meant to improve the opportunities and lives of black youth, specifically black and progressive politicians like Barack Obama, are exceedingly reticent to make and defend an explicitly racialized agenda. And so black youth are left to fend for themselves on issues of race and racism, again learning the lesson that politicians are not to be trusted and that even in an environment where expansion of our political community is promised, some will fight the equal rights and inclusion of black youth seemingly forever!

As you've noted, the perspectives of black youth are rarely discussed as part of our understanding of contemporary politics. What do we understand differently about the current political scene if their views are factored into our analysis?

I think it is hard to understand and think effectively about the issues that confront us without thinking about the perspective and lived experience of black youth. As I discussed in a different question, black youth are at the center of many of the most troubling issues confronting the country. Issues ranging from the decline in public education to the rise in incarceration and the dominance of the prison industrial complex all disproportionately impact black youth. So it will be hard to develop effective and inclusive policies, programs and approaches to these issues without seriously considering the perspectives and including the insights of black youth.

However, it is more than just a simple gesture of inclusion when thinking about how black youth help us to understand and imagine differently the political scene. We have to acknowledge that young black people often have a different take on issues than others groups of young people that necessitate different policy choices and political collaborations. For example, if we take the issue of whether we are currently or even approaching a post-racial state, black and white youth think very differently about this issue.

Since the election of Barack Obama, much has been made of the generational divide in the populace. Some have suggested that once the so-called millennials come to dominate the political domain, many of the thorny social issues that have caused great debate and consternation among the American public will be resolved. This line of reasoning implies that young people who embrace and personify a more inclusive society will eventually take over policy-making and thought leadership, moving both areas in a more liberal direction. Commentators point to the significant differences in opinion registered among various generations on topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion as evidence of the more inclusive worldview held by the majority of young people.

The promised harmony around social issues that is presumably evident among younger Americans extends beyond the confines of sexually infused social policy to the prominent and always simmering issue of race. An article published in The New York Times suggests that much of the problem of race and racism found in the Tea Party and the NAACP has to do with the fact that they both are largely comprised of older members who grew up as the targets or beneficiaries of Jim Crow. Columnist Matt Bai writes, "The Tea Party and the N.A.A.C.P. represent disproportionately older memberships. And herein lies a problem with so much of our discussion about race and politics in the Obama era: we tend not to recognize the generational divide that underlies it."

As evidence of this substantial generational divide, Bai cites pre-midterm data from the Pew Research Center indicating that "there is nearly a 20 point spread between Mr. Obama's approval ratings among voters younger than 30 and those older than 65." Perhaps Bai's most important observation is one that he seems to add almost as a throwaway: his comment that "These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations." I show in the book that significant and profound differences in how young whites, blacks, and Latinos think about such topics as racism, citizenship, and gay and lesbian issues still exist today and that these differences are a defining feature of American politics as practiced by the young today, even in the age of Obama.

Far from the generation of millennials signaling the end of race or even the beginning of a post-racial society, I present data in the book that suggest that deep divides still exist among young people, with black youth particularly skeptical about the idea of a post-racial anything. I note in the book that on a survey we administered seven months after the 2008 election, we asked 18-35 year-old respondents if they believed racism was still a major problem. The divide between black and white young people was stark: 68 percent of black youth stated that racism remains a major problem, compared to 33 percent of white respondents and 58 percent of Latino respondents

A similar split was evident when we asked if blacks had achieved racial equality. A near majority of whites (48 percent) thought blacks had achieved equality, compared to 15 percent of blacks and 39 percent of Latinos. As we know the racial landscape is far more expansive than one that accounts for just blacks and whites. When asked if Latinos had achieved racial equality, support for this assertion dropped among whites. In fact, only 29 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Latinos believed that Latinos had achieved racial equality.

In the many articles written about the generational shift in attitudes on social issues, such as gay marriage or even race, few, if any, take the time to disaggregate the data by race and ethnicity to determine whether there might be divergent trends among the many groups comprising "youth." When researchers disaggregate their data (that is, if they have sampled enough people of color to pursue statistical analysis of different racial and ethnic groups) they often find that there are significant differences in how young people from the various racial and ethnic groups that make up the American populace think about not only same-sex marriage and abortion, but also race. If leaders continue to make policy and academic insist on writing articles with data assuming that the ideas of white youth represent the attitudes of all young people, they are all in for a rude awakening.

As the demographics of the country continue to move from one dominated-in population and power-by whites to one increasingly populated by individuals of color, our analyses must start paying attention to the ideas, attitudes, and actions of young people of color. Making the experiences of black and Latino youth central to our understanding and "work" around race provides a very different perspective in terms of what we must do. In the realm of race, the experience of black youth and, at times, Latino youth is that race still figures prominently in their lives, shaping where they can live, if and where they work, and how state authorities, such as the police, treat them. For these young people, racism still blocks their access to full citizenship, in particular the psychological aspects of believing that one belongs to and is valued in the larger political community. In the book I use the experiences of black youth to underscores the necessity of not just including but highlighting the voices and experiences of black youth if we are to bolster democratic practice in the 21st century.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. . She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

The Political Lives of Black Youth: An Interview with Cathy Cohen

I have mentioned here several times before my participation in a new research network on youth and participatory politics, which has been funded and organized by the MacArthur Foundation as an extension of their work on Digital Media and Learning. Part of the pleasures of participating in this network has been the chance to engage in "mixed methods" research and in the process, to learn more about research methods that previously seemed very alien to my own. In graduate school, the qualitative and quantitative students walked past each other like ghosts: we shared the same offices, in some cases, but there was not much fraternizing across enemy lines. :-) Here, I've had a chance to learn about and contribute to the design of a large scale national survey as well as having the ethnographic work my team is doing informed by thoughtful questions from the social scientists and political philosophers on the team. I have especially loved getting to know Cathy Cohen, a political scientist who remains surprisingly open to our questioning of what counts as politics in the digital age and who is often leading the way to challenge the established wisdom in her field. Her previous books have included The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and The Breakdown of Black Politics and Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader. She has done extensive research on the political lives of black youth and what they can tell us about the current state of democracy in America, work which led this fall to the publication of a important new book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics.

The information here is transformative. Cohen tells us for example that more black youth have participated in buycotts, that is directing their consumer purchases towards social change, than in boycotts, that archtypical tactic of the civil rights generation of black leadership. She describes how black youth have been stigmatized not only by white racists but by many black political leaders who often pathologize youth culture as symptomatic of the problems confronting the black community today. Her approach combines statistical and cultural analysis to offer a multilayered portrait of contemporary black youth, their hopes, their fears, their frustrations, their values, and their politics. As she notes, these perspectives are often left out or remain undifferentiated in larger accounts of youth and political participation.

The picture she paints will complicate further claims that the election of Barack Obama represent a "post-racial" era in American politics. As her comments below suggest, current politics are very much shaped by implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions about race at a time when the racial composition of the country is shifting dramatically.

I was lucky to get Cohen to respond to some of my questions about this book, which I strongly recommend to my readers. What follows is simply a glimpse into the rich analysis that runs through Democracy Remixed.

Walk me through your title. What do you mean by "Democracy Remixed"? Why is this an appropriate metaphor for the book's findings?

I decided on the title of Democracy Remixed for a number of reasons. First, it seems to me that one of the interesting consequences of taking seriously the political ideas and actions of some of our most marginal citizens--black youth--is that it pushes, challenges, and changes the nature of how democracy currently functions in the United States. If it doesn't then something is seriously wrong.

For example, if you begin to look at the participation rates of black youth, although there were historically high in 2008, there are still serious challenges to the full participation of black youth in our democracy. The issue of felony disenfranchisement and the general disproportionate impact of incarceration and policing in the lives of black youth are made visible when we focus on the political lives of black youth. Far too many young black people are unable to engage in the most basic of democratic practices--voting--because some states have taken away the franchise of those who have been convicted of a felony, even after they have served the terms of sentence. Thus, if we are serious about facilitating the participation of young black people in something as basic to democracy as voting, then we must examine and "remix" our ideas and laws about felony disenfranchisement.

Similarly, when we include black youth as full and equal members of our political community, it means that we acknowledge their worth and will debate and pursue politics that reflects their priorities and needs. For example, if young black people were active participants in our policy debates, the political agenda might be "remixed" to include specific policies and programs such as quality education for marginalized youth, especially young black people who suffer from dropout rates of nearly 50 percent in some urban cities.

As a country we might find ourselves designating more money to health programs accountable for erasing the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health problems among black youth. It might mean that we would do more to ensure that young people are not killed while playing outside their homes or on their way to or from school; a way of life for black children in Chicago and other major cities.

As equal members of our political community, the future of black youth must be recognized to be the future of the nation. Their suffering is our suffering. And their progress is our progress. Only by remixing our democratic ideals and practices can we truly become an inclusive and full-functioning democratic community.

You begin your book with the story of your nephew Terry. How did his experiences inspire and inform the project? What would you like to see Terry and others of his generation take away from the ideas in your book?

As you note in your question, it was the experiences of my nephew Terry and my other nieces and nephews that inspired this project. Terry, at least for me, represents many of the challenges of black youth today. He has faced and dealt with many of the issues that confront the lives of far too many young black people: violence, a failed educational system, incarceration, becoming a parent too early, and difficulty in finding a job just to name a few. While these are familiar themes that have been outlined in a number of books on black youth, what is different about Terry and hopefully my arguments in this book, is that we both try to provide a more nuanced representation of black youth than is regularly presented in other texts.

I believe that too often we are publish monolithic representations of black youth that either focus exclusively on their failure or their success. Bill Cosby is an example of one celebrity who has garnered a lot of media attention through the simplistic degradation of black people and black youth. I try in the book to detail the complex lives of black youth. As my nieces and nephews as well as thousands of young black people who answered surveys, took part in in-depth interviews and participated in focus groups for this book demonstrate, one has to pay attention to both the agency and structures that are a part of the story of black youth.

When I talk with Terry about the difficulties he has encountered, his is a balanced account, noting structural barriers such as the lack of jobs one can find with a criminal record, but also detailing how he has contributed to his own struggles by, for example, having children without being able to fully care for them, emotionally and materially. While Terry is willing to discuss the impact of being tracked at an early age into special education classes largely because the teachers in his school were unable or unwilling to deal with the learning challenges and energy of young black boys and girls, he also is quick to point out that he did not take advantage of the educational opportunities presented to him. It is the complicated story of being young and black in the United States today that I believe continues to deserve exploration and detail.

I hope the young people who read this book will first and foremost see themselves throughout this book. One of the things that was really amazing about doing the research for this project was the willingness of young black people to take time out of their schedules to talk to me and other researchers associated with the project. Repeatedly, they told us they were willing and eager to talk to us because people rarely asked them their opinions about the issues facing them and their ideas for solutions. So I hope those same young people are able to hear their voices in the ideas and arguments of the book.

Second, I hope the book reminds both young Blacks and the nation as a whole of the centrality of young black people to our democratic futures. Here I'm not only talking about the fact that black youth suffer disproportionately from some of the most important issues facing the country--unemployment, the decline of public education, violence, HIV/AIDS--but also they are a central part of what is promising about the next generation. In 2008 black and Latino youth came to the polls in record numbers to vote for the nation's first black president. Their excitement, determination, and unprecedented turn out is a signal of the promise of an expanding democracy.

Third and finally, I greatly respect young black people for their political intellect, their determination, and their ability to honestly and openly state when they have made bad decisions. Like most of us, these are young people striving every day to do the right thing and be decent human beings. I hope this book affirms their efforts to work hard, to do what is right and their basic humanity.

I was very interested in the mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods shaping this study. What did each contribute to your understanding of the political lives of black youth?

I wanted to use a mixed methodological approach to the book to reach a level of breadth and depth in reporting on the political lives of young black people. Specifically, the research design started with a national representative sample of young people ages15-25 that included oversamples of black and Latino youth. By oversamples I mean including larger number of Blacks and Latinos than might be necessary to make a traditional random sample so that our statistical analysis of young Blacks and Latinos would be more reliable and thus the margin of error would be smaller. In addition to ensuring that the sample would allow us to highlight and analyze the ideas and actions of black youth in comparison to other racial and ethnic groups of young people, we also wanted to develop a survey that would focus on and be rooted in the lives of young black people.

Many of the surveys used to explore the attitudes of young people start with white youth as the normative respondent. What I mean by that is the survey is developed with a young white person in mind. We developed a survey that tried to tap into the lives of young blacks. Toward that end we did things like include questions on rap music and rap music videos since we know that as both a cultural and political form hip hop and specifically rap music is central to the lives of black youth. Much of the statistical data included in the book comes from two original data sets--the Black Youth Project--and another survey we mounted before and after the 2008 presidential election--the Mobilization and Change Project. All of the data from these projects are available to the public and can be downloaded through the websites mentioned above.

Once we had the data from our new survey instrument in hand, we knew that this data would only allow us to say general things about the population of young people from different ethnic and racial groups. It would not provide us with the depth of knowledge needed to write a book that would capture and detail the nuanced political lives of black youth. To gain greater knowledge and go deeper we utilized two methods to gather additional qualitative data. One strategy we used was to carry out interviews with about 40 black youth, most of whom had completed the national survey and lived in the Midwest. We targeted four cities--Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis and conducted interviews with black respondents in their city.

We were able to find respondents because at the end of the survey we included a question asking black respondents if they would be willing to be interviewed in the future. Over 90 percent of black youth answered affirmatively to the question, providing three contacts that might be able to find them within a year. Even with this information we were only able to find about 50 percent of the respondents who agreed to a future in-depth interview. After we confirmed the interview, graduate student researchers drove to their town and sat-down with respondents for over an hour, assessing in a more free flowing and detailed manner their thoughts on topics ranging from politics to the role of race in American society. Excerpts from these interviews are included as quotes throughout the book.

Finally, in 2005 and after the 2008 presidential election we held a series of focus groups with young black people in Chicago ages 18-21. We used the early focus groups in 2005 to inform the development of our first national survey and our general work on the Black Youth Project. The focus group held in 2009 was used to get a sense of what young people thought about the election of President Obama and how they thought the policies of the nation's first African-American President would impact their lives. Again, I also use quotes from these focus groups throughout the book, especially in chapter six.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. . She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

Starstruck: An Interview with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Part Two)

You also call attention to the less visible labor which goes into the production of the celebrity. Why is becoming a celebrity such hard work and why is it worth it for people across a range of different sectors of the entertainment industry?

One thing that my research has indicated is that celebrity is big business - hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars go into the production and upholding of celebrities. Many paychecks and livelihoods beyond those of the stars themselves are a result of celebrity. Being a celebrity is hard work in that one has to constantly keep on top of cultivating one's public persona and of course getting into the Hollywood star machine is virtually impossible for most of us. That said, many of us question the self-perpetuating, almost tautological nature of celebrity, but if we look at the number of jobs and payroll it makes a lot of sense why there are so many people who want to keep the celebrity industry and the production of stars in business.

John McCain rather famously attacked Barack Obama for being a "celebrity" on the same order as Paris Hilton. What were the implications of this slur and what might it suggest about our ambivalence towards celebrity?

For someone like Obama McCain's slur has no negative impact - Obama is really talented and a very gifted politician so McCain can try to compare Obama to Hilton but it does not detract from Obama in the way he might have wanted. McCain's comment rings true though: we're collectively fascinated with both Paris and Obama and we care about how they drink their coffee and when they go to the gym. We are ambivalent about celebrity because we do think it's frivolous but the fact is that we care about our stars and they build empires around our fascination (See again: Paris Hilton. See also: Kim Kardashian).

What are "celebrity networks" and what approach did you take to studying them?

I was interested in how celebrities might be different from us. One way in which they are different is that they spend time with an elite group of individuals and invite-only exclusive events - these social behaviors are part and parcel of one's celebrity status. In order to capture celebrity networks my colleague Gilad Ravid and I looked at the caption information for over 600,000 Getty Image photographs and ran social network analysis to study who was in the photos, at what event, when and where. We found that celebrities really do have more exclusive networks but also that they are able to access one another with much greater ease than those of us in "random" networks. Given that much of career mobilization hinges on "who you know" this means that they have greater possibilities to advance their careers in these industries by virtue of being a part of the network.

How do the "democratic celebrities" which emerge through reality television differ from the more traditional kinds of celebrities you mostly discuss in your book?

Well, democratic celebrities are different because they are more like us - again less icons of perfection than our Hollywood stars. They give us the belief that should we want that type of stardom we could achieve it. They are also circumventing the conventional star system and they are created through the public's - their fans' - preferences. They've "beaten the system" and don't have to comply to rigid Hollywood standards of stardom.

Some scandals seem to focus greater awareness on celebrities, while other scandals may destroy them. Do you have any sense on why these very different consequences?

I think the different consequences are a result of whether or not there is a disconnect between our perception of the star the scandal in which she/he is involved in. Tiger Woods took a hit because he was perceived as a clean cut family man and it turned out he was engaged in a string of infidelities. We expect a lot less from Charlie Sheen - not that his behavior is in any way okay but we've never thought him to be the poster child of good behavior. Kate Moss' cocaine scandal was initially thought to hurt her career but she's even more famous and in demand than ever - but she's always been the bad girl of the fashion world and never pretended to be anything other than that. It's really about synchronicity between the star's public persona and their behavior - good and bad.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press) and Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Faber & Faber). She is assistant professor at University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Developme

Starstruck: An Interview with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Celebrity culture is in many ways the flip side of fan culture. Having spent many years studying fans, I was delighted upon arriving at USC to meet a new colleague, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, who studies celebrities. We instantly began comparing notes. In many world, those fans who are drawn towards celebrities display very different dynamics than those drawn towards fictional characters. Celebrity-focused fans seem more competitive, less collaborative, with each other, in part because the celebrity is a limited good. The fans who get close to the celebrity often become "protectors" of that access by "policing" the behavior of other fans. Only a limited number of fans can be "close" to Johnny Depp, while there can be as many Jack Sparrows as there are fan fiction writers. And so, I suspect celebrities often see fans at their worst rather than understanding the richness of all that fan culture has to offer. Currid-Halkett's book, Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity, was released late last year and I am happy to present it to my readers "for their consideration," as the posters around Hollywood this time of year would put it. I found it a very engaging and informative read, one which seeks to understand the economics of being famous, and one which takes an imaginative approach to mapping the social networks which grow up around celebrity culture in Hollywood and elsewhere. She certainly has a lot to say about what it means to be famous in our culture, including being famous for being famous, as is true say for Paris Hilton, or being famous in a niche community, as might be true for Big Name Fans in the science fiction world or in her example, designers in the wargaming world. While there's just enough gossip here to keep us turning the pages, people checking out this book will get a lot more -- a deep understanding of what makes being a celebrity or being close to a celebrity or selling news and pictures of celebrity such a lucrative business in today's culture.

You open the book with a comparison of the kinds of lifestyle information some people divulge on Facebook and the role which celebrities play in our culture. In what way are they the same? How are they different? Why do you think so many young people want, above all, to be famous?

Celebrity hinges on the collective fascination we have with particular people which means it can exist in all social stratospheres. Hollywood is just a very visual mega version of a phenomenon that exists in all of our lives. Facebook and social media more generally just provide more avenues for people to cultivate a public persona. If we look back to high school or the family reunion we see the same type of collective fascination in more old fashioned contexts as much as in "celebrity 2.0".

You define celebrity as "the special quality that some individuals possess that propels society to care more about them than about other people." Do we have any basis for understanding why some personalities become celebrities and others fall below the grade?

Yes and no. I think that it's hard to truly pinpoint what makes us anoint some people as stars while we discard others - is there a meaningful difference between say Paris Hilton and every other pretty socialite? That said, celebrities do behave differently than everyone else. They over share, they put themselves in the spotlight, they show up at events that are documented and they create a public persona - we see this on Facebook as much as we see it in Hollywood.

You suggest that the nature of celebrity shifts when the media system changes. How might we contrast our current era of celebrity gossip from, say, the Hollywood star system of the 1930s?

Social media and the 24/7 gossip cycle have transformed stars from being icons of perfect who we admire from afar to individuals who we attempt to relate to and who are, to borrow US Weekly's phrase, "Just Like Us". Also the ability to take a photo and have it online in under 10 minutes means that we are recording the day by day activities and banality of stars. I actually feel bad for them because now it's not just looking fabulous at the Oscars, they have to think about what their makeup looks like when their grabbing their morning Starbucks order.

One of the interesting aspects of the book centers around what you call "relative celebrity," a topic which takes you from the Warhammer workshop to ROFLcon, trying to understand how people become famous within smaller niches. What can studying such relative celebriities tell us about the larger phenomenon of celebrityhood?

Relative celebrities are simply fractal versions of mainstream Hollywood-style celebrity. They are not on their way to Hollywood, they are autonomous forms of stardom. In this sense, relative celebrities tell us a lot about how celebrity is a social phenomenon everywhere and a way in which society is organized. We anoint special people, we collectively obsess about certain people for things that transcend their talents and our stars provide an important social function -as you've pointed out in your own work, they are the material and information we gossip about. So their function is more than just existing as people - their existence provides a stickiness for society to bond over.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press) and Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Faber & Faber). She is assistant professor at University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development.

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

Wired contributing editor Frank Rose is releasing a new book this month which will be of interest to many of my regular readers -- The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories. It is a highly readable, deeply engaging account of shifts in the entertainment industry which have paved to way for more expansive, immersive, interactive forms of fun. He's talked to key players -- from Will Wright and Jeff Gomez to James Cameron and George Lucas -- and brings back their thinking about the changing media landscape. As he wrote me, "at various points in my career I've focused on technology and at other times on entertainment, but when I joined Wired in 1999 I started writing about both together." Rose has been exploring some of the key concepts from the book through his blog as he's been working through the project. I suspect when I teach my transmedia storytelling class again at the USC Cinema School next fall, this book will be on the syllabus, since it manages to condense down many of the key conversations being held around these much discussed topic into language which is accessible and urgent.

When I first heard of his concept of "deep media," during a talk Rose gave at South by Southwest, I was intrigued by its relationship with what I've called transmedia entertainment. And in fact, I've been asked about the relationship many times and didn't really know what to say. So, naturally, given a chance to interview Rose for the blog, that's where I started. It sounds like his own thoughts on the relationship have evolved over time and in interesting ways. As the interview continues, we talk about world-building, the relationship between games and stories, the interweaving of marketing and storytelling, and the impact of 9/11 on interactive entertainment.

You write in the book about what you call "deep media." What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?

To me it's mainly a question of emphasis. Are we focusing on the process or the goal? Transmedia, or crossmedia, puts the emphasis on a new process of storytelling: How do you tell a story across a variety of different media? Deep media puts the focus on the goal: To enable members of the audience (for want of a better term) to delve into a story at any level of depth they like, to immerse themselves in it. Not that this was fully thought out when I started--the term was suggested by a friend in late 2008 as a name for my blog, and when I looked it up online I saw that it had been used by people like Nigel Hollis, the chief analyst at Millward Brown, so I adopted it.

That said, I think the terms are more or less interchangeable. I certainly subscribe to the seven core concepts of transmedia as you've laid them out. I also think we're at an incredibly transitional point in our culture, and terms like "deep media" and "transmedia" are needed to describe a still-evolving way of telling stories. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if both terms disappeared in 15-20 years as this form of storytelling becomes ubiquitous and ultimately taken for granted.

Throughout the book, it seems you see these creative changes towards a more immersive and expansive entertainment form being fueled by the emergence of games. Why do you think computer and video games have been such a "disruptive" influence on traditional practice in other entertainment sectors?

Because they engage the audience so directly, and because they've been around long enough to have a big influence on other art forms. Movies like Inception, as you've observed, are constructed very much like a game, with level upon level upon level and a demanding, puzzle-box approach to narrative. If you're a gamer, you know intuitively how to approach this. If you're not, well, good luck.

One of the reasons I started this book was that I'd begun to meet screenwriters who'd gone from TV to games and back again, and when they came back it was with a different approach to narrative--moving across multiple levels, thrusting you directly into the story and letting you figure it out for yourself, that kind of thing. But at first I just had this vague sense that games and stories were blurring into each other--that in some way that I didn't fully understand, games were becoming stories and stories were becoming games. I got obsessed with trying to understand the relationship between the two. I spoke with a lot of game designers, but it wasn't until I got to Will Wright that I found someone who could really answer my question.

We all know that games are in some sense a rehearsal for life--a simulation that models the real world. That's why kids who never play games tend not to pick up the skills they need to navigate adult existence. Wright said that at bottom, stories are an abstraction of life too--an abstraction we share with one another so we can all make sense of the world. This took on added depth for me when I stumbled across, in a neuroscience paper of all places, an 1884 exchange between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson on the nature of fiction. James described it as an "impression of life." Stevenson countered that life is "monstrous, infinite, illogical" while art is "neat, finite, self-contained"--a model, in other words. Steven Pinker took this a step further a century or so later when he described fiction as "a kind of thought experiment." Jane Austen novels? Rehearsals for womanhood in Regency England. All those Hollywood disaster movies? Rehearsals for the apocalypse. And so on.

So stories and games are intimately connected because they're two sides of the same impulse. Stories give rise to play, and play gives rise to stories. Think of Star Wars, and all those action figures, and the fan fiction that came out of it--story transmuted to play and then to story again.

The big question now is, will games and stories actually merge? Will we ever have the experience of being at the center of a carefully constructed dramatic narrative? That's certainly the way things seem to be headed, but I'm not convinced that anybody in the business today will achieve it. Probably there's a nerdy freshman at Harvard or USC who will. My advice would be, watch out for the Winklevosses.

Another key idea running through the book is the idea that entertainment is now designed to be engaged by collectives, often of the kinds that form in and through social network sites. What are some of the consequences of perceiving audiences as collectives of people who interact with each other and with the producers rather than as aggregates of isolated eyeballs?

I'm not entirely sure, and I don't think anybody else knows either. It's too new, it's too different from anything we've ever experienced before. It's not that we haven't had participatory entertainment--we've had game shows on TV ever since the late '40s, and on radio before that. But the idea of people working together to "solve" or interpret a story at any scale beyond the water cooler is unprecedented, simply because no technology has enabled it before. Will it change storytelling? It already has. Inception, Lost--because its narrative was so convoluted, Lost implicitly demanded that people connect online to figure it out. No one ever dared do that on TV before. Does this herald some emerging facet of connected existence? Definitely. How will it change us as a society? Too early to say.

Frank Rose is the author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Genera-tion is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, to be published in February 2011 by W.W. Norton, and a contributing editor at Wired, where he has written extensively about media and entertainment. Before joining Wired in 1999, he worked as a contributing writer at Fortune and as a contributing editor at Esquire and at Travel + Leisure. He is also the author of The Agency, an unauthorized history of the oldest and at one time most successful talent agency in Hollywood, and West of Eden, a 1989 best-seller about the ouster of Steve Jobs from Apple, now available in an updated edition.

A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part Two)

You describe educators in the new culture of learning as mentors, rather than teachers. Can you explain the difference between the two?

The key difference for us is that in the new culture of learning mentors are very likely to be peers who may have picked up something a little ahead of the curve or who may have more experience in something than their peers. Mentorship is a much more flexible concept and one which is tied less tightly to authority. Since so much of what we see as the key to future learning is passion-based, we think it makes more sense to understand the process of learning as something that can be guided by a mentor, as opposed to being taught by a teacher. No one can teach you to follow your passions, but they can help guide you once you discover what motivates you.

You write about learning collectives. Often, when I try to describe this concept, I run up against the deeply embedded tradition of individualism, which has made all forms of collective sound, well, "socialist." Have you found effective ways of responding to American's ideological revulsion against collective identities and experiences?

Collectives, as we use the term, have nothing to do with the politics or economics of socialism. Instead what we are trying to capture is the formation of new institutional structures that are radically different from more traditional notions of community. Collectives are literally collections of people who form around a central platform. What is interesting is that collectives tend to promote individual agency and may actually be more consistent with individualism than they are with even community based theories of social interaction. Collectives, as we use the term, are actually institutions that enable and enhance individual agency. And because the costs of entry and exit are usually negligible, they tend to have much less persistence than more traditional institutions have had in the past and hence they don't outlive their usefulness as the world changes around them.

One of the key contrasts we need to draw is between notions of communities and collectives. Communities are institutions that are designed to facilitate a sense of belonging. Collectives are institutions that facilitate individual agency. Anyone who joins a collective looking for a sense of belonging is going to wind up disappointed, because that is not how they function. Collective are more social platforms than social entities. Communities may form within a collective, but they need not form in order for the collective to function. The key point is that because collectives are agency driven, they form the perfect environment for the cultivation of imagination. In other words, the collective amplifies what I can do by tapping its collective experience.

In that sense "collective identity" is something of an oxymoron. Collectives are spaces in which individual identity is critically important. It makes no sense to talk about the "Facebook community" or the "Google community" because people are using those platforms in such incredibly different ways. Yet at the same time, Facebook and Google have become such common and shared practices that they are almost regarded as part of the fabric of online life. No one goes to Google for a sense of belonging, yet there is no denying it has had a powerful, even transformative, social effect. Our book is an argument for these collectives as environments where the cultivation of imagination is possible like it never has been before. But we are also very careful to say it is not just a matter of exposure. Cultivation is a purposeful act, not something that just happens as a result of exposure or access, but what we are discussing may also be a new sense of cultivation, one where the collective itself is committed to making the individual better.

You draw on the concept of "concerted cultivation" or what others called the "hidden curriculum" to explain why what happens outside of schools has a powerful influence on young people's performance in the classroom. To what degree does it make sense to extend this well established educational principle to think about the informal learning which takes place online? Isn't part of the point the alignment of the values in a middle class home and the classroom? Would this principle work only if schools were ready to embrace the values of the online world? Yet, elsewhere, you suggest some core conflicts between the two.

This goes back to the core thesis of the book. What we were able to identify were two radically different learning environments, one which was overly structured (such as the contemporary classroom) where boundaries are put in place to actually discourage play, experimentation and real inquiry based learning. The other environment is completely unbounded and unlimited, best represented by the information explosion on the Internet. Absent some sort of structure or boundaries, learning is not any more likely to happen in an unrestricted space than it is in a tightly controlled one. What we see happening in the most successful learning environments is a fusion of these two ideals. Like a petri dish, the best learning environments have boundaries which control and limit them, but within those boundaries permit almost unrestricted growth, experimentation and play. Neither innovation nor learning can happen in a vacuum and we have seen time and again that it is the constraints that students face that provide the opportunity for really innovative learning to happen.

The core conflict is a matter of mentality. Our schools believe that teaching more, faster, with better technology is preparing our students for the 21st century. Their answer to dealing with change is to keep doing the same thing faster. To our way of thinking, this is like trying to fix a leaky bucket by pouring more water in it. We do think there needs to be more of an alignment on both sides. We hear over and over again how our schools are broken. That metaphor only works if you treat them as machines. When you think of schools as learning environments, it no longer makes sense to say the environment is "broken." What we hope this book does is, like the work on concerted cultivation, help people see that the line between schools and the world or the world place and daily life is illusory. Learning is happening everywhere, all the time.

This brings us back to imagination and the last line of the book: Where imaginations play, learning happens.

As you note, people not only learn in "different ways" but they also learn "different things" when confronting the same information. Yet, doesn't this insight run against the current culture of schooling with its emphasis on standardized testing? How can we as a culture work past this contradiction between our understanding of learning and our policies for measuring classroom success?

What no one seems to pick up on is that innovation by its very nature runs counter to the idea of standardization. Something is innovative because it is outside of the standard. If we are serious about learning and embracing change in the 21st century, we need to also start thinking about evaluating learning in more sophisticated ways. Standardized testing is easy. It is also efficient. Again, these are the standards that we use to judge machinery. But we should be surprised when our students who go through the machine end up emerging looking like cogs.

Another key distinction we are trying to make is to understand the difference between creativity and imagination, two terms that are often used interchangeably. Creativity is a much later stage and something that can not be taught. It is the product of a fertile imagination. Imagination, on the other hand, is something that can be cultivated in response to a learning environment. Much of what we found in our research was that there is no creativity without imagination and that imagination, the true life of the mind, is something that is not given much (if any) space in classrooms or workplaces. Part of why we think collectives are such powerful environments for learning is that they stimulate imagination by encouraging activities like play, experimentation, and inquiry.

You describe inquiry as a core principle of the new culture of learning. In true inquiry, we follow our interests where-ever they lead us. Is true inquiry possible within the current structure of disciplines which shape our schooling practices?

Is it possible within the current structure? Probably not. What this book is pointing to is the need for a complete overhaul in our educational philosophy. Our schools are training people for the jobs of the 20th (and sometimes 19th !) century. Inquiry is not a new idea. Is was a core principle of Plato's academy and it was the cornerstone of John Dewey's education philosophy. Until now, however, it has not really been possible on a large scale. We now possess a technological infrastructure which makes it possible to engage in inquiry and to truly follow our interests. But at the same time, we believe there need for some constraints or boundaries on how far and in what direction those interests go. In large part, the role of the teacher needs to shift from transferring information to shaping, constructing, and overseeing learning environments. We take the idea of cultivation very seriously. You don't teach imagination; you create an environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish.

How do we understand the value of diversity in this new culture of learning? Do learning networks work better if they include homogenous mixes of people pursuing the same goals or heterogeneous groups pursuing different interests? To what degrees are our current schooling practices a product of a historically segregated culture?

This is a great question that we don't get to go into much in the book. The thing that makes learning different in the 21st century from any other time in the past is the diversity of information, knowledge, experience, and interaction that is available to us in the digital age. This new culture of learning only works if it can be fed by an enormous influx of constantly updated information. It is driven by change, so it is a way of looking at the world that is maladjusted to homogeny. In the theory of inquiry we spell out, we talk repeatedly about the questions being more important than the answers and the idea that solutions to one problem are gateways to dealing with increasingly more sophisticated problems and deeper questions. People in learning environments are inherently curious. Diversity is not only a value; we would say it is the key ingredient in formulating a new culture of learning in the 21st century.

What do you see as the value of remixing as a means of learning? Many teachers confuse remix culture with plagiarism, which they have been taught to prevent at all costs. How can you help educators resolve these competing understanding of what it means to build on the work of others?

The crux of the issue is one of content versus context. Plagiarism is the intentional misrepresentation of someone else's ideas as your own; it is about content. Remix is an effort to fundamentally transform meaning by shifting or altering the context. The idea of making meaning through context is a relatively new one, because it is only recently that we have had the technological tools available to us to reshape contexts and then disseminate that information on a large scale.

What we have had, however, are things like parody, social satire, and commentary, all of which rely on very similar mechanisms to make arguments about meaning. Once you start thinking of remix as reshaping context rather than content creation, it becomes much easier to understand both its power and it utility. Of course as an added benefit, the easier it is for the average user to manipulate context, the more transparent the tradition of mainstream media doing the same thing becomes. There are countless examples of editing, tight focus, perspective and so on which have radically remade the meaning of events and have reshaped national and international perspectives.

You talk about learning, making, and playing as the core mindsets that support education. Despite a decade now of work on games for learning, many will be surprised to see "playing" on this list, in part because our schools are shaped by a puritan work ethic which distrusts play as frivolous. What would need to change for formal education to fully grasp and embrace the value of play?

There are two critical things to realize. First, play is not trivial, frivolous or non-serious, in fact, quite the opposite. Play can be the place where we do our most serious learning. And second, it is something we do all the time. When we explore, we play. When we experiment, we play. When we tinker or fiddle, we play. Science is play. Art is play. Life, to a great extent, is play. Every great invention of the past hundred years has had an element of play in its creation. So we are using the word in a very deep and serious way. A big influence on our work was Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens, which goes so far as to make the argument that culture grew out of play, not the other way around. So, from Huizinga's perspective play is the most basic and most human part of us.

When education became more "mechanized" it began to lose that sense of play. After all, who wants "play" in their machinery? Play is not precise or efficient; it is messy. But play also exemplifies what we think of as the ideal learning environment. Play is defined by a set of rules which form a bounded environment. But within those rules players have as much freedom as they like to create, innovate and experiment. Just think of all the amazing athletic feats that have emerged from a game like soccer, simply from the rule "you may not touch the ball with your hands." It is that boundary that sets off an incredible set of innovations and ideas and in doing so, forms an extremely rich learning environment.

Those same principles can be applied to any environment that values learning and we believe that if we follow those ideas, we will see a revolution in education that will create a new generation of explorers, innovators, and people who understand both the ways to and value of embracing change.

Douglas Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research focuses on the intersections of technology and culture. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center for Communication. Doug is also the author of the book Hacker Culture and a coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. He is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, an international, interdisciplinary journal focused on games research.

John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and an adviser to the provost at the University of Southern California and an independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is an author or a coauthor of several books, including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion; The Only Sustainable Edge; and The Social Life of Information, which has been translated into nine languages. He has also authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in scientific journals.

Prior to his current position, John was the chief scientist of Xerox and, for nearly two decades, the director of the company's Palo Alto Research Center. He was also a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part One)

It is my privilege and pleasure from time to time to showcase through this blog new books by important thinkers who are exploring the relations between digital media and learning, concerns which have become more and more central through the years to my own interests in participatory culture. Today, I want to call attention to a significant new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, written by two of my new colleagues at the University of Southern California -- Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. Asked to write a blurb for this book, here's what I had to say:

A New Culture of Learning may be for the Digital Media and Learning movement what Thomas Paine's Common Sense provided for the American Revolution -- a straight forward, direct explanation of what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas lay out a step by step argument for why learning is changing in the 21st century and what schools need to do to accommodate these new practices. Using vivid narratives of people, institutions, and practices at the heart of the changes and drawing from a growing body of literature outlining new pedagogical paradigms, they place the terms of the argument in language which should be accessible to lay readers, offering a book you can give to the educator in your life who wants to become an agent of change. My hope is that our schools will soon embrace the book's emphasis on knowing, making, and playing.

This book really is a gift, one which arrived too late for the Christmas season, but just in time for the start of the new semester. I know that I will be drawing on its insights to shape my own New Media Literacies grad seminar this term and to inform the new afterschool program we are launching at the RFK Schools here in Los Angeles. I admire it for both its clarity of vision and clarity of prose, not a common combination. In the interview which follows, I play devil's advocate, challenging some of the core premises of the book, with the goal of addressing critics and skeptics who may not yet be ready to sign on for the substantive reforms in pedagogical practices and institutions they are advocating.

Doug, you shared a story of how your students gradually took over control of your class. On one level, this sounds like teachers' worst nightmares of where all of this may be leading, but it sounds like you discovered this process has its own rewards. Can you share some of what you learned about student-directed learning? How might you speak to the concerns of educators who are worried about their jobs and about satisfying various standards currently shaping the educational process?

This was a fascinating experience for me and it speaks directly to the distinction we are making throughout the book between teaching and learning. Even after having thought long and hard about what it means to be an educator and being open to ideas such as student-directed learning, I still found that I was carrying a whole lot of baggage about what it meant to be a responsible educator. Primarily, what that meant was transmitting valuable information and testing how well that information was received, absorbed, and processed. What I had not really thought about was the ways in which that limits and cuts off opportunities for exploration, play, and following one's passions.

The fear is easy to understand. What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.

That doesn't mean there is no role for teachers and educators. Quite the opposite. One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments. In a way, that is a much more challenging, but also much more rewarding, role. You get to see students learn, discover, explore, play, and develop, which is the primary reason I think that most of us got into the job of teaching.

"Lifelong learning" has become a cliché. What is it about the world of networked computing you describe which transforms this abstract concept into a reality? Are the kinds of learning experiences you discuss here scalable and sustainable?

We take it as a truism that kids learn about the world through play. In fact we encourage that kind of exploration. It is how children explore and gain information about the world around them. Since the time of Piaget we have known that at that age, play and learning are indistinguishable. The premise of A New Culture of Learning is grounded in the idea that we are now living in a world of constant change and flux, which means that more often than not, we are faced with the same problem that vexes children. How do I make sense of this strange, changing, amazing world? By returning to play as a modality of learning, we can see how a world in constant flux is no longer a challenge or hurdle to overcome; it becomes a limitless resource to engage, stimulate, and cultivate the imagination. Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked world, information is always available and getting easier and easier to access. Imagination, what you actually do with that information, is the new challenge.

Essentially what this means is that as the world grows more complicated, more complex, and more fluid, opportunities for innovation, imagination, and play increase. Information and knowledge begin to function like currency: the more of it you have, the more opportunities you will have to do things. To us, asking if this kind of learning is scalable or sustainable is like asking if wealth is scalable and sustainable. But instead of finances, we are talking about knowledge. Education seems to us to be one of the few places we should not be afraid of having too many resources or too much opportunity.

You argue that many of the failures of current teaching practice start from "the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring it." Granted the world is changing rapidly, how do we identify the narrowing range of content which probably does fall into this category and which provides a common baseline for other kinds of learning?

The problem is not with facts remaining constant. There are some things we know that we have known for a very long time and are not likely to change. The force that seems to be pushing the knowledge curve forward at an exponential rate is two fold. First, it is the generation of new content and knowledge that is the result of simply participating in any knowledge economy. This leads to a second related dimension: while content may remain stable at some abstract level, the context in which it has meaning (and therefore its meaning) is open to near constant change. The kind of work you have been examining from the point of view of convergence culture is a prime example: users are not so much creating content as they are constantly reshaping context. The very idea of remix is about the productions of new meanings by reframing or shifting the context in which something means. The 21st century has really marked the time in our history where the tools to manipulate context have become as commonplace as the ones for content creation and we now have a low cost or free network of distribution that can allow for worldwide dissemination of new contexts in amazingly brief periods of time.

If you look at something as simple as Google News, the simple act of viewing a news story provides data which is fed back into the system to determine the value and placement of that story for future users. Millions of micro-transactions, each of which are trivial as "content" powerfully and constantly reshape the context in which news and current events have meaning.

You challenge here what James Paul Gee has called the "content fetish," stressing that how we learn is more important than what we learn. How far are you willing to push this? Doesn't it matter whether children are learning the periodic table or the forms of alchemy practiced in the Harry Potter books? Or that they know Obama is Christian rather than Muslim?

Ah, this question throws us into one of the key traps of 20th century thinking about learning. Learning is not a binary construction which pits how against what. In fact, throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.

Where something means or its context raises questions about institutions and agency, about reliability and credibility and it always invites us to interrogate the relationship between meaning and context.

In our framework, we stress that every piece of knowledge has both an explicit and a tacit dimension. The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means. The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices. It is the dimension where the context and content interact. Our teaching institutions have paid almost no attention to the tacit and we believe that it is the tacit dimension that allows us to navigate meaning in a changing world.

Knowledge may maintain consistency in the explicit, while undergoing radical changes in the tacit and we believe that understanding how knowledge is both created and how it flows in the tacit is the key to understanding and transforming learning in the 21st century.

Douglas Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research focuses on the intersections of technology and culture. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center for Communication. Doug is also the author of the book Hacker Culture and a coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. He is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, an international, interdisciplinary journal focused on games research.

John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and an adviser to the provost at the University of Southern California and an independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is an author or a coauthor of several books, including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion; The Only Sustainable Edge; and The Social Life of Information, which has been translated into nine languages. He has also authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in scientific journals.

Prior to his current position, John was the chief scientist of Xerox and, for nearly two decades, the director of the company's Palo Alto Research Center. He was also a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Four): Why Fans Matter

The final section of The Survival of Soap Opera focuses on the evolution of fan community practices online, on various soap opera fan experiences/demographics, and on relations between the soap opera industry and its fans. Below, a variety of the contributors to this section answer questions about the relationships fans have with the soap operas they watch and with one another. Tom Casiello is a current member of the writing team for The Young and the Restless, a former associate head writer for One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives, and a two-time Daytime Emmy Award-winning writer with As the World Turns who has written about the genre at his blog, Damn the Man! Save the Empire.

Abigail De Kosnik is an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies who writes on media, fandom, and copyright. As editor of the collection, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also wrote an essay in the collection, entitled "Soaps for Tomorrow: Media Fans Making Online Drama from Celebrity Gossip. C.

Lee Harrington is professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University is co-author of the book Soap Fans and who has written on the soap opera genre since the late 1980s for publications including The Journal of Aging Studies, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Transformative Works and Cultures. As one of the book's co-editors, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also co-authored a piece for the book with Denise Brothers, entitled "Constructing the Older Audience: Age and Aging in Soaps."

Roger Newcomb is the Editor-in-Chief of soap opera news site We Love Soaps, the producer of two Internet radio soap operas, and executive producer and co-writer of the film Manhattanites. His essay in the book is entitled "As the World Turns' Luke and Noah and Fan Activism."

Radha O'Meara is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in screen studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who has published her work in Screwball Television: Gilmore Girls and in the Austrian journal Metro. Her essay in the book is entitled "The 'Missing Years': How Local Programming Ruptured Days of Our Lives in Australia."

Julie Porter is a longtime newspaper editor and reporter who is webmaster of soap opera site talk!talk!. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Hanging on by a Common Thread."

QueenEve is the pseudonym of a career professional and soap opera fan who has moderated and/or founded several popular soap communities online. The collection features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with QueenEve focusing on fan activity around and against soaps.

How has the relationship between U.S. soap operas and their fans evolved over time?

Tom Casiello: I honestly think the relationship between the soaps and the fans hasn't changed nearly as much as others believe. (I also think we have to be very careful not to group them all together as "the soap operas." There are currently six U.S. daytime soaps on the air, all of which should have their own individual identity, wherin their fans expect different things from each show.) At its core, the audience still wants stories and characters they can connect with on a human level, mixed with the element of fantasy and escapism they've come to expect. They want to know the characters they've loved their whole lives, whom they've watched grow and evolve, are in capable, trustworthy hands...and they will continue to live on in their homes daily. While audience demograhics may shift, and trends will come and go, strong, long-term serialized storytelling with heart is all the fans have ever wanted.

Roger Newcomb: Obviously, from radio soap operas to present-day television and internet soaps, the way fans view or listen to their soaps has changed tremendously. The relationship the soaps have with fans has evolved as well. Even 30 years ago, the main feedback mechanisms were snail mail and telephone feedback lines. In 2010, fans can email the shows and their networks, and many times the stars themselves. The shows also have Facebook and Twitters accounts to solicit immediate feedback from fans, and the actors themselves directly interact with fans in a more personal way through social networking. It is not clear whether this increased and immediate interaction has impacted storylines or story direction.

QueenEve: I think it used to be a far more personal relationship shared between female multi-generational family members and the soap opera. Over time, with the growth of soap magazines covering more than just "the stories," suddenly we knew about the actors playing the characters and the writers writing the show, making it a little less personal. We learned about the relationships between the actors playing the parts (marriages, divorces, and kids), entirely separate from their parts, and the experience expanded beyond one among just you, your mother, and the story. Then, with the internet, it became even less intimate and much more of a group activity with other viewers. So, what had been something between female members of a family and the soap eventually involved the actors, the writers, the media, and other viewers who may not have viewed the show and characters as you and your family did. The other side of that is that the "family" element has sort of dropped out, and it is no longer a multi-generational female experience. Some of that is the changing role of women in society, but a large part of it is that soaps have backed away from telling multi-generational female stories in search of the almighty 18-49 demo, and the audience loss has reflected that. So, I think it went from a highly personal and intimate experience to a more expansive but impersonal experience such that viewers don't have the investment they once did.

What changes have we seen in recent years in how fans of U.S. daytime dramas connect with one another?

Tom Casiello: The Internet for one - for the first time in history, it's much easier for those with the same interests to connect instantaneously, on a level playing field. Who they are in their lives, where they come from, their education - it's irrelevant on the Web. Here, they are all equal fans, and that has not only helped organize a stronger group effort in their campaigns but also created a world of discussion to bounce their ideas and opinions off of each other in what is hopefully a moderated environment.

Abigail De Kosnik: The most striking fan activity that the Web, and online communities, have brought about (in my view) is that "fans make their own fun," as one of our contributors, Web site moderator "QueenEve," stated. Since fans have started communicating online, they have basically produced their own virtual soap operas - spreading spoilers and dissecting upcoming plots, posting speculations about what's going to happen next as well as (often very thoughtful) analyses of what happened recently on their favorite shows, in addition to gossiping about behind-the-scenes rumors (Which co-stars won't work together? Why did the Exec Producer fire that actor? When is that former writer coming back to this show?). There's also been a level of drama in the wars between fan bases that matches that of the heightened conflicts depicted on soap operas. The animosity that warring fan bases have borne toward one another has been awesome in its fierceness, and, while I don't want to minimize the fact that some people's feelings have probably been deeply hurt by these acrimonious exchanges, I must say that there's an element of watching or participating in soap fans battle online that is immensely engaging and entertaining. I have taken part in some of these "bitchfests" myself (and it's not always fans vs. other fans; it's also fans vs. the shows or the networks or particular storylines), and I'll always remember those impassioned campaigns as really interesting, exciting times of my life. There's something about the dedication and commitment that soap fans have for their shows that really infused the online fan experience with an intensity that many other Internet fan groups lack. It comes, I think, from the fact that, when the Web became a big part of soap fans' lives, many fans had already been engaged with these soap story worlds for years - in many cases, fans' involvement predated the Internet by decades. The Web, which permits for a really wide range of discussions and actions that can be micro-interventions or can go on for months or years, almost seems like it was specifically built as a platform for soap fans, who have decades' worth of information and insight to discuss.

C. Lee Harrington: While soap viewers were among the first groups to migrate to the Net recreationally, as Nancy Baym discussed in Tune In, Log On, they were slower to create the type of user-generated content currently associated with media fandom, in part because the frequency (daily) and longevity (the average age of US soaps is 40 years) of the "primary"' text created less need for viewers to fill narrative gaps in between episodes or installments. Over the past few years, soap fans have become increasingly engaged in vlogs, video-sharing, fan fiction, podcasts, and mash-ups, while much of soap fans' energy remains devoted to the ongoing daily criticism, discussion, and fan activism which takes place in online forums and the blogosphere.

Roger Newcomb: Fans are connecting on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and continue to interact on various message boards. The fans seem to be more tech-savvy these days, so the number of message boards and Facebook pages has grown by leaps and bounds. In some ways, this has splintered the online audience, with more websites and social network sites dedicated to particular actors, characters, or soap couples. We Love Soaps TV receives almost 10 percent of our hits from Twitter and, in many cases, from fans who tweet and re-tweet our features. Twitter has become the fastest way of spreading information about soaps around the web.

Julie Porter: Be careful what you wish for! To me, that's the warning label that should be placed on the desire to raise viewership at any cost. The race for ratings - and ad revenue - has had an unintended consequence along the way: a decrease of conflict in storyline. The intense competition for audience share gives soap viewers a powerful amount of clout in determining how stories are resolved - and, generally, they want favorite characters to be happy, and want to see their characters' conflicts resolved. But is that what they really want? Accelerated storytelling satisfies the short-term viewer but weakens the long-term story. Conflict makes for anxiety, but quick resolutions make for an awfully boring soap, long-term. Once, it might have taken three years to resolve a complex story in a big reveal. That's storytelling. But, these days, if the focus groups say to wrap it up - well, it gets wrapped up quickly, and there's short-term satisfaction but a lot of opportunity for story and character development is lost. Faster-paced storytelling throws characters into a revolving door of reaction; the storyline rules, but deep character development is almost nil. And so the viewer who wanted a quick resolution also quickly loses interest. The willingness of networks to give focus groups and online campaigns a strong role in the decision process also leads to a bad end: It places creative control in the hands of executive management rather than writers, and fan feedback becomes the tail that wags the dog. The soap that has evolved into a marketing tool isn't nearly as satisfying as one that does what soaps were intended to do: explore the feelings and lives of people, and their ups and downs.

QueenEve: I think, in the past, you might have a discussion with a neighbor or friend about the soap or the "girls" in the dorm, but fandom was fairly generic. Now, with the internet, you have both a gathering place and a divisive means of organization. That is, people generally check in on the internet to find fans of the characters or couples they like, to the exclusion of a more general audience. It has led to "board wars" in the past, between couple fans especially. The Sonny & Brenda versus Jax & Brenda fans of the 90s on General Hospital was a good representation of that, as were the Robin & Jason fans versus the Carly & Jason fans. So, on the one hand, the internet allowed fans to find each other on the internet and connect while, on the other hand, it leads to divisive and heated fights.

How do the teams who make these shows take into account the fans' feedback and mindset, from your perspective?

Abigail De Kosnik: I know for a fact that the shows do pay attention to soap fans' feedback, to some extent. The contributors to our book who work in the soap industry verified this, and I have heard soap actors often tell fans who want to see changes on their favorite shows that they must write or call in to the network to voice their opinions. One of my e-mails to ABC, urging them to portray professional women - the female nurses, doctors, lawyers - in a more positive light on General Hospital, got quoted almost verbatim by ABC Daytime exec Brian Frons in an interview he did with one of the soap magazines back in 2003. But, on the other hand, I think many fans, and I am one of them, are frustrated by the fact that, although the Internet permits for a much greater flow of feedback from soap viewers to soaps' producers, the shows don't seem to be able to take effective action in response. Several of our industry contributors have told us that, with soaps, time is a huge factor in this - of course, feedback on a storyline comes in well after months of that story are written and shot - but, also, I wonder if the case of soap operas, in which we see this enormous wave of feedback going to TV shows and not that much difference being made, just illustrates the fact that television is a creative industry and, probably on any television program, whether daytime or prime time or a miniseries, the writers just can't care too much about what the audience thinks about a particular storyline or character. I mean, Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner doesn't think about what fans want, or what they've liked about past episodes, when he puts a new season of Mad Men together, except in the most general way (I think he once mentioned that one reason for an increase in child character Sally Draper's air time was that many viewers relate to Sally the most, she's their "way in" to the show, since they were about Sally's age in Mad Men's time period.). So, maybe the frustration of soap fans is just indicative of the fact that online participation isn't a guarantee that "the people" can influence the power centers that much. The Web gives an illusion of what others have called "participatory democracy," but just sending a bunch of e-mails obviously isn't the way to change the minds of the minority who are the decision-makers. However, I do think that there are probably ways to use online connectivity to influence power centers, both in soap operas and in other arenas, like politics. And maybe soap fans can pioneer ways to use digital technologies to share feedback that really creates change, and then political fans and organizations can learn from those tactics!!!

C. Lee Harrington: From what I can tell, soap opera creators have waffled back and forth on this. The production team rightfully knows a projected story arc in ways viewers do not, and there is a longstanding perspective of "trust us to tell a good story," even when viewers are rejecting what they are seeing daily onscreen. The flip side of that is that, with the instantaneous feedback that the internet allows, production teams (or perhaps network honchos) can get too engaged with daily (or minute-by-minute) viewer reaction and respond accordingly, to the long-term detriment of the narrative. The heated debates about the usage of focus groups in...when did that start in daytime? Late 1990s?...preceded the current tension between short and long-term narrative and industry goals.

Roger Newcomb: I personally think, for the most part, the fan feedback online is disregarded. When there is a huge outrage over something (like the abrupt end of the Kyle and Fish storyline on One Life to Live), the shows and networks take notice, but, even then, it doesn't necessarily change the outcome. In general, there are so many opposing views from fans on storylines that it is difficult to know which is the majority. I've also directly heard from writers and producers of daytime soaps that they believe the online audience does not necessarily reflect the perspective of the total viewing audience, even when the online audience number in thousands, a greater number than a supposedly statistically sound Nielsen sample.

QueenEve: From my experience, they couldn't care less about fans' feedback and mindset unless it feeds their agenda and own personal likes and dislikes. Occassionally, the feedback is strong enough that it can change things, but I have seen more often them using the feedback as a means not to change things but rather to force a story even more firmly down the fans' throats. That is, if some new character is not going over with the fans but the show is highly invested, we'll see even more of the character, and we will get overkill of stories trying to make this character more sympathetic and hearing other well loved characters "pimp" and "prop" the new character endlessly.

How has the trend of an aging soap opera audience impacted the soap opera industry in the U.S.?

Tom Casiello: The networks continue to look for new ways to entice younger viewers to their shows, as they've always felt (with good reason) that these shows survive when passed down from generation to generation. However, I do believe we are seeing the first signs of a possible shift in that thinking. Those audience members over fifty are consuming far more than their counterparts from half a century ago did. Consumers with more income in older demographics are proving to be just as valuable as younger demographics. The key is to find a way to welcome new viewers into the fold while trying not to alienate older viewers...and it's a struggle all the soaps have faced for the last fifteen to twenty years, more so than ever as the generation gap grows wider.

C. Lee Harrington: As my chapter with Denise Brothers suggests, the aging of soap opera audiences had a major impact. The age of all television viewers is going up (as the global population ages), and soap viewership is no exception to this trend. However, the core demographic remains 18-49 year old women, which means soap viewers are rapidly aging out of network priorities. This is visibilized on-screen in terms of which actors/characters are prioritized (with vets moved to window-dressing or dropped from contract to recurring status), as well as the story content itself. The older viewers and actors we spoke with for our study are keenly aware of this trend and believe the genre is suffering for it. If soaps do not respond more fully to the aging of its viewership, an older demographic that is more economically powerful than the industry apparently appreciates, the genre will be in even more trouble than it is now.

Roger Newcomb:Obviously, the aging soap audience is one of the contributors to the decrease in viewers. As longtime fans have passed, they weren't replaced by new fans of the genre. Even though the average age of soap viewers is the mid-50s, the shows have continued to focus on younger characters to a large degree. But there have been some shifts in the past year. Days of Our Lives features more over-50 contract actors today than ever in the history of the show. One Life to Live has recently shifted the focus to the veteran actors on the canvas. There seems to be a better mix between younger and older characters, and this may be due to the networks finally realizing who their audience is.

QueenEve: Not at all. The shows keep trying to write for an audience that isn't there -- 18 - 34 -- and are losing the "aging audience" that they simply do not value. It's insane really, because it's not just the soap opera audience that has aged -- it's all of society now that the baby boomers are aging. Why that audience isn't valued is a mystery to me.

What "surplus audiences" outside the target demographic should soap opera producers be paying attention to? What can they learn from these audiences?

Tom Casiello: Diversity is a major issue daytime needs to address. This isn't just a Caucasian versus African-American issue. In a perfect world, these shows would also represent Latino characters, Asian characters, Jewish characters, homosexuals/bisexuals; there's no end to the types of characters these shows should involve in their long-term stories--while always striving to find a balance between honesty and stereotyping, walking that fine line between truth and cliche. All of these demographics can play vital roles in front-burner stories and can present just as many interesting character dilemmas as a middle-aged, Caucasian, heterosexual character can...probably with an added layer of nuance, an original perspective that puts an entirely new spin on the storyline.

C. Lee Harrington: As I noted above, I believe older viewers should be repositioned from "surplus" to "core," given demographic projections. To engage the US viewing population as fully as possible, soaps would benefit from greater diversity in characters and storytelling overall--more LBGTQ characters, more characters of color and immigrant characters, more characters of lower socio-economic classes etc. There are genre-specific risks to this, of course (I have published several articles on the generic challenges that gay and lesbian characters/stories present to daytime), but narratives that better reflect the US population as a whole may engage a wider audience. I also echo Radha O'Meara's call below for greater attunement to audiences in other parts of the world, given the still-central role that serial narratives play in global import/export patterns. As Denise Bielby and I wrote in Global TV (2008), The Young & the Restless and The Bold & the Beautiful has been particularly smart in writing narratives for multiple geographic/cultural audiences, avoiding lengthy on-screen legal trials and certain types of humorous stories that may be perplexing to non-Americans, for example. I'm not sure the extent to which other programs are following suit, but, if not, they should.

Roger Newcomb: The soaps have targeted women 18-49 and 18-34 for decades. Men make up 20-25% of the total viewing audience, but you do not see commercials for men on any of these shows. African-Americans also make up a large portion of the audience, but characterizations of African-Americans are few and far between on daytime soap operas. Gay audiences, targeted by networks like Bravo, would have been a potential goldmine for soaps, but, with the cancelation of As The World Turns, there is only one regular gay character on daytime now--Bianca on All My Children. Targeting various niche groups would seem to be a more lucrative alternative for soaps than the current one-size-fits-all model.

QueenEve: I think the soaps should go back to the beginning and start writing compelling stories about characters of all ages and stop writing for the "sweeps explosions." I think people like the soap opera genre. If they didn't, the genre's serial aspects would not have been adopted by primetime TV and be so successful there. It's ironic because, as soap operas tried to be more like primetime with big explosions, fights, special effects, and adventure, they became less successful. While, as primetime became more like soap operas with ongoing stories that build throughout a season (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, ER, etc.) they became more successful. Daytime soaps are bleeding viewers not because the soap opera genre is dying but because it is being executed so poorly, compared with primetime TV. People want a better product.

Radha O'Meara: I'm most interested in international surplus audiences for US soap operas, and my contribution to the collection was about the Australian audience for Days of Our Lives. I think that the focus on US audiences for US productions is particularly strong, commercially and critically. If producers and creators give more serious consideration to international soap audiences, they might learn from different strategies and priorities in scheduling, episode duration, and attracting niche audiences, including young people. This might help them to attract greater audiences globally and domestically. I find the strong focus on domestic distribution and audiences for US soap operas in American media studies a little troubling. Although US scholars are cognizant of international distribution and audiences, they seem to maintain a strong emphasis on the US as the principal audience. From an antipodean perspective, it seems American media studies could be more open to the implications of plural global audiences.

Given that many soap operas have long histories with international audiences, there is a wealth of experience and data on which to draw. The broadcast of US soap operas in international markets can highlight the potential of alternatives for scheduling and attracting niche audiences. For example, the most popular US daytime soap opera in Australia is The Bold and the Beautiful. It is broadcast on weekdays on the Ten network in the 4.30 p.m. timeslot. This has allowed the show to garner a significant number of young viewers, who watch it after coming home from the day at primary or high school. Since loyalty to soaps can be so enduring, this early attachment can lead to a lifelong connection. I began watching the show regularly after coming home from high school several decades ago and still enjoy it.

I suspect The Bold and the Beautiful's half-hour format is a significant part of its appeal as the highest-rated U.S. daytime soap in Australia, and indeed the world. This is a contrast to many other US daytime soaps which run for an hour, and particularly those which are screened in Australia (Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital). The half-hour format might be more appealing to Australian viewers, as Australian viewers are more accustomed to popular half-hour soaps made in Australia and Britain, such as Neighbours, Home and Away, Coronation Street, EastEnders. Throughout the long history of US soap operas, program duration has consistently expanded. Early radio and television soaps often ran for 15 minutes, including a single commercial break, but most television soaps expanded in the 1950s to half-hour and later to full hour programs. A few even tried 90 minutes daily. In today's fast-paced world, perhaps US soaps could experiment with episodes of shorter duration. Rather than cancelling soaps with falling ratings, US producers might consider what shorter episodes could do for both international and domestic audiences.

Producers and scholars should consider what makes particular soap operas popular in different regions and the implications this has for definitions of soap opera as a commercially successful genre. Soap opera in the US is much more clearly defined by US programs and by local emphasis on the scheduling and audience distinction between daytime and primetime. These distinctions are much less significant for international viewers. Many Australian soap fans follow daytime and primetime US, UK, and Australian soaps. Despite obvious differences, they often have no trouble grouping them together as soap operas, which share common family traits. In fact, Australian audiences are often unaware of the "original" features used to define programs in the US: US daytime soaps have been broadcast here at midnight, and primetime soaps have been broadcast during the day; daily soaps have been broadcast weekly or bi-weekly, and weekly soaps have been broadcast daily. This means that producers and scholars can learn more about what audiences seek in soaps by exploring broader definitions of the genre and its audiences. According to Christine Geraghty, Australian soaps have influenced British soaps to integrate more male characters, young characters, and "masculine" storylines over the past few decades (Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps, Polity 1991). Perhaps US soaps might also consider such changes.

In my contribution to the collection, I wrote about an unusual rupture in soap opera broadcasting. After screening episodes of NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives in a continuous sequence for over thirty years, in 2004, Australia's Nine Network skipped approximately one thousand episodes. The Nine Network continued to broadcast the program daily, but most Australian viewers missed four years' worth of episodes. An interesting tension arose from this fissure between those who understood the Australian audience as a component of a global, homogenous audience for Days of Our Lives centered on the US, and those who understood the Australian audience as a unique, local experience. Scholars and producers should both consider their positions on this tension. Similarly, this rupture of Days of our Lives for Australian audiences raised questions about the nature of soap audiences' enduring commitment to particular programs. It highlighted how significant parts of the audience seemed to value their own history with and experience of the program more highly than a wider, communal experience. This deeply personal connection is something that producers presumably want to foster, and new distribution methods may impact on these experiences in even more divergent ways. These are some of the lessons US soap opera producers can learn from international audiences, and they may even help them maintain their domestic audiences.

The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Three): New Trends In Production and Distribution

The third section of the The Survival of Soap Opera examines how soap operas have been experimenting with both production and distribution, from new ways of taping and editing soaps to the use of transmedia storytelling. Below, several of the contributors to this part of the book answer some questions about these new trends for daytime dramas. Ernest Alba is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin whose previous work on soap operas can be found at MIT CMS: The American Soap Opera and through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. He co-authored a piece for the book with Bernard Timberg, entitled "'The Rhetoric of the Camera in Television Soap Opera' Revisited: The Case of General Hospital.

Patrick Erwin is a freelance writer and journalist who has written for the soap opera genre for Marlena De Lacroix's site and at his blog, A Thousand Other Worlds. His essay in the collection is entitled "Guiding Light: Relevance and Renewal in a Changing Genre."

Racquel Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Irvine and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Radio-Television-Film Master's program whose research into the soap opera genre includes reception studies of online and offline fan communities and industry history. Her essay in the collection is entitled "From Daytime to Night Shift: Examining the ABC Daytime/SOAPnet Primetime Spin-off Experiment."

Erick Yates Green is an assistant professor of media production in the School of Communication at East Carolina University and a director and cinematographer. His piece in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Production Process of Soap Operas Today."

Deborah Jaramillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University, where her research focuses on television as a complicated collocation of culture, aesthetics, commerce, and politics. Her essay in the book is entitled "It's Not All Talk: Editing and Storytelling in As the World Turns."

Elana Levine is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about soap operas in her book Wallowing in Sex as well as in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Flow TV and in the anthologies Beyond Prime Time and Convergence Media History. Her piece in the collection is entitled "'What the hell does TIIC mean?' Online Content and the Struggle to Save the Soaps."

Emma Webb is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas whose work focuses on fan influence and online message boards, including multiple academic projects on U.S. daytime soaps and soap opera fans. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Fan Video and the Influence of YouTube on the Creative Decision-Making Process for Fans."

What do you feel have been some of the most successful or compelling experiments in telling soap opera stories, or distributing that content, in the past few years in the U.S.?

Patrick Erwin: I do think that the Guiding Light experiment I describe in the book was compelling and important. I've said before that it's a case of "the operation was a success, but the patient died." It may have been too much change for an existing show that had a very defined visual palette. But I believe it was incredibly important in terms of defining what's possible. As we move increasing towards narrowcasting on TV and the Web, programming will need to be made on a more economic scale.

Racquel Gonzales: Two experiments I found promising and expanding the possibilities of the medium were the SOAPnet Night Shift series (as I've explored in my contribution to the book) and the popular, nostalgic past episode blocks featured on SOAPnet and most recently on ABC (though their "past" episodes hardly delve into the so-called "golden era" of soap history). These two share a key element crucial for contemporary resonance with audiences: acknowledgment and embrace of a rich soap past. Soap fans, more than any other TV viewer, can have years and even decades of memories with the same storylines, characters, fictional families, and fictional locations. So much soap viewing pleasure comes from those historical and memory ties between the audiences and the soap themselves and our ability to make those complex narrative connections with the texts. When the soap industry can bring about these moments of remembrance, even in experimental ways like the Night Shift spinoff, they can tap into a shared history of viewing and a soap viewer's memory of watching. Of course, this can always create a backlash where, for instance, viewers watching a General Hospital episode from 1996 on SOAPnet lament the good ol' days in comparison with current GH!

Erick Yates Green: The innovative webisode series entitled What If that was aired on ABC.com and SOAPnet.com that brought together central characters from different and established soap operas is innovative. Like previous webseries Imaginary Bitches, Family Dinner, Gotham, and Venice, What If was developed as a series (in this case, 10 webisodes) and was originally aired on July 12, 2010. You can find additional information on the series here and here. Like feature films and TV primetime broadcasting, the world of soap operas distribution is VERY dynamic in our contemporary media playing field. What If, at least, is dealing with the divergent media distribution venues not only with programming that goes first to the web as well as broadcast, BUT, interestingly, as they experiment with divergent distribution, they also experiment with bringing together characters from their different primary shows into an experimental melodramatic melting pot as well.

Deborah Jaramillo: I ran into a great Mexican telenovela this summer on Univision, which, as I sadly noticed at NCA, mass communication scholars continue to forget is a U.S. broadcast network. One of the most amazing things about this novela, Soy Tu Dueña (I Am Your Owner), was that it actually broke into the top 25 broadcast programs in the late summer of 2010. And Univision has recently been beating the English-language broadcast networks in the competition for 18-34 year-olds. Soy Tu Dueña would never have appeared on my radar had it not been for the World Cup in May. Even though the audience for the Mundial is probably more male then female, Univision still promoted the hell out of Soy Tu Dueña during the matches. Soy Tu Dueña features an all-star cast, including Lucero, who sings the title song with Joan Sebastian, and Silvia Piñal, a veteran of Buñuel films ("la primera actriz," the credits boast). Soy Tu Dueña is actually a remake of La Dueña, produced by Televisa in 1995. This was the complete package--pre-sold product, big stars, an excellent theme song--that rode on the coattails of the biggest sports event in the world. Sports...not exactly novela territory. It was a great experiment, and it worked.

Elana Levine: I've seen a few particularly compelling experiments in recent years. One is . While the first season of the series seemed to stretch the GH writing staff too thin and resulted in boring, even unpleasant takes on the daytime program's characters and stories, the second season (which used a new-to-daytime head writer) was truly remarkable. Drawing on GH history by including favorite actors/characters from years past, introducing a diverse array of engaging new characters, and balancing some hospital-centered, more episodic storytelling with serialized tales featuring the core cast, it was a pure pleasure for GH fans and, I believe, would have been enjoyable for new viewers as well. I don't know that it was an economically sustainable project in SOAPnet's eyes, however. In the more promotional realm of webisodes, I have found ABC/SOAPnet's What If... webisodes to be a fun and engaging means of promoting the shows and appealing to viewers. These webisodes feature characters from different ABC soaps encountering one another, allowing fans to see new combinations of characters they know well but think of as existing in separate universes. But perhaps the most significant new development in distributing soap content in recent years is what has come to seem standard practice--the streaming of soap episodes online. Daytime soaps came to this distribution window later than prime time programming, but I believe that increasing viewers' access to the shows serves their continuation well.

What have been the biggest failures?

Ernest Alba: I recently gave a lecture to a classroom of 50 undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin based on the essay by Bernard Timberg and myself in The Survival of Soap Opera. During the discussion, I discovered a few surprising things about young people and their relationship to soap opera - primarily that they think they know all about soap operas, don't like it based on what they know, and they have several misconceptions about them. Based on the discussion of soap opera in that class, I would say that the biggest story is of the failure of soap opera to communicate its value as entertainment to a young audience.

When I posed to them the question, "What are some associations we have with soap people who watch soap operas?" I received several different responses: "Old people," "My grandma and my grandma's friends watch it," "Anyone that has free time during the day watches soaps," and my favorite: "Lonely people watch soaps." This class of mostly freshman students associate soap opera not with their parents but with their grandparents! One student related that she watched them with her mother who watched them to learn English. It is clear that young people associate soap opera with people that they perceive as being diametrically opposed to them in their viewing habits and lifestyles.

Furthermore, it seems that they are confused about what soap opera is and how it can be an enjoyable experience. They seem to believe that soap opera is a less realistic form of storytelling than other television formats, like the primetime drama or the reality show. One student made the audacious claim that House M.D. is a soap opera. Immediately a cacophony of protests rose from the class. The way they distinguished their conceptions of soap opera from House was that House had better acting, less exaggerated plots, Hugh Laurie (a single, strong male lead), more comedy, and other things to draw you in as opposed to "sappy" and "exaggerated" drama. The student finally threw up her hands in defeat and said, "Apparently, a lot of people like House and don't want it to be associated with soap opera." Despite their acknowledgement of the fakeness of television drama in soap operas, they are unwilling to associate their dislike of "fakeness" with their favorite shows, which are also clearly scripted, staged, and unrealistic depictions of reality. It is this attitude of defining soap opera primarily as that which is antithetical to anything they value that allows them to participate in the tradition of denigrating soap opera as a form of entertainment.

If there is one thing that gives me hope, it is that only two students raised their hands when I asked who had never watched an episode of a soap opera. A full quarter (about 13 or 14 people) raised their hands when I asked if they'd regularly watched a soap opera at some point. One student listed four or five soaps she watched regularly when she was younger. The students know that soap opera exists and some understand it quite thoroughly, but many hold common misconceptions about soap opera because it doesn't play a role in their life and plays a role in the life of people they don't consider their peers. They use those misconceptions to further dissuade themselves from watching soap operas.

Patrick Erwin: For me, I think the change in narrative from a more character-based narrative to more of a traditional soap/action adventure hybrid is the biggest failure of the last decade. Even when GH had the Luke and Laura/Ice Princess type of stories, they worked because the narrative was still rooted in the reality of what happened to those people. Soaps have alienated their existing audience and demographic by chasing the youth demographic and have implemented closed-ended storylines that buy short-term attention at the expense of long term fan investment.

Racquel Gonzales: It is difficult to pin these down in a bullet point style, but, broadly, the soap industry has been disconnected with the desires of its audience for a while, and that gap has only gotten wider against the many TV and network changes throughout the 1990s and 2000s. On a very basic level, there are numerous cringeworthy experiments and sensational storylines whose aims were to entice new viewers and keep long-time viewers interested, but their results generated disinterest and audience ire. As a soap fan and scholar, the most disappointing and frustrating failures have been those manipulations of soap history and viewers' investments for quick fixes on ratings because the soap audience investment in these various often fantastic storylines depend on character continuity, recognizable relational ties, and simply a day-to-day viewing that makes sense.

Deborah Jaramillo: With regard to As The World Turns, I was very disappointed with the quicker pace and the elliptical editing that made my program resemble an hour-long drama rather than a soap. I am not against formal experimentation in any genre--my piece in the anthology elaborates on this theme--but much of the pacing and editing decisions seemed to stem from an atmosphere of panic and not from artistry. I constantly complain to my students (especially when they started to get impatient with Lost several seasons back) that no one knows how to appreciate the beauty of serialized programming because no one watches soaps anymore. So many people deride television viewers' short attention spans, but watching an old-school soap opera was a daily exercise in patience. We've lost those conventions that make us wait and anticipate. We've lost process in favor of product, and this has contributed to a spoiled audience.

Elana Levine: As my essay discusses, I think ABC's character blogs revealed a poor understanding of fans' investment in soaps. Because these blogs did not do much to expand or delve into the thoughts and experiences of their character-authors and so rigidly reproduced the preferred meanings of current storylines, they revealed themselves as baldly promotional efforts, with no real interest in exploring show history or character depth.

Emma Webb: The first is not distributing free content online earlier. ABC didn't begin to distribute their soaps this way until 2009, even after they had been making prime-time shows available this way for over a year, and even though many of the networks had been partnering with Hulu since it's inception in 2007. The second is the lack of investment in production of soaps. As Sara Bibel points out in her chapter in the book, as the ad revenue for each soap has gone down, costing-cutting measures like eliminating breakdown writers and the actors' rehearsal time (so that each show can speed taping). This has resulted in a change in what I believe is most critical to soaps: the stories. The stories that now show up on screen often have continuity issues, focus on new characters that the audience does not know (as unknown new actors are significantly cheaper to feature than veteran actors that the audience does know), and actors (based on what has been said at personal appearances) are often confused about the direction of the story and their character's motivation. It is a downward spiral. It appears, based on the rating trends, that, as soaps cut more costs, the quality of each soap goes down, and more viewers tune out, resulting in less ad revenue and more cost cutting.

What lessons can we learn from both these successes and these failures?

Ernest Alba:While I find it encouraging that soap operas like General Hospital and Young and the Restless still have strong ratings, I find it discouraging that old warhorses like Guiding Light and As the World Turns have been cancelled. The biggest failures of soap opera from my perspective are that they have failed to capture a new young audience. It is clear that many students are able to pinpoint some of the strengths of soap opera - emotion, drama, and multi-character narrative structures - but they perceive them as weaknesses. Still, other strengths - longevity of characters and complexity in family structure - are mysteries to them. In our essay for the book, Bernard Timberg discusses the ways in which the camera rhetoric in soaps conveys meaning to an audience. These camera movements and ways of editing and framing a scene are unique to soaps in that they are not the same ones used in serial dramas and do not convey the same meanings. In the way meaning is constructed by the camera, we have argued that soap operas have changed little. But, if the potential audience has changed so much that they are unable to decode the meanings in soaps, it might be time to change the way in which soap opera is filmed and edited so that new audiences who are used to reality shows and documentary-style filmmaking can decode the camera's rhetoric and, if not understand the intended meaning of the narrative, at least understand the intended meaning of the shot. Some experimentation in this vein has obviously already taken place in several soaps, but the traditional way of filming and editing still dominates. My one suggestion is that we must look/research to ensure that audiences still understand how to decode the stylistic conventions of soap opera filmmaking or begin to encode meaning visually in a different way.

Patrick Erwin: I think it's important that serialized storytelling return to basics, whether it's classic TV soaps or new Web soaps. The audience may be smaller, and I don't think we've quite figured out the equation that can make money on the Web, but, again, we need to move from broadcasting to narrowcasting, and soaps need to learn not to try to be everything to everyone....but rather be who they were, and are, proudly.

Racquel Gonzales: It is a difficult road to anticipate the current and future viewing audience, a road soaps have been on since they began on radio. And thinking about what does or doesn't work right now in soaps really sparks wider questions about contemporary TV viewing in general, especially since seriality has been embraced as a potential element of current "quality TV."

Deborah Jaramillo: If soap operas are on their way out--if everyone involved in As The World Turns knew the clock was ticking--why mess with the formula? Why try to attract an audience that isn't going to come? Why not go back to your roots and just celebrate the genre, the form? This is not to say that all changes in soaps happened recently--all genres are static and dynamic--but, if you're going to pander to an audience, pander to the one that's stuck with you across generations.

Elana Levine: The first lesson would be the importance of story, of the writing. The second season of Night Shift worked because it was well written by someone (Sri Rao) who understood the rhythms and appeals of soap narrative and who respected and drew from GH history. This seems an obvious set of principles on which to base soap writing, but, too often these days, the insular community of soap writers ends up failing to take advantage of these core generic traits. The disappointments of the ABC character blogs further enforce this point. I believe that these platforms did not provide the kind of attention to history and the pleasures of soap narrative that they might have, and thus they turned off rather than drew in many viewers.

How has transmedia storytelling impacted the U.S. soap opera (or not)?

Racquel Gonzales: Soaps have been exploring transmedia storytelling for quite a while, particularly in print, with different characters' "diaries" being made available in book form. While these avenues provide alternate revenues, they also create more fragments for audiences to piece together for storyline continuity.

Elana Levine: I don't think transmedia storytelling has had an important role in US daytime soap opera thus far. Most attempts along these lines have been pretty obviously promotional and not particularly interested in expanding or further developing the story worlds in any substantive ways. Perhaps the current format of US daytime soaps demands so much of both the production staff (churning out so many episodes so quickly) and of viewers (watching five broadcast hours a week in most cases) that there is little time or interest in expanding those story worlds in additional ways.

Emma Webb: I think one of the failures of soaps has been the inability to successfully integrate transmedia storytelling into their shows. There have been attempts (as with Robin's blog on General Hospital, as described by Elana Levine), and characters writing books (for example, As the World Turns' Katie Peretti "writing" Oakdale Confidential), but they don't appear to have been successful. This may have been because, as Levine points out in her chapter, often times there is the temptation to move the character's motivation and thoughts from the screen to another other media outlet, leaving viewers frustrated and confused at a character's on screen motivation rather than providing an alternate entry point for lapsed or new viewers. However, while soaps' attempts at transmedia storytelling does not appear to have been successful, fans' attempts at transmedia seems to be more so. For example, in 2005, As the World Turns paired the characters of Lucy and Dusty together, and, in an attempt to help educate potentially new or lapsed viewers, many fans created video synopses of the two characters' history and storyline together. These videos provided an entry point for those viewers who had not been watching the show. And this type of video could provide a way for lapsed or returning viewers to get a recap of a character's storyline which could make it easier to catch-up.

How have alternate distribution outlets changed the way fans find and share U.S. soap opera content?

Racquel Gonzales: YouTube has been an amazing tool to bring together shared viewing memories, though I'm not sure the networks themselves appreciate the site like soap viewers. Moreover, in uploading old VHS recordings of soap edits on YT, soap fans have created an invaluable archival resource for fellow soap viewers and soap scholars. The medium makes it impossible to provide a simple DVD set of a soap. Just imagine how many discs would be required to just capture a month of One Life to Live from 1988. On YT, some of these episodes have been made available by fans for fans, while the comments section provides (as I've said previously) a shared space of viewing memory.

Debrorah Jaramillo: I'm going to continue with the topic of the Mexican novela on U.S. television, not to be stubborn, but because it presents an interesting complication with regard to transmedia fandom. Unless a novela is an original production of a network like Univision, it is being aired in the U.S. after it has completed its run in its country of origin (or it simply could be delayed by a few weeks). In both cases, it becomes nearly impossible to engage with the novela within the transmedia landscape. I'm terrified to search for Soy Tu Dueña online because I don't know if it has actually completed its run in Mexico. I don't want to know what happens, and I don't want to run across fan commentary. My relationship with this novela is completely untouched by the internet and even print magazines. I feel like I'm watching this in the 1980s, even though the image is in beautiful HD.

Emma Webb: Making soaps available online (either through the network's website, YouTube, or other sites) has been the biggest change to the way that fans share soap opera content in the last few years. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, this also means that fans don't need to set their DVRs or watch the show's broadcast in order to keep up with their favorite soap opera. Another interesting development is that, when the content is considered to be bad or uninteresting by a group of fans, fans often ask their fellow fans if "today was worth watching?" And there are alternatives for fans who don't want to sit down and watch an entire episode. If a fan thinks that their favorite soaps are boring but still wish to see select scenes, they can easily go to YouTube and watch the scenes that interest them in what is often 10 minutes or less. With these new distribution outlets, it's even easier for a fan to catch-up if they have become a lapsed viewer. Fans can easily go back and find key moments from a variety of sources. However, this also means that, because this content is available online, fans' attention to detail about individual characters seems to have become more heightened. So, as soaps struggle with diminishing production values as they cut their budgets, the fans are even more likely to notice the slip in production values.

The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Two):The History and Legacy of Serialized Television

The second section of The Survival of Soap Opera looks at the deep history of the stories and characters on U.S. soap operas and the unique ways this genre draws on a show's backstory (or, in some cases, does not make good use of such history). This part of the book includes multiple reflections on the similarities and differences between serialized primetime genres and daytime serials. Below, several of the contributors to this section answer some questions about how contemporary U.S. soaps relate to their backstories. Kay Alden is co-head writer of The Bold and the Beautiful, a former consultant for ABC Daytime, and the former head writer for The Young and the Restless, a show for which she wrote from 1974 to 2006 and won four Daytime Emmys and two Writers Guild of America awards. The book includes a piece based on Sam Ford's interview with Alden about what makes the soap opera genre unique.

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy at Peppercom Strategic Communication, a research affiliate with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (where he conducted Master's thesis work on soaps and taught a course on the genre), and an instructor with the Popular Culture Studies program at Western Kentucky University (where he is teaching a class on soaps) who has published work on the genre for Fast Company, Portfolio, and Transformative Works and Cultures. Ford co-authored the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." He also wrote an essay for the collection, entitled "Growing Old Together: Following As the World Turns' Tom Hughes through the Years."

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera critic and active member of the online soap opera fan community who has written for Soap Opera Weekly and currently writes on the genre at her Red Room member blog. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas."

J.A. Metzler is a lifelong soap opera viewer who runs a boutique marketing and communications consultancy and formerly participated in a daytime writer development program. His essay in the collection is entitled "Did the 2007 Writers Strike Save Daytime's Highest-Rated Drama?"

Christine Scodari is a professor of communication and multimedia studies and a women's studies associate at Florida Atlantic University who has written numerous pieces of scholarship on issues of gender and age in soap operas, including her book Serial Monogamy. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Of Soap Operas, Space Operas, and Television's Rocky Romance with the Feminine Form."

Why is the history of U.S. soap operas so vital to their continued survival?

Sam Ford: U.S. soap operas may be one of the most hyper-serialized forms of storytelling in history, but it certainly does not "own" serialization. As many essays in our book point out, there are many ways in which primetime television and other types of storytelling are often "doing serialization" better than daytime serial dramas these days. Yet what sets the U.S. soap opera model apart not only from primetime serialized television shows these days but also from telenovelas and other adaptations of the soap opera genre is their history. As soap operas look to compete in an increasingly cluttered media landscape, the industry's answer is often to adapt what they have to offer to what it seems audiences want: thus, we hear discussion about the MTV-ization of our culture or else reality television's effect on audience expectations, and many people in the soap opera industry start thinking and talking about how soap operas need to adapt to these changes. My response is quite the opposite: that soap operas have to stick to their major points of differentiation in storytelling style, even as they change with the social stories of the times. In short, rather than trying to tell their stories more quickly to compete with primetime serialization, soap operas have to think about what primetime cannot do. Primetime shows can do CGI better than daytime dramas because they have bigger budgets. Primetime has a better chance to do location shoots these days. What primetime can't do is tell stories with characters who people have been following for decades, with such complex backstories and generations of fans who have grown up watching these shows.

As soap operas concentrate on quick-fixes to jump start the genre instead of leaning on the history that sets the genre apart, these shows run the risk of distancing themselves from their very points of differentiation. For instance, my work has concentrated on the now-cancelled As the World Turns, a show that maintained one of its core families for its entire 54-year run and had multiple actors who had been in the same role for up to five decades. My essay in this collection focuses on the character of Tom Hughes, who audiences watched from birth in 1961 to the show's cancellation in 2010. No other form of entertainment can accomplish that sort of storytelling, and the rich history and complexity such storytelling drives cannot be duplicated elsewhere on television. (I've made the argument elsewhere that narrative worlds like the super hero universes of Marvel and DC, the pro wrestling narrative world, or the "real" worlds of various sports leagues or political news might rival the "immersive story worlds" of soap operas in their longevity and depth.) In our collection, Jason Mittell's piece points out the many ways in which primetime serialized television differs from daytime soaps, rejecting the notions of many who feel that complex primetime television narratives are a direct descendant of U.S. soaps. And, elsewhere, Jason writes about complex primetime television shows as having a high degree of "drillability," with dense texts that have multiple layers of meaning to unpack. Soap operas achieve complexity as well, but--to Jason's point--in a much different way than primetime shows. Rather than a (relatively) small number of episodes that are quite dense, soap operas achieve their complexity through accretion--by telling the daily stories of characters over the course of decades and thus relying on collaboration with their audiences in comparing any current moment in the text with the deep history of those characters. Primetime television shows cannot provide those pleasures, and yet daytime soap operas very rarely take full advantage of the types of stories only they can tell.

Have you seen examples of today's soap operas in the U.S. taking advantage of their histories in powerful ways that you believe exemplify what the soap opera genre is supposed to do?

Sam Ford: There were certainly elements of the end of As the World Turns which played on the rich history of those characters and the show. In particular, bringing back longtime show favorite Dr. John Dixon after several years of absence from Oakdale was a fantastic nod toward fans, as was featuring several of the show's most enduring faces more prominently in the show's final months. Meanwhile, while I didn't watch it myself, I heard many great things about Days of Our Lives' treatment of the death of show matriarch Alice Horton in 2010 after portrayer Frances Reid's death. J.A. Metzler's piece in our book highlights The Young and the Restless' renewed focus on longtime character Katherine Chancellor as a sign of how that show gained some traction by recalibrating its focus through the writer's strike, and The Bold and the Beautiful writer Kay Alden writes in her piece about how that show has retained focus on four central characters from its premiere to the current day. These examples are stark reminders to fans of why they still watch soap operas in particular and the pleasures that soap operas provide that cannot be found elsewhere. My suspicion would be that it is these moments, periods, eras, and elements which keep millions of U.S. viewers still dedicated to a genre that is clearly in decline.

Why do these soap operas ignore or not properly make use of that rich history?

Sam Ford: Writers too often see the history of soap opera story worlds as a point of risk rather than a strength, especially as writing teams move from one show to another and thus have decades of history to catch up on. That leads to new writing regimes bringing in new characters and downplaying those characters they are afraid they can't write so well. Rather than seeing fans' desire for continuity as a way to engage with them and draw them in, it's seen as a negative: to avoid fan complaining, writers just stay away from history they don't know that well. I've had head writers of shows complain to me in the past about how difficult it can be to come on board a new show and try to catch up on storylines of years gone by, especially now that these shows have several decades of history. Much of the problem has to do with resources: many shows don't have digitized or easily accessible archives to review history and, even if they do, there is so much history to catch up on, and writers are expected to write 260 original episodes each year. So, if you aren't already steeped in the history of the show you write for, it's extremely hard to get caught up. In my mind, that means knowledge of and history with the franchise should be a requirement for being hired to write for a soap, but it's typically not.

J.A. Metzler: As ratings for all soap operas have eroded over time, I think that soap producers and writers have sought to find alternate ways to build a viewing audience. I think many producers/writers have been trying to "recreate the wheel" instead of relying upon the tenets that have long made serialized storytelling popular: character consistency; evolution of a character or set of characters over time; and a certain feeling of familiarity that comes with "visiting" with these characters on a regular basis. I think too many have tinkered with the older, more tested formula, ignoring their shows' rich history and consistency in order to try and evolve to a new formula driven by a faster-paced, plot-based type of storytelling with a revolving door of younger, unfamiliar characters, in the hopes of engaging a new audience of viewers who they believe have a limited attention span for slower-evolving stories based on character and continuity.

In what ways are contemporary U.S. soap operas failing to use their history in compelling ways?

Lynn Liccardo: There was great excitement among As the World Turns fans when word leaked out that Julianne Moore would be briefly reprising her breakout role of Frannie Hughes. Her appearance was to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of Frannie's father and step-mother (and aunt), Bob and Kim Hughes, which coincided with the show's 54th, and final, anniversary this past April 2nd. As it happens, on April 2nd, I was in St. Louis, presenting my essay for The Survival of Soap Opera, on the Capitalizing on History panel at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference. You just cannot plan that kind of irony.

Had I not known of Moore's appearance two episodes hence, and, had I not seen a clip somewhere online of her lifting a glass to toast her parents, the April 1st episode might have given me false hope for how the show would close out its 54-year run. The episode opens with Kim and Bob celebrating their anniversary over champagne at the Lakeview. Kim gives Bob a framed photograph of their cabin, which she had redecorated. She tells him that she's made sure that his schedule was clear so the two of them could spend a long weekend together. But Bob's schedule had changed, and he wants to postpone their getaway. With the conflict in place, the stage was set for the kind of story that could have - make that should have - been the linchpin for the show's final months. Instead, it was all over in three short episodes that barely scratched the historical and emotional surface before all was resolved.

While ATWT had used the short-arc format extensively in 2008-9, after the show's cancelation was announced in December 2009, the writers had returned to soaps' more traditional narrative structure. Why the show chose the short-arc for Kim and Bob's anniversary reveals great deal about TPTB's attitudes towards both longtime fans and the show's history. Before I get into why, a little bit of background about the couple. Bob Hughes was a young boy when ATWT began in 1956. He may well have been the first character to be SORASed (soap opera rapid aging syndrome) when Don Hastings took over the role in 1960. Kathryn Hays began playing Kim Sullivan (Reynolds, Dixon, Stewart, Andropoulous, Hughes) in 1972. The admitted doppelganger of ATWT's creator, Irna Phillips, Kim proceeded to seduce Bob, who was married to her sister (Frannie's late mother, Jennifer). For more than a decade, Kim and Bob suffered the consequences of their indiscretion. But, by 1985, the couple was deemed sufficiently rehabilitated to marry and assume the role of tent pole characters previously occupied by Bob's parents, Nancy and Chris.

In recent years, ATWT had abandoned its traditional intergenerational storytelling in favor of more isolated storylines (see here). So the flashbacks interspersed in the second episode of the arc filled in the backstory for newer viewers. For this longtime fan, it was an exercise in ambivalence: while I was delighted to see the show's glorious past, those flashbacks were also a bitter reminder of just how much had been lost. The emotional depth so apparent in the flashbacks stood in stark contrast to the superficial, even trivial, manner in which Kim and Bob's story was playing out.

There were no good guys or bad guys here. Both characters' points-of-view were valid and easily understood. Bob was reluctant to give up his profession and concerned about the legacy he would leave; Kim, worried about the serious health issues both had dealt with the previous year and tired of playing second fiddle to Bob's career, wanted to spend more time with her husband. In fact, the tension between Kim and Bob mirrored aspects of the tension between Bob's protègè, Reid Oliver, and legacy character Luke Snyder as the two embarked upon their short-lived relationship.

This brings up another issue. When fans complain about soaps' lack of intergenerational storytelling, TPTB often point to the budget restrictions that limit the number of actors per episode. Okay. But Kim and Bob were on fairly often in the final months, so the actors were already getting paid. However, with Kim and Bob's problems so quickly resolved, the characters' only purpose was to prop Reid and Luke and their son Chris. Tom was right when he said of his father and Kim, "If they can't make it, what hope is there for the rest of us?" How much richer the story would have been if all the couples trying to find their way back to each other could have learned from Kim and Bob's troubles.

And the conversations: Kim with her niece, Barbara, and daughter-in-law, Margo; Bob with his sons Tom and Chris and grandson Casey. The old rivalries referenced: Bob's first wife and Tom's mother, Lisa, and the impact being a child of divorce had on Tom, for instance, or Bob's affair with Susan Stewart, the mother of Casey's girlfriend, Alison. All of that could have been spread out and fully examined over the show's final months. Instead, some of the interactions reduced characters to farce: both Lisa and Susan trying to seduce Bob as a test to prove that he really loves Kim. Really? Now, of course, maybe if this had been a facet as the story evolved the course of several months...

Not to belabor my almost morbid fascination with Executive Producer Christopher Goutman's psyche, but I have to say that, like the train wreck that killed Reid Oliver; the first time Luke and his first love, Noah, made love, and the death of the show's matriarch, Nancy Hughes, there was a perfunctory quality - even patronizing, and almost spiteful - about how Kim and Bob's story was shoehorned into these three episodes. It was almost as though Goutman was taunting longtime fans: "Look how we remember the show's history, and, yes, we actually do remember how to lay out this kind of story and write these kinds of scenes; but three episodes is all you're going to get. So, be satisfied, and don't complain." And, for the most part, that was exactly the response from fans and the soap media. Other than a few laments about the story's brevity, I don't recall see any critical comments on the boards. It seems that fans have been conditioned not just to accept these crumbs, but to be grateful for them - even if TPTB make a mockery of the show's history in the process.

Kim and Bob's truncated story was a far cry from how ATWT's sister show, Guiding Light, closed out its 72-year run in 2009 with the marriage of Vanessa and Billy Lewis. Both were long characters, to be sure, but not nearly as deeply-woven in Springfield's canvas as Kim and Bob were in Oakdale's. And, while, as a couple, Vanessa and Billy had their fans, theirs was not a manifest destiny. In fact, there were a few on the boards who would have preferred that Vanessa remarry another former husband, Matt Reardon. But Kim and Bob were forever.

Funny story: I came across the questionnaire I filled out for C. Lee Harrington and Denise Brothers' essay for the book, "Age and Aging in Soaps." Here's what I wrote back in 2007: "What I'd really like to see is a former love come into the life of a vet...(but) I'm not interested in seeing a marriage - Tom-Margo, Bob-Kim - threatened." While I'm sure I meant it at the time, I would have so loved for As the World Turns to have ended its 54 years showing Kim and Bob fully confronting their conflicts, secure in the knowledge that they would, indeed, resolve them.

What is the relationship between these soap opera and other forms of serialized television drama in the U.S., such as reality television or primetime scripted dramas?

Kay Alden: When reality TV descended upon us, unlike some others, I did not view this development as the harbinger of the death of the soap opera. Instead, I argued that the sudden popularity of such programming increased the likelihood of the survival of the soap opera, in that these reality shows inherently draw their support from the innate human desire to know "what happens next," which is our stock in trade in soapdom. I believed at that time that the enormous popularity of the reality shows would not sustain because of the lack of knowledge the audience has of the characters, unlike in soap opera, where viewers have known these characters often for many years. I believed that this type of programming is inherently formulaic, and, between that fact and the lack of well-known, well-drawn characters, I did not believe that reality TV, over time, could compete with what we do in daytime television via the scripted medium. I did hope, however, that seeing a new public interested in this type of serialized drama might somehow transfer to a new, younger demographic available for daytime serials. Regrettably, such transference has not occurred.

It is interesting to note that, in many reality programs, more attention is now placed on the characters - who these people are whose lives have been brought together for the duration of the program; who will form alliances; who will be the successful manipulators? Reality TV has learned the lesson well, that in order to succeed, an audience needs to care about the characters involved. Choosing the cast of Dancing with the Stars has now become a significant facet of the show, as producers hope to cement viewer involvement with their "characters" even before the season actually begins. Survivor promotes the characters in their upcoming season as the primary draw for viewers to tune in. Thus, I maintain, reality TV has learned what we must always remember in our soap opera world: daytime drama is a character-based medium. It is the characters, far more than clever plot twists, which keep viewers tuning in again and again. In reality TV, the plots are simple. The drama is the contest: who will win the game. But the relationships among the characters, the friends and foes that develop, the alliances, the manipulations...these are the facets that keep viewers involved. Now, the question is: what can we learn from this new venue that has so successfully entered our realm and captivated the viewing public? Immediacy, surprise, fresh plot twists...all these are important. On The Bold and the Beautiful, we have recently tried to find ways of adding more of the "reality" perspective, with our real-life shows among the homeless of Los Angeles and subsequent additional reality segments we will be featuring on the show. But, above all, we in soap operas must continue to concentrate on our well loved and well understood characters. This is where we in daytime drama have the supreme advantage, with shows that have been coming into viewers' homes for years and characters our audiences know and love. In the quest to reach out and garner new audience, let us always remember that it is our beloved characters which provide our first and foremost draw for loyal viewership.

Christine Scodari: I've seen it dozens of times, whether I'm casually perusing online forums devoted to primetime dramas or systematically investigating them for my research. "Why must every show have a romance?" a fan queries. Another chimes in, "I'm tired of them shipping the male and female leads." Then, almost like clockwork, there's the rub: "This is not a soap opera!" Not only do such exchanges refer to something essential (but not unique!) to the soap opera genre (developing romantic relationships or, in fanspeak, "ships" between ongoing characters) but implicitly to another ingredient that makes the first one possible and, perhaps, probable--serialization.

Before 1978, when Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991) debuted, there had only been a couple of short-lived soaps in prime time. Except for these and one or two series in which the leads were married from the start, there were no developing romances between ongoing characters in U.S. primetime dramas during network television's first three decades. Prior to the 1980s, nighttime dramatic series were structurally episodic, and save for maintaining the basic premise, setting, and slate of regular characters (anthologies, of course, didn't even have these), each episode was its own mini-movie. Guest players entered and left the canvas within the hour, including villains and objects of affection for the primarily male heroes. Thanks to an amnesia-inducing reset button, whatever guest characters the regulars loved, or fought, or mourned in the previous episode would conveniently be forgotten the following week. Star Trek's (NBC, 1967-1969) Captain Kirk may have had his disposable girl-on-every-planet, but, while Della Street pined for the title character in the legal drama Perry Mason (CBS, 1957-1966) and Miss Kitty Russell eyed Marshall Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955-1975), these long-suffering regulars never got to first base.

The show most credited with ushering in the hybridized, serial-episodic primetime drama and the related phenomenon of developing romances between ongoing characters is Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-1987). However, neither it nor its many imitators are true soap operas. As Thompson notes in From "Hill Street Blues" to "ER": Television's Second Golden Age (1996), Hill Street's creators were ordered by the network to insert at least one plot each episode that would begin and end within the hour. And that they did, usually by bringing one or more professional storylines to closure while attenuating the personal ones. Such series were showered with Emmys and lauded as innovative and gutsy for their long-term character arcs and sink-in-your-teeth acting, with nary a nod to the much-denigrated genre that actually pioneered such storylines (albeit in low-budget fashion).

Since then, mushrooming media options and accompanying audience fragmentation have made serial and serial-episodic primetime dramas into riskier investments for the major commercial networks. Viewers who miss a week or two of complex plotting become frustrated and often drop off. As a result, such series fare worse in both first-run and syndication than episodic, procedural dramas such as those associated with the "Law and Order" and "CSI" franchises. Daytime soap opera viewership has, logically, declined for many of the same reasons. The new model for serial-episodic drama series in prime time is one that is more episodic than serial. Its epitome is CBS's The Good Wife (2009-present), in which a long-term arc anchored in attorney Alicia's troubled relationship with her politico husband and flirtation with a partner at her law firm very sparsely peppers each installment, while the "A" plot of each episode is one open and quickly shut legal case. Meanwhile, daytime dramas languish as their numbers dwindle, their business model insufficient to address today's realities. In a spate of experimentation to see what, if any, primetime traits might be emulated in order to improve its prospects, daytime has lately dabbled in storylines sampling every dramatic subgenre from the occult to organized crime to high school musicals and forayed into reality TV territory, in part by incorporating talent and other contests into its plots. These gestures have one thing in common; they are efforts to nestle shorter-term storylines within longer arcs, just as competitive reality series tell a weekly tale of which contestant will be eliminated in the course of weaving a seasonal narrative about who the ultimate victor will be.

Even for soaps, then, it seems that serialization and the intricate, patiently plotted character stories it can engender are becoming suspect. The pivotal contribution daytime made to the development of "high quality" primetime drama has been persistently overlooked, and now this very feature--serialization--is one to be gingerly employed, if not drastically curtailed, wiped away like that soapy ring around the tub. Perhaps the anti-shippers need only wait--wait until soap operas themselves fade away and inflexibly episodic series are again so dominant in primetime that elegantly evolving relationships between regular characters are virtually impossible to assemble.

I, on the other hand, would mourn that eventuality.

Lynn Liccardo: My focus has been on the relationship between daytime soaps and primetime scripted dramas - hence the title of my essay for the book, "The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas." So, it's no surprise that, as my daytime soap viewership came to an end with the final episode of As the World Turns this past September, I was looking at several primetime shows to take up the slack, one in particular: the CW's Life UneXpected. But as the wise Yogi put it so well, "It's like deja-vu, all over again."

Creator Liz Tigelaar's experience as an adopted child inspired the story of sixteen-year old Lux, who seeks out her birth parents. The show surely would have resonated with soap opera's creator, Irna Phillips, whose difficult relationships with her adopted son and daughter provided material for powerful stories on As the World Turns and Another World. Like Friday Night Lights and Mad Men, LUX (yes, the wordplay between the title and the title character is a bit precious) is one of those modest stories of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. LUX was always a strange fit on the CW (a joint venture between CBS and the old WB), a fact the network acknowledged when the show premiered in January 2010:

The drama is unlike most of the CW's current schedule, because it's not about sexy high schoolers in Beverly Hills or sexy college students on the Upper East Side. Instead, it's a mature, adult drama.

The show has more in common with classic WB dramas like Gilmore Girls and Everwood, dealing with the relationships between parents and children. Not only is it the best new show of 2010, but it's certainly the best new show the CW has produced in its four years on the air.

Indeed it was, but that was then. Just before the second season premiere the very week ATWT left the air in mid-September, Tigelaar gave a candid - very candid (were that former ATWT executive producer Christopher Goutman as forthcoming about the network interference he had to deal with over his 11 years with the show) - interview detailing the changes the CW demanded before renewing Life UneXpected last spring. "I could tell tales about Baze and Kate and Lux and Ryan the rest of my life and not get bored. The CW would kill me and cancel my show, but I seriously could."

And I would happily watch Tigelaar's tales. Sad to say, the second season reminds me of what daytime soaps have become: a few beautifully written moments squeezed in-between what the network wanted from Tigelaar: "to introduce new characters, to provide more conflicts, foils, love interests to all the main characters." In the words of The AV Club's Todd Vanderwerff, "Can we maybe get some more superficial conflict in here?" So, for its second, and likely final, season LUX morphed from "a mature, adult drama" to one more CW show about a "sexy high schooler," in this case, having an affair with her teacher while thoughtlessly betraying her best friend.

Fan reaction was predictable. For ShellySue at TWoP:

Last night I was thinking, "This show is horrible. I can't possibly watch it anymore. It used to be a good show with so much potential. What happened?" At that same moment ShelleySueTeenDaughter said, "This show is great. I can't believe I ever didn't like it. It was so boring in the beginning. I'm glad they made it more interesting." So it's clear to me that I'm hating this show because it isn't written for me anymore (if it ever was). To bad, because I really used to enjoy it.

Tigelaar gets character - and she gets soap opera - "I love those conventions, I love those moments...I love those soap opera storylines..." She has worked on some of the primetime shows I've always believed embodied the ethos of your mother's soap opera: "an ensemble of fully developed, multi-generational, middle-class characters shown in open-ended, inter-connected, intimate stories, where the actions of one character reverberated for all," among them American Dreams and Dirty Sexy Money. Yes, yes, I know the Darlings were filthy rich, but, in the first season, the family relationships were grounded in emotional honesty. That is until ABC programmers started mucking around with the second season, then cancelled the show. The recent announcement that the CW was not ordering additional 2nd-season episodes beyond the initial thirteen suggests that Life UneXpected will soon follow suit.

The AV Club's Todd Vanderwerff speaks for many frustrated fans of these kinds of shows when he says:

If there's one thing networks believe in the very pits of their stomachs, it's that real life, life as it's really lived, cannot make for interesting and compelling television, despite the fact that the entire output of Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (thirtysomething, etc.), Friday Night Lights, and even the shows of David Simon suggest that writing small-scale stories about people living mundane lives can be really, really fascinating when done right

But the truth is, for the broadcast networks, the numbers simply aren't there for these kinds of small-scale stories. Friday Night Lights made it to five seasons only because of the deal NBC put together with DirecTV. Mad Men survives on AMC with fewer than two million viewers. So it's not surprising that there's a growing consensus that if serialized storytelling is to survive, it will be on cable - and not just premium cable.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick provides a clear and cogent explanation of how economics allow basic cable to take a chance on a show like Men of a Certain Age. CBS would have taken the show; after all, co-creator Ray Romano made the network a ton of money with Everyone Loves Raymond. But the network wanted changes - 30 minutes, more comedic - Romano was not willing to make. (For what it's worth: as mentioned above, CBS is one of the owners of the CW, which might account for what's gone on with Life UneXpected.) But Romano stood his ground, and Men of a Certain Age, which was well received by critics, returns for its second season on TNT on December 6th.

But it's not just taking a chance on a show: it's giving the show - and viewers - a chance. A cable show may get pulled after one season, but not before all thirteen episodes have aired - and in the same time slot. So, while a critically acclaimed show like Fox's Lone Star might not have survived more than one season, the show would have gotten a fair shot instead of being cancelled after two episodes. Losing Lone Star so quickly was particularly frustrating because the show had a fascinating, if edgy, premise - a con man leading a double life while trying to break with his past - with a cast that included Jon Voight and David Keith.

Of course, while Fox's decision to use Lone Star cannon fodder against ABC's Dancing with the Stars makes sense in the real world of broadcast networks - put your strongest show up against the toughest competition - why, when it predictably failed to beat DWTS, Fox didn't give the show a lifeline at FX is anybody's guess.

This is hardly a new phenomenon: Sam Ford and I had this conversation in 2006. The economic realities that force the broadcast networks to move shows around and pull serials after a couple of episodes have created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; many viewers who've been burned before simply don't watch, or, if they do watch, don't allow themselves to become emotionally invested.

So maybe creators wanting to tell "small-scale stories about people living mundane lives" should follow Ray Romano's lead and not allow the broadcast networks to try to save any more of these shows by destroying the very qualities that make them so special. Had Liz Tigelaar gone to TNT or AMC instead of The CW when she was looking for a home for Life UneXpected, the show might be preparing for its third season rather than facing almost certain cancellation.

But, while cable offers hope for the future of serialized storytelling, there are challenges. The thirteen-episode cable season limits the depth of serialized storytelling. Fans on Television without Pity's FNL board were hungry for more; marnyh's comment was typical: "As much as I adore this show, it really was harmed by the abbreviated season. There was too much stuff I wanted to see more of, and too many characters I wanted fleshed out." As for Mad Men, on Ginia Bellafante's New York Times blog, one fan posited, "I'm sure we can all agree that Congress should pass a law that this show should be two hours, at least 40 weeks a year. Rest up, Mr. Weiner."

Then there's the question of gender. Because FNL, Mad Men, and, to a lesser extent, Men of a Certain Age, are about, well, men, or at least, manly pursuits, these shows are able to escape the "chick" label and, as a result, attract more media buzz. Witness Charlie Rose, one of the few places where in-depth conversations about popular culture take place. Rose's shows about FNL and Mad Men, have, with the notable exception of Connie Britton, have included only men. This is not to devalue the opinions of Matt Roush, Ken Tucker, and Bill Carter, but to suggest that people like Virginia Heffernan, Ginia Bellefante, and Alessandra Stanley, all of whom (and yes, I realized they're all at The New York Times) have written with great insight about these shows, and others, would enrich the conversation around Charlie's oak table.

Another example: Todd Vanderwerff's posted his observations about Life UneXpected on The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. The A.V Club is a reference to "the olden times, a school's audiovisual club would be composed of a bunch of geeks..." Needless to say, AV clubs were largely populated by socially inept males. Hence, Michael Clayton's response to the Vanderweff post: "I think I grew an ovary just reading the first 2 paragraphs. Seriously though, I've never heard of this show. Why is AVClub covering it?"

As serialized storytelling continues its transition, there are questions that must be asked and answered: Who's the audience for these kinds of shows? How to identify potential viewers? And why is that audience so small compared to, say, reality shows? Since there is such and enormous range of serialized storytelling, exactly what do I mean by "these kinds of shows" beyond being "small-scale stories about people living mundane lives?" What about the web? I'm still working on that, so check my blog for the future of serialized storytelling, part 2...

The Survival of Soap Opera (Part One): The State of the American Soap

Soap operas have been a staple in American broadcasting since the dawn of network radio in the 1930s, yet at a time when several major soaps have been canceled, they seem to be an endangered species. A new book released this week, The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations For a New Media Era, brings together key thinkers about this embattled genre from the worlds of industry, fandom, journalism, and academia to share their reflections on the current state of the American daytime serial and to offer their suggestions on what tactics and strategies might allow it to thrive in a new media era. The book is edited by three researchers -- Sam Ford (Director of Digital Strategy for Peppercom Strategic Communications), Abigail De Kosnik (assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies), and C. Lee Harrington (professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University) -- who have been key contributors to the Convergence Culture Consortium (soon to be rebranded as the Futures of Entertainment Consortium). Ford is also the co-author with Joshua Green and I of my current book project, Spreadable Media, which we hope to release late next year. This book does what the best contemporary media scholarship should be doing -- tackling an issue which has enormous impact on the shape of our communications environment, brokering a conversation which brings key stakeholders to the table and reflects the diversity of perspectives around this topic, and making an intervention which reaps pragmatic rewards even as it sharpens our conceptual understanding of how television production emerges at the intersection between Broadcast networks and networked communications. The prose remains accessible throughout, in part because it is designed to reach an audience far beyond the university book store ghetto. There's an immediacy about the project because it seeks to bring classic scholarly perspectives to bear on a very pressing set of concerns. And there's a passion to the writing because everyone contributing feels a strong stake in these developments, because whatever else they are, they are fans of soaps as a genre and care about their long-term viability.

I have asked the three editors of the book to help organize a forum to be conducted in four installments through this blog, bringing together some key contributors to the book, to share their reactions to its four core themes. This material is at once a sample of what the book offers but also an extension of the book which is able to include some developments which have unfolded since the book went to press.

The first section of the book looks at the many challenges U.S. soap operas face today. Below, a cross-section of the contributors to that section answer some questions about the state of the U.S. soap opera industry today.

Giada Da Ros is a television critic for a weekly Italian newspaper who has published essays on a variety of primetime television dramas, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, The L Word, Lost, and Queer as Folk. 

Patrick Mulcahey, a current writer with The Bold and the Beautiful, has won four Daytime Emmys and three Writers Guild of America awards for nearly three decades of writing for soap operas, also including General Hospital, Guiding Light, Loving, Santa Barbara, Search for Tomorrow, and Texas. The collection features a piece based on Da Ros' interview with Mulcahey which focuses on changes in soap opera writing contracts. 

Barbara Irwin, a professor of communication studies at Canisius College who has researched soap operas for more than two decades, has co-authored two books on soap opera The Young and the Restless and currently serves both as chair of the soap opera area of the Popular Culture Association national conference and as co-director of the Project Daytime research initiative. The collection features a piece based on C. Lee Harrington's interview with Irwin and research partner Mary Cassata, focused on the state of U.S. soap operas today. 

Jaime J. Nasser is the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film Studies Program; the Gender and Sexuality Program; and the Latin American, Latino and Iberian Peoples and Culture Program at Bryn Mawr College who recently received his doctorate from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts with a dissertation that focused, in part, on the emergence of the telenovela. Nasser's essay in the collection is entitled "Giving Soaps a Good Scrub: ABC's Ugly Betty and the Ethnicity of Television Formats." 

William J. Reynolds is a published historian who writes about the Ossining, New York, area and U.S. presidencies and he researches soap opera history and actively participates in online and offline soap opera community events. The collection features a piece based on Sam Ford's interview with Reynolds on memories of the soap opera The Edge of Night. 

Tristan Rogers is an actor best known for playing the role of Robert Scorpio for various stints over the past three decades on General Hospital and General Hospital: Night Shift and who currently has roles on both The Young and the Restless and online series The Bay. The book features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with Rogers about changes in the soap opera industry, audiences, and texts. 

Melissa C. Scardaville is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Emory University who has published her work on soap operas for American Behavioral Scientist and previously served as the Guiding Light editor for Soap Opera Digest. Scardaville's essay in the book is entitled "The Way We Were: The Institutional Logics of Professionals and Fans in the Soap Opera Industry."

For readers who are not soap opera fans, where do U.S. soap operas find themselves today?

Barbara Irwin: Soap operas today find themselves at a crossroads.  With diminishing ratings, intensifying scrutiny focused on the bottom line, and a new media landscape, questions are being raised as to their lasting power.  In the last year and a half, we've seen the cancellation of two long-time CBS/Procter & Gamble shows, Guiding Light (the longest running scripted series ever in broadcasting) and As The World Turns.  On the heels of these cancellations was the recent announcement that the Disney/ABC-owned cable network, SOAPnet, will end its run in January of 2012.  Viewership of soap operas has declined dramatically over the last 20 years, with three-quarters of the audience vanishing.

In their heyday on radio in the early 1940s, one could listen to as many as 65 different soap operas on any given day.  In 1970, there were more soap operas on television than at any other time - 19 in all.  Today, just six remain. Evolutionary changes in industry and storytelling have brought us to the present state of soap operas.  For their first sixty years (1930-1990), there was little change in soap opera storytelling, due in great part to the close ties the writers and creators had to the originator of the form, Irna Phillips.  Just less than 20 years ago, nine of the 12 soap operas on the air were being written and/or executive produced by individuals with a direct connection to Irna Phillips - what I would call the "second generation" of soap opera creators.  Most of these individuals have by now been replaced, and some have passed away, leaving the writers of today farther removed from Irna and her way of creating and writing soap operas.  The changes evident in storytelling reflect this distance.

Industry forces are also at play.  Today, even the most powerful headwriters are not insulated from the corporate executives whose job it is to ensure that their creative branches remain profitable.  The soap opera industry has made numerous attempts to reduce costs and at the same time regain or build new audience.  Some of the cost-cutting efforts are invisible to viewers, such as going to a 4-day production schedule. Reducing the size of casts and writing out long-standing characters played by high-paid actors, however, changes the soap opera landscape and potentially alienates viewers. Other cost-cutting measures that have affected the soaps include fewer sets, smaller production staffs, and the near elimination of the large production "roxie" scenes and remotes as stories climax.

New means of distribution have been implemented in an effort to regain lost audience and build new audiences.  SOAPnet, launched in 2000, provides same-day re-broadcasts of soaps and weekend marathons in an attempt to provide soap viewers with an opportunity to watch their shows at convenient times.  DVRs offer another avenue for time-shifting.  The Internet offers network soap opera sites, YouTube, and other platforms through which viewers can see full episodes, clips, and features related to the soaps.  But with these new technologies comes the end of habitual, ritualistic viewing.

Webisodes and online soaps represent an innovation in soap opera storytelling, though, with limited story arcs and definite start and end points, these diverge from the traditional soap opera.  This form of storytelling is in its infancy, but it does offer the possibility of driving lost viewers back to their network soaps and to build a new and different audience.  With the proliferation of mobile devices, delivering soaps to viewers on the go may hold some promise.

Advancing technology is something of a double-edged sword.  While it has the potential to help the ailing soap industry, it also has created an environment in which viewers have wide-ranging options on their televisions and an unlimited online world that has increased the competition for viewing soaps immensely.

How would you explain the shift of the soap opera industry's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades?

Giada Da Ros: Soap operas, as a genre, are at a difficult conjuncture right now. Reasons are different. The main one, in my opinion, is that they are opaque and therefore hard to "read." On the surface, they appear easy to follow. In reality, giving meaning to what is seen on the screen requires time and commitment to the program. I love the genre, yet the idea of following a new soap makes me cringe. I don't care for it. I know that if I want to follow one, I have to give myself time, know to learn who the characters are and what the relationships are. Like in real life: love at first sight can happen, but, for the most part, you need time to care about someone and to learn what is that makes them special, when they are having a good or a bad day, what is the norm or the bizarre about them. It doesn't happen instantly. The shift in people's behaviors and the fact that they don't give themselves time, I believe, reflects in the shift in the soap opera industry's popularity. Soaps are always in flux, yet you must keep a zen-like quality of viewing: you are in the moment, always. You don't know what the future holds. They say it takes at least six months to build a soap audience, and that is for a reason.

Also, viewers are more aware of TV genres and tropes and have expectations that they didn't use to have in the past. They are more visually educated and critical. Trusting this knowledge and the expectations they often incur is a common misconception. Most viewers when approaching soaps expect to see Caravaggio, not Picasso, and they judge it accordingly. Despite appearances, soaps are more conceptual than mimetic. They do not portray reality; they use realistic elements to create a different reality: one of the mind, abstract and symbolic, which borders with the superficial "illusion of reality." Several planes of reality intersect, and the emotional reality emerges. Conventions of the genre, narrative and of other kind (like recasting, being back from the dead, the twin sibling, or inside jokes) are proof of how an intellectual leap beyond reality is required of the viewer. Awareness of this gap comes only progressively. The occasional viewer mistrusts and misjudges these aspects that are specific of the genre. I believe this misjudgment was less likely to occur in the past because people had fewer expectations about TV in general.

What are the primary reasons for the decline in U.S. soap opera viewership in the past few decades?

Barbara Irwin: Two critical factors appear to be related to the decline in audience.  Most of today's viewers, from the oldest to young middle-age, likely established their soap opera viewing habits directly as a result of their mothers' or grandmothers' viewing.  But, as the overall viewership declines, the likelihood of being "taught" soap opera viewing at the knee of one's mother is diminishing.  If soap opera creators are to initiate a new generation in the habit of viewing, they will have to connect with them directly. And a second factor making an impact on the diminishing audience of soap operas today is the proliferation of alternative viewing options.  With the dramatic increase in the number of television channels available in US households and increased time spent online, competition for viewing time is fierce.

The soap opera audience's awareness of alternative viewing options may be linked to the 1995 broadcast of the O.J. Simpson trial.  For thirty-seven consecutive weeks, the daily soap opera line-up was preempted and interrupted regularly.  The trial also received wall-to-wall coverage on cable's Court TV (now truTV).  It could be argued that the real-life drama unfolding before viewers' eyes was more dramatic than what the soaps had to offer. Many viewers did not return to their soaps after the trial ended, having discovered that the reality played out on Court TV and other cable networks was more worthy of their viewing time.

While the Simpson trial cannot be blamed for single-handedly causing a crisis in the soap opera industry, it points to the larger picture. During this time, loyal soap opera viewers became aware of the vast array of viewing options available to them, and broadcast and cable programmers noted the types of programming viewers responded to. Reality-based programming began to flourish, and the sordid lives of real people were played out on myriad talk shows, court shows, magazine, and tabloid shows, all competing for - and many winning over - the soap opera audience.

Giada Da Ros:  I truly believe two main elements work against soap operas and help their decline at the present moment: their cultural standing in the public opinion and the way they are sold to the audience. In the mainstream, the regard for the professionalism and skill of soap operas is quite low. In  a culture that relishes being media-savvy and hip, choosing soap operas is not desirable, quite the contrary. This is an obstacle insofar as, to go against the current, you must truly love the genre. Otherwise, it is simply not worth it, because you do not get "rewarded" for it; you get "punished." Fans are bullied into thinking they are not cool and, for the most part, they are afraid to come out as defenders of a genre they love. Hence the decline.

Also, I believe the way soaps are promoted to be misguided at best. Promo ads are packed with the gist of twists: short, fast segments. This is the way it is done in primetime; this is the common sense. But I don't think it's the smart choice for soaps. It may bring a viewer to check out a soap, but it doesn't guarantee you stay. You see fast; you want fast. I argue you should go the other way. Show just one segment: plain, ordinary, yet meaningful. Don't go for what attracts; go for what pulls you in, for what ultimately lets you stay and gives you pleasure in watching soaps. Give a half-a-minute soap in the ad spot that leaves you with the idea that there is abundance, that there is more, and that you can have it by watching the program. You want two things from the audience you need to attract: that it craves the ritualistic, soothing return to the show and that it is able to see beyond the genre's rhetoric and conventions and use them as tools to enjoy the narrative. You don't want a viewer that is so fixed on the grammar and syntax of the genre that he or she is unable to understand it but rather one that speaks its narrative language. The only way to do that is to concentrate on what soaps do best without having them try being something else and being sold as something else. The way the industry is selling its product helps its decline.

Jaime Nasser: The shift of the soap opera industry's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades is partly linked to the decline in U.S. soap opera viewership in the past few decades. There are two reasons that stand out which are interconnected: First, the increasing popularity and availability of  television programming on demand and DVD means that there will be a decline in viewership of programs of limited availability. By "limited availability" I refer to programming that is available only via traditional broadcasting such as the case with most soap operas. Second, the shift in prime time programming from primarily an episodic to serial format offers similar, or comparable pleasures to the daytime soap opera format. I am not saying that prime time serials are the same as daytime soap operas but they share strong similarities that increasingly blur the lines between daytime and prime time serials. The industry is able to provide high budget serials that are considered "high quality" and whose narratives are sufficiently self contained that allow for effective digital marketing (DVD and on demand), as opposed to the open ended and expansive nature of the daytime soap opera whose main feature is that it does not end. In conclusion, the increase in consumption and availability of contemporary high budget, serialized television texts on demand (DVD and the internet) partly explain the decline of the soap opera's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades. An observation: The soap opera might have a comeback once technology catches up to the expansive nature of the format. That is, it becomes profitable to sell soap opera's and/or make them available for on demand viewing.

Melissa Scardaville: Many people will say it's because of the Internet, more choices in television programming, and the style of soap opera storytelling now being the purview of multiple genres. These are all valid reasons, and all played a role. What is often left out of the discussion are the Nielsen ratings. We never, ever accurately measured television audiences in the past, so it's very difficult to discuss the decline. We don't really know how many people watched, so we don't know why they left and who they were.

That said, even if we can't quantitatively devise an appropriate number, we can say qualitatively that soap viewership has declined. Why? Very simply is that the audience no longer trust the shows. They do not trust that their shows will stay on the air. They do not trust that, if they get invested in a storyline, there will be any payoff. They no longer trust there will be consistency. Your investment as a soap fan pays off because, if you watch today, you will get an even deeper understanding of the events of tomorrow. Audiences no longer trust that this will occur, so they stopped investing in the first place.

How have declines in budgets for these shows impacted their quality?

Tristan Rogers: It is doubtful that budget reductions have seriously been at fault when it comes to the soaps.  At day's end, it all comes down to the way the shows are managed, and this started way before budget cuts crept in.  You can trace this back to the 80s.  For me personally, it all started on General Hospital when Gloria Monty stepped down.  She realized what was happening and had made a plan to get out.  Shortly after this, Capital Cities took over ABC, and many things changed, although, on the stage level, this was never evident.  At the managerial level, it was.  The "free wheeling" days were over.  Still, this was never an issue for the show.  The changes were made at a much higher level.  I never had the feeling there was a desire to preserve what we "had." There was a constant desire to pursue the "heydays of the early 80s," and they were gone.   Hence, the use of location shoots increased, something I felt to be a waste of time.  Better to go back to story and use what was happening "real-time," something that has never been fully exploited.

Daytime has always been hampered by the restrictions that are put on what can be done and said.  I will admit things have changed radically in the area of speech.  You can say things undream't of back in the 80s, but this looseness has not been extended to story. You still can't get out there and really take a current situation and project it with the drama and edge it requires.  The point has to be "blunted." And so we get this "merry-go-round" of situations and relationships.  I would love to have  a character evolve with a dark side that was "Dexterish" in nature.  But that just won't happen.  Or, if it did, the character would have to be made "cartoonish" in order to be acceptable. Stories with that kind of edge and background are not the domain of daytime. And this is precisely what they need to be, or we are left with what we currently have.  Daytime needs to reflect more of what is happening in the world. I mean, apart from the luridness and drama of interpersonal relationships, which daytime does well and pretty much pioneered.  Everyone learned from daytime and then went on from there.  We need to be accorded "some" of that license. And this doesn't require a bigger budget.  In the end, it all comes back to story,  not bigger budgets, gimmicks, or stunts.

Melissa Scardaville: If we trace the organizational linage of television to its radio days, we see that the medium is deeply rooted in theatre and literature. In the 1990s, television became a more visual medium as it adopted film techniques for the smaller screen. That's not the say that soaps could not be visually stunning prior to 1990, but large-scale, technically complicated displays were usually reserved to advance major story. Over time, explosions, car wrecks, natural disasters, and location shoots became expected. Money was challenged to the visual elements of soaps.

The declining budget also meant a severe restriction in dayplayers, under fives, and non-contract players. Soaps only have one character: its community. When that community no longer has inhabitants, you lose the very fabric that ties it all together.

Third, in soap operas, characters are defined by their relationships. Not just romantic relationships, but who this person is as a parent, a co-worker, a best friend, a neighbor, etc. Declining budgets meant core characters could not be used as often, which weakened their ties to others and which diluted the character's identity. Budget cuts also meant that it was more advantageous to use the same small set of characters who only have ties to each other and not the larger community. This approach conditions the audience to watch for specific characters and/or couples and to not be invested in the soap as a larger town. Thus, soaps developed a fractured audience where Pine Valley, Oakdale, or Springfield were defined by viewers in irreconcilable ways. Therefore, communities went from having multiple definitions and understandings to having rigid and fixed identities.

So, in short, the decline in budgets affected the:

a) Channeling of money to visual and away from storytelling

b) Loss of community ties

c) Characters with few ties

What are the chief differences between today's soap operas and the soap operas of yesteryear in the U.S.?

Patrick Mulcahey: Formerly, soaps operas were to American small-town life what shows like Cheyenne and Gunsmoke were to the American West.  Our Springfields and Pine Valleys celebrated and mythologized the close-knit communities and families our viewers came from or wished they had.  For mothers home alone with children or single working women in the urban centers, the big canvas we worked on supplied an ersatz sense of community and of extended family, too, that was lost or imperiled in their real lives.  That Feels like home appeal is crudely explicit in the earliest radio serials.  Knowing your neighbors.  Fearing the town gossips.  Parents who never let go, of each other or you.  Seeing your siblings every day.

The strategies of serial storytelling itself have hardly changed since Homer.  But the insistence, by program and advertising executives from other genres and other media, on sex and fantasy romance as the soap's raisons d'être represented a fatal misreading of what soaps were about that hastened us to our doom.  It was difficult enough to design big stories in a time when social attitudes toward sexuality and marriage were splintering.  But the network-prescribed emphasis on personal feelings, personal choices, loves-me-loves-me-not dilemmas existing in a vacuum because they're now nobody else's business; the unremitting emphasis on even individual bodies, gleaming and twisting in protracted candle-and-bedsheet scenes. All this spelled the end of what soap operas did best and made of us a cheaper, cheesier version of entertainments better done elsewhere.

William Reynolds: The soaps of yesterday, which were only thirty minutes in length, told more in-depth stories than today's hour-long shows.  Today's soap producers feel compelled to outdo themselves and their comeptition with large-scale special effects and exotic remote location shoots.  Soaps feel compelled to give us tornadoes,  floods, and explosions to draw the audience in.  However, sets do not have to be elaborate, nor do special effects have to be over-the-top. Soaps have lost their intimacy.  A longtime soap viewer like myself does not feel as if they are looking in our neighbor's window and seeing two people converse over a cup of coffee and listening in on their conversation. Today, all intimacy is gone because the viewer knows that this is "big business," and everything being done is on a large scale.

Finally, and this is strictly from my personal viewpoint, soaps have crossed the line and, in some instances, border on being pornographic.  I would normally tune into CBS in anticipation of seeing As the World Turns and would catch some of The Bold and the Beautiful, and what I would see on my screen would be something that I would expect to see in an adult movie. I also heard about a scene in which one of the genre's grande dames, Robin Strasser, gave (the allusion) of giving oral sex to a male counterpart on One Life to Live.  I have the greatest respect and admiration for Robin Strasser and her career that has spanned four decades, but my skin crawled when I heard about this.  My heart ached for her when I heard this. And, on Guiding Light there was a male character, I think it was Coop, who had a conversation with his significant body part. Call me old-fashioned, but I remember, when I was only 4 or 5 years old, hearing Lisa on As the World Turnssaying for nine long months simply that she was 'carrying Bob's child.'  The soaps have come a long way since then, and, in my opinion, not for the better.

Melissa Scardaville: The differences between today's soap operas and the soap operas of yesteryear stem from two discrete influences. First, changing business strategies in the television industry have affected both daytime and primetime. Overall, there is faster storytelling, quicker delivery of dialogue, more emphasis on youth and beauty, and less flexibility given to grow an audience. These changes negatively impacted soaps because the genre, contrary to popular opinion, is really about nuance, paradox, and multiplicity: hard concepts to convey in a very fast-paced environment. When one attempts to translate subtly and complicity into a fast-paced, visually oriented environment obsessed with immediate gratification, you lose the emotional authenticity key to soap operas.

Applicable directly to soaps is the increasing role the network plays in creative decisions and the declining resources soaps have to manage that feedback. Let's be clear. Networks have always played some role, and soaps have always made some bad decisions. It's not that there are more bad decisions now, but more people with more power over long-term story have the opportunity to make more decisions. Resources that soaps have long used to facilitate these decisions -- multiple rehearsals, extensive writing staffs trained as writers, spontaneity born out of a show running short -- have been eliminated. Soaps have turned into inflexible organizations where one wrong turn leads to a permanent break rather than a temporary re-routing. Together, in today's current soap climate, this inflexibility and the overall change in business strategies affect what stories are told, who gets to tell them, and how.

From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: An Interview with Rhianon Bury (Part Two)

You closed A Cyberspace of Their Own with a call for more research which dealt with issues of race and class as they relate to fan practices. While some such work has been done, this still remains largely unexplored territory. Why do you think it has been so hard to deal with race in fandom as compared to issues of gender and sexuality?

I think it's because fandom is predominately white as are the scholars that study it. This is not to say that people of colour are not fans! But I suspect that they are a minority in many of the participatory cultures that are being studied. Moreover, many do not mark themselves out in terms of their racial identity and therefore are assumed to be white by the other participants.

In contrast, there is a solid body of literature dealing with race and ethnicity in media and film as well as in cyberspace and digital culture. In general, critical discussions of race are started by scholars of colour who have investments in a politics of social transformation much the way that critical discussions of gender were started by feminists (most of whom are women). I chose to work with female X-Files fans, in part, to underscore both their experiences of marginalization in public cyberspace and their strategies of resistance. The subtitle of my book is an intentional reference to Virginia Woolf's famous essay, "A Room of One's Own."

Your book discussed the function of humor in the female-centered fandoms around The X-Files and Due South. There is still relatively little writing on fan humor as compared to the more romantic, erotic, and melodramatic aspects of fan production. Why? What has Fan Studies missed by not focusing more on fan humor?

I haven't a clue why so little is written about humor. Having a background in sociolinguistics, I have a particular interest in language practices and in how things get said, not just in what gets said. Humor plays such an important role in the community making process, cutting across fan interactions and practices, including romantic and erotic talk. As I argued in Cyberspaces, humor is bound up with class, gender and by extension race and ethnicity and nationality. I looked specifically at the repartee, the plays on words and witty exchanges by white, middle-class educated "elite" fans. I'd be very interested to learn about the role of humor in other contexts.

Your discussion of Due South explored the ways that fans did or did not connect with its "Canadian" origins. We are seeing ever more international content develop American fan followings, increasingly based on its accessibility on the internet. Does this process of acquiring the content change how fans think about its national origins?

When I look back, I'm struck by how ahead of their time the American Due South fans were. Many of the MRKS members I worked with in 2000 had never seen the series when its first two seasons were originally broadcast on CBS (Due South was a Canadian-US coproduction at that time.) They either picked it up in syndication or heard about it from fans in other fandoms. There were no opportunities to even rent or buy commercial DVDs.

Due South with its American fan base was part of what Chris Barker calls reverse flow. In his 1999 book, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, he challenged the notion that the one-way flow of American programming to the rest of the world would lead to the homogenization of culture and the erasure of local and national identities. The more likely outcomes, he argued, were fragmentation and hybridization. You're certainly correct to suggest that online accessibility is providing more opportunities for Americans to become fans of series from other countries.

Whether this changes their sense of national identity (and there are differing notions of what constitutes being American) remains to be seen. I think that will depend on the type of content being viewed, the viewer's other identifications (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender) and the context of viewing. My sense is that the majority of non-US programming with large American fan followings is British--Dr Who and now Sherlock come to mind. The Anglo-American flow is hardly new although the ability to download episodes almost immediately after they are broadcast in the UK instead of waiting months for the series to be broadcast in North America does offer the opportunity for American fans to hang out in fan spaces dominated by British fans. Considering that most Americans and Canadians outside of Quebec are monolingual, their opportunities to consume a range of international media content and participate in discussions are rather limited.

In your more recent work on Six Feet Under, you have questioned some of the founding assumptions of fan studies. In particular, you have challenged a tendency to equate fan resistance with progressive politics. What do you find in your work on HBO discussion boards which led you towards a different understanding of fan politics?

I was a huge fan of Six Feet Under but only occasionally perused the HBO boards until I watched the fourth season episode, "That's my Dog." As some folks may recall, this episode focused almost exclusively on the psychological and physical violence inflicted on David Fisher by a young man whom David had stopped to help after his car broke down. I had strong but very mixed emotions: on one hand, I was horrified by what had happened to a character I was emotionally attached to; on the other, I felt manipulated by the writers.

So off I went to the HBO boards, where I discovered a number of posts containing vitriolic homophobic comments, blaming David for his victimization (a fantasy scene indicated his initial sexual attraction to the young man). I was shocked that such comments were made by fans of a show with a central gay character.

My later analysis of the posts for the episodes of Season 4 revealed a remarkable pattern of interaction around every storyline in which David expressed explicit gay desire (e.g., giving a blowjob to a plumber in the funeral home; having sex with Sarge, a man he and Keith had picked up and played with after a paintball tournament). First the man-on-man sex scenes were flagged as "excessive," with negative references made to Queer as Folk. These were followed by complaints that David's expression of desire was out of character or morally questionable, and finally by complaints that there was too much "gayness" on television in general.

Of course not all fans responded this way but even the well-meaning comments made in defense of David's actions served to erase his identity as a gay man. I described these fans as textual gamekeepers. Unlike the slash fiction writers who poach by queering the characters that have been written by the producers as straight, these fans "straightened out" the gay storylines. I bet there's a whole lot more textual gamekeeping going on in fandom that has yet to be uncovered.

While your earlier research seemed to focus on relations within the fan community and on interpretive and evaluative responses of fans to the series texts, this new research seems to focus much more on the technologies we deploy in accessing content. Will these strands ultimately come together? What relation exists between whether fans consume content on Hulu and the kinds of social and meaning-making practices that evolve around that content?

It's true that in my previous work I did not pay attention to modes of viewing or the accessing of content. Until recently, fan scholars just assumed that fans as committed viewers watched the original broadcast or a home recording shortly thereafter if they had to miss it. Even the technologies that enabled the creation of fan cyberspaces I studied were in the background. These new modes of consumption, production and interaction are unlikely to change the ways in which fans make meaning out of texts or the community-making process.

However, they certainly have the potential to change what it means to be a fan, how one becomes a fan, what one does as a fan and the kinds of relationships one has with other fans. These are the types of questions that I hope to begin to answer with the survey and interview data.

Let me close by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way I disseminate research on fandom. The norm in academia is to analyze our data behind closed doors and not report on it until we have a finished "product" in the form of a conference paper, a journal article, a book chapter, etc. With the use of blogging and microblogging technologies, I plan to informally report on findings as I work my way through the data in the coming months. I hope this will provide opportunities for dialogue with fans and fan scholars, and in turn provide feedback to inform my analysis.

Rhiannon Bury is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her research interests include communication technologies, identity and community, and media fan culture. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own, was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently collecting data for her Television 2.0 project. To take the survey, visit here. Check out her blog.

From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: An Interview with Rhianon Bury (Part One)

Several months ago, I was contacted by Rhianon Bury, an early contributor to the scholarly research on female online fan communities through her book, A Cyberspace of Their Own, asking me to help her publicize a survey she was conducting on how fans engaged with new delivery platforms for television content. Bury agreed to do an interview for my blog which deals with this new initiative and what it means in terms of her own methodological approaches (an expansion from primarily ethnographic to a more hybrid approach), as well as shifts in the field of fan studies and new media since 2005 when her book first appeared. Like many of us, Bury is finding it hard to separate out the study of media audiences, creative industries, and new media practices, at a time when some aspects of fan culture have become more central to the operations of convergence culture, while, as many recent scholars note, others remain marginalized and in some cases, continue to be fully hidden from outside attention.

You have recently launched an online survey designed to better understand the shift in the media consumption patterns of fans in response to the changing affordances of the new media environment. What kinds of shifts are you hoping to explore?

I am interested in learning more about shifts in both modes of viewing and fan practices afforded by time shifting, streaming, downloading and Web 2.0 technologies. Industry data has provided a starting point for my "Television 2.0" project. According to Nielsen, 38 percent of US households now have DVR/PVRs, up from 33 percent in 2009 and 24.4 percent in 2008 (TVbytheNumbers). In addition to its traditional Live data stream, Nielsen produces two additional streams: Live+SD (same day) and Live+7 (seven days). Although the latter are not significant in setting advertising rates, their effects are starting to be felt in network decision making. Writing in the New York Times, Bill Carter suggests that NBC's The Event was spared early cancellation on the strength of its Live+7 numbers. NBC subsequently ordered a full season, although it remains to be seen whether all will be broadcast given that the live/live+sd numbers continue to fall (Toni Fitzgerald).

A number of recent surveys by marketing research companies attempt to quantify the popularity of viewing of time shifted and online content. Say Media, for example, found that 56 million Americans are "off the grid viewers," 13 percent of whom can be classified as "opt outs" who have no longer watch live TV at all (GigaOM). This matches Strategy Analytics findings that 13 percent of Americans are planning to cancel their cable subscription in the next year. The large majority of "cord cutters" are under 40 and are college educated.

This type of industry data, however, cannot capture the complexity of viewer and fan engagement with multiple screens and platforms. I want to know how much television programming people are watching in front of the television screen, the computer screen and/or on a mobile device. I also want to learn more about what kinds of programming people watch (and rewatch) on which platform(s) and under what circumstances. Television programming is not a homogenous category and viewing is not a homogenous activity.

In terms of media fandom, anecdotally we know social media looms large. Web analytics software can quantify views, hits and clicks of primary and ancillary content on network sites, Hulu, and YouTube. The resulting data, however, tells us very little about the heterogeneity of fandom in terms of the range of practices that fans engage in (or not) and their varying levels of investments and involvement in participatory cultures.

Until now, you have been seen primarily as a qualitative researcher. What has motivated you to adopt a more quantitative approach to this project?

First of all, I am trying to fill what I see as a large gap in the study of fan and participatory cultures. It is of great concern to me that eighteen years after the publication of your very important work, Textual Poachers, no large-scale quantitative academic studies have been conducted. Without valid and reliable data, we cannot make generalizable claims about fan practices. We know fans watch television programming on a variety of platforms, go to cons, participate in online discussion forums, are members of online fan communities, read and write fiction, make vids, live tweet episodes, etc., but we have no idea how widespread these practices actually are among the fan population to use research terminology. Getting a snapshot of this population is not only interesting but critical to establishing a legitimate field of study, at least in the social sciences.

Moreover, unlike my previous research, my starting point is not a particular fandom but rather the individual viewer/fan. There is a tendency among fan scholars to study the fandoms of which they are a part. Methodologically, there's nothing wrong with this choice as long as one is sufficiently reflexive. Such an approach also foregrounds research questions on community and community making. I'm sure we all know people who really enjoy particular television shows but who don't actually do much more than watch the show, talk about it face-to-face, add it to their list of "likes" on Facebook and/or go to the broadcasting network website on occasion.

The Television 2.0 project is actually a mixed methods study. I will be doing not only a quantitative analysis of the data collected in the survey but a qualitative one as well. The second phase will consist of follow up interviews with interested survey respondents, starting (I hope) in early 2011. I still consider myself primarily a qualitative researcher because my interest in measurement is not an end in itself.

You published Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online in 2005 and it reflects research done much earlier than that. What do you see as the biggest changes in online fandom over that time?

It's hard to believe that almost fifteen years have passed since I started working with members of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs). In the preface to Cyberspaces, I recounted first discovering their websites using a lynx browser on Mozilla using a monochrome monitor. I can't even visualize that interface today!

Beyond the obvious technological changes, one of the biggest shifts has been in the gender composition of fan-based cyberspaces. Research on internet access and use shows that gender parity was reached around 2000 in North America. Would the DDEBs be set up as private female-only listservs today? I doubt it, not because listserv technology is obsolete (at least for this purpose), but because the Usenet group (alt.tv.x-files) where the founding members originally met likely would have had far more participation from women, thereby "diluting" the sexist attitudes of more vocal male members of that forum. In other words, the practices engaged in by the majority of members would have created different community standards or norms.

More significantly, online X-Files fandom would not have been concentrated in one space. A range of alternatives would have been available: discussion forums on Fox and Television Without Pity; LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, particularly for fan fiction writers and vidders; Second Life and Facebook. Fans who had felt personal affinities with others on the various forums they visited would have become personal Facebook friends. Earlier this year, I reconnected with some of my research participants from the DDEBs on Facebook, which has been fun. And just this week, I read the status update from one of the members of the original DDEB indicating that she has created a private Facebook group for the community.

A second major shift that I would like to mention is related to the production of television's secondary texts or paratexts. There was been a lot of "industry creep" into the areas that were once exclusively the domain of fans. Most networks host discussion boards and produce a range of ancillary content for their series websites, including quizzes, polls, games, as well as facebook pages and twitter feeds. The reasons for this move are obvious: fans are also consumers and media content producers want to foster fan loyalties to their brand. Combine easily accessible sites with the power of Google and YouTube, the latter which allows for far wider distribution of fan vids than in the past, and the result is a multiplicity of entry points into fandom.

Rhiannon Bury is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her research interests include communication technologies, identity and community, and media fan culture. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own, was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently collecting data for her Television 2.0 project. To take the survey, visit here. Check out her blog.

From Fear to Facebook: An Interview with Matt Levinson (Part Two)

This is the second part of an interview conducted by Erin Reilly, Research Director, Project New Media Literacies.
Now that you've established a one-to-one laptop initiative at Nueva, do you see a need to think ahead on integrating mobile devices into the system as well, especially with the lure of the iPad being promoted for schools?

There's always the need to think ahead, and of course with technology, it can be a challenge to keep pace. The iPad is cheaper and lighter than a laptop, it has a great screen, it's fun to use, and the number of apps is growing.  There is no video creation capability, it's hard to type on it (unless you have purchased the keyboard), you can't take photos with it, though you can view and manage your photos.  Will it gain traction as a stand alone device for schools?  I'd like to think so, but it may take some time.

Will students really use the iPad exclusively and primarily for the "academic enhancement" of the courses?  Probably not.  The iPad will double as a learning and social/entertainment tool. Schools need to go into these endeavors with both eyes open to the possibility that students will take the devices in directions not anticipated or even imagined, and that's what is exciting.

The iPad is a fantastic, alluring consumption device, and transforms navigation, reading, and viewing.  The key question is how to turn it into a content creation tool.  That will be the challenge for schools to face as they move to adoption of the iPad.

Can you share more about how the iLab at Nueva School works?  ...From how you established a relationship with Stanford University, to how you work with them on going, to how the iLab is used in students' learning.

The iLab opened its doors in 2007, the same year we launched the laptop program.  We have a superb iLab director who partners with teachers to create curriculum that embeds design thinking and incorporates engineering principles.  Our iLab director is an engineer, and she is working to develop a K-12 design thinking curriculum.  The exciting part about the iLab is the way teachers bring an interdisciplinary lens into their planning and approaches, and design thinking asks kids to step out of their comfort zones to go deeper into idea development.  The premise of the iLab is to be explicit about teaching creativity.  Beyond class projects, kids also have the opportunity to explore in the iLab during lunch recess with robotic arms, for example.  Each summer, we send teams of teachers to Stanford's Design Thinking Workshop, and that has helped with teacher development and curricular implementation. 

How do you encourage your teachers to push the boundaries?  Can you provide an example of an exemplary teacher? 

Nueva is about pushing boundaries for kids and for teachers.  We love it when teachers come up with new ways of looking at curriculum or have a new idea about how to implement technology.  One teacher in particular, a science teacher, has been a self-starter and leader with technology from the start of the laptop program.  This past year, she was a Google fellow.  She is always thinking about technology, and bubbles with ideas and implementation.  She is eager to figure out how to make iPads work in the classroom.  Her whole class is digital - lectures, labs, assignments - and she takes pride in the "green" aspect.  Her enthusiasm has spilled over to others and there is an organic approach to teacher development with technology.  Also, there is nothing better than to see a teacher beaming with being able to imagine possibility with kids and technology.  

In talking with other schools and teachers, we've heard that bringing in experts or other adult role models into the classroom are one of the hardest things to do.  Do you find this the case at Nueva?  And if not, can you share some insight to others on how to facilitate these connections?

One big lesson we've learned at Nueva is that you can't go it alone.  Reach out to experts in the field.  Don't be afraid to ask for help.  We try to foster an environment at Nueva where we are all learners.  We have speakers come and speak to parents, teachers, and kids and we hear similar messages. It sends a signal to kids that we are all trying to learn.  During the first year, we reached out to Common Sense Media, and to cyber safety experts like Steve DeWarns.  In the second year, we brought Alan November to work with our teachers, and to inspire our students.  The big takeaway is that we are comfortable knowing what we don't know and then we try to learn more.  Technology is endlessly fascinating, and there are always new iterations.  We want to keep learning along with the kids. 

I completely agree that "finding the balance between appropriate oversight and student's rights and needs for privacy is anything but easy".  In your chapter on Privacy and Little Brother, you talk about how Nueva School uses ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) technology to monitor what the student is doing on his / her laptop. How do you respond to those who might argue that this is a violation of student privacy? Another concern that could arise with use of ARD in schools is the removal of teachers having to discuss with students what they are doing on their laptops during class time.  How would you address this concern?

The key thing about ARD is that it cannot serve as a stand alone to manage student behavior in the classroom.  It's so critical to invest time in the classroom with kids to create the culture and build the relationship.  It's also so important to be transparent with kids about why ARD is being utilized by the school.  The ultimate goal is for kids to gain the ability to regulate their behaviors.  At times, it can be a challenge for kids, particularly in their first year of the laptop program, to control their use, and to keep the focus on using the laptop as a tool to enhance teaching and learning.  A big challenge for schools, and we've seen this with Lower Merion in Pennsylvania, is the issue of transparency and communication.  We have ARD as one tool to use, but the most effective tool is the relationship among student, teachers, and parents.

A graduate of Teachers' College, Columbia University, Matt Levinson is the assistant director and head of the middle school at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, California. Prior to moving into school administration, he taught middle and upper school history for fourteen years at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey. Matt Levinson is the author of From Fear to Facebook: One School's Journey, published by ISTE in August 2010. He writes and thinks about technology, parenting, and schools.

From Fear to Facebook: An Interview with Matt Levinson (Part One)

Today, I am cross posting an interview which Erin Reilly, the research director for the New Media Literacies Project, did for our blog.

From Fear to Facebook

by Erin Reilly

Matt Levinson recently released his book, From Fear to Facebook: One School's Journey.  I had a chance to interview Matt on his journey of moving from New Jersey to California in 2007 to start a 1-to-1 laptop program at the Nueva School. 

This book is a must-read for any school grappling with the questions of what it means to meaningfully support teaching and learning with technology.  Matt shares the promises and perils that he and the Nueva Community faced as they integrated a laptop program. It is an interesting, holistic road map that takes into account each stakeholders position whether it was the teachers to the parents to the students.

Let's begin with expectations... When you started the 1-to-1 laptop program at the Nueva School, what were your goals for the initiative and how did they play out?

I had just moved to Northern California from New Jersey in 2007 at the start of the laptop program, and approached the rollout with confidence that the community, which is made up of tech-savvy teachers and parents in Silicon Valley, would handle the transition smoothly.  Even though most families had home computers and were technologically sophisticated, and the teachers had lived with laptop carts for several years, none of us were prepared for the culture clash that occurred between kids and adults.  Parents and teachers felt overwhelmed by the laptops initially, and we all struggled to figure out how to map out acceptable boundaries, set limits, and also seize on opportunities to enhance teaching and learning with technology.  

From Fear to Facebook shares many of the challenges the Nueva Community overcame when implementing the one-to-one laptop program, but now that it is underway, what are new promises and challenges with the program?

We are now entering year 4 of the laptop program and progressing in our use of technology.  Teachers are more confident now and create curriculum with technology at the forefront of their thinking. The school culture has also been established with buy in from all stakeholders.  We are still taking steps to build a more powerful participatory culture with the use of blogs and wikis, discussion forums, and digital portfolios.  We are running programming and podcasting classes, and further integrating curriculum across multiple disciplines.  The challenge is how to leverage new opportunities with new tools - flip video cameras, iPads (a few teachers have the now and are beginning to think of ways to implement curriculum with iPads).  

Can you share with us an example of one of the most difficult obstacles Nueva has faced in this journey, how you overcame it and the unexpected positive outcomes that resulted?  How did you foster a participatory culture whereby dialogue between all stakeholders in the Nueva Community happened and all voices were heard?

The first two years of the program, we approached the laptop program from the outside looking in.  In year two, we learned the valuable lesson that we had to include the kids in our discussion and planning and develop a model from the inside out.  The kids resisted the boundaries of the acceptable use policy, but at the root of the issue was their feeling that rules were being imposed without their consideration and voice.  We had many community discussions with kids at lunch, with parents at parent coffees, and we held parent education evenings with our very talented Social and Emotional Learning teachers facilitating discussion with parents about how to create agreements in the home.  This turned the tide.  

Parents often break into two sides of connecting children to the world outside of the school walls. One side would like to have less restriction and provide students the freedom to explore while the other side would rather have more restrictions put in place.  In what ways do you and others at Nueva School navigate the school / home relationship and balance between parents of differing viewpoints?

This is a constant, ever evolving challenge and opportunity.  We try to give parents the ability to customize their homes with laptop restrictions, but we do not implement a one size fits all program.  Our Social and Emotional Learning Team is critical to this part of the laptop program.  They serve as a vital resource for parents, and incorporate digital citizenship into their curriculum.  They communicate constantly with parents about what they are doing in the classroom and how parents can follow up at home.  We tell parents that we want to know about their frustrations and challenges with laptops and we want to be a helpful resource for them.  The key thing is for parents to feel that the school is partnering with them on the perils and possibilities of parenting in the digital age.  There will always be different parenting styles, and we learn as much from parents as they learn from us, and it's critical to listen to parents on opposite sides of this type of issue.  It helps us to frame our approaches.   

There is a tension between participatory learning and how schools currently provide a "one size fits all" approach to instruction that can be standardized, measured and assessed.  There also is a certain notion of what the role of both teacher and student looks like which is very prominent in the United States Public Education System.  Knowing Nueva is a private progressive school, do you think the current public education school system can radically change?  What are some characteristics they could adopt from progressive schools to have schools like Nueva can become the norm rather than the exception?

I think there are so many exciting possibilities out there right now.  We can begin to break down the walls of schools with technology, deepen and personalize learning for students, differentiate instruction, and meet the needs of students of all abilities.  One of the virtues of a progressive school environment is that student-centered learning is valued and honored.  Laptop learning is perfect for this environment because it allows and fosters the role of student as engineer, designer, and architect of their own learning with guidance from a teacher.  We need to move to the idea of learning playlists and digital itineraries for students.  With tools like Google Apps for Education, schools can create a participatory culture within their school walls, and depending on comfort with security issues, can open up the school to communities around the worlds.  Also, with tools like Skype, learning world languages can look different and individualized learning can happen more and more.  We need to shift to one size fits each as the operating premise for schools, and that can be applied in every community.    

A graduate of Teachers' College, Columbia University, Matt Levinson is the assistant director and head of the middle school at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, California. Prior to moving into school administration, he taught middle and upper school history for fourteen years at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey. Matt Levinson is the author of From Fear to Facebook: One School's Journey, published by ISTE in August 2010.  He writes and thinks about technology, parenting, and schools. 

Doing Drag in Wal-Mart and Other Stories of Rural Queer Youth: An Interview with Mary L. Gray (Part Three)

You argue that queer identities are "achieved, not discovered." What do you see as the process by which youth outside the metropolitan areas "achieve" a sexual orientation?

I think that what makes queer youth identities organized outside metropolitan areas so different is that they must be negotiated in communities where everyone assumes a deep familiarity with each other. If anonymity, access to critical masses of queer folks, and unfettered exploration of queer-controlled counterpublics define urban queer identity formation (and I think they do for white, middle class queers in major cities), familiarity, an absence of visible queer presence, and circumscribed sharing of boundary publics shape the achievement of rural sexual orientations and gender identities. So, crafting and articulating a sense of queer self where one has, as a talk about in the book, never met a stranger is a vastly different project than what young people able to access a city's LGBT Center or youth program can do.

Rural youth and young adults definitely travel beyond their small towns to larger cities to recreate the sense of being in the majority (and just to find dates!) but their day-to-day lives gives them fewer tools on hand to build an identity that approximates what they see in popular media. And, at the end of the day, many of the youth I met were trying to achieve queer identities that looked like what they saw on television or in film.

The hard part was that rural places, if depicted at all, are not part of that queer achievement. Small towns and rural communities play out like evil characters (think Deliverance or Boys Don't Cry or Brokeback Mountain). So young people in Rural America have to enact their identities in ways that don't disparage their small towns so much so that they become inhospitable. In that regard, popular media has left them little they can use.

You challenge many preconceptions about how small town gay youth use the web to find a world beyond the paroachialism of their own communities in favor of a much more complex picture. What roles does digital media play in the kinds of struggles you account in your book?

I did start out my research assuming that youth simply used digital media to escape their dreariness of their lives. Isn't that what most of us assume?

What I found was that rural youth used digital media to interject their own voices and experiences into the mix. So I follow the case of one young trans-identifying person who used a website to chronicle his gender work. He shared this website with family and friends--both local and living elsewhere. Digital media were at once his tools for articulating his experience and for finding resources and support that weren't available to him locally. In short, they use digital media not to find a queer world elsewhere but to augment the world they queer through their presence and actions.

How does rural youth's "complicated, and often, compromised, access to computers and internet connections...hamper" their capacities to engage with online spaces that are meaningful to them?

I think what worried me most is that queer organizers will believe that the internet is the window through which we will see the lives of rural queer youth. In fact, the majority of youth I worked with did not have access to a personal computer in their home. Several communities still did not have household broadband service available in their area. Schools were the only institutions that had reliable net access but all them, without exception, had both monitoring software and filtering software installed so that students could not search for information with the word "gay" in it without receiving some sort of sanction. Most of the public libraries in these communities have recently started blocking the most common social networking sites.

All of these social barriers to access deepen what DiMaggio and Hargattai describe as digital inequality. It's no longer about whether the hardware is present or not (even though, in several cases, that digital divide still persists); if our social understandings of youth culture increasing involve young people's capacity to build out social spaces for themselves through networked connections, these rural young people will be left even further marginalized by the mainstream. To make my point concrete: the more queer-specific content, whether commercial or non-profit, tracks to an imagined consumer who's cruising with the speed of broadband and looking for hook ups through geo location applications that only exist for the city connoisseur, the further distanced rural queer youth will be from taking part in creating what "queer culture" means.

As you worked on the book, you were often pulled into these local controversies as an outside resource or consultant for local queer activists. How did this dual role complicate and/or enrich your research process? Has the book's publication changed your status as a public intellectual working on these issues?

This book came out of my desire to see what the internet did and could mean to rural queer youth. It's a very personal project in that I was an aged-out former queer youth activist from the sticks of the Central Valley and I wanted to know what would make life better for someone like me if I hadn't left my hometown.

Carrying my commitments to queer organizing into my fieldwork meant that there were some people who would not want to talk with me and would not let me in. So, for example, I did not spend anytime in schools or with many teachers uninvolved in LGBT organizing so I lost a sense of how they fully fit into the lives of the youth I did work with. But I know I gained quick access and found the number of teens I did because I had a backstory that looked something like their lives.

My commitment to seeing what my work could bring to their lives also gave me a focus beyond an academic conversation. It's allowed me to feel like this work can and will have a life of its own as it makes its way to queer rural organizing projects and media activists trying to think through how to reach those with socially compromised access to information. It has been so surreal to see other scholars pick up what I've learned from these rural queer youth and their communities. It's really a dream come true for me to be able to make a living bringing legitimacy to these questions and model the kind of scholarship that inspired me to go into this wacky line of work we call "the academy."

Mary L. Gray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people's understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work.

Doing Drag in Wal-Mart and Other Stories of Rural Queer Youth: An Interview with Mary L. Gray (Part Two)

You pose some critiques of the way national gay rights organizations are structured based on an assumption of large urban bases of supporters. How has this limited their ability to serve the needs of the kind of communities you discuss in your book?

The limits of current national organizing models really hit home for me as I watched rural LGBT Kentuckians attempt to battle an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment campaign. It was 2004 and the elections were heating up. Like so many other states that year, Kentucky not only had the Presidential candidates on the ballot, it also had this amendment to contend with. Every effort spent on fighting this amendment looked like the best of legislative politics--voter drives, campaign fundraisers, door-to-door campaigns to not only get out the vote but also educate voters about the incendiary amendment likely to hurt unmarried opposite-sex couples as much as it would ban same-sex couples from marrying.

But these strategies so central to how most non-profit organizations "do" social justice organizing don't have legs in rural communities. Voter drives in communities where the same wealthy, landowning families have controlled elected seats for generations; fundraisers in communities where unemployment rates hover around 40%; and door-to-door campaigns in communities where publicly debating or disagreeing with a neighbor threatens the "getting along" venire necessary to daily life are all strategies that work against queer organizing in rural communities.

What national gay rights organizations need to do is identify what needs and values they share with rural communities. And this cannot happen until national gay rights organizations identify the ways they have privileged building movements on not only an urban base of supporters but also an upper middle class to wealthy, overwhelmingly white base that prioritizes issues from that vantage point. Arguing for marriage equality because it will give partners equal access to their inheritance and healthcare benefits falls flat in communities where the median income is below the poverty line and communities do not have access to medical care let alone health insurance. Most urban-based gay rights organizations imagine that their key constituencies live in Chicago, Miami, or New York City. That limits how much they pay attention and therefore how much they can effectively address the needs of the youth living in the communities I discuss in the book.

You write, "Historically, an unspoken agreement operated in rural communities: queer difference was allowed to quietly exist, if not flourish, as long as it did not interfere with one's commitments to family and community." How has that "unspoken agreement" impacted the kinds of arguments which must be made as queers struggle to find acceptance and tolerance in small town communities?

I think this ethos of "live and let live, quietly" has, until now, defined what acceptance and tolerance look like for queers living in small towns because to do otherwise threatened the reliance on familiarity that I talk about in the book. But it might also define how any queer person, who lacks unconditional, uncompromised social privilege, has to live as well.

I would argue that we haven't examined the utility of this ethos in rural communities or communities at the margins of social privilege. There are few people who can afford to live unconditionally, without compromise and have the social power to set the terms of how they are to be treated. The ethos of letting queerness exist quietly serves a critical role in maintaining community solidarity while still creating room to queerly roam in places that often cannot count on the nation-state for any kind of social safety net but demand everyone's allegiance to each other, first and foremost.

To know someone, for decades, is to feel you can rely and call on them for help. But as our broader cultural expectations of what made for a "good gay life" began to incorporate the notion of being visibly out and acknowledged as a queer person--when we began to define queerness as an intrinsic part of our identities rather than something we can or should have the right to do--that created a fundamental tension between rural communities and queer communities and allies based in cities. Demanding respect for a queer-identifying person, noting, again, that this, in part, came out of academic trends in psychology and sociology, became fundamental to much of the social change and acceptance we see today.

I wouldn't argue that we should return to requiring that queer difference remain unspoken. However, that means that queers struggling for acceptance in small towns or in any communities that demand allegiance to other social identities (being part of a community of color, for example) must fight to maintain their status as locals while also making a case that the kind of difference they bring to their communities is an asset rather than a harbinger of all the bad that "outsiders/citydwellers" have wrought on their communities.

As I note in the book, rural-based organizers have the best outcomes when they use the salient notion of "family" to remind local communities that these queer kids in their midst are still valued local sons and daughters. Organizing fails whenever it smacks of outsiders from cities providing education and outreach to rural folks assumed to be just plain ignorant and hateful. It's much more complicated than blind hate. We've done very little, academically or politically, to see rural queerness in more complicated terms.

You argue that in small town America, the issue is rarely about visibility but often about familarity. Can you explain the difference? How does a small town politics based on familiarity allow us to form a critique of an urban politics based on visibility?

This is a tough one to answer. I think a small town politics based on familiarity allows us to critique single issue urban politics invested in solely queer visibility. If the only right I fight for is my right to be queerly me, I can't work in solidarity with anyone beyond the class of individuals who also consider the right to queer identity their primary goal.

Small town politics require coalitions and translation. For example, a small town high school might have 2-3 students interested in environmental justice; 2-3 students interested in racism and social justice; another 2-3 students interested in LGBT rights. Together, these students can form a working coalition that has to constantly explain to each other and potential members what these different movements share in common and why they should help each other. There will never be enough "critical mass" for any of these single issues to gain the attention and sway the hearts and minds of the majority of students at any one school but as a bloc, students invested in these issues as a set of concerns that speak to something bigger can not only survive but thrive and maintain the presence.

Gay and lesbian organizers might look at the queer students in that social club and say "but where's your gay-straight alliance?" Small town politics that use the familiar of longstanding friendships and relationships to build their strength have something to teach us about the place and value of visibility vs. the place and value of transforming what seems like someone else's concern into something akin to my own issues.

I am fascinated by your concept of "boundary publics." In what ways does this push us not only beyond Habermas but also beyond the critiques of Habermas posed by Frazier and Warner?

Thank you! The notion of "boundary publics" is meant to do two things: it forces us to consider how critiques of Habermas' Public Sphere, Fraser and Warner's notion of counterpublics in particular, implicitly reinforce a reliance on material wealth to imagine public dialogue. The other goal I had in mind was to draw on the analytic power of "boundary objects"--a concept developed by Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and extraordinary thinker--to get at how enmeshed "online" and "offline" experiences are for the youth I worked with.

On the first point: if Habermas hoped to theorize the ideal possibilities of deliberative democracy and Fraser and Warner attempted to account for who was left out of those deliberations and how they responded to those exclusions, I wanted to offer a conceptual rubric for examining the metrocentric underpinnings of how we have imagined the Public Sphere and responses to it and consider what people with little access to public space and place do to stand their ground and eek out social recognition.

My hunch was that media, a range of media not just the emergent kind, are a part of the contemporary construction of our sense of social space. Rural areas and small towns have such limited access to capital--privately organized or publically mobilized--that they underscore the kinds of resources necessary to set public discourse in motion. In fact, rural areas and small towns are arguably left out of national debates (or spoken about rather than spoken with) because they have such a tentative hold on anything that resembles a robust Public Sphere or counterpublic as imagined by the theorists you note above.

The sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism has traditionally paid keen attention to how people navigate their social worlds. The late Susan Leigh Star was one of the first to consider how different groups might approach a specific set of tools and lay claim to them in ways that made those tools or objects brokers or translators among social worlds.

Media, for me, are the perfect example of this process. The youth I worked with used media to translate and therefore transform the different social worlds they inhabited. They did not have the option to create a stand-alone counterpublic of their own as they had neither the capital to start them nor, as minors, the social standing to legally maintain them. But youth could experience media as a space that stretched the boundaries of their local queer scene. As I discuss in the book, they could do drag in the aisles of Wal-Mart and post the photos of their experiences online to sew together their different social worlds. So, my hope is that the model of "boundary publics" helps media scholars attend to the ways individuals' ideas about media, their everyday experiences of media, and the broader social structures and institutions that both extend and constrain media's possibilities intersect.

You describe the ways that a group of queer high school students engaged with Wal-Mart to illustrate the fragility and instability of these boundary publics. Can you walk us through that case study and what you learned from it?

In the course of my research (2 years with 14-24-year olds in rural parts of Kentucky, TN, West Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois) I came across a group of young people who regularly went to a Super Wal-Mart in their region and catwalked up and down the aisles of the store either in drag or putting on clothes and make-up at the store to build a drag persona on the fly. I was utterly shocked that they did this yet they found it so mundane and were surprised that I was surprised. After all, where else could they go after 9pm to hang out together and have fun with friends from different counties?

They were also friends with young people who worked at the store so it increased their sense of belonging and safe access. And, as they told me, this was "their Wal-Mart" their backyard, really, so they felt it was a place they knew and were known locally.

At the same time, they did not and could not completely control this space. It was a "borderland," as queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa might say, in that the Wal-Mart was a place beyond binaries--most everyone in the area circulated through that store as it was one of the only resources for basic commodities in a 50-mile radius. Their access to the store and any tolerance of their queer presence was tentative at best, certainly impermanent.

But it was this fragility and instability--they could be asked to leave or chased out by antagonists any moment--that, paradoxically, set the terms for them to occupy the Wal-Mart in the first place. As long as they tacitly agreed to share the space rather than own it as queer-only turf and as long as they agreed to have their fun but, ultimately, leave the space when their antics pushed others to the limits of their patience, these rural queer youth could hold regularly court. If they had tried to make this space exclusively and permanently theirs, they would have certainly been barred from the store altogether.

These kinds of compromises and brokering of resources define their rural lives. Unlike their urban or suburban peers, they cannot muster the means to create a stand-alone space of their own but through their willingness to accept the delicate and ephemeral nature of their time in Wal-Mart they can be queens for a day and come back to do it again when the timing is right.

Mary L. Gray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people's understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work.

Doing Drag in Wal-Mart and Other Stories of Rural Queer Youth: An Interview with Mary L. Gray (Part One)

Mary L. Gray's Out in The Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America is an extraordinary book -- accessible, engaging and engaged, combining vivid storytelling and sophisticated theory-building. Gray captures the powerful stories of young people of varied sexuality as they construct and defend their identities in parts of the country which have been overlooked by most previous scholars focusing on queer culture and politics. They took Gray into their lives and she in turn shares with us what their world looks and feels like in ways which will challenge many of our preconceptions about what it means to be gay-les-bi-trans in America. You will learn here about the fragile publics that get constructed by these youth when they gather in Christian bookstores, church basements, even the aisles of Wal-Mart and seek to find common cause with each other. As she does so, she avoids the temptation which ensnares so many academics to score cheap yucks at the expense of the Red States and "flyover country." Instead, Gray tries to help us to understand what is happening in rural America, why this region has become culturally enbattled as it becomes economically and demographically at risk, and why some of these queer youth will continue to live there even given the contradictions shaping their own experiences. This is what good cultural analysis should look like. This book should be read by anyone who is shaping the lives of American young people because it tells the stories we don't hear about the people we often don't see or think about. Gray makes the case that many of our current theories about sexual politics have a deep urban bias, which in turn impacts the policies and tactics we use to address these concerns. What does it mean to push for visibility in a world where, as one young man explains, everyone in his community already knew he was gay well before he had a language to describe what that meant to him?

Gray has much to say in the book about media -- about the ways these young people form their sense of what it means to be queer through media constructions, about how they struggle to find narratives which they can use to reconcile their loyalties to and their differences from their local communities. She pushes us beyond the cliche of rural queer youth seeking escape or refuge on line to examine what they are doing with digital media that allows them to survive where they are.

What follows is a three part interview with Gray which will challenge many of your preconceptions. As they say in The Matrix, what happens next is up to you.

Your opening chapter can be seen as a critique of what you call "metronormativity" within queer studies discourse. Why do you think queer scholars and activists have been so preoccupied with the urban experience? What do you help to learn by digging deeper into the experience of queers living in small towns and rural areas?

I would argue that queer scholars' and activists' preoccupation with urban scenes is two parts serendipity and one part willful ignorance.

First the serendipity: Around the late 1980s, queer scholarship gained traction and visibility in universities through its historical and literary studies of urban-based gay and lesbian networks. This scholarship, inspired by feminist scholars seeking a similar recognition for the depth and richness of women's lives, highlighted the lives of queerly-identifying people in cities. In part the focus on urban lives was because the scholars doing this work were queer-identifying people living in cities! Describing the historical urban migrations of gay and lesbian-identifying people post World War II or discovering/recovering the queer subtext that shaped the Harlem Renaissance put queer studies on the map as a viable body of knowledge contributing to broader disciplinary conversations worth attention. No one really noticed that history, literary studies, and other humanities-based scholarship seemed fixated on urban subjects. Queer scholars probably didn't notice that they were following suit.

At the same time, disciplines like Anthropology and Sociology, and particularly Psychology, played key roles in recognizing and validating the social justice and civil rights efforts of gays and lesbians fighting for the decriminalization of homosexuality and, later, protections for gay and lesbian-identifying people. When the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the 1973 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) list of mental disorders, it literally redefined homosexuality. Emboldened by politically progressive civil rights movements of that era and the previous decade, psychology and psychiatry no longer sought cures for homosexuality. Instead, those disciplines looked for fundamental differences that could explain the origins of homosexuality. That led to a spate (what social psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams has called a "cottage industry") of stage theories to map the coming out process.

Here's where the willful ignorance comes in. Most of the studies we have of queer life reinforce the belief that individuals start out different and find others who share their sense of difference and move on to create a queer life together out of the "family we choose." To be sure, pioneering scholarship in queer studies had good reason to examine urban centers, particularly as gay and lesbian liberation movements gathered momentum and political clout as early as the mid 60s to form vibrant communities and chosen families to replace the biological families they left behind to come out as queer.

These movements gained steam by drawing on the resources and alliances available to them in cities. For example, Harvey Milk, a San Francisco City Supervisor and one of the first widely known, gay-identifying men to enter politics, relied on his connections to local unions, businesses, and other burgeoning civil rights campaigns, to win his seat on the Board of Supervisors and take a leading role in coordinating a countermovement to the now infamous Proposition 6 (or Briggs Initiative), a measure that proposed banning gay and lesbian people and their advocates from working in California's public schools. Local and statewide legislative action on behalf of gay and lesbian-identifying people has, historically, come out of the confluence of the material, political, and physical presence of gay and lesbian people that can only amass in a city.

What queer scholars and activists did not do and are only now beginning to do is reexamined what life might have been like or could be like for someone who doesn't live in a place that fosters or values standing out as queerly different. We have never considered how our origin stories about queer life implicitly privilege the visibility of cities and the visibility of queer individuals in those landscapes. Until now. I think the main reason we now ask the question "What is life like for those living beyond the city limits?" is because it is now imaginable that someone can (and many do) live a queer life in non-metro areas.

By digging more substantively into the lives of queers living in small towns and rural areas, I hope to accomplish two things: 1) I hope that my work allows us to examine how lives without the material and cultural benefits that many city dwellers and upwardly mobile folks take for granted can still be rewarding, beautiful, and models of a "good queer life" and 2) I hope that my work helps queer activists in particular see the limits of assuming we need (only) the specific resources of cities to expand queer rights. Until we understand why our political strategies work well in NYC but not in rural Maine, for example, we will be unable to advance the causes or needs of anyone living outside a metropole.

What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions we have about the experience of growing up queer in Rural America?

Our biggest misconception is that growing up queer in Rural America is, by definition, awful. Our second biggest misconception is that it must be uniformly better for queer youth living in cities. And the third misconception: that the Internet must make it better for all these kids.

I would argue that growing up queer anywhere in the United States presents challenges. Nothing is more punishing and potentially soul crushing to queer youth than the experience of navigating the institutionalized heteronormativity that defines the primary and secondary education experience. Simply put, our nation's schools are in the business of producing young men and young women. We are still (and likely will be for some time) brought up to believe that what defines men and women are 1) the differences that distinguish them and 2) the sexual attractions that bring them magnetically together. Any young person that troubles the clarity of these core beliefs--suggests that masculinity and femininity aren't so easily or naturally separated or that sexual attractions might not be so clear cut--threatens an entire social system built around these 2 suppositions.

Now, the assumption is that Rural America is more invested in these gender and sexual norms than its city cousins and that is what makes them more hostile to queer difference. While I think there are different investments in these norms in rural communities, I wouldn't argue that their investments in norms are more heartfelt. The issue for rural areas and small towns is that they have been ravished over the past century as sources of raw materials and expendable extraction. They rely on each other and their deep familiarity with locals to keep their communities alive and afloat.

When rural young people identify themselves as queer, they not only mark themselves as different, they link themselves with identities that are unequivocally associated with city life. They also upend and potentially undo the most important identity they have in their communities: a familiar son or daughter, a local from that town. When Rural America seems to reject queer folks, whether with its voting record or in sound bites from its townspeople, we are witnessing a much deeper tussle over who rural community members feel they can trust and who they feel they can turn to in times of trouble (which, in this economic crisis, they feel everyday).

And this is why the Internet, and emerging media more broadly, can make a difference to rural queer young folks but it cannot change their overall experience of oppression. For the youth I worked with, the Internet did 3 things: 1) it helped rural queer young people tell their own stories so that there was something other than bleakness to be said about rural queer life; 2) it allowed young people to feel connected to broader communities of LGBT-identifying people that could not physically, demographically be present in these young people's daily lives; and 3) it allowed young people to plant a queer flag locally that said "I'm here" and strengthen existing networks of queer-identifying youth in the region. What the Internet could not do is address the underlying poverty that made even Internet access hard to come by and it could not make advocacy around difference more palatable to communities defined by and organized around (and deeply invested in) sameness and familiarity.

Mary L. Gray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people's understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work.

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

Throughout, you suggest that the DJ is a particularly contested figure in contemporary music culture. Why? How does the DJ's performance straddle some of the categories by which we've historically organized discussions of music-making?

I chose to interview DJs for this book because they were among the first people to cope with the destabilizing influence of configurability on our understanding of culture and society. They can't help but break the rules, and they do it with such style!

Our understanding of music within the modern framework is characterized by stark black-and-white dichotomies, none of which existed recognizeably before a few centuries ago. Artist and audience are treated as separate classes of individual, architecturally divided by stage, pit, proscenium, and so forth. Performance and composition are understood to be entirely different roles in music production, with the intellectual, "white collar" labor of composition preceding and trumping the more physical, "blue collar" labor of performance. The difference between original and copy is key to our judgment of artistic merit, market viability and property rights. From a formalistic standpoint, figure and ground are fundamental to both musical meaning and copyright enforcement--the melody is generally far more highly prized than the mere "arrangement" that supports it. And the distinction between materials and tools is fundamental to our understanding of music as a commercial, industrial process--like any other product, music is understood to be mined, refined, packaged and sold.

Clearly, DJ music--in its many forms--challenges each of these dichotomies. The DJ is located firmly in the grey area between artist and audience. The acts of sampling, cutting, scratching and remixing can't be easily categorized as performance or composition, at least not by the old definitions. While technically every sample is a copy of the work it was taken from, the resulting work couldn't exist without original creative input from the DJ. The foreground of a sampled song may become the background of the remix, and vice-versa. And if we inspect a DJ's laptop, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to say on the face of it which sound files and applications are materials, which are tools, and which are finished products.

The interesting thing is that, unlike the rest of configurable culture, DJs have already dealt with most of these inconsistencies, and developed ethical and aesthetic systems that take them into account. They haven't thrown out the modern framework entirely, but neither have they given up on doing stuff that violates its basic principles. Their solutions to these problems, which range from elegant to kludgey to paradoxical, give us an interesting glimpse into how our society at large might solve the larger metaphorical and definitional problems it faces from configurability.

The DJ is also an interesting figure because it's used, both linguistically and taxonomically, as kind of a negative category. Over and over, my interviewees would tell me: "oh, that's not composition, it's just DJing," "that isn't performance, it's DJing," "he's more than a fan, he's a DJ," and "he's not a musician, he's a DJ." And yet these same interviewees would often self-apply the term, using a nom-du-laptop like DJ Drama, DJ Food, DJ Axel, and so forth. In other words, they were self-identifying as "other than."

Similarly, my interviewees often used a strawman they referred to as "some kid in his bedroom" (or a variation on that theme) to discuss a hypothetical music maker that didn't rise to a requisite level of musicianship, artistry, or any given stratum of legitimacy. This was especially true of the music industry execs I spoke to, but also quite common among DJs themselves. It's almost as though they needed the strawman to acknowledge that their methodologies are inherently suspect, thereby validating themselves in contrast to the proverbial "kid." And yet, these same interviewees would often extol the virtues of "bedroom producing." I challenge you to find a published interview with Danger Mouse (of Grey Album and Gnarls Barkley fame) in which he doesn't use the word "bedroom" at least once.

To me, this strange admixture of pride and deprecation, otherness and selfness, is astoundingly reminiscent of the "double-consciousness" that W.E.B. DuBois described as the cornerstone of the African American experience--and, in fact, I've borrowed and mashed the term up in my book. To me, configurable culture is marked by "DJ consciousness," a state in which we are all now required to see (and hear) ourselves simultaneously from within and without, as both subject and object. This has its benefits and drawbacks; gone is the privilege of pure subjectivity that once characterized the American (white) middle class experience. But what we are gaining in exchange is a broader set of communicative tools, a more modular creative economy, and, ultimately, a way out of the confining, atomistic vision of the individual that characterized modernity.

You note that the remix practices associated with music and technology are heavily coded as male. What would we learn if we examined them alongside characteristically female forms of remix, such as fanvids?

That's a very interesting question. In our society, both musical production and computer hacking are traditionally coded as male, so configurable music comes to the table with a double-helping of sexist privilege. And, though I tried to develop a balanced methodology, nearly all of the DJs I was able to interview were men (although Mysterious D, one of the two women I spoke to, pulled far more than her weight in terms of pithy insight!).

In my book, I take this enduring disjunction as a sign that, although configurable culture may be changing our social expectations and parameters, it doesn't wipe the slate clean. We will lurch into our collective future with many of our old biases and stereotypes intact, and maybe even pick up some others along the way (for instance, we have an ugly new stereotype in the form of the "booth bitch," the woman who tags along and interferes with her DJ boyfriend at the club).

Yet, as you point out, many newer forms of digital fan culture and participatory culture are either coded female (e.g. slash, fanfic, fanvids) or are more balanced (e.g. AMVs, fansubbing, wikis). So there's nothing inherently male-coded or sexist about configurability. If anything, I think that the challenges configurable culture poses to our traditional understanding of what's known as the "modern individual" will undermine the male/female gender identity dichotomy much as it has opened grey areas between artist and audience, production and consumption, and so forth. If the mechanism by which we construct and perform our identity is becoming more multifaceted, plastic and permutable than it was in the past, it seems likely that our identities themselves will soon follow suit.

As Mysterious D told me, this blending of identity is, for her, one of the most important facets of mash-up culture. She sees her global mash-up dance club, Bootie, as one of the few places where people "that would never hang out together" can "have something in common." And this covers the entire spectrum of party people: "gay, straight, alternative, mainstream, you know, the whole everything."

I'm currently fielding a follow-up to the 2006 survey on configurable culture that provided some of the data in my book. When the results are in, my coauthors and I will definitely publish some findings surrounding gender, identity and emerging technologies. Among other things, we'll test Mysterious D's "whole everything" proposition against actual data trends. In the meantime, researchers like Mimi Ito, Nancy Baym, Eszter Hargittai and Steven Shafer have done some of the best existing work in this area, and I encourage any interested readers to seek them out.

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.