February 20, 2012

Inventing the Digital Medium: An Interview with Janet Murray (Part One)

February 20, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

I first met Janet Murray when I arrived at MIT almost 25 years ago. At the time, she was working on her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, while I was working on Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Murray, along with the members of the Narrative Intelligence Reading Group, was an early guide for me to the emerging realm of digital culture and helped to shape my thinking in ways that I will never be able to fully acknowledge. A few years later, Murray and I worked together, along with Ben Singer and Ellen Draper, to create The Virtual Screening Room, the prototype for a fully interactive digital textbook for studying film analysis. In many ways, what we constructed together using Hypercard was more advanced than anything we've seen so far coming out of the realm of e-books, with hundreds of clips on command from almost as many movies to illustrate core concepts in film editing.

Shortly afterwords, she left MIT for Georgia Tech, while with William Uricchio, I took over the leadership of our newly created Comparative Media Studies Program. We've remained in touch through the years, with Murray always proving to be a wonderful thinking partner, sometimes affirming, sometimes challenging my own thinking, and always overseeing cutting edge projects which stretched the affordances of digital media in the service of expanding human expression or more fully realizing its pedagogical potential. We've both found ourselves under attack for being "narratologists" in the famous "Ludologist" debates, and sharpened our own thinking about games as a medium in the process. I was delighted (well, for many reasons) when the British magazine, Prospect, identified both of us as among the top thinkers for the digital future.

Murray recently released her long-awaited new book, Inventing the Medium: Principals of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. On one level, the book is a textbook designed to help designers in training develop a fuller, more robust understanding of digital media, one which builds productively on principles she first outlined in Hamlet on the Holodeck, but which also reflects on the past decade plus of developments as many once cutting edge practices have now become normalized and routinized within digital media. This book captures some of the thinking she did as the chair of her program at Georgia Tech, which remains one of the most forward thinking about new media platforms and practices.

On another level, the book is a theory of media -- especially of media change -- with a strong emphasis on the intersections between technology and culture. I was delightful to see how much more deeply Murray had read and thought about media theory since the first book, and in the process, she is pushing all of us to think more deeply about what it might mean to consider the digital as its own medium rather than as a delivery system for multiple media or what it might mean to think about the local choices made in digital design as contributing to a larger evolution of that medium. Murray's writing has shifted in a more technical direction than her first book, which was very much an argument for why humanists should engage with new media production and critique, but she remains very much a humanist at heart, who sees digital media as making vital contributions to our contemporary culture. Inventing the Medium is an epic accomplishment, one which we will all be mining for years to come.

In this interview, Murray reflects about the larger conceptual framing of the book, what it has to say about the nature of media change and the role of design in constructing contemporary culture. Her thoughtful and engaging responses to my questions should provoke further reflections about the state of the art in digital design.

Your earlier book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, has been described as an experiment in speculative poetics, in that you were reading early signs of what kind of affordances digital media would offer for human expression. Inventing the Medium now has several decades of experiments and innovations to draw on. How did this change the way you approached this project?

When I sat down to write Hamlet on the Holodeck (HoH) I challenged myself to prove what I believed from the day my students at MIT showed me Eliza and Zork - that this was the beginning of a new medium of expression that could be as rich as print or film. To do that, I had to step back and say what were the equivalents of the material affordances that made film a new medium and not just a way of recording plays or acting out novels. So I came up with the formulations in Chapter 3 of HoH which is probably the most widely read part of that book - that the equivalent of cutting the film and changing the focus of the lens, etc. for cinema was the procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial affordances of the computer as a medium of representation.

At that point my interest was just in talking about these 4 properties as affordances for storytelling, but it immediately became clear to me in my work as an interaction designer, leading educational computing and (what would now be called) "digital humanities" projects that talking about these affordances and the aesthetics of interactivity and immersion that come out of them was a great way of focusing design teams and conceptualizing key design choices.

So the new book picks up that focus on the design process itself, and it looks beyond narrative to see the design of any digital artifact - any device, web page, app, archive, based on electronic bits and running code - as part of a common enterprise that I call "Inventing the Medium."

So the new book grows out of the previous one, but it also reflects the very different experience I've had since moving to Georgia Tech in 1999 where I served as Director of Graduate Studies (2000-2010) and where I established and continue to teach courses in interaction design, game design as a cultural practice,,and interactive television for students go on to work for all the major players in digital media from Apple and Ideo to Disney Imagineering, Electronic Arts, and Zinga, to Turner Broadcasting, Showtime, DirectTV, and AOL to Google, Amazon, and IBM and so on. Working in this community of diverse creative abilities, brought me much closer to the concrete design challenges of commercial world than my work at MIT. And my contact with all those companies, as well as my work with the American Film Institute as a Mentor and Trustee throughout the heady changes of the 2000s gave me a first-hand look at how productive change can be nurtured or thwarted within a community of practice. . .

So the short answer to your question is, my core ideas from 1997 have proven quite useful despite the profound disruptions and exhilarating inventions of the past 15 years because my experience at MIT from the 1980s through 1990s anticipated a lot of the challenges that hit the wider society later. And the principles I'm always trying to teach my students and that I did my best to put down in Inventing the Medium (ITM) should last over the next several decades of change, because they are not about how to design for any particular platform, but about how to approach the digital design process itself so that decisions you make today will align with the trends of lasting innovation and solutions that you arrive at in the context of today's gizmos can teach you something and inform choices that you will make as a designer in the unknown future environment.

You describe this book as documenting "the collective cultural task of inventing the underlying medium." In what sense is this a cultural as well as a technological project? To what degree do you think designers are aware of their impact on the future of a medium as opposed to the pragmatic issues of designing an App?

In my own teaching I encourage designers to have a kind of double consciousness, sort of short-term and long-term. The short-term consciousness involves serving the immediate users - and the more specifically we can think about them the better - and honoring the constraints of the immediate task, which can mean using a specific platform or limiting functionality in some way. But another part of their mind has to be fixed on the horizon, on the immediate work as part of a larger cultural task, that draws on media conventions from the past that have made for coherent communication, and that creates a foundation of conventions that will make for ever greater coherence going forward.

I have identified design in this book as a cultural project but I think there can be a whole bookshelf or Kindle folder full of books elaborating on that idea, and taking other aspects of our understanding of human culture as starting points for understanding digital design. For me, the key cultural task is the creation of media conventions - the equivalent of the headline, the byline, the chapter division, the cinematic establishing shot or 180 degree rule - the organizing conventions that allow us to build greater complexity and expressivity into the rituals by which we share our understanding of the world and our empathy for one another.

The cultural task I have in mind is meaning-making. I think this is the same task that babies undertake and early humans must have undertaken in clapping hands in imitation of one another, in pointing to something to direct attention to it, in intentionally clapping hands in synchrony with another person. These are the the radical cultural primitives, and language, drawing, writing, print, photography, and now computation are all ways of expanding our ability to clap, to point, to think together and synchronize our minds and our behaviors.

You draw on some of the same core concepts here as in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Which ones have had to be rethought the most to reflect the actual changes which have taken place?

Well if I were writing HoH again I would have to make changes, and I intend to do something like that for my next book - sort of a Return to the Holodeck (!) But Inventing the Medium is really a matter of taking the same ideas deeper, and so I see it as continuous with HoH.. The main change is that just as I had to think deeply about the affordances of the medium for HoH in order to think about interactive storytelling as a special case of digital affordances, for ITM which focuses on digital affordances as the basis of a design process, I had to think much more deeply about what a medium is. In HoH I took "medium" for granted. For ITM I had to think about whether what I was claiming about a medium was true for other media. I actually had another 50,000 words about this that I had to cut out and condense into parts of the Introduction, Chapter 1, and the last chapter on the Game Model, because it slowed down the main argument about design too much to go into it. But I am writing more about that in other places. I gave a talk about it for the MECCSA in the UK and I'm going to be writing that up for an article in Convergence.

I have two main insights about what a medium is that I can state briefly here. One is that any medium is composed of three parts: Inscription, transmission, and representation. (I define all this in the book and summarize it in the Glossary which is also reproduced on my blog ) . The other is that the most productive paradigm for designers in thinking about a medium, to my mind, is the paradigm of focused attention.

And actually this paradigm, come to think of it, came indirectly from one of the most dramatic reactions to HoH, which was the hostility (which you received as well) from the ludologists who were trying to set off a place for Game Studies separate from what they thought of as the "hegemony" of "narratology." I found it very useful to my thinking that they foregrounded games as its own communicative and representational genre. This led me to think about the place of games in human culture, and I realized in reading Michael Tomasello and Merlyn Donald, neither of whom talk about games explicitly, that the experience of focused attention and "theory of mind" that the cognitive folks think of as distinguishing us from our primate cousins, is really the pleasure we find in synchronizing our behavior with one another - which is the essence of games.

For me it was a particularly illuminating moment when I read in Merlyn Donald's work the statement of how much human culture could accomplish without first inventing language. This was amazing to me as a hyperverbal person of course. But then it was illuminating to my thinking about what a medium is. And it led me to think of focused attention as the key to the design of a new medium.

Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized designer and media theorist, and Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech where she also directs the Experimental Television Laboratory. She holds a PhD in English from Harvard University and was a pioneer of digital humanities applications at MIT in the 1980s and 1990s, moving to Georgia Tech in 1999, and serving as Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media from 2000-2010 during which time she led the redesign of the MS curriculum and the founding of one of the first PhDs in the field. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998), which has been translated into 5 languages, and is widely used as a roadmap to emerging broadband art, information, and entertainment environments, and Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011). At Georgia Tech, her interactive design projects include a digital edition of the Warner Brothers classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH and in collaboration with the American Film Institute; the Interactive Toolkit for Engineering LearningProject, funded by NSF; and a series of prototypes for the convergence of television and computation, created in collaboration with PBS, ABC , MTV, Turner, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, and other networks and media companies. Murray is an emerita Trustee of the AFI and a current board member of the George Foster Peabody Award. In December 2010 Murray was named one of the "Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future" by Prospect Magazine.

February 16, 2012

Teaching Harry Potter: An Interview with Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr-Stephenson (Part Three)

February 16, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

Becky, you looked at Harry Potter fan culture as part of your involvement in the Digital Youth Project. What insights did you gain there about fandom as a site of informal learning and how did they feed into this current project about Harry Potter in schools?

The research I did with Potter fans for the Digital Youth Project focused on understanding interest-driven participation and was primarily concerned with media makers--podcasters, fan fiction writers, artists, and so on. Key to the way we on the Digital Youth Project understood interest-driven participation was an element of independence from school curricula or conventional status hierarchies; the practices we examined were things that young people seemed to pick up on their own rather than embarking on them as part of a class project or because of shared interests with friends from school or their neighborhoods. (Of course, we found that interests rarely develop completely independently. There is usually a person/persons or shared experience that kick-starts interest-driven participation.)

Working with fans was an amazing experience and extremely helpful for understanding learning in "informal" sites. I put "informal" in quotes here because one of the most interesting things I found working with fans was just how much organization, dedication, and expertise go into fans' practices. The rules and hierarchies of fandom are different from those that dominate school or the paid workforce--in general, more inclusive, less concerned with traditional markers of status (like age), and a bit more flexible--but I they certainly have a structure and logic to them. Some of the teens I interviewed in my research spent as much time producing podcasts, maintaining websites, or writing as they would if it were a full-time job. Others balanced Potter activities with others at school, such as working on the yearbook or school newspaper, mixing and matching the practices and skills involved in each activity to create their own style of production.

My fandom research fed into Teaching Harry Potter in a number of ways. Most importantly, it's how Cathy and I met and became colleagues and friends! (We just happened to sit next to each other at the closing feast at E7--a Potter camp for families we describe in the book--and, as they say, the rest is history.) Beyond that, having seen numerous, diverse examples of rich learning and motivation for participation emerging around the Potter series helped me better understand and describe what was (and what could be) happening in schools. As readers will see in our chapters on technology and "imagining more," we believe that learners (regardless of the setting) have specific needs and rights that can be addressed through thoughtful, careful resourcing and approaches to teaching and learning. Further, we believe that civic participation and a commitment to social justice are essential to meaningful learning and participation--something we learned from our friends at the Harry Potter Alliance and various Wizard Rockers. (More on that in a minute.)

One of the challenges I faced in shifting my focus to the school based research was not setting up a dichotomy of interest-driven fan practices versus what was happening in classrooms. Certainly, the students in Andrew, Allegra, and Sandra's classrooms had a different kind of shared reading experience than did many of the fans I worked with, one that was not independent from school but rather prompted and scaffolded by their teachers and shared with their classmates through specific assignments and classroom activities. This doesn't mean that it was inferior to what the fans were doing--just different. As we worked on Teaching Harry Potter, I think I came to a better understanding of how powerful school experiences can be for introducing and supporting interests on one hand--and just how treacherous it can be for teachers and students alike if schools do not allow for experiences that can lead to exploring deep interests.

You close the book by imagining what a more perfect school structure would look like and what it would mean in the lives of the kids you studied. Can you share some of that vision?

We use the image of the Mirror of Erised--the powerful magical mirror that allows one to see his/her deepest desires--to frame our discussion of what public education could (and should) look like. Although multiple reveals from the Mirror are not canon, we take four glimpses into the mirror to see the following things:

Expert teachers engaged as leaders and trusted professionals: as the featured teachers' stories reflect, opportunities to exercise agency, make decisions about curriculum, and be creative in one's teaching are not always available to teachers. In our ideal vision of schooling, this situation would be different and teachers would be not only allowed to teach in the ways they feel are best for their students, but encouraged and supported in doing so.

Universal access to technology and new media learning tools: in the book, we described some of the ways that schools use educational media and technology as similar to using the Polyjuice Potion--using technology to disguise bad pedagogy, resulting in those technologies being used in insignificant and spurious ways. Instead of continuing to "Polyjuice" technology and new media, we'd like to see schools learn how to adopt and integrate them in ways that support robust, student-driven learning.

Emphasis on Experiential, Student- Driven Learning: We want to see students and teachers working side-by-side on projects that matter to them. As we mentioned earlier, there is a strong social justice component to the Potter series that has been picked up by various groups within the fandom, the Harry Potter Alliance in particular. The HPA is a great example of experiential learning, as its campaigns focus on getting young people out into the world to enact change. While we recognize that not every student nor every teacher will have the same commitment to social justice, we value the notion of experiential learning--whether that is in relation to world events or mathematics--and wish for more equitable access to such experiences.

Authentic Tasks as the Central Form of Student--and Teacher--Assessment: in our final look in the Mirror, we see one outcome of the above-mentioned emphasis on experiential learning--an educational system that does not rely on standardized assessment and scripted curriculums. Instead, both teachers and students are assessed in ways that are sensitive to their particular needs and that encourage confidence in future practice.

These four elements are certainly not the only positive changes we can imagine for schools, but they represent a significant start. They also represent a turn toward a more caring, trusting, and loving educational system. After all, it is the power of love, not magic, that is the most important lesson Harry has taught us.

Catherine Belcher works with LA's Promise, a nonprofit organization focused on improving schools and empowering neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. She currently serves as the Director of Teaching and Learning at West Adams Preparatory High School. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where her work focused on Latino educational history and language access. She then served as a new teacher supervisor at St. Joe's University in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. A lifelong educator, Catherine taught social studies at both the secondary and middle school levels, and has served as a mentor, lead teacher, and curriculum designer. She has presented on the use of Harry Potter in educational spaces at several conferences, including Enlightening 2007, Azkatraz (2009), Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). Catherine lives in LA with her husband and 11 year old daughter, a Potter aficionado in her own right who proudly displays the Ravenclaw banner in her room, although some days she joins her mom in the Gryffindor common room so they can talk books and dare each other to try eating the grey Bertie Botts Beans.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is a media researcher focused on teaching and learning with popular culture and technology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in 2008. She has been a part of several organizations and projects aimed at informing and inciting innovation in education, including the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Currently, she is working as a Research Associate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab through a partnership between USC and the Cooney Center. She is a co-author (with Mizuko Ito and others) of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009, MIT Press). Becky has presented papers on Harry Potter and youth culture at a number of conferences, most recently, Infinitus (2010) and NAMLE (2011). She lives in Los Angeles and is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her first child, who she hopes will be sorted into Ravenclaw (not Slytherin).

February 15, 2012

Teaching Harry Potter: An Interview with Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr-Stephenson (Part Two))

February 15, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

One of your teachers faced pushed back from students that the Harry Potter series were books for white kids. Perhaps many readers are thinking the same thing. Yet your title stresses their value for the "multicultural classroom." So, what do the books offer for children of color? How does this approach to "multiculturalism" differ from approaches which seek to match students with writers from the same ethnic and racial background?

In the book, we talk about what we mean by "multicultural" education (all the students and teachers in Teaching Harry Potter are of color and therefore bicultural, meaning they negotiate their home and school cultures on a daily basis) and what we believe, and have seen, the Potter books contribute to the educational process within these settings. The first thing we question is the idea that the "whiteness" of the books negates their use in multicultural classrooms. The nature of the books themselves - their complexity and Rowling's willingness to take on difficult and contemporary issues such as racism, genocide, classism, and difference - make them uniquely valuable, and each of the three teachers illustrate this to great effect in their accounts.

We discuss three features that make the Potter books central to the teachers in our book: Harry's status as a "newcomer" to the Wizarding world - to which Sandra's largely immigrant students relate, a normalization of difference - utilized to great effect by Allegra with her special education students, and the opportunity for multiple interpretations of the text - particularly useful for Andrew's students, but employed by all three teachers. Again, teacher capacity and quality are paramount here. We're looking beyond a base reading of the text; the quality of the approach, interaction and reading experience makes all the difference. One can certainly read Harry Potter simply as a book about white kids in an English boarding school. None of the Teaching Harry Potter teachers took that route - which one might call the dark and easy path. Instead, they challenged their students to use Harry Potter to help them tackle difficult social topics and academic exercises, and to do this with the belief that there was definitely something in Harry's story they could use to help them grow as learners and people.

It's also important to note that we firmly believe in access to literature from multiple arenas; classics and books reflecting a diversity of authors, including those matching the students' background, are vitally important for young readers. But access to a particularly valuable popular work like Harry Potter is important because of its accessibility and all it has to offer. On another level, it is also important because so many white, middle to upper middle class kids DO have ample access to Potter and other popular series at home and at school. In many ways, building students' reading confidence, helping them discover that yes, they too can tackle a book of this length or "that style," whether they end up feeling it is ultimately for them or not, is the most valuable accomplishment.

What's striking about the teacher stories running through the book is the degree to which each adopted their instruction to the particular needs of their students, finding the Harry Potter books to be a highly flexible resource in that regard. How does this customization and remixing process differ from the standard ways that schools are thinking about curriculum in this age of No Child Left Behind?

Finding space for customizing/remixing curriculum was one of the biggest challenges the teachers in our book faced. By not following the standardized curriculum, they were doing something subversive--and, as their stories reflect, they often had trouble getting support from administration and colleagues. Despite the challenges they faced, however, each of the teachers featured in the book did a beautiful job of adapting Potter for their classrooms. Whether we are talking about Sandra, who read the book in Spanish with her ELL students, Allegra, who used the audio books to support her special education students' particular needs for reading support, or Andrew, who approached the book as an accessible gateway to challenging AP content, it is clear in each teacher's story that the needs of her/his students were primary influences on the decisions made around reading the books. In talking with the participating teachers, it seems that the rich stories in the Potter books provided unique opportunities for discussion, analysis, and connection with students' lives. Moreover, just the experience of reading an entire popular book together--as opposed to the excerpts and readers associated with the standardized curriculum--appears to have offered opportunities for deep, meaningful learning.

This kind of responsive teaching is radically different from the standardized curricula commonly found in schools, not because teachers prefer standardization (although some certainly must), but because standardization is thought to be more efficient and its results more easily measurable. As we discuss in more detail in the book, most current policy initiatives reward efficiency and demand accountability--and neither reward nor require responsiveness, flexibility, or creativity. All of this adds up to a demoralizing and frustrating culture for teaching in which teachers' expertise is put to the side in favor of standardized content and methods. Fortunately, the teachers featured in Teaching Harry Potter pushed back hard against these negative forces, instead focusing on how they could provide meaningful learning opportunities for all of their students, even when reading Potter meant working around (and/or subverting) the prescribed reading curriculum--and taking considerable criticism from colleagues and supervisors for doing so.

While each teacher had his/her own approaches to customizing the reading/learning experience, Allegra's story stands out as particularly salient to the topic of adaptation/remixing. A creative and dedicated teacher, Allegra wanted to support her students' developing reading skills and practices and felt that multimedia tools like the series' audio books could supplement the instruction and assistance she could provide for students one-on-one as well as to the class as a whole. As they worked through the first Potter book, Allegra's students moved fluidly between the printed text and multimedia by reading along with the audio books. The highly-engaging audio books provided students with a model for fluent reading as well as created a situation in which students could focus more attention on listening to and comprehending the story rather than struggling to decode every word themselves.

Allegra's story also stands out in relation to adaptation because Allegra was working with special education students. As discussed in Allegra's chapter, Harry Potter is a great book series for use in special education for a number of reasons, a key one being the prominence of "difference" as a theme in the series. All Hogwarts students are special in that they have magical abilities; some (like Neville) require more support for learning than others (like Hermione), and others (like Harry) seem to benefit from an alternative, customized curriculum. As Allegra notes in her chapter, seeing varied, positive representations of difference was beneficial to her students.

Harry Potter's status in the literary canon is still being debated and many teachers may see it as "mere popular culture" and not sufficiently literary to bring into school. Given the choices they face in schools with a diminishing focus on reading in any form, what's the case for why we should teach Harry Potter and not say Animal Farm?

Why not both? Granted, the limitations you speak of do exist and districts, schools and teachers must make increasingly difficult decisions about what to include, there are creative ways to include popular books in the curriculum. Andrew, who is the high school AP English teacher in our book, never actually reads complete Potter books with his students. Instead, he uses key excerpts from both the books and the movies to support teaching particular literary aspects. In using these regularly, his students gain a sense of the stories and many end up reading the books on their own. Sandra does read one book a year with her students, but it takes a great deal of planning to make it work, including framing her rationale for using the books. The key for all three of the teachers in our book is a set of very clear goals for their students around using Harry Potter. They don't just read Harry Potter because it's fun or the teachers like the books.

Each teacher uses the texts or movies to teach specific points in the curriculum, encourage habits of mind, or build stamina around reading. All three share the goal of building their students' confidence as readers; because Harry is accessible and also smartly written (it links to so many literary traditions, for example) each teacher uses it to catch his/her students by surprise - eventually each class realizes they've engaged the story, understand it, can connect it to other stories and text, and can discuss its merits and/or weaknesses, in many cases using high level academic language, as in the case of Andrew's AP English class. His students would certainly be primed to critically examine Animal Farm, for example. They hold a "literary confidence" not necessarily present previous to discussing/analyzing Potter.

The debate around including popular texts in school curriculum will certainly remain a constant, especially since debates around which "classics" to include in English courses seems never ending. But there is certainly a current wave of coolness around reading - prompted by Potter and sustained by such series as The Hunger Games - that if recognized, harnessed, and used could serve to help students connect to the "classic" texts that have actually influenced a great deal of popular works.

How do we measure the success of these teachers' attempts to use Harry Potter to engage with their students? And why do you think that school systems are so slow to recognize and reward this kind of success?

Measuring teacher success - successful teaching - is probably the biggest educational debate right now. The growth over time data we talked about above is one example of how teachers are increasingly measured by one of the few types of hard data that are produced by teachers and schools en masse. Otherwise, the criteria for "success" becomes more objective and therefore difficult to define and evaluate in large numbers. In the book, we include a list of 9 "shared commonalities" - characteristics the Teaching Harry Potter teachers hold in common that we believe serve as the basis for (and evidence of) their success. One of these does include standardized test scores, but that serves more as one criteria, not the central identifiable aspect of the teachers' success. To our mind, these commonalities are identifiable and clearly contribute to student success. However, we spent time talking with the teachers, getting to know their philosophy and role in their respective schools. It took time to identify the roots of their success, something schools and districts don't have a lot of to work with.

We also hold a particular view of what it means to be a successful teacher. For example, we believe popular culture and media are valuable in school and consider wise and appropriate use of them with students a mark of great teaching. Many would disagree, however. We could spend a long time arguing our point, which we've done, actually, and still not have any kind of consensus on the issue, let alone on how to measure what using popular culture successfully would look like. This is one of the major obstacles faced by each of the teachers in our book, they had to constantly justify their use of Harry Potter books and media and in some cases were actually allowed to use the books because of their successful testing records. So, in the end reading Harry Potter with one's students became the reward for the kind of "success" that could be easily and "objectively" measured - and that's where school districts and policy makers live right now.

February 13, 2012

Teaching Harry Potter: An Interview with Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr-Stephenson (Part One)

February 13, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

Catherine Belcher and Becky Herr- Shepardson's Teaching Harry Potter: The Power of Imagination in the Multicultural Classroom is quite simply one of the most powerful and engaging books I've read about American education in a long time, and I strongly recommend it to the full range of people who read this blog -- those who are fans, those who are teachers, and those who care about the future of learning. Teaching Harry Potter tells a powerful story about the current state of American education, one which contrasts the enthusiasm many young people and educators feel towards J.K. Rowling's remarkable book series and the constraints which No Child Left Behind-era policies have imposed on how reading gets taught in the classroom. Reading this book produced powerful emotional responses--an enormous respect for the teachers described here who are battling to engage with their students in meaningful and timely ways and despair over some of the obstacles they must overcome in doing so. There's much to be optimistic here in the ways these teachers care deeply enough about their students to take intellectual and professional risks and much that is disheartening about the ways that the system crushes opportunities that all recognize are valuable but which do not fit within the formal "standards."

The two writers move back and forth between a nuanced reading of J.K. Rowling's books which considers how they represent the value of education, detailed accounts of what teachers have been doing with the books as they adapt them for a range of multicultural classes, and big picture considerations of educational policy and pedagogical practice. You can learn more about this book and its authors on Teaching Harry Potter's official website and on the authors' blog.

The following is the first installment of a three part interview with the writers, during which they use Harry Potter to pose some powerful critiques of what's working and what's not in contemporary American education.

Let's start with the question that frames your introduction -- Why Harry Potter? What does this book series help us to understand about the contemporary state of American education?

We chose to use Harry Potter to explore American education because of the powerful things the series has to say about teaching and learning. Even though the magical school system in the Potter books more closely resembles British schools (and, one might say, a particular, nostalgic view of British schools) than the American public schools we discuss in our book, we saw important parallels between how issues such as childhood and adolescence, power (both political and personal), knowledge, literacy, and even media and technology were discussed in the books and how they are discussed in contemporary education. For example, teachers we have worked with have often discussed the challenge of balancing students' informational needs with the school district's desire for "safety" (which can mean anything from approved book lists to highly-restrictive firewalls on school networks); a similar theme is evident in Harry's interactions with Dumbledore and other Hogwarts faculty who struggled with questions about how and when to share information with Harry and his classmates.

The Potter series also reminds us of the importance of looking carefully and closely at situations--as things are not always what they seem to be at first glance--and of the importance of listening to alternative narratives. Both of these things seem particularly salient in relation to the state of contemporary American education, which, when viewed as a whole, seems very much like a lost cause. Looking closer, however, it is apparent that there are great and creative teachers, committed administrators, communities dedicated to supporting their schools, and students who, when given the resources they need, do extraordinary things. It is unfortunate that these stories are so often drowned out by discussions of standardized policy and procedure, as they are important reminders of what is possible. The exclusion of the Harry Potter books themselves, or the "strangeness" of including them in school reading lists, speaks to this as well. The assumption that they are simple children's books belies so much of their meaning and potential.

Further, we love the spirit of learning in Harry Potter: students taking ownership over their own learning and teaching one another; reading books from the restricted section of the library; finding secret passageways to Hogsmeade. Hogwarts students seem to have a sense of autonomy, adventurousness, and wonderment that we wish for all students.

A few pages into the book, you have already framed it as a defense of teachers. Why do teachers need defending? Why do they deserve defending?

Teachers, great teachers, definitely need defending in today's climate. We realize that not all teachers are created equal, and that there is a great need to improve teacher preparation, hiring policies, evaluation, and retention in public schools, particularly in large, urban school districts. However in the book, we talk about how the current climate around accountability, measuring teacher quality by test scores, and the role of teacher unions in protecting ineffective teachers has created a situation where the voices and needs of high quality teachers are being drowned out. Can we really afford that? We felt it vital to draw attention to the work of passionate, highly skilled teachers, to make the counter argument that they exist and are indeed out there - and that they are innovative and current in their approach. We also thought it important to highlight the tensions these teachers deal with in trying to continue their work and grow as creative professionals under the current political climate.

We also believe it is important to discuss the fact that there is more than one way to talk about good teaching. Most of the public discussion today centers on measuring teachers in some manner, usually through their students' test scores, which in many ways make sense since those are the one set of hard, "objective" measures available. Scores also provide a quick and easy answer. But good teaching is about much more than test scores - as is evidenced by Sandra, Andrew and Allegra. We are straightforward about the fact that their students do indeed test well, but we don't focus on that particular aspect of their work. What becomes clear in these three teachers' accounts is that they do much more than test preparation in their classrooms. They work - and often struggle - with making their pedagogy more nuanced and layered as they strive to offer a richer experience for their students. It is also important to note that they work with urban, and/or high poverty students of color, who are more often "test-prepped" and remediated than their suburban counterparts. Do teachers such as these, who believe in their students and work against the grain to offer them a rich literary experience deserve defending? Yes, most definitely. The task is figuring out how to balance that need within a system that currently throws all teachers into the same pot, regardless of their track record with students.

Harry Potter is a series of books about education. What insights might teachers take for their own pedagogical practice from studying the various teachers and administrators depicted in the book?

One of the most important insights teachers might take from the characterizations of teachers and administrators in the books is an understanding of how students perceive them. The Hogwarts faculty members are, by and large, portrayed as archetypes: Minerva McGonagall (stern and confident), Severus Snape (bitter and cruel), Remus Lupin (caring expert), Gilderoy Lockhart (inexperienced and self-absorbed), Albus Dumbledore (wise sage), and so on. Because readers only learn about the teachers through Harry's experiences with them, we spend much of the series not knowing much about them, their backgrounds, or their motivations. Teachers in the series--like many teachers in American schools--knew much more about their students than vice versa. While we're certainly not advocating that teachers give up all rights to privacy, we do think that it's important to be aware of the fact that most students navigate schools with a very incomplete picture of who their teachers are as people--and that this lack of information can serve as an impediment to connecting with teachers, even those who are very skilled and willing to act as caring mentors.

For the teachers we profile in Teaching Harry Potter, the Potter books provided a way to share a bit of themselves with their students by sharing a piece of media about which they were passionate. Now, not all of the featured teachers were die-hard Potter fans (though several definitely would describe themselves that way), but all enjoyed the books, identified their value for their students, and went to great lengths to share the books in their classrooms. Their dedication to brokering access to the books for their students and to creating engaging reading experiences that recognized students' different needs and desires is admirable.

Another thing that teachers might take from the Potter series is the value it places on experiential education--that is, teaching and learning that is grounded in students' real lives, that gets them up, out of their seats, and interacting with one another as well as with people outside of the classroom. Take, for example, Professor Lupin's lesson on defeating Dementors with the Riddikulous spell--this exercise challenged students to use magic that was extremely relevant to their lives at that moment and, although the lesson itself was loud, rambunctious, and risky, it was also highly effective in teaching students a spell they could immediately apply outside of the classroom.

Moves toward standardization of curriculum are generally moves away from experiential learning, as experiential learning needs to be connected to specific contexts, moments in students' lives and in the schooling process. It takes a great deal of creativity and bravery for teachers to privilege this kind of learning in the classroom, especially in the current educational climate in the U.S.

February 07, 2012

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

February 07, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

Jared Gardner's Projections: Comics and the History of 21st Century Storytelling was the first book I read in 2012 and it was the ideal choice. Gardner makes an incredibly valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship within comic studies, tracing the history of American comics, from the early comic strips at the dawn of the 20th century, through new digital manifestations of sequential art, at the dawn of the 21st century. Projections combines critical analysis of key comics texts with close engagements with the history of their production and reception, making significant new discoveries around figures and events we thought we already knew, and expanding in important ways the canon of which comics justify our research. There are two elements here which are close to my own heart: First, the degree to which Gardner consistently understands comics as a medium (not a genre) and one which has to be understood comparatively in relation to the other modes of communication at the same time, so comics are discussed in relation to photography, cinema, television, newspapers, books, games, and other digital media, and we remain attentive to patterns of cross-influence across their history.

Second, Gardner makes some significant discoveries about the role of comic fans at key junctures in the evolution of the medium which help flesh out forgotten chapters in the history of participatory culture. His chapter on comics in the context of collector culture touches on some of the same authors and themes I want to explore in my own book project on comics and material culture, so I was delighted to have someone with whom I could bounce some of my ideas about retroconsumption against.

In the following interview, we discuss the relations of comics to other media and the role of fans and collectors in comics history, among a range of other topics. This was an interview I had to do. I kept jotting down questions as I read the book, eager to engage with the author, who surprisingly I did not know, and learn more about the thinking which guided this project. I hope you will enjoy his thinking as much as I have.

The book's subtitle, "the history of 21st Century storytelling," frames your account of the evolutions of comics as a medium in relation to the present moment, which you characterize in the book's conclusion as one of convergence and transformation. In what sense do you see comics as "21st century storytelling"? Is it possible that comics were also embodiments of 19th and 20th century storytelling at other moments of their evolution?

Absolutely! The title is in part an an appeal to scholars interested in narrative and media to take comics seriously as providing a century long history of engaging with transmedial and multimodal storytelling. Narrative theory has become increasingly interested in comics, particularly for the ways in which it complicates its traditionally text-based models and theories; but for media theorists comics often look decidedly "old media"--associated with forms (illustrated magazines, comic books, newspapers) that seem firmly rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is in fact precisely the adaptability of sequential comics since its full development in the late nineteenth century that has contributed to some degree to this association. Sequential comics first developed in the pages of illustrated magazines in the U.S. & Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the illustrated magazine was largely cannibalized by the Sunday newspaper supplement as pioneered by publishers like Pulitzer and Hearst, and as cartoonists moved over to this new venue their work was shaped by the new affordances of the weekly newspaper supplement: color, seriality, a larger and more cacophonous frame within which to tell their stories. As adventure comics in particular began to move into a new format in the 1930s--what would come to be called the comic book--the form again adapted, changing the ways in which it engaged with readers, told its stories, and explored the relationship between text & image, panel and page. So, as you say, comics have always found ways to adapt new media environments and to explore the possibilities of what we might somewhat anachronistically call an interactive, multimodal approach to storytelling from the 19th century on. One of the interesting questions with which I conclude is why, given this history, comics has been so very slow to adapt itself to digital environments in the 21st century.

Your conclusion really describes a crisis in the state of the medium, as comics may evolve away from printed form and become part of the digital landscape. What factors do you see speeding or slowing the dissolution of comics as a print based medium?

I do think comics as a medium are at a crossroads, but I am optimistic that comics will survive the translation into digital forms of production, distribution, and consumption--although what emerges on the other end will likely look as different from the comic book or graphic novel as the comics in the 19th-century illustrated magazine do when compared to those found in the Sunday newspaper supplement. So I guess I would not describe it as a crisis, but I do think that it is time for the best creators working in the form to step up and take more creative risks--and for some brave publishers to give them a safety net.

My biggest concern--and I have written about this probably too much in other venues--is that people involved in comics are understandably overwhelmed by the dramatic contractions of the traditional print mediums in which they have long worked and end up retreating into a kind of elitist stance, making expensive "art books" for an increasingly smaller, older and wealthier audience. That truly would be a crisis for comics, which is why I get anxious when I see, for instance, alternative cartoonists abandoning the traditional "floppy" comic book not for new digital platforms and possibilities, but for $20 hardcover comic books that have no hopes of bringing new readers and communities to comics.

But, I also understand the reluctance of comics creators--especially those who are established--to turn to new media platforms with their work. There are so few working models out there that demonstrate that comics creators, historically among the most exploited and underpaid of our modern storytellers, can hope to receive remuneration for their work on the internet. The big mainstream companies--especially DC and Marvel--are exploring digital distribution models both for the iPad and for personal computers, but for the most part these are simply bland digitizations of traditional comic books. And there is every reason to suspect that these digital comics will continue to diminish the viability of traditional comics stores and the communities they have enabled for the past forty years.

Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in the long run that the traditional comics store can or will survive the next twenty years, again with the exception of some well-placed boutiques. But as we see the loss of serial comics books and comic book shops, we see the loss as well of the spaces and the places for collaborative interpretation and shared ownership that is very much at the heart of comics. Certainly, this should be something the internet can find a way to replace, but I am not convinced that Disney (Marvel) or Time Warner (DC) have much interest in nourishing collaborative readers with a sense of shared ownership in their serial narratives. Which is why I don't believe, no matter how much revenue the big companies are ultimately able to move through digital distribution networks (and so far the jury is out whether they can make much at all), that the model represented by platforms such as Comixology on the iPad or Marvel's Digital Comics for the PC is one in which comics will thrive and grow as a form.

What we need are more creators ready to bring their best work to the internet in order to explore the possibilities of the digital environment: comics that break free from the limitations of the printed page--rolling out into an infinite ribbon or inviting new modes of navigation that open up the page to exploration in new dimensions and directions. But we also need new publishers ready to come in and create a place and a business model where this kind of experimentation can be rewarded and find new readers and new investments. Disney and Time Warner already largely see the comic book part of their business empires as loss leaders or promotional tie-ins for their Hollywood enterprises. We need instead a 21st-century Pulitzer or Donenfeld to imagine the business of digital comics in which a 21st-century George Herriman or Siegel & Shuster can thrive.

As you note, comics have never exerted so great an influence over the media landscape as they do at the present moment, yet they have rarely seemed so marginal as a medium in their own right.

In truth, in some way comics have less influence today than they have in the past century, despite their surprising visibility. Comics sales are down by any measure in almost every corner of the industry and the notion of a "comics scare" of the kind the nation experienced in the early 1950s is truly unimaginable today. The marketing and merchandizing of comics properties is up, of course, making a very few people wealthy and successful, but little in the vast majority of adaptations of comics on film suggests that Hollywood has any interest in learning from comics in terms of how comics have historically told stories and engaged with readers.

For better or worse, the current love affair between Hollywood and comics will likely cool, perhaps with this year's Avengers, which has so much money riding on it at a time when audiences and critics are growing restless with the decade-long tide of comics movies that it seems almost doomed from the start (then again, I loudly proclaimed the iPhone was going to be a flop, so I would not trust my powers of prognostication). And Hollywood has its own crisis to face, one which it has been kicking down the 3-D road for the past few years.

So while I am truly happy for any cartoonist who secures a retirement from a movie deal, outside of the success of scattered individuals I don't believe the future of comics lies with Hollywood. But they may belong with film. Independent films like American Splendor and even the rare Hollywood production like Scott Pilgrim point to the possibilities of comics and film listening to and learning from each other in ways they have not since their shared origins more than a century ago, but Scot Pilgrim of course was accounted a failure by any Hollywood metric. The best hope for comics and film going forward is to create new sites of convergence where creative success and the bottom line will be measured outside of the blackbox accounting of Hollywood.

You describe in your Coda the shifts which have occurred in film viewing as a result of having ready access to a digital archive of favorite films which we can watch and manipulate as we choose. This access to comics starts earlier, yet there has also been a dramatic increase in comics reprints over the past few years. How has this effort to preserve and represent early comics influenced your decisions about where to place emphasis in this book?

I don't think this book would have made any sense to write had it not been for what we affectionately call the golden age of comics reprints, a period of publishing that has seen long-lost newspaper comics and comic books returned to print. I am fortunate to have daily access to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum here at Ohio State, but until recently without such privileged access extensive reading in historical comics was virtually impossible. Of the comics I focus on extensively in the early chapters in the book--Happy Hooligan, Mutt & Jeff, Krazy Kat, Superman, Spider-man, R. Crumb's underground comix, etc.--almost all are now available in accessible reprint editions. The big exceptions here were Sidney Smith's The Gumps and Ed Wheelan's Minute Movies, pioneering serial strips from the 1920s, but I am now working with the Library of American Comics to get one and possibly both into an affordable reprint edition in the near future. Of course, this "golden age" will end long before we recover all of our lost comics history. In the long run, what we really need is a vast digital comics archive of the kind that licensing and copyright laws makes sadly impossible to imagine at the moment.

There has been an ongoing debate between film studies and comics scholars about how much early comics influenced early cinema. How do you characterize the initial relations between these two mass media, which gained public visibility at roughly the same cultural moment?

In the end, though, I see less evidence than do others of clear influence on the level of the fundamental grammar. Cartoonists and filmmakers ultimately learned to tell stories in unique ways as they explored the unique affordances of their respective media. But there is little question that comics helped provide early film with both a model of "celebrity" with the remarkable national success of early comic strip characters such as Happy Hooligan and Buster Brown and with a clear model for how graphic narrative could provide an opportunity to make knowable the often overwhelming experience of modernity.

As I argue, however, there were ultimately lots of reasons--both economic and formal--for film to go its own separate way very early, and it did. Despite their shared origins, comics and film ultimately did not interact a tremendous amount for much of the twentieth century, all of which makes their convergence in the beginning of this century more interesting--especially as that convergence has extended well into its second decade now, a lifetime in term of the half-life of Hollywood film genres.

Jared Gardner is professor of English and film at the Ohio State University, where he also coordinates the popular culture studies program. In addition to Projections, he is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature (1998) and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (2012). He blogs (far too irregularly) for The Comics Journal and Huffington Post.

February 02, 2012

Is It All About the Hips?: Sangita Shresthova on Bollywood Dance (Part Two)

February 02, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

As you note, images of India in the west are often shaped by the legacy of orientalism. In what ways does the western response to Bollywood dance perpetuate rather than challenge orientalism?

To me the themes of nostalgia and orientalism have emerged as a bit of a paradoxical relationship in the case of Bollywood dance. On one hand, Indian dance has functioned, among other things, as a lesson in Indianness for first, second and even third generation Indian dance. Though less rigid in its adherence to protocols and certainly more hybrid in content, Bollywood dance has also approximated this function for Indian-American youth. The West's growing interest in Indian dance both complicated and perpetuates these desires for Indianness as both are shaped by a particular imagined India. Both the nostalgic and orientalized gaze tend towards opulent and recognizably Indian movements, gestures and costumes. But unlike the nostalgic gaze, the foreign interest in India, particularly the one in continental Europe, sometime borders on a slightly condescending fascination with kitsch. To me, this labeling of Bollywood with kitsch and the slightly condescending (though perhaps well intentioned) interest that this generates is where the legacies of Orientalism are perpetuated through Bollywood dance. As I write in my book, I see Bollywood dance as unintentional kitsch.
Though very different in intention, Bollywood dance driven by nostalgia and Bollywood dance informed by orientalism can at times look very similar as they both tend to highlight a idealized kind of Indianness. That said, there are differences in the nuances of how these motivations for Bollywood dance manifest. These nuances, however, may only be intelligible to a very small percentage of audience-members.

In India, there seems to be a perception that Bollywood dance is too much influenced by western music and dance cultures, where-as in the United States, it is often read in relation to the politics of multiculturalism. What is it about the dances themselves which invite such radically different interpretations?

The simple answer to this question would be to say that, given the large number of Hindi films produced every year and the global reach of the industry, we should not be surprised that there are conflicting definitions of what Bollywood dance means and does. There is certainly some truth in this especially when we consider that the various narrative contexts of the song-and-dance sequences. Conservative heroines need to move in ways that are appropriate to their convictions. Worldly heroes need to demonstrate this through their globally informed dance style. Narratives demand that Bollywood dance incorporate many cultures and styles. Live Bollywood dancers can then just pick and choose the movement content that best suits their needs and preferences.

There is, however, a more complex answer that builds on this inherent narrative diversity. I believe that it is really the hybrid mixing of dance styles and cultures, which defined Hindi film song-and-dances since early days of cinema, that lies at the heart of Bollywood dance. This mixing also supports the various at times conflicting definitions of Bollywood dance. The hybridity of movement contained within Bollywood dances in turn allows people to pick and choose the elements that most reflect their personal preference and aspirations. This is why Bollywood dance can mean different things to different people in different contexts. The specific meanings associated with the genre of Bollywood dance can thus become extremely localized while at the same time remaining connected to the Hindi cinema's international trends and flows.

As you note, one constant in the Bollywood cinema has been that the songs "have always been embedded in the narratives in Hindi films." Yet, another constant, surely, is that the songs (and the dances, as you note) also circulate outside the film. What do you see as the relationship between these two different contexts? As you trace the way Hindi film music and dance circulates beyond the film itself, what aspects of the narrative significance remains and what gets redefined? What roles do the narrative context play in shaping the choices different dance schools make about which numbers are appropriate for their students to perform?

Yes, Bollywood song-and-dance sequences live outside films as much as they live in them. Hindi film songs (and the accompanying videos) are often released months before the actual film to help promote the film. The recent case of the surprise hit "Kolaveri Di" is an exceptional example of how effective this strategy can be. Notably, Kolaveri Di, did not actually contain any choreographed dance. The song spread quickly through the internet, garnering more than 37 million views in advance of the release of the Tamil language film 3 that it was composed for:

A portion of the many people who saw the song on Youtube.com (or one of its many response "avatars") surely made plans to actually see the film when it is released in 2012.

Similarly, there are many instances when a song-and-dance sequence endures even as the popularity of the film that contained it fades away. The "Choli Ke Peeche" (What is behind the blouse?) song-and-dance sequence from the film Khalnayak (1993) is a perfect example of this.

That said, there are many layers of meaning within a song-and-dance sequence. Audiences who have seen the film that contained the sequence are more able to interpret the nuances in a song-and-dance that refer directly to the plot. If they are very familiar with Hindi films, they may even be able to pick up on some inter-textual references that connect that particular film and dance to other earlier cinematic works. Inter-textual references to other films, subplots and even real-life events outside the film's narrative are quite common in Hindi films. Audiences familiar with neither the film nor the references that it contains are left to their own devices in interpreting a song-and-dance sequence that circulates outside the film.

Both the narrative and extra-narrative circulation of song-and-dance sequences have implications for Bollywood dance. Dance instructors need to be aware of the possible meanings that may be associated with any given Hindi film song before they teach it to their students. This seems to be particularly true to Bollywood instructors outside India where the appropriateness is a key consideration in choosing songs.

Given some of the cultural sensitive issues you discuss, and given the uncertain cultural status of Bollywood itself among intellectuals, what has been the reception of your book so far in India and Nepal?

In a stark departure from the scorn it used to receive, Bollywood has gained prominence in academic and other intellectual circles in India in recent years. There is even talk that it is now hip to study Bollywood! In that sense, I am happy to note that my book has been released at a good time and the overall positive response I have received so far confirms it. A few valid minor quibbles aside, the reviews of my book in both Nepal and India have been overwhelmingly positive. I have also been quite surprised with how much attention my book has garnered given the saturated book market in India. I have even been featured in Marie Claire! Flatteringly, the Sunday Indian said my is "a fine blend of in depth research, humour, and astute cultural sensitivity." So far, the reviewers have also generally voiced a general agreement with the points I put forward in Is It All About Hips? In Nepal, a positive review of my book in the Nepali Times (a prominent Nepali weekly) elicited an interesting exchange in the comments section with some commenters suggesting that I was "another Nepali turned Indian" and that "Bollywood makes for some cheap and easy popularity." Paradoxically, these comments actually confirmed my observations about Nepalis national identity and troubled relationship to India. As the Marie Claire (December 2011) feature on the book states: "Whether you love 'em or hate them, the world cannot resist Bollywood."

You can find out more about Sangita Shresthova's work on Bollywood and dance at: www.bollynatyam.com.

Sangita Shresthova: A Czech/Nepali scholar, filmmaker, dancer and
media scholar, Sangita's work has been presented in academic and
creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin),
AIGA Boston/ATE Massaging Media Conference (Boston), the Other
Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival
(Seoul), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), and Akademi's Frame
by Frame (London, UK). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of
World Arts and Cultures and earned a MSc. degree from MIT's
Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on Hindi film
dance. Sangita is also founder of Bollynatyam (www.bollynatyam.com).
She currently works with Professor Henry Jenkins on questions related
to participatory culture, new media, and civic engagement.

January 31, 2012

Is It All About the Hips?: Sangita Shresthova on Bollywood Dance (Part One)

January 31, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

Sangita Shreshtova, a 2003 Alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, recently published an informative and engaging new book, Is It All About the Hips?: Around the World With Bollywood Dance, which explores some important questions at the intersections of transnational media, participatory culture, and film performance. She writes with the experienced eye of someone who is herself a gifted dancer and choreographer and with the theoretical sophistication of someone who has gone through several top academic programs.

This engaging ethnography explores the ways Bollywood dance is moving off the screen and into the everyday lives of fans all over the planet, through attentive close studies of what performance means in a range of different local contexts (from London and Los Angeles to Kathmandu). Shreshthova knows from her own work as an organizer of the Prague Bollywood Film Festival that these films, their music, and their dance cultures, are traveling not only to places where there is a strong South Asian diasporic community but also into places which have had limited history of contact with India before. This is part of the fascination of our current moment where popular culture is being circulated across traditional borders in ways which produce unexpected consequences.

I have been lucky enough to have worked with Shreshtova, first as my graduate student at MIT and now as the research director on the CivicPaths project here at USC, so it is a source of great pride and pleasure to be able to share with you this interview. Here, she shares both her own journey to write this book and some core insights about the transnational contexts within which contemporary popular and participatory culture operates.

In your acknowledgements, you describe Bollywood dance as "a messy, yet appealing, reflection on my own scattered cultural identity." What aspects of your autobiography did you draw upon in shaping this book? Is there something about Bollywood entertainment which speaks especially to the diasporic experience?

While my book is based in ethnographic and academic research, there are certainly some autobiographical elements that informed its final shape. For one, my initial encounters with Hindi films are interwoven with my own cultural struggles to define my Czech-Nepali mixed race identity growing up in Kathmandu. It was during this time that I was first drawn to the hybrid content of Hindi film song-and-dance sequences. Much later, I was once again drawn to Hindi films as a homesick undergraduate student at Princeton University. At that time, I was so grateful to the Indian students who shared their Bollywood audio and video collections with me. The songs and images became an accessible way for me to feel connected to a familiar culture in ways that somehow eased the profound isolation that dominated my initial years in the United States. Watching the films also connected me with other students in similar situations.

Films like Pardes (1997) really catered to diasporic nostalgia. Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_(film)

When I returned to the study of Bollywood as a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I, of course, drew on these early experiences with Bollywood. I then combined my research with my training in dance and media.

So yes, to me, Bollywood films, in general, are very well suited to the diasporic experience. For one, they provide accessible familiar content that can be shared in the community. To me, the hybrid nature of the films themselves is also particularly well suited to the fragmented identities that emerge out of particular diasporic experiences. And, Bollywood dance specifically is an eloquent commentary on the juxtaposition of the global flow of media enabled by media technologies and the physical experience of these images on a local level. This is why I am particularly cautious about the nostalgic urge to treat Bollywood film content as representative of Indian (and at times even explicitly Hindu) culture. To me the richness of Bollywood (dance) is its portable mixing of cultural content that enables multiple (related) meanings to emerge in multiple locations.

You describe Bollywood dance as "a participatory culture based in Hindi film fandom." What forms does the participation take? How is it linked to other forms of fan practice which surround these films?

There are many practices associated with Hindi film (and more recently Bollywood) fandom, including keeping up with current trends within the industry, organizing screenings, creating art inspired by films and actors, and following references to other films and actors within a given narrative. To me, the shared memory of films is really central to Bollywood fandom. This pleasure may further be encouraged when audiences make watching Hindi films a group activity - to be shared with relatives and friends.

As one of the organizers of the Prague Bollywood Festival, I had the opportunity to witness and encounter many Bollywood fans. (image source: www.bollywood.cz)

In many ways, Bollywood dance grew out of these shared pleasures. Put simply audiences wanted to experience the films first-hand. The also wanted to share these pleasures with others through performance. In this context, thresh-hold to participation in Bollywood dance was very low and took place in the privacy of people's homes or at community gatherings. Anyone could participate. By emulating particular movements from films, dancers could summon up the shared memories of those films. They would also teach movements to each other and invite others to join in as best they could. In many ways, Bollywood dance movements became a shared language of Bollywood film fandom. To me, this is what makes Bollywood dance a participatory culture.

In some ways, current trends towards a more "professional" Bollywood dance as live performance are now changing these practices. There is, however, no indication that the Bollywood dance as fandom is about to fade any time soon.

You are describing a phenomenon throughout the South Asian diaspora where Bollywood dance classes are growing in popularity, sometimes at the expense of more classical Indian dance. What factors have contributed to this growth? What do you see as some of the consequences?

The relationship between Bollywood dance and the Indian classical dance world is quite controversial and has been for some time. For the sake of clarity, I will situate my answer within the United States and limit my observations to this context. The growing popularity of Bollywood dance and its frequent positioning as representative of Indian dance has indeed caused much concern among Indian classical dancers in the United States. While I am not sure about the actual enrollment numbers, there is a general sense that Bollywood dance is gaining in popularity at the expense of Indian classical dance and many classical dance teachers have expressed their distress at this trend. Often this distress also is tinted with a slight disdain for Bollywood dance, which classical dance teachers tend to see as a less refined, dislocated and even crass from entertainment. There is also a sense that Bollywood dance is in some ways riding on the coat tails of the hard work that many Indian dancers have done to establish and raise awareness about Indian dance outside India. The popularity of Bollywood dance is also a source of concern for those advocating the preservation of specific (conservative) elements of Indian culture in the lives of Indian-American youth who may otherwise only feel a very tenuous connection to Indian culture.

Students of Bollywood dance often feel that Bollywood dance is much more accessible, malleable, learnable, and fun than Indian classical dance. As source material, song-and-dance sequences from Hindi films are today quite readily accessed through sites like Youtube.com. Students can quickly adapt movements to suit their skill level. They may be in a position to show off their moves to their friends quite quickly as well. In contrast, music to classical Indian dances is often a closely guarded and will only be shared once a teacher deems the student is ready to make a public appearance. There are very few or no compromises made to accommodate student's skill level. They have to master set dances. It may take years before an Indian classical dance student actually has a dance to show and even longer before he/she is ready to perform in public.

Reflecting on these realities, several Bollywood and Indian classical dance teachers have been searching for new ways to address this situation. More and more often, Bollywood dance teachers and dancers make a very active effort to integrate Indian classical elements (and at times actual full classes) in their teaching. They often also actively encourage that their students study classical Indian dance. On the other hand, Indian classical dance teachers make efforts to add Bollywood (or as they prefer to call it Hindi Film dance) components into their repertoire. Drawing on the Indian classical dance Kathak, Anjani Ambegaotkar has choreographed an ode to Hindi film dance in "Made in Mumbai", and Made in Mumbai II.

Sangita Shresthova is Czech/Nepali scholar, filmmaker, dancer and media scholar, Sangita's work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), AIGA Boston/ATE Massaging Media Conference (Boston), the Other
Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), and Akademi's Frame by Frame (London, UK). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures and earned a MSc. degree from MIT's
Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on Hindi film dance. Sangita is also founder of Bollynatyam (www.bollynatyam.com). She currently works with Professor Henry Jenkins on questions related to participatory culture, new media, and civic engagement.

January 22, 2012

Funny Pictures?: An Interview on Hollywood Animation with Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (Part Two)

January 22, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

Both cartoons and comedy shorts have a relationship to the Hollywood studio system which is different from the feature films which have dominated film studies. What do we learn about the logic of the studio system by recentering our focus on this level?

CK & DG: To a certain degree, these shorts operated on the margins of the studio system. The units set up to produce them even occupied a separate space within the studios, physically reinforcing their marginality. In many ways, like the B-film, shorts were the poor step-child of the studio family, less highly regarded than the A-level feature, but a indispensable part of the distribution mix.

Even if the studios didn't value the work of the animators to the degree that they might have, the studios did provide an outlet for these animators to ply their craft and the sheer volume of cartoons produced during this period is quite impressive.

Looking more closely at these marginal products of the studio system reminds us that it wasn't only about stars and valued literary properties; the studios were responsible for turning out a varied array of products for mass consumption and both diversity and reliability had equal weight in the industry's calculations. If we consider the role of

works such as cartoons within the broad aims of the studio system, it allows us to see that system as the complicated, hierarchical, sometimes ungainly method of operating that it was. It also helps to reveal some of the ways in which the studios did resemble factories, because turning out animated works relied on so much repetitive labour. Scott Curtis's consideration of boredom in the work of Tex Avery is an incisive look at how that repetitious labour finds itself replicated on a formal level.

The essays here certainly cover the canon of American animation, including the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Tex Avery, and Frank Tashlin. What new insights do we gain about these familiar figures as a result of the comparative approach this book adopts?

CK & DG: The most obvious insight is amplified context. Focusing on the studio period means that we don't isolate particular figures as aberrational geniuses. But when exceptional work was produced, we can still understand its relationship to the traditions and tendencies evident throughout the period. Directors like Tashlin and Avery were distinctive, but as various of the contributors point out, they were beholden to broader tendencies enshrined within the system and influenced by comic conventions passed down from other comic forms. By focussing on the basic common element of animated humour, one can begin to see th continuities linking these figures to a larger representational system, to widely-held cultural values, and to a pre-existing industrial context.

At the same time, your contributors also bring new discoveries into the mix. What films and filmmakers should we be paying more attention to as a result of this new scholarship?

CK & DG: Well, we hope that readers will take their cue from Rob King's eye-opening chapter on Charley Bowers and pay more attention to this largely forgotten hybrid figure. More generally, the volume's tacit message is that much of animated work from this period remains underexplored. Again, there are so many films being made during this time that to watch even a fraction of the output requires a lot of time. Representative works of interest are highlighted in the volume, by authors such as Richard Neupert and Donald Crafton, just to take two examples of contributors who focus on largely unheralded cartoons from the 1930s.

But the same could be said of almost any decade within this period: there is a lot to see and a lot to discover. And the work on sound, primarily represented (in very different ways) by Philip Brophy and by Daniel, reminds us that we shouldn't ignore the sonic dimension of these funny pictures.

All that said, this anthology can only scratch at the surface; our main aim was to come at the vast amount of material from a key perspective that had largely been overlooked--that all of these films were made with an aim to get audiences laughing.

The formal structure of the gag is a shared concern of scholars working on comedy and animation. What can we learn by exploring this issue across these two domains?

CK & DG: One of the more interesting aspects of the gag from an analytical perspective is the constructed nature of it. And yet, as familiar as the gag may seem to a viewer, it must still be produced with an eye to conveying a spirit of spontaneity, else the responsive laughter will be diminished.

For both live-action and animated films, a lot of preparatory labour goes into the mounting and execution of the gag. In live-action, practice makes perfect, whereas in animation, it's all achieved in the process of drawing. Yet the result is so similar. The gags often play to the spatio-temporal strengths of the cinematic universes created by film comedy, the seeming defiance of gravity, the manipulation of objects, the emphatic, almost parodic violence of the pratfall.

Because the intent--to elicit laughter--runs across both live-action and animated comedy, gags are surprisingly similar in both forms, even if the means differ substantially. As might be predicted, animated gags don't have to go to the lengths of live-action to impress us, as it's all ultimately on the page and almost anything is possible.

As many of your contributors suggest, comedy and animation both draw on earlier forms of popular amusement, such as vaudeville and the comic strip. How does this book contribute to our understanding of this larger history of popular culture?

CK & DG: By stressing the comic conventions that underlie so much of what comes out of Hollywood, live entertainment and the print media, our anthology tries to draw through lines that suggest productive intermedial cross-fertilization. Popular culture is always a product of diverse and not always completely compatible factors. This was true early on, as evidenced by Mark Langer's demonstration of the debt that the Fleischer Brothers owed to vaudeville and the comic strip. Similarly, J.B. Kaufman shows how silent live-action comedy exercised an influence on early sound-era animation. And both Paul Wells' article and your own remind us not to forget that popular comic forms also intersect with modernist tendencies in intriguing ways.

Dealing with these genres, your authors necessarily have to confront the history of stereotyping, especially racial and ethnic stereotypes, in American humor. What new insights do we gain?

CK & DG: Nic Sammond's work on racial masquerade and early American animation is a game-changer, in our opinion. He asks the hard question: how do we reconcile our ready laughter with the fact that many of these cartoons are irredeemably racist? Rather than simply condemning these works, he tries to understand the roots of their racist humour and why they still strike us as funny. There are no simple answers available, but the questions demand asking. And as we say in our Introduction, this is equally true of much of the uncomfortable laughter that these cartoons often engender as they trade in stereotypes, demean women or adopt ideologically reprehensible positions. But by so insistently focussing their energies on being funny, they draw our attention to why we laugh in the first place.

What has been the lasting legacy of the early cartoon shorts on contemporary forms of animation?

CK: The studio-era cartoons have become a part of our shared cultural heritage and especially in this 'age of allusion,' their importance to present-day animators cannot be ignored, because it is constantly on display. The technology of animation may be changing at a head-spinning rate, but its basic impulse--to keep audiences laughing--remains pretty much the same. So these earlier works will never cease to be a source of inspiration for animators nor of delight for viewers. Our anthology is a reminder that the pleasures of studio-era animation, as palpable as they are, demand careful consideration, as surely as do our often visceral reactions to those pleasures. We designed Funny Pictures to supply that consideration while never denying the satisfaction of the belly laugh. We didn't want to lose sight of the indelible fact that cartoons are funny--while still providing room for reflection.

Daniel Goldmark is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Charlie Keil is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking 1907-1913 and American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, and Practices.

January 20, 2012

Funny Pictures?: An Interview on Hollywood Animation with Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (Part One)

January 20, 2012/ Henry Jenkins

A few years ago, I featured here the draft of my essay, 'I Like to Sock Myself in the Face': Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism,"which updated some concepts first introduced by J. Hoberman about American comedy in the 1950s and sought to make a case that artists such as Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Basil Wolverton, and Olsen and Johnson, among others, were part of an informal "school" or "movement" which straddled media platforms. Now, the book for which this essay was written -- Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil's Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood -- has been published and I am featuring this week an interview with the two editors about the collection. For those of you who are interested in either the history of American cartoons or in live action comedy, this collection will be a rare treat, one which brings together many of the key people working in this space today, including Mark Langer, Donald Crafton, Richard Neupert, Susan Ohmer, Paul Wells, Nicholas Sammond, Philip Brophy, Rob King, Scott Curtis, and Linda Simensky. The contributions extend from considerations of the silent films of the Fleischer Brothers to the echoes of the studio era cartoons in contemporary animation practice, from discussions of racial stereotyping to the role of the musical score. Collectively, the essays both map the familiar and the less well known and contribute enormously to our understanding of how comic texts do or do not fit the logic of the classical Hollywood film as articulated by recent film scholarship. At its core, the book is making an argument that the history of live action comedy and animation are intertwined in ways more complex and more decisive than anyone had previously suggested.

In the interview which follows, the book's two editors, Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, chose to speak in a collective voice, offering their insights onto their goals for the project and what they've discovered along the way.

Let's start with the question you use to frame your book. Is Hollywood animation a subset of the broader field of comedy or is the cartoon a particular (and distractingly popular) strand of animation practice?

CK & DG: One of the points we wanted to make in putting together this anthology involved acknowledging the hybrid status of the Hollywood cartoon: it is both an example of studio-era comedy and of animation practice. Insofar as American animation developed primarily within versions of the studio system, it became indebted to principles and practices of that system pretty much from the outset. In fact, the routinized labour involved in producing animation would seem to exemplify Fordist principles of manufacture sometimes associated with the studio system. So animation could be seen as the consummate studio product.

But the Hollywood cartoon, with a few notable exceptions, also aligned itself with comic traditions, derived from comic strips, vaudeville, and other pre-existing forms of humorous representation. In that regard, it has strong ties to other forms of comedy coming out of Hollywood at this time.

As we say at the beginning of the book's introduction, Hollywood made efforts to define itself as a purveyor of entertainment, and nothing epitomized that moreso than the relentlessly comic cartoon. And yet there is the proviso: Hollywood cartoons often resist the pull of verisimilitude that we associate with classical period norms, and the cartoon's indebtedness to comedy often manifests itself in an admittedly bounded tendency toward anarchy.

As someone who works in comics studies, I am well aware that both comics and animation are constrained by a tendency to imagine them as a genre rather than as medium and from an assumption that they are, as your title suggests, just "funny pictures." What steps can or should be taken to break out of that ghetto?

CK & DG: One is to rethink the concept of genre, a move that has been undertaken productively by many different scholars in the field, Rick Altman being just one notable example. That would help us imagine the generic category of comedy more expansively, so as to see logical connections between the work of live-action comic directors and those working in animation. There are numerous points of overlap even if there are relevant medium-specific distinctions.

Another is to stop thinking about animation as a genre, period. That makes little sense, as animation is a broad type, in categorical terms, akin to documentary or experimental cinema. What links Hollywood cartoons to other animated work is the fact of animation, not any generic affiliations.

But what binds cartoons to their humorous live-action counterparts is the common aim of trying to evoke laughter from an audience: whether that makes all such films part of the same broad genre or mode is a separate matter. But at a certain level, Rabbit of Seville has more in common with A Night at the Opera than it does with Begone Dull Care, so the fact that these are FUNNY Pictures should not be undervalued

Does focusing a book on the comic aspects of animation run the risk of reinscribing the stereotypes or does it allow us a way to think past them?

CK & DG: Admitting to the inherently humorous nature of these films addresses an historical reality borne out of production decisions made at the time. Studios could have made serious animated films had they wanted to, and Disney certainly infused its features with a high degree of dramatic material (though rarely the shorts). But the cartoon as comic short remained the studio norm for decades, and even now, as Linda Simensky shows when writing about television animation in the 1990s and its indebtedness to the studio era, the vast majority of American animated film and television material is still designed to make audiences laugh.

Rather than seeing this as a stereotype, our volume seeks to understand how and why this happened. Many of the contributors take very seriously the cartoon's impetus to make us laugh and that proves to be a valuable analytical endeavour. From Susan Ohmer's examination of how Disney engaged in forms of audience response research in the 1940s to ensure that their cartoons maximized the production of humour through animation to Ethan de Seife's attentiveness to Frank Tashlin's mise-en-scene-based comedy, the essays in our volume demonstrate in quite varied ways how paying closer attention to the comedic aspects of American studio-based animation reveals a new dimension of a seemingly familiar period of classical filmmaking.

Tish Tash: The Animated World of Frank Tashlin

November 22, 2011

Comics and Graphic Storytelling: A Sample Syllabus

November 22, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Last week, I featured an interview with the editors and contributors to a new anthology, Critical Approaches to Comics, suggesting that it signaled the solidification of Comics Studies as a field of academic research. As it happens, I am putting the final touches to a syllabus I have been developing for a Comic Studies course which I will be teaching in the Spring here at the University of Southern California, one which makes extensive use of that collection. Today, I thought I would share with you the basic blue print of this class, which is designed to expose students to a range of different methods for studying the medium and to as broad a sample of (primarily) American comics and graphic storytelling as I could cram into one subject. I've found in the past that undergraduates often know a pretty limited sample of comics -- sometimes the mainstream super heroes, sometimes independent titles -- but they lack a depth of historical perspectives and a mental model of a full range of what comics can and are doing. As a consequence, the most valuable thing we can do as teachers is to expose them to as many comics as it is humanly possible to read in a semester and to diverse ways of reading and discussing what they are reading. At the moment, I have probably pushed this past the breaking point and I am most likely stripping down some of what is currently listed, but having pulled together such a rich list of materials, I figured why not share them with my readers.

JOUR 499 Special Topics: Comics and Graphic Storytelling

Henry Jenkins

"Comics are just words and images. You can do anything with words and images" - Harvey Pekar

In this class, we will take apart Pekar's core claim about the nature of his medium. Our approach is emphatically exploratory. While we will deal with many of the dominant figures of historical and contemporary comics, we will not necessarily observe proper boundaries (between high and popular art, between independent and mainstream comics, between historical and contemporary comics, between American and international comics). We want to explore the full range of different uses which have been made of this medium.

Our central focus will be on comics (including comic strips but primarily comic books and graphic novels) as a medium rather than as a genre - that is, we believe that the formal practices of comics can be deployed to tell a broad range of different kinds of stories and speak to diverse kinds of audiences. We want to put this proposition to the test by developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium and then looking at how artists have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts.

To do this, we will need to read lots and lots of comics - don't complain. I am assuming you are taking this class because you like, no, love, comics. Some of them will take you outside your comfort zone. Some of them will deal with controversial material. Some of them will look ugly or strange when you first encounter them. Some of them may frustrate or confuse you. But most of them, when everything is said and done, will entertain you. Few of you will read as broad a range of comics as you will encounter here, so use this reading to map the territory and expand your tastes. While I hope you like the comics I've chosen, I care more that you come to understand and appreciate them for what they tell us about the comics tradition.

Objectives

By the end of the class, the student will:

Be able to deploy a range of different methods for analyzing comics (including formal technique, genre, authorship, and intertextual analysis)
Grasp how comics tell stories through words and images
Be able to describe the basic vocabulary of graphic storytelling
Be familiar with the core figures who shaped the history of comics as a medium
Discuss the continuing relevance of the superhero genre as an window into understanding American life.
Be aware of the differences between American comics and the graphic traditions of other leading comics-producing countries, including Japan and France
Understand the differences between mainstream, independent, and underground comics traditions
Understand the relationship between the comic strip and comic book traditions
Developed a model for thinking about the ways comics have been a vehicle for journalism, history, autobiography, and social commentary
Explain how contemporary comics artists have built upon materials borrowed from the larger tradition, using past themes and icons to shed light on contemporary culture
Be able to discuss how women and minority authors have carved out a space for themselves within the comics tradition

Assignments and Grading

Page Analysis - Each week, the student should select one page from one of the comics we read and develop a one page analysis, which applies some of the concepts or methods we have been studying that week. Please turn in a copy of the page in question with your analysis to aid with the grading. The writing is intended to be exploratory and will be graded (Check, Check Plus, Check Minus) based on the student's abilities to look closely at what's on the page and to explain why the choices made matter in our understanding of the work as a whole. Please keep in mind that this will be the primary means by which I can appraise whether or not you have done the readings each week and whether or not you have understood them fully. Push yourself to apply a range of different methods of analysis over the course of the semester. (30 Percent) DUE DATE (Due every Friday)

Formal analysis paper - The student will select one of the comics we've read this term (or another of their own selection, with the approval of the instructor), and write a concise five page paper applying one of the methods of formal analysis we have examined in the first part of the class (McCloud, Eisner, Smith and Duncan) with the goal of helping us to better understand the techniques the graphic storyteller is deploying and how they contribute to the overall meaning and expressiveness of the book. Where possible, ground your analysis in the readings, though do not simply replicate what the critics we are reading have already done. Please provide concrete examples to support your claims. (20 Percent) DUE DATE (Feb. 22)

Author Analysis - Select a favorite comic book author, preferably one we have not read in the class, and develop an concise five page analysis of their specific qualities as an author, informed by the Randy Duncan essay we've read on Alan Moore. Draw examples from multiple texts from their body of work to show repeated patterns or themes. Discuss their relationship to their genres and to the comic book traditions which have informed their approach. Again, the paper will be evaluated based on the quality of the argument and your ability to support your claims with concrete examples. (30 Percent) DUE DATE (April 2)

Character analysis paper - Select a character from comic strips or comic books who has been especially meaningful to you. Write a concise five-page paper which explores some of the following questions: What do you see as the primary qualities of this character and how have they emerged over time as we have watched the character interact in a range of different situations and stories? What has changed and remained the same about the character over time? How have shifts in authorship impacted the character? Again, ground your analysis with concrete examples which support your claims. The paper will be evaluated based on the quality of the analysis and of the supporting evidence. (20 Percent) DUE DATE (Exam Week)

Books

(A Word to the Wise: Comics are expensive, and we are going to be reading lots of them in this class, so my recommendation is that you form a buddy or club system, much as you did when you read comics when you were younger. Go in together with 2-3 people and swap off the comics, so you each carry a more reasonable part of the price.)

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper, 1990, 224 pp.)

Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011, 328 pp.)

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library, Number 16 (self-published). (64 pp.)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road (Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 2000, 296 pp.).

Peter Kuper, The System (New York: DC Comics, 1997, 192 pp.)

Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, DayTripper (New York: Vertigo, 2011, 256 pp.)

David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp (New York: Pantheon, 2009, 344 pp.)

Craig Thompson, Blankets (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2011, 592 pp.)

David B., Epileptic (New York: Pantheon, 2006, 368 pp.)

Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002, 144 pp.)

James Sturm and Guy Davis, Fantastic Four Legends: Unstable Molecules (New York: Marvels, 2003, 128 pp.).

Keith Chow and Jerry Ma (eds.) Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (New York: New Press, 2009, 200 pp.)

Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke (New York: DC, 2008, 64 pp.)

Mike Carey and Peter Gross, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (New York: Vertigo, 2010, 144 pp.)

Joyce Farmer, Special Exits (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010, 208 pp.)

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2004. 160 pp.).

The rest of the Readings will be on Blackboard.

Schedule

Week 1

Monday, January 9 - Getting Started

Scott McCloud, "Setting the Record Straight," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 2-24

Wednesday, January 11 - Caricature and Illustration

Scott McCloud, "The Vocabulary of Comics," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 24-59.
Joseph Witek, "Comic Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family's Dirty Laundry", in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 27-42.
R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Excerpts from The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics (San Francisco: Last Gasp Comics, 1993), pp. 6-41.
R. Crumb, excerpts from The Book of Genesis Illustrated (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), Chapter 1-9 (28 pages)

Week 2

Monday, January 16 - Martin Luther King's Birthday - No class.

Wednesday, January 18 - The Gutter and The Frame

Scott McCloud, "Blood in the Gutter," Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 60-93.
Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library, Number 16.

Week 3

Monday, January 23 - The Shape of the Page

Will Eisner, "The Frame," Comics and Sequential Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 39-102.
"Will Eisner, The Spirit," in Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.) A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1981), pp. 269-294.
Will Eisner, "A Contract With God" and "Izzy the Cockroach and the Meaning of Life," The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 3-62, 187-204.

Wednesday, January 25 - Visual Storytelling in the Japanese Tradition
Pascal LeFevre, "Mise En Scene and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 71-83.
Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road (Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 2000).

Week 4

Monday, January 30 - Wordless Comics

David A. Berona, "Wordless Comics: The Imaginative Appeal of Peter Kiper's The System," in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 17-26.
Peter Kuper, The System (New York: DC Comics, 1997).

Wednesday, February 1 - Temporality and Seriality

Scott McCloud, "Time Frames" Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 94-117.
Richard McGuire, "Here," Raw Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 69-74.
Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, DayTripper (New York: Vertigo, 2011).

Week 5

Monday, February 6 - Line and Color

Scott McCloud, "Living in the Line" and "A Word About Color" Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pp. 118-137, 185-193.
Randy Duncan, "Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in Asterios Polyp," in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 43-54.
David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp (New York: Pantheon, 2009).

Wednesday, February 8 - Abstraction and Realism

Andrei Molotiu, "Abstract Form: Sequential Dynamism and Iconostasis in Abstract Comics and in Steve Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man," in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 84-100.
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, "The Final Chapter" in Bob Callahan (ed.) The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Stories: From Crumb to Clowes (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2004) pp. 122-141.
Stan Lee and Jim Steranko, "The Strange Death of Captain America" in Bob Callahan (ed.) The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Stories: From Crumb to Clowes (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2004), pp. 64-84.
David Mack, "Chapter One," Daredevil/Echo: Vision Quest (New York: Marvel, 2010), pp. 1-23.

Week 6

Monday, February 13 - An Art of Tensions

Charles Hatfield, "An Art of Tensions: The Otherness of Comics Reading", Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 32-67.
Craig Thompson, Blankets (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2011).

Wednesday, February 15 - Text and Image

Douglas Wolk, "David B: The Battle Against the Real World," Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (New York: Da Capo, 2007), pp. 139-146.
Herge, "TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn, " Herge's TinTin Adventures, vol. 3 (London: Methuen, 1990).
David B., Epileptic (New York: Pantheon, 2006).

Week 7

Monday, February 20 - Presidents' Day - No class.

Wednesday, February 22 - Comic Characters

Walt Kelly, The Ever-Loving Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 27-69.
Al Capp, The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002).
Carl Barks, "The Second Richest Duck," Uncle Scrooge Vs. Flintheart Glomgord (Prescott, AZ: Gladstone), pp. 1-20.
Jeff Smith, "The Great Cow Race," Bone: Book Two (Columbus, OH: Cartoon Books, 2004), pp. 153-258.

Formal Analysis Paper Due

Week 8

Monday, February 27 - The Origins of a Genre: The Superhero 1

Peter Coogan, "Genre: Reconstructing the Superhero in All-Star Superman" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 203-220.
Grant Morrison, "The SunGod and the Dark Knight," Supergods (New York: Spigel and Grau, 2011), pp. 3-26.
Jerome Siegel and Joe Schuster, "Superman," in E. Nelson Bridwell, Superman From the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Crown, 1983), pp. 23-127.
Grant Morrison, Excerpts from All-Star Superman (New York: DC Comics, 2008), TBD.

Wednesday, February 29 - The Legacy of a Genre: The Superhero 2

Scott Bukattman, "X-Bodies: The Torment of The Mutant Superhero," Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 48-80.
Gary Conway, Gil Kane and John Romita Sr., "The Night Gwen Stacey Died," Amazing Spiderman 121-122, 1973, pp.1-25.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "The Incredible Hulk #1," The 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time (New York: Marvel, 2001), pp.1-25
Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, "Monsters Among Us," Marvels (New York: Marvel, 2010).
Brian Michael Bendis, "Side-Tracked," Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 5 (New York: Marvel, 2003), pp. 1-22.

Week 9

Monday, March 5 - Genre And Multiplicity: The Superhero 3

Paul Chadwick, "A Stone Among Stones," The Complete Concrete (Portland, OR: Dark Horse, 1994), pp. 11-38.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "Fantastic Four #1," The 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time (New York: Marvel, 2001), pp.1-25.
James Sturm and Guy Davis, Fantastic Four Legends: Unstable Molecules (New York: Marvels, 2003).

Wednesday, March 7 - Genre and Ideology: The Superhero 4

Keith Chow and Jerry Ma (eds.) Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (New York: New Press, 2009).
Stanford Carpenter, "Truth Be Told: Authorship and the Creation of the Black Captain America," in Jim McLaughlin (ed.) Comics as Philosophy (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 46-62.

March 12-17 - Spring Recess - No class.

Week 10

Monday, March 19 - Authorship (The Writer)

Matthew J. Smith, "Auteur Criticism: The Re-Visionary Works of Alan Moore" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 178-189.
Alan Moore and Rick Veitch, "How Things Work Out," Tomorrow Stories 2, not numbered (10 pages)
Alan Moore, "Secret Origins," Supreme: The Story of the Year (New York: Checker, 2002), pp. not numbered (23 Pages)
Alan Moore, "The Radiant Heavenly City", Promethea Vol.1 (New York: America's Best, 1999), pp. 1-36.
Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke (New York: DC, 2008).

Wednesday, March 21 - Authorship (The Publisher)

Julia Round, "Is This a Book?': DC Vertigo and The Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s," in Paul Williams and James Lyons (ed.) The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), pp. 14-30.
Jean-Paul Gabilliet, "Production," Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), pp. 111-132.
Neil Gaiman with Charles Vest and Malcolm Jones III, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in The Absolute Sandman Volume One (New York: Vertigo, 2006), pp.495-519.
Bill Willingham and Lan Medina, "Old Tales Revisited," Fables, 1, no pages (aprox. 32 pages)
Mike Carey and Peter Gross, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (New York: Vertigo, 2010).

Week 11

Monday, March 26 - Crossing Borders

Douglas Wolk, "Gilbert Hernandez: Spiraling into the System" and "Jaimie Hernandez: Mad Love," in Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (New York: Da Capo, 2007), pp. 181-202.
Jaimie Hernandez, "100 Rooms," Locas: The Maggie and Hopie Stories (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004), pp. 60-90.
Gilbert Hernandez, "Heartbreak Soup," Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004), pp. 13-57.

Wednesday, March 28 - Comics and Reality 1: Comics Journalism

Amy Kiste Nyberg, "Comics Journalism: Drawing on Words to Picture the Past in Safe Area Gorazde" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. .
Joe Sacco, excerpt from Palestine (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002), pp. 81-141
Joe Sacco, excerpt from Safe Area Gorazde (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002), pp. 1-56.

Week 12

Monday, April 2 - Comics and Reality 2: Comics and Everyday Life

Joseph Witek, "'You Can Do Anything With Words and Pictures: Harvey Pekar's American Splendor," Comic Books as History (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), pp. 121-156.
Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, excerpts from Local (Oni, 2008), no pages (aprox. 60 pages)
Harvey Pekar, excerpts from American Splendor (New York: Ballatine, 1987), pp. no pages (aprox. 30 pages).

Author Analysis Paper Due

Wednesday, April 4 - Comics and Reality 3: Autobiography

Joyce Farmer, Special Exits (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010).
C. Tyler, "Gone," Late Bloomer (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005), pp. 96-102.

Week 13

Monday, April 9 - Comics and History 1

Hillary L. Chute, "Graphic Narrative as Witness: Marjane Satrapi," Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 135-174.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

Wednesday, April 11 - Comics and History 2

Joseph Witek, "Comic Books as History: The First Shots at Fort Sumter," Comic Books as History (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), pp. 13-47.
Ho Che Anderson, excerpt from King: A Comic's Biography (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010), pp. 94-153.
Howard Cruise, excerpt from Stuck Rubber Baby (New York: Vertigo, 2011), pp.41-85.

Week 14

Monday, April 16 - High/Low

Henry Jenkins, "Comics as Debris: Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers" (work in Progress).
Art Spigelman, excerpts from Breakdowns: Portraits of the Artist as a Young %@*! (New York: Pantheon, 2008), pp. . No Pages (13 Pages)
Basil Wolverton, "Powerhouse Pepper: A Nightmare Scare," Raw Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 175-180.
Jack Cole, "Plastic Man: Plague of the Plastic People," in Art Spigelman, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (New York: DC, 2001), pp. . No pages (13 pages)
Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman, "Superdooperman," Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.) A Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1981, pp. 311-318.

Wednesday, April 18 - Haunted By the Past

Harvey Kurtzman, "Corpse on the Imjin!," Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (eds.) A Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1981), pp. 305-311.
Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Jack Davis, "Foul Play," Grant Geissman (ed.) Foul Play! (New York: Harper, 2005) pp. 83-89.
Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Joe Orlando, "Judgement Day," Grant Geissman (ed.) Foul Play! (New York: Harper, 2005) pp. 147-153.
Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Reed Crandall, "The High Cost of Dying," Grant Geissman (ed.) Foul Play! (New York: Harper, 2005) pp. 217-223.
Bernie Kriegstein, "Murder Dream," B. Krigstein Comics (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004), pp. 179-184.
Charles Burns, "Teen Plague," Raw Vol. 2, No.1, pp. 5-25.

Week 15

Monday, April 23 - Comparative Perspectives

Henry Jenkins, "Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?" in Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (eds.) Critical Approaches to Comics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1-14.
Kim Deitch, "Karla in Komieland," Raw Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 59-68.
Kim Deitch, "The Cult of the Clown," Beyond the Pale! (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1989), pp. 43-52.
Kim Deitch, "The Stuff of Dreams," Alias the Cat! (New York: Pantheon, 2007), pp. no pages (23 pages)

Wednesday, April 25 - The Future of Comics?

Scott McCloud, "The Infinite Canvas", Reinventing Comics (New York: Harper, 2000), pp. 222-228.
Scott McCloud, "Planet Earth," "The Conversation," Zot! 1987-1991 (New York: Harper, 2008), pp. 17-64, 517-534.
Scott McCloud, "Hearts and Minds," Zot! Online, http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/zot/index.html
Scott McCloud, "The Right Number," http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/trn-intro/index.html
Scott McCloud, "My Obsession With Chess," http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html

Week 16 - Date TBD (May 2-9)

Character Analysis Paper Due

November 18, 2011

Whither Comic Studies?: A Conversation with the Editors and Contributors of Critical Approaches to Comics (Part Two)

November 18, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Many American fans know little to nothing about comics beyond the United States, Japan, and maybe France. What steps can we take to insure a more global conception of Comics Studies, one which engages more fully with the development of the medium in a range of different national contexts?

Leonard Rifas: Many (most?) of the American and other students who sign up for my class arrive claiming to know little to nothing about comics in the United States, Japan or France! To emphasize a more global conception of comics in the lesson on defining comics, I have passed out examples of cartooning in various formats from around the world (China, Nigeria, South Africa, Italy, Mexico, etc.) and asked them decide which of these specimens are "comic books" or "graphic novels" and for what reasons. I assign as a final project that they do presentations based on research questions of their own choosing, and some of those projects have focused on comics from Korea, Chile, and other nations. I introduce my lessons with news items about comics, and in the first three weeks of this quarter, these items have included news pertaining to comics or cartoonists in Syria, India, Brazil, Japan, and other places (but especially the many comics-related events here in our own city, Seattle.)

David A. Beronä: Associations like the International Comic Arts Forum and journals like the International Journal of Comic Art have been important avenues in opening up our understanding of global comics and cartoonists. Incorporating comics from other countries into our libraries and classrooms would support this effort. As a scholar of the wordless comic, I also believe this specific genre is the best ambassador for cultural understanding between countries and provides a context for commonality.

What relationship can/should exist between comic scholars, comic fans, and comics creators?

David A. Beronä: I believe the role of the comic scholar is essential in raising an understanding of the comic creator's work that is enjoyed or sometimes overlooked by fans. I see this relationship in the shape of a triangle, with each role important to the other two. The creator must have fans but also scholars to open up interpretations and insight that heighten not only the experience for the fans but also for the creators--providing them with a serious interpretation of their work beyond the entertainment value.

A recurring fear among students is that the academic study of popular medium, such as comics, will destroy our pleasure. This seems especially strong with comics given the history of dealing with comics as "subliterate" or "transgressive," often defined in opposition to school culture. How might we address those concerns?

Randy Duncan: Some creators, such as Dave Sim and Frank Miller, have an antipathy toward comics scholarship because they worry that studying comics in college will make them too respectable and analyzing comics will suck all of the fun out reading them. However, I find that for the vast majority of my students understanding more about the evolution of the art form, understanding how words and images work together, and knowing how to look for intertextuality and subtext makes reading a comic book or graphic novel a richer, more satisfying experience.

Leonard Rifas: I have built my class around the history of how comics earned their low reputation and how they went on to gain legitimacy. Attendance at the lecture which deals with the most disturbing images is optional, and every quarter some students chose an alternate assignment because they prefer not to have to see those images.

What models exist for thinking about comics authorship? In what ways is authorship complicated by the collaboration of authors and artists? By the history of corporate ownership over certain characters?

Randy Duncan: Will Eisner used to stress that comic book writing is not simply the words. To Eisner the act of writing a comic involved choosing both words and images and weaving them together as one unified art form. He felt the best work was done by a cartoonist, a writer/artist, and that the art form was compromised when the act of writing was artificially divided between a scripter and a penciller. It is true that much of the collaborative work produced in the industrial process of mainstream comics is not very unified; the individual contributions are often stitched together like some sort of Frankenstein's monster. Yet some collaborations (e.g. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso) seem to produce comic book writing as tightly woven as that done by a cartoonist. In these instances it makes no sense to consider the scripter the author of the work; they are clearly co-authors.

Why has Comics Studies been so slow to develop when compared to say game or internet studies?

Matthew J. Smith: I think that the larger social stigma attached to comics has been historically more pervasive in academia than anywhere else, but I don't think academics are entirely to blame for holding a poor perception of the medium. When the gaming and internet have come under attack, those industries have not overcorrected in response to criticism the way that comics publishers did in the 1950s, inaugurating decades of self-censorship through the Comics Code. When the bulk of your material is ghettoized as comics was, it's difficult for a wider audience of academics to consider the medium's potential. Thankfully, several of our intellectual forebearers were not so narrow-minded as to dismiss comics outright, and we'd like to think that the arrival of this book takes the field one step closer to wider acknowledgment as the legitimate field of study it is.

Granted, the field has some work yet to do, and Randy and I have talked about the lessons we could learn from early Film Studies in particular in a post on the Comics Forum.

What relationship should Comics Studies posit between comics as a medium and other forms of visual expression and graphic storytelling--ranging from the Artist Book to the illustrated children's book?

David A. Beronä: American culture has always been more accepting of both artists' books and picture books than comics, though it has been comics, under the guise of graphic novels, that has gained a growing acceptance by readers. There is a cross over that is being address in each of these forms and ultimately display not a comparison of forms but simply our insatiable appetite for visual storytelling. The stuffy didactic generations who were "told" a story has evolved into a generation that wants to be "shown" a story, which allows a greater personal interpretation of content and hopefully for change in our lives.

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (as well as the Will Eisner books which informed it) have helped to define the critical studies of comics around formal issues. To what degree does this tradition still define what we say about comics? What other models does the book offer which might break from this focus on understanding the visual building blocks of the comics medium?

Randy Duncan: One of the reasons we wanted distinct sections (i.e., Form, Content, Production, Context, and Reception) was to be sure the book offered a significant number of models that went beyond formal analysis.

Matthew J. Smith: Indeed, my contribution is an adaptation of film studies auteur theory (which itself has been previously adapted to television studies). Thus, the text not only covers formalist approaches, but moves beyond them to address ethnography, historical approaches, political economy, etc. By selecting a broader range of contributions, we wanted to demonstrate the vitality of the field where multiple approaches to the generation of knowledge are welcomed.

Is there a canon of Comics Studies--a set of basic creators or works that are essential for understanding the medium? How has such a canon emerged--through popular or academic discourse? Are canons an inevitable/valuable aspect of constructing an academic field around the study of comics? Why or why not?

Randy Duncan: In this postmodern age canons are considered elitist and exclusionary. Yet, many scholars who feel that way cannot resist the urge to makes lists. A number of the Critical Approaches contributors took part in the Best Comics Poll at the Hooded Utilitarian site, and then we had great fun debating those lists on the Comix-Scholars List. And, of course, canons are inadvertently established by what scholars choose to study. For this project Matt and I didn't want to be the canon makers so we let each contributor chose the work they wanted to analyze. We had recruited a diverse group of contributors so we were confident the works chosen would be suitably diverse.

Leonard Rifas: No particular work is essential for understanding comics, but some works have deservedly become common reference points for comics scholars, and I introduce my students to many of those works, beginning in week one with McCloud, Eisner, Harvey, Cohn, Groensteen, and Horrocks, and later including Wertham, Dorfman & Mattelart, Schodt, Hatfield, and others. The canonical creators I introduce include Töpffer, Kirby, Crumb, Hergé, Tezuka, Barks, Spiegelman, and more. The value of a canon includes recognizing the particularly successful examples of work in this medium.

Contributors

David A. Beronä is a woodcut novel and wordless comics historian, author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008) and a 2009 Harvey Awards nominee. He is the Dean of the Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire, and a member of the visiting faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Randy Duncan is a professor of communication at Henderson State University. He is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (Continuum, 2009) and co-founder of the Comics Arts Conference. Duncan serves on the boards of the International Journal of Comic Art and the Institute for Comics Studies.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California and the former Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. His 14 published books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, and the forthcoming Spreadable Media: Tracing Value in a Networked Culture.

Leonard Rifas teaches about comics at Seattle Central Community College and the University of Washington, Bothell. He founded EduComics, an educational comic book company, in 1976.

Marc Singer is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is the co-editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Ashgate, 2009) and the author of a monograph on Grant Morrison, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.

Matthew J. Smith is a professor of communication at Wittenberg University. He is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (Continuum, 2009) and former president of the Ohio Communication Association. In 2009, Wittenberg's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award.

November 14, 2011

Whither Comic Studies?: A Conversation with the Editors and Contributors of Critical Approaches to Comics (Part One)

November 14, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Even as a child, I knew that reading comics demonstrated a thorough lack of discipline -- it was something I did in the summer or at home, sick in bed. In a world before comics shops and subscriptions, my generation would grab whatever was available to us on the spin-racks at the local drug store -- there was not yet a canon (fan or academic) to tell us what we were supposed to read. We read for no purpose other than pleasure -- there was no method to tell us how we were supposed to read. Indeed, many adults were there to remind us what a monumental waste of time all of this was -- there was nothing like Publish or Perish pushing us to read more comics. We read in secret -- under the covers by flashlight, hidden in a textbook in class -- with the knowledge that there was something vaguely oppositional about our practices. You didn't stand up in front of a classroom and do a book report on what you'd read, let alone frame a scholarly lecture or essay. Or at least this is the myth of what it meant to read comics as it has been constructed nostalgically by several generations of fans turned critics and intellectuals. Of course, like all of the other aging "boy wonders" constructing that mythical golden age, I should know because I was there.

Given this collective history, why should we discipline the reading of comics?

This is the opening from my essay, "Should We Discipline the Study of Comics?," which serves as the introduction of an exciting new anthology, Critical Approaches to Comics, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan.

The appearance of such a collection marks a significant turning point in the emergence of comic studies as a field for academic investigation, bringing together more than twenty respected comics critics and analysts to describe their methodological and theoretical assumptions and apply them to specific works. The result is intended as a textbook for use in the expanding number of courses in comics and graphic storytelling, being offered in universities and colleges. Indeed, I plan to use the book as a key secondary texts running through my own comic studies class, which I am teaching this spring at USC.

The book's essays are organized into units structured around Style, Content, Production, Context, and Reception. These categories reflect the diversity of disciplinary perspectives which have been brought to bear on comics. I have gotten to know many of the contributors through our participation in the comic studies track at the San Diego ComicCon, but it says something that we are more likely to run into each other at a fan-run event than at any academic conference.

Critical Approaches to Comics is going to be an important book in terms of defining and organizing this field, which has been surprisingly late to coalesce, given the centrality of comics as a medium to any discussion of popular culture in the 20th and 21st century. As such, my introduction was intended as a reflection on what lessons comics studies might take from other closely related fields such as film, television, and game studies, and an outline of other potential moments when some form of comic studies might have emerged. Specifically, I suggest what the study of comics would have looked like if this collection had been pulled together in response to the writings of Gilbert Seldes in the early 20th century, Frederic Wertham at mid-century, or more recently, Scott McCloud and Art Spigelman, each of whom would have different thoughts about what texts should be studied and why, about who should be included in the conversation and what languages we should be using, and about the core issues which comic studies would most urgently address.

I've used the event of this book's release to collect thoughts from the editors and some of the contributors on some core issues surrounding the current state and future directions of the academic study of comics.

The publication of a methods case book represents a key step in the institutionalization of Comics Studies as an academic field. As I suggest in my introduction, I experience this process with some ambivalence having gone through the establishment of other academic fields studying popular culture, including television or game studies. How do you characterize the current state of comics studies? Should it remain a multidisciplinary field of investigation or should it take on the properties of a discipline?

Matthew J. Smith: Given the increasing numbers of books, academic conferences, and college-level courses focused on the study of comics, I think Comics Studies is already coalescing. However, I do not think our aim is to build another silo on our college campuses but to preserve the open commons we seem to be interacting with one another in. Right now the field's greatest strength--and the one we celebrate in Critical Approaches--is its multi-disciplinarity. Moving forward from this point in history should involve how to capitalize on that and still forge a more coherent identity that universities can acknowledge and appreciate.

Marc Singer: We don't have to equate institutionalization with the formation of a single discipline. Comics studies should be and probably always will be multidisciplinary because comics themselves fall across the intersections of multiple disciplines--art, literature, mass communications, economics, and so on. But building an academic field doesn't have to mean codifying a single critical approach. Institutionalization supports research and teaching by exposing new scholars to earlier work, preserving their work for future generations, and modeling standards of academic scholarship. The challenge for Comics Studies is to build the professional practices and institutional support of a mature academic field without narrowing the range of disciplines, methods, and approaches available to scholars.

David A. Beronä: Just as graphic novels are being taught more in college and universities, a new generation of readers is enthusiastically reading comics without any preconceptions from older generations. This growing readerships is evidenced in school libraries where graphic novels account for a large percentage of the circulation. There is also a cross over of graphic novels with picture books, which encourages a wider readership of young readers growing into adulthood who will look for more adult themes in comics to reflect their growing interests.

Art Spiegelman has been a major champion of the idea that graphic novels constitute a distinctive literary and artistic genre. What links do you see between what is happening around comics in the universities and this larger project to legitimize comics as an expressive medium? Will we ever reach a point where we do not need to, as the title of another book puts it, defend comics?

Randy Duncan: I think we are already at that point. Graphic novels are being read in book clubs and selected for university Common Book programs. Certainly comics scholars are tired of having to make the legitimacy argument and many of them are simply refusing to do so in their work. Of course, the argument will still have to be made within the institution when we have to convince a chair or dean to add a comics course or consider comics scholarship in tenure and promotion decisions.

At most comic shops I know, there is a physical separating out of independent/alternative and mainstream comics. How have you dealt with this cultural divide in the book and to what degree does it shape the field of Comics Studies?

Randy Duncan: We chose to ignore the divide. A lot of the scholars we admire are quite comfortable slipping back and forth across that divide as if did not exist - writing a book about alternative comics, presenting a paper about Kirby's Devil Dinosaur, posting about an early 20th century comic strip, teaching a course on superheroes, and so on.

David A. Beronä: A comic is a comic is a comic is a comic! From the serious tone of the woodcut novels by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward to the edginess of the Vertigo line of comics; from manga to mini comics, this media provides a visual story which may be thought provoking or not but is forever entertaining.

Contributors

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California and the former Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. His 14 published books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, and the forthcoming Spreadable Media: Tracing Value in a Networked Culture.

Leonard Rifas teaches about comics at Seattle Central Community College and the University of Washington, Bothell. He founded EduComics, an educational comic book company, in 1976.

November 01, 2011

When Outlaws are Innovators: An Interview with Jonathan Taplin (Part Two)

November 01, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

There's a recurring focus here on the influence of technology on the creative process, though the picture we get seems somewhat inconsistent -- sometimes limited means and low tech generate creative strategies, while other times artists embrace the emergent properties of new media. How would you describe the relationship between artistic experimentation and technological innovation?

Well you know sometimes I'm a skeptic about the promise of technological innovation leading to artistic breakthroughs. We used to talk about the 80-20 rule in movies and music. 80% of the business would be done by 20% of the content. Professor Christian Sandvig showed me some data last week that on You Tube maybe 3% of the content gets 90% of the views. And most of that content is music videos from major artists. Now I realize that You Tube allows any filmmaker to get their work seen and I'm not interested in going back to the days of the early 1970's. If I had been unable to sell Mean Streets to one of the majors in 1974, it would have literally disappeared. There were no "indie" distributors of any consequence.

The other side of this relates to some work we have been doing with T Bone Burnett on the future of the music business. Bone makes the point that the digital revolution has actually taken us backwards in the quality of the sound we listen to. In other words, that vinyl album of Jimi Hendrix--Are You Experienced, was much fuller and warmer than listening to the MP3 with a pair of ear buds.

The other part of the work is figuring out how the musicians get paid as well as the songwriters do. When you go into a Gap store, you are paying for the music they stream in the store. The same with restaurants or bars or elevators. But that money only goes to the music publishers, so all my friends who were songwriters in the 1960's are doing quite well and all who were just drummers or singers are poor as church mice.

So while the digital revolution is certainly democratizing the distribution of media, we need to understand that there are winners and losers. Just look at the relative fortunes of Google and The New York Times. Has Google built a $30 billion ad business on the back of other company's content? Maybe?

A central concern here is the ways that these artists have dealt with issues of democracy and racial equality. What roles do you think the arts have played in shaping the public's perception of and acceptance of an increasingly multicultural society?

I think the "modern arts" have done more to shape a multicultural society than almost any other force. I say "modern", in the sense that in 19th Century America, the most popular kind of public entertainment was the minstrel show.

So the modern art of jazz changes that completely. Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong bring this incredibly original music to a white audience that had entertained itself by watching white men do blackface routines of the most grotesque caricatures. When Benny Goodman played at Carnegie Hall with a black piano player, Teddy Wilson, in the early forties it was considered incredibly daring. So we have come a long way and the artists have been the ones to push the edge of the envelope. Even as late as 1957, right wing writers were railing against rock and roll because they thought that if a young white kid loved Chuck Berry, it would inevitably lead to "race mixing". And of course that was true.

You describe throughout how crisis in capitalism provoke great art. What does this suggest about our current moment? Will the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements be equally generative? Why or why not?

I think the jury is out on this question. Certainly the artist's role in the "Great Refusal" that Marcuse describes, does not seem to be present right now. There is no Woody Guthrie or Joan Baez singing to either OWS or the Tea Party. The crisis of capitalism that was the great depression certainly generated a lot of art because the government thought it was just as important to keep artists off the unemployment line as auto workers. So the WPA in the 1930's funded cats like Jackson Pollack and Orson Welles. They sent Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange out into the deepest pockets of rural poverty to take photographs that inspire us still today. I think if Obama proposed a Federal Arts program like that of the 1930's he would be probably decried as an chardonnay drinking elitist and denounced by both the radio talk show hosts and the House Republicans. Certainly you see the meager amounts of money provided to the NEA and NEH being cut back each year. The City of Paris spends more money supporting artists than our Federal government.

The second part of the current disconnect stems from the weird balance between the current anger and the utopian optimism of many of the Vanguard movements I wrote about in Outlaw Blues. As someone pointed out Martin Luther King's most famous speech was "I have a dream", not "I have a nightmare". It's very hard to sustain a social movement just on anger, which is why the Tea Party movement has probably already peaked. As for Occupy Wall Street, my sense is they really believe in direct democracy. When I visited the New York encampment, it was organized like a late 1960's commune. Now the history of communes in America, which I talk about in the book, has been a real struggle to demonstrate (in Martin Duberman's words) "that individual development and group membership are complimentary not contradictory goals". That is really hard if you are living and working with the same people 24/7 like at OWS or in a commune in the wilds of New Mexico. But it's not so hard to reconcile these two forces, as you and I know, around the groups we support in our academic lives like Project New Media Literacy or the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Near the end of the book, you shared some insights into the impact of Steve Jobs on American culture. Is Jobs a friend or a foe to the tradition you are describing across this book?

Steve Jobs was a hero to me because he somehow was able to bring Art and Science together in a way that I strive for. He was versed in the humanities and was curious about technology. Its clear to me that Wozniak was the coder and Jobs was the marketer at the beginning of Apple. When I hear educators talking about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), it drives me crazy. Our schools are art and humanities starved as it is and they think the solution is teaching MORE STEM.

As Steve Jobs pointed out to Walter Isaccson in the new biography, if he had never taken calligraphy at Reed College, the attention to font, which distinguished the early Mac, would have never happened. We are good in the country at building objects of desire---I Pads, Scorsese movies, Springsteen songs, Harley motorcycles. I'm not sure our comparative advantage over India and China is STEM. Its what Steve Jobs did, which was STEAM---Art plus technology. I think that is the vision that shapes almost everything we are doing at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. If somehow we can blend the humanities and engineering in one lab, we will have succeeded. We certainly feel our early efforts to team communications scholars from Annenberg with engineers from Viterbi have been rather successful.

What are you able to accomplish by publishing this book electronically, which would be hard if not impossible to achieve through print?

When I first got the I Pad, I instantly knew it would make a new kind of book possible. Outlaw Blues has over 100 embedded videos that are an integral part of the text. I don't think the story would have been half as interesting if I had not had the videos. I could describe the scene at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan first went electric, but you would never understand it as well as being able to see the video of that moment.

What is so cool is that this circles back to this relationship between art and technology. In doing the film research, I realized an explosion of video source material right after World War II. So the 16 MM optical sound film was really perfected by Kodak in 1935, but it was World War II that the war cameramen embraced it because the cameras were so much lighter to carry around while dodging bullets in battle. After the war, a whole new documentary style using light weight cameras begins, and with it the ability to record on film almost everything. So Cartier Bresson's "decisive moment" gets extended to the "decisive 5 minutes"---the length of an early reel of 16 MM film.

You have been working with T. Bone Burnett on a project concerning the Future of Music. What can you tell us about this project?

T-Bone and I are both concerned about two problems in the contemporary music business. The first is sound. The current MP3 track, heard through ear buds on your I Phone is a pale approximation of what the musician heard when he finished the mix in the recording studio. The basis for the MP3 was invented in the Bell Labs in 1979! Remember the early modems in the 1980's were 24 KBPS, so you needed to strip out a huge number of frequencies to compress a music file to travel over a 24 K modem. But today we have 10 MBPS wireless bandwidth with 4 G. Why should we be confined to this shitty audio codec?

The second part is to figure out how to get musicians paid for recordings. As I said before, the songwriters get paid for every stream:in a bar, restaurant, clothing store, elevator, internet radio station, etc. But the musicians don't get a cent and must rely only on CD sales and I Tunes downloads. As long as most of the world thinks its cool to listen to pirated content, then the musicians don't earn a dime. Some of my students say, "well the musicians make their money from touring, the records are just a portion for their concerts." So you are telling me that Aretha Franklin, having made some of the great music of the 60's and 70's has to continue to tour, just to survive? That doesn't seem fair when millions of people are listening to "Respect" this year.

The best solution we've come up with is a broadband access license of a couple of dollars on top of your broadband bill which goes into a general copyright fund and is paid out to artists based on how many of their songs were listened to illegally per month around the world. A company called Big Champagne already has the data by crawling the web. It wouldn't be hard and it would generate about $2 billion per month for content creators.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Taplin is Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival seven times.

In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia. In May of 2010 he was appointed Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

October 31, 2011

When Outlaws are Innovators: An Interview with Jonathan Taplin (Part One)

October 31, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

My new USC colleague, Jonathan Taplin, is like the cool older cousin that everyone of my generation always wished they had. He was at Woodstock and was hanging out with Bob Dylan and his mob at the Newport Folk Festival the day Dylan went electric. He organized The Concert for Bangladesh and produced Mean Streets. He went on tour with The Band and he was behind the scenes helping to negotiate the deal which saved the Disney Corporation. Now, he's best buddies with T. Bone Barnett and he's the founder of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. And he lived to tell the tale. In fact, his new book, Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars, recounts these and many other events which changed popular culture (especially popular music). His memory is vivid, his attention to detail is sharp, and his writing is compelling.

But, Outlaw Blues is more than simply Taplin's memoirs, fascinating though it is to read these stories. Taplin sees the big picture, and he uses the book to document what he calls the "American Vanguard", which he traces back to Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain (suggesting that these "dead white guys" were as lively and controversial in their own times as Eric Clapton was in his.) He writes about Louis Armstrong, Upton Sinclair, Orson Welles, Jackson Pollack and Edward R. Murrow, with the same vivid attention to details and personality as he describes what happened when Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock or discusses a young Martin Scorsese's uncomfortable reactions tof Hollywood hedonism.

His account connects these phenomenal artistic accomplishments to issues of technological innovation, shifting business models, and above all, the dramatic social, political, and cultural debates of the period. Before everything is said and done, Outlaw Blues ends up being the hidden history of America from the mid-19th into the early 21st century, one full of lessons for those who are trying to make sense of the media changes that are helping to define our present moment.

But, Outlaw Blues is still more than that, because it is the first publication of a new Annenberg Innovation Lab initiative which is seeking to re-imagine the affordances of the book. Most existing ebooks slavishly and mechanically reproduce printed books and utterly fail to take advantage of the properties of this emerging platform. So, when they made the Kindle version of Convergence Culture, my publishers had trouble reproducing the sidebars, which are a central feature of the book, and were designed to approximate the juxtapositions we associate with the web. But the Annenberg Innovation Lab believes that ebooks can be media rich and interactive, even participatory, experiences. But, they can achieve that goal only if they are "born digital," only if they are designed for this platform from the get-go.

Outlaw Blues, thus, included hundreds of clips, allowing us to see parts of the musical performances the book describes, and thanks to Taplin's behind-the-scene's perspectives, watch them with new eyes, because we have a clearer sense of what the people on stage are thinking. And the musical bits exist alongside bits of interviews, documentaries, and other key media texts of the period. Here's where you go to learn more about this "innovative" project.

In this interview, I asked Taplin to focus on some of the larger themes -- about the nature of creativity and popular culture, about art and politics, about technological change and personal expression -- which run through the book.

Throughout Outlaw Blues, you describe the "American Vanguard." What do you see as the characteristics of this tradition? What roles did it play in shaping American Arts and Letters?

I guess I prefer the term "vanguard" to French "Avant Garde", but I think they have the same intent. Webster's defines it as "An intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts". Emerson returned from Europe in 1837 and said that we had had quit our "extreme Eurocentrism" and celebrate a unique American culture. Almost from the beginning, that literature found itself in cultural and political opposition to the establishment. Whether it was Emerson's break with Protestant theology or Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, where he took on both slavery and imperialism; the Vanguard was ahead of even the most progressive politician in America. And I think this tradition continued up through Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Pete Seeger---all the way to Bob Dylan's famous song "Oxford Town", with these lyrics:

Oxford Town in the afternoon/ Ev'rybody singin' a sorrowful tune/

Two men died 'neath the Mississippi moon/Somebody better investigate soon

But beyond the political, I think the more important element was their role in experimentation. Two trumpet players, Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong basically invented the idea of improvisation and the solo in jazz. Jackson Pollack helped invent the language of abstract expressionism. Orson Welles reinvented both the radio drama (with War of the Worlds) and the motion picture (with Citizen Kane). So somehow the combination of experimentation and willingness to stand in opposition to the conventional wisdom are the defining characteristics of the American Vanguard.

You often define the "American Vanguard" is opposition to the commercial culture of the same period, yet many of those you discuss -- from Louis Armstrong to Dylan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Elvis -- are among the most popular artists of all time. So, what relationship are you positing between being an "outlaw" artists and the commercial marketplace?

The funny thing is that when Bob Dylan started making records, Frankie Avalon and Fabian were on top of the hit parade. When Elvis first started making records, Frank Sinatra, who was the king of pop music in 1955 said that rock and roll, "is sung, played and written by cretinous goons." The difference between what we think of as mainstream culture and what the kids were liking has of course been with us for a long time.

When Mezz Mesrow and Eddie Condon, two white kids from the suburbs went down to a black club in Chicago in 1935 to see Louis Armstrong, they were both pissing off their parents and potentially the patrons of the club. The fact is that youth culture did not became the dominant commercial culture until the mid 1960's. Mitch Miller and his Orchestra were the largest selling act for Columbia Records in 1963. So in a sense the Vanguard musical artists changed the nature of commercial culture. As Andy Warhol pointed out, what was weird about the 1960's was not that artists became more commercial, but rather that commercial culture became more artistic.

What motivated you to write Outlaw Blues through a combination of memoir and historical perspectives? What relationship are you positing in this way between what happened in the late 20th century and the broader history of popular culture?

I had been studying what the Austrian economist Schumpeter called "Long Waves"---the notion that history and economics move in 60 year cycles. This was all part of his theory of creative destruction. So I definitely felt like I had been lucky enough to live and work in one of those periods of creative revolution from 1963-1982 and so I was curious about those other periods when Vanguard artists were really altering the cultural dialogue.

So I started with the Transcendentalists in the 1830's and then sixty years later there was Twain, the invention of cinema and radio, the phonograph record, Buddy Bolden, jazz. And then sixty years later were the beats and bebop, leading to the sixties cultural explosion. I'm not saying the Long Wave is a perfect way to look at cultural history, but these upheavals do tend to come in waves.

So from that basis I tried to put the book together. I didn't want it to be a memoir, per se, but I knew my own personal experiences with some of the important artists of the late 20th century could add to the story.

In that sense, Dylan is really carrying on a poetic tradition from T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, who so radically changed the nature of narrative poetry in the early part of the Century. I had studied poetry at Princeton with Walton Litz, a truly inspirational teacher and he gave me such an appreciation for Auden and Eliot that I felt that somehow I could carry my own students back to an appreciation of that work. After all, the poetic tradition of hip hop has roots that could even be traced back to Gertrude Stein and Dada. It's just that a lot of kids don't have much sense of where their culture came from. It's like Jay Z and Tupac are in a "folk" tradition, just like Robert Johnson was. They are just taking from the past and reinterpreting it.

Your chapters are structured around a series of moments or scenes where a number of artists, often working in different media, seemed to thrive. What do these scenes have in common? What factors contribute to the emergence of these kinds of creative moments?

This is such a fascinating topic. Jacques Barzun has a wonderful theory about the Renaissance. You had all of these amazing artists living literally down the street from each other in Florence. They went to each other's studios and probably drank together in the evenings. So they were both rivals and friends and that rivalry pushed them to experiment more. The physical proximity---the scene---was critical.

I certainly witnessed the same thing with The Band, Dylan, Clapton and Van Morrison. They hung out together and they pushed each other to really excel. My reading tells me the same thing was going on in Paris in the 1920's and certainly in New York in the 1940's when both Abstract Expressionism and Bebop were being birthed in very close quarters. In fact I could name the bars, Mintons for the jazz scene and the Cedar Tavern for the artists. This leads me to wonder if all these notions of virtual communities can have the same creative juice as the physical presence of jamming at 2 AM in Harlem.

So if the first factor is the competitive scene, then the second factor is a general sense that the "canon" of the moment is moribund. The only reason Marty Scorsese, Terry Malick, George Lucas and Bob Rafaelson got to make their first films in the early 1970's was that the Hollywood system, that had been turning out failing movies like Hello Dolly and The Molly McGuires, was bankrupt. The studios had no money, so they were open to this new generation of film school brats that were willing to work for peanuts and make films for $500,000.

I think a lot of what you write about and study---the rise of Transmedia---comes out of this same kind of Interregnum. As Gramsci said, "The old is dying and the new cannot be born." Much of the underpinning of the music, TV and Film businesses are being destroyed by the digital revolution. The DVD sell through business that created 55% of movie revenues is dying. The album, which allowed music companies to sell you 12 songs when you only wanted one, has been unbundled. TiVo completely is undercutting the advertising revenue of TV.

What we need to see is if new scenes will arise to reinvent these businesses. I guess that is part of our task at the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

October 03, 2011

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part One)

October 03, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

I have had a chance to watch Anne Balsamo at work in many different contexts -- as a junior faculty member at Georgia Tech focusing on cyberfeminism and reconceptualizations of the body; as a designer in residence at Xerox Parc where she was developing devices intended to embody alternative conceptions of the future of publication and reading; as someone dispatched by the MacArthur Foundation to encourage us to reflect on the nature of "design literacy"; and most recently, as a colleague at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC where we are working together to launch an expanded ebook project. She is someone who has been able to pursue a shared research agenda in a range of different contexts (both academic and industrial) and in the process, to build upon the work of others around her, to carry with her what she's learned into these new spaces. What I love about Balsamo is her fearlessness in moving beyond her own comfort zone and her ability to inspire creativity and reflection in those she finds around her. I am so blessed to have a chance to work with people like Balsamo and her other colleagues at the Innovation Lab on a regular basis. Her newest book, Designing Cultures: The Technological Imagination at Work, could only have come about as a result of her experiences working in these many different environments. It is one part autobiography, one part portfolio (she shares some of her great projects through an attached disc), and one part theoretical reflection. Above all, it is an intervention by someone deeply rooted into the humanities into the current debates about technological innovation. Her conceptual models and frameworks are sure to spark discussions at digital humanities labs around the world, but my hope is that they do not end there, that they offer engineers and programmers and designers a way to reflect on their own contributions to culture (and their own contexts of innovation).

In this interview that follows, we talk together about some of the key themes of her book, which, as the title playfully suggests, deals both with the design of culture and with the cultural contexts where design takes place.

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Early in the book, you make the statement, "the wellspring of technological innovation is the exercise of the technological imagination." Can you break that down for us? What is the "technological imagination" and how does this concept bridge between technology and culture?

Inspired by the concept of the "sociological imagination," first developed by C. Wright Mills in the 1960s, I define the technological imagination as a mindset that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. This imagination is performative: it improvises within constraints to create something new. It is through the exercise of their technological imaginations that people engage the materiality of the world, creating the conditions for future world-making. Most importantly, this is the capacity to understand that all technologies come from somewhere, that they could always be different from what they are, and that they always have multiple and contradictory impacts.

In the active engagement between human beings and technological elements, culture too is reworked through the development of new narratives, new myths, new rituals, new modes of expression, and new knowledges that make the innovations meaningful. When people participate in the activities of producing "innovation," their technological imaginations are engaged in a complex process of meaning-making whereby both technology and culture are created anew.

Throughout the book, you talk about "innovation," which as you note is a widely deployed concept these days. What do you mean by "innovation" and how does your use of the term differ from some of the notions currently shaping industry and government discourse?

Innovation is a process, not a product. Innovation changes how life will be lived in the future. I think that many people--industry pundits and government spokespeople--believe that innovation is a "thing." I make the distinction between "invention" which implies the creation of new things--new applications, services, devices, processes--and "innovation" which is the process whereby the elements of human life are rearranged such that life in the future is lived differently.

You suggest that a key aim of the book is to get your humanities colleagues more engaged with the process of technological innovation. Why? What will they gain from participating in a process which may seem alien to many of them? What will humanities people bring to the table that is currently missing from our conversations around technology?

I argue that the process of technological innovation is actually NOT at all alien to humanists; it is the process of engaging with technologies to change the shape of the way culture is lived, reproduced, and expressed in the future. This is an abiding interest and contribution of the humanities that is more commonly understood as the process of education through their engagement with a range of technologies of literacy (i.e., the book, historical narrative, aesthetic materials of expression). If one believes, as I do, that innovation is the process whereby culture is rearranged, then it is easy to see the valuable role of humanists in providing the tools and the critical frameworks for understanding not only how culture might change in the future, but also how current cultural arrangements structure conditions of possibility of any effort of innovation.

How a Robot Got its Groove from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Our colleague, Tara McPherson, has argued that issues of gender and race tend to be pushed aside when people talk about designing new media. How and why do these questions surface throughout your book?

This book, indeed the entire project that goes by the name "Designing Culture" is a direct outgrowth of my earlier work on the biotechnological reproduction of gendered bodies. In my first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke 1996), I examined the cultural implications of what were then (in the 1980s-1990s) emergent bio-technologies. What I learned through that project was how to critique the technocultural arrangements that reproduced gendered identities for the bodies that engaged with new technologies (body building, cosmetic surgery, surrogate motherhood, computer-mediated communication, and virtual reality). By the time I finished, I realized that if I were to take my feminist political commitments seriously, it was not enough for me to critique the ideological work of emergent technologies, I had to go further to examine how the critique might suggest ways of doing things differently in the future.

In some sense, all my work is influenced by Donna Haraway's assertion that "all technologies are reproductive technologies." Whereas the first book examined a broad range of BIOLOGICAL reproductive technologies that were innovative during the last two decades of the 20th century, the new work examined what I believed were going to be the DOMINANT reproductive technologies of the 21st century: digital media technologies. This "turn to reproduction" is but one way in which feminist theory--as a way of thinking gender--informs all my research.

Thus I formulated new research questions that directed my attention to study and participate in the processes whereby new technologies are developed which enabled me to build a framework to understand the techno-social-cultural conditions of technological innovation. Put simply, I continued to study the processes of technologically-assisted cultural reproduction...but with the new project the focus was on the creation of new digital media technologies rather than on biological technologies.

To follow these questions, I turned my attention to the investigation of the practices of technological design and I immersed myself in projects that would allow me to learn how to use new media technologies to create new digital applications. My first project--to create the interactive documentary called "Women of the World Talk Back"-- was the result of my experiments with a range of (what were then) innovative new media digital authoring tools for the purposes of creating feminist activist interactive media. Through collaborations with colleagues and students--who had a much more developed set of technological design skills than I did--my technological imagination was inspired and shaped to think differently about the cultural possibilities of new technologies.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

October 03, 2011

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part Two)

October 03, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

You worked at Xerox PARC, which, as you note, has become a mythic locale in the early history of digital technology. What do you think the current myths about Xerox PARC get right and what do they misunderstand?

Among the many lessons I learned during my time working at Xerox PARC is the understanding that the future is created first in the imagination, and then is enacted through the many activities of the research laboratory (among other places). Contrary to the old adage--that the best way to predict the future is to invent it--what I came to appreciate is the important role of narrative in creating an imaginary relationship between the FUTURE and the present. The first act of innovation is an act of story-making--which involves the spinning of a narrative that features technologies, materials, beliefs about "needs" and "opportunities," and is performed by researchers who (as in the case of Xerox PARC) are employed in the business of innovation. I'm not sure how that matches with the cultural work of Xerox PARC today--the scene has changed in the decade since I left. But I suspect that the researchers there are still eagerly engaged in the cultural processes--and performance--of innovation.

You argue that technologists should "pay attention to the technological literacy of the intended users off the technology-under-development." What advice can you offer to technologists about the best way to "pay attention"? What are the "ethical responsibilities" of technologists in regard to those who will be left behind if their tools and platforms are more widely adopted?

My approach to the topic of "paying attention" is grounded in the theory of "strong objectivity" developed by the philosopher of science, Sandra Harding. This argument is best situated within the debates about objectivity, scientism, and relativism of the late 1990s that were spurred by important work in critical feminist science studies. Harding argues that we need NOT to abandon ideals of "scientific objectivity"--as some feminists might have than been accused of advocating--but rather we need to be more RIGOROUSLY objective in understanding that reality is multidimensional; and that science, to be a truly objective explanatory enterprise needs to engage the minds and points of view of people who have been trained (socialized) to see the matter of the world from different perspectives.

Perhaps the key issue here is that what we are to "pay attention to" is multidimensional; thus the ethical responsibility of any technologist is to actively seek to see the world through different eyes, and not to assume that the point of view that one embodies is privileged as the only "point of view." Haraway calls this the "god trick." The ethical response is to understand how one's perspective is always partial, and to seek out other points of view (as it were) when developing or experimenting with the creation of new technologies.

I don't see the issue as one about people who will be "left behind"--because I understand that technologies are not simply objects, but rather a whole technocultural formation. Everyone lives in a current technological cultural moment that is constantly unfolding; an individual's position within that technocultural formation is what we really need to address when we think about "access to technology." No one is actually "left behind" in a cultural formation; they are differently positioned, constrained, enabled, empowered, with different (and often unequal) access to resources such as tools, knowledge, economic goods. I would argue that issues that are framed in terms of "people left behind" do not reflect a complex understanding about the nature of technoculture and cultural reproduction. To frame this question in this way presupposes an answer that puts the emphasis solely on "access to technology." Yet we know that simply providing access--dumping computers into classrooms for example--doesn't work to address the broader issues of inequality in power, economic resources, and intellectual support. Its time to start thinking more complexly about strategies for rearticulating dominant technocultural formations to allow for more liberatory and equal participation.

What is Literacy? from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

What does your book's focus on "design" contribute to the larger conversation around New Media Literacies and Digital Learning which has been sparked by the recent interventions of the MacArthur Foundation?

As I elaborated in the book, I make explicit the connections between the processes of design thinking and the skills and sensibilities that you list as key 21st century literacies. I argue that we need to teach designing practices across the curriculum; I support the notion that "design is a new liberal art." The issue of designing (design thinking, critical design skills) emerges as an important topic as we come to appreciate the many ways in which young people use new digital technologies to create and participate in innovative learning experiences. As they are called to be "designers/authors" of their own learning experiences, they will be well served (I assert) by learning also important design methods and critical frameworks for the analysis of their designed efforts.

The central premise of the book is that the work of design is one of the most important sites of cultural reproduction in a digital age. When I turn my attention to the designing/authoring efforts of students, I understand that even when these students think they are making it all up for the first time, they are actually engaged in the process of reproducing cultural understandings that came before them, and setting up the conditions for the reproduction of these understandings in the future. Thus for me to teach design also requires the teaching of ethics and the training of the historical imagination....both of these concepts are less fashionable to speak of these days

DML efforts might cast these concerns as "civic engagement" or as topics for "learning games." While there is nothing wrong with that approach--who could argue against "civic engagement" as an important topic for contemporary new media and digital learning--as I elaborate in the book I believe that there are additional insights to glean from discussions about ethics and about history in the context of understanding the praxis of designing and the reproduction of culture.

Given your discussion throughout about the need to reimagine the book, I am curious about the process which led you to develop Designing Culture as a print based book with digital extensions. What do you see each medium contributing to our experience of the whole?

The book and the digital projects were designed/authored simultaneously; but at any point, one creative project would take precedence over the others. This is because I'm not really good about multitasking at the broadest levels. It is also because the knowledge making process that is invoked during the course of creating digital media applications is different for me than the knowledge making process that emerges through the act of writing/authoring.

I wrote the book, as I explained in the conclusion, for personal, professional, and theoretical reasons. One of the most salient theoretical reasons is that the book is well suited to one of the most critical, but most commonly overlooked stages of designing: the stage when the designer returns to the design effort (and outputs) to critically assess the lessons learned and the cultural impact of the project. This stage of self-reflexive assessment is not easily accommodated in digital media genres of the museum exhibit, videos, interactive applications, and such.

The technological form of the printed book allows for the theoretical elaboration of abstract concepts and of self-reflexive accounts of designing practice. The book I wrote was neither a factual account of a series of moments long past, nor was it a simply a work of speculative design fiction. It was an authored account that was both factual and fictional; that was highly determined by my own biography and set of theoretical commitments, but not able to be reduced to either biography or theory.

If we return to C. Wright Mills notion of the "sociological imagination" we will hear him call for this kind of disposition--the sociological imagination for him was the capacity to make the connections between one's own personal biographies and the broader social and institutional forces and formations that invariably shape those biographies. This is the deep theoretical tradition I was trained in as a cultural theorist: to seek to make connections between my personal investments and biographical moments and the broader technocultural formation that I participate in as a subject/author and that I am "subjected to" through the work of ideology and other shaping forces.

Moreover, the DESIGNING CULTURE project is an example of the technological imagination at work in that the project manifested across a range of media technologies: where each part of the project was realized and expressed in the modality that was best deployed for my particular authorial objectives. Here I borrow Mill's insight to suggest that the technological imagination is the disposition that allows one to make the connections among technological forms and more personal/authorial objectives. Other people might call this paying attention to the "media specificity" of different modalities of cultural expression. Indeed that is what a good story teller always does: chose the best medium for addressing the desired audience that is matched with the story one wants to tell.

You are part of the leadership of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. What opportunities does the Lab offer you to push your concepts to the next level?

My work with the Annenberg Innovation Lab is very exciting for me because it offers an opportunity to collaborate with other people on the project of technological innovation that begins by taking culture seriously. This is the challenge that is laid out in the book: it is time to treat culture as a serious concept in our discussions, learning activities, design projects, and technological inventions.

Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, invokes the mantra for the lab as such: Every day culture eats strategy for lunch. This assertion resonates strongly with the main thesis of the Designing Culture project and sets the stage for a whole range of interesting experiments in the design of innovative technologies and the exercise of the technological imagination.

September 15, 2011

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part Two)

September 15, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Some have argued that the criteria for evaluating news has shifted from

impartiality to transparency. How would you rank mainstream news and citizen

media in terms of their embrace of transparency as a civic virtue?

An effort to be impartial - or "objective," to use the word most journalists revere - is not a bad thing. The problem is that it's impossible to achieve in the real world. We all come to our jobs with life histories, world views, and sometimes outright biases.

That said, transparency is a definite virtue. It's one of several principles - though not enough by itself - that information providers of all kinds should embrace. Add transparency to thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independent thinking, and we're getting somewhere.

I would rank traditional media organizations low on the transparency scale. They're still among the most opaque institutions around. But there are glimmers of openness, here and there, that give me some hope that journalists are beginning to understand why they need to do this. Bloggers and others we might put in the "citizen journalism" sphere vary in their openness, too, though I'd say bloggers tend to be somewhat more transparent than professional journalists.

It's about trust in the end. For people who are honorable in the way they work, transparency inspires greater trust.

What role should the news media itself play in fostering basic civic skills,

including those of critical reading and thinking? For example, how should

the news media be responding to persistent rumors about Obama, such as those

promoted by so-called Birthers? Is this a "teachable moment," as one would

say in the Education Schools, and if so, how should teaching taking place

via the news media?

I wish the news media had made this a core mission a long time ago. They didn't, and still haven't. That's a real shame; it would have helped not just their audiences but themselves - because audiences would have gotten a better idea what it takes to do quality journalism and had more respect for it.

If I ran a news organization and learned that a sizeable percentage of people in my community believed something that was false - birtherism, for example - I would make it part of my mission to help them learn the truth. That sounds easier than it would be, because people who believe lies are invested in those beliefs, but teachable moments abound in today's world.

You also advocate in the book that in an era where many of us are playing

more active roles as citizen journalists, that the status of journalism

classes in colleges and universities shifts from training professionals to

training all citizens. Should journalism now be a required subject as part

of a newly configured liberal arts education?

The principles and skills of journalism map extremely well to every other endeavor, when you think about it. They're part of being an engaged citizen in a variety of ways.

So, yes, I would make some kind of 21st Century media literacy - call it journalism or whatever - a part of the core curriculum. At several schools, "news literacy" is becoming a required course, though in the ones I've seen the emphasis (for practical reasons) is on consumption of news. The emphasis should be on critical thinking as consumers , but we are not literate unless we are also creators.

Many argue that the key difference between citizen and professional

journalism is the role of fact checking. Yet, your book describes many

different mechanisms on the grassroots level which are designed to check

facts and otherwise insure the integrity of information, while, for many

reasons, the place of fact checking in professional journalism is declining.

So, how long can we frame this as a meaningful distinction? And if this is

not the best way to think of the differences between amateur and

professional journalism, what would be productive ways of understanding

their relationship?

I don't agree that the key difference between citizen and pro journalism is fact-checking. It can be a difference, but as you note, sloppiness is growing in traditional media and lots of bloggers are doing work that I trust a great deal.

The real issue is that we all have to take more responsibility for what we know, and what we say. Certainly we have to trust some sources more than others, but we have to be skeptical in varying degrees of everything, and the more important something is to us the more we need to look deeper. I don't buy a car based on an advertisement, and if I see a story about some alleged medical breakthrough - especially if I am personally a candidate for that treatment - I'll check further.

I'm trying to blur the distinctions between "pro" and "amateur" in the information world rather than highlight them, by improving the practices of both and encouraging audiences to take more responsibility.

Your book maintains a healthy faith that the current shifts in journalism

are going to not only maintain but expand diversity. As you know, many would

disagree with this claim, suggesting that core news organizations are

eroding amidst waves of consolidation of ownership and that this is going to

result in a much narrower range of information and opinion. What would you

say to those critics and skeptics of the current news ecosystem?

There's no question that traditional journalism is in trouble as a business, and that some parts - vital parts - of what these organizations have done will go missing for a time. Consolidation of the traditional media into an ever-smaller number of corporate hands is also a reality.

At the same time, there's never been more quality information about all kinds of things in some profitable niches, such as politics, technology, fashion, sports and a host of other things. Meanwhile, in a host of unprofitable (as media companies) niches, domain experts are telling us what matters. And new techniques for providing information, using APIs and databases among other tools, are leading to an explosion of social news gathering and dissemination.

We're also starting to see some genuine innovation in business models, That's key to what needs to happen.

Are we where we need to be? Not even close. But I have to stress that we're very early in this transition. If it's a baseball game we're in the bottom of the second inning or top of the third.

What practices might emerge around citizen journalism which would increase

its accuracy and reliability?

The main one would be a recognition on the part of the information provider that it's better to be trusted than distrusted - and that following some basic principles (the ones outlines above) are the road map to be trusted.

I stress principles because they don't change much, if at all. The rest is simply tactics, which do change, but if tactics have principles as a foundation, we'll be fine.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

Dan's latest book, Mediactive, aims to encourage a better media supply in part by creating better demand -- to spur people to become active media users, as consumers and participants. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People was the first to explain the rise of citizen media and why it matters. Dan also writes an online column for the Guardian and blogs regularly at Mediactive.com.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. From 1994 until early 2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

September 13, 2011

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part One)

September 13, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

"We're in an age of information overload, and too much of what we watch, hear and read is mistaken, deceitful and dangerous. Yet you and I can take control and make media serve us -- all of us -- by being active consumers and participants."

This language appears at the top of the website Dan Gillmor, long time advocate for citizen journalism, has constructed around his most recent project, Mediactive, and beautifully captures his particular contribution to the media literacy movement. Gillmor's approach acknowledges the challenges and opportunities the new media landscape presents us in a way which is at once pragmatic and empowering. He certainly knows the risks to democracy posed by waves of misinformation and disinformation being spread across an array of media channels and the challenges of a context where we do not always know who created the media we are consuming. He also recognizes the value of expanding who has access to the channels of communication and thus the democratization which occurs when a broader range of citizens are producing and sharing media with each other. What he demands is that we each take ownership over the information we consume and share with each other, and taking ownership for him starts with skepticism.

Gillmor's book provides a solid foundation for anyone wanting to work with young people or adults about news literacy, one which is as invested in new forms of civic media and citizen journalism as it is concerned about the future of professional news. In this interview, we get a glimpse into Gillmor's current thinking about what it means to be a discerning citizen in the digital age and what the obligations of journalists are to help foster core civic skills and competencies.

Your new book, Mediactive, seeks to encourage "skepticism" about news and information. What do you see as the core virtues of skepticism and how does it differ from cynicism, which some would argue is wide spread in the

current context?

Skepticism is an essential part of being well-informed. It starts us off in the right place: assuming nothing but learning to trust some sources of information more than others.

Skepticism differs from cynicism in one key way: A cynic has essentially given up any hope that an information provider can do a good enough job to ever earn trust. A skeptic recognizes that there will be flaws, but also believes that trust can be earned.

Throughout the book, you use the concept of a media or news "ecosystem." Can

you explain this concept and suggest ways that the ecosystem we inhabit

today is different from the one which other generations confronted?

Let's look at agriculture as an analogy for a second. American factory farming is an ecosystem, but highly non-diverse - nearly a "monoculture" in many crops where a single variety overwhelmingly dominates the market.

The news ecosystem has been something of a monoculture in recent years, at least in the newspaper business in most U.S. communities that support daily papers, where typically there's a single surviving one. Broadcast is close to that - just a few entities with government-granted airwaves that no one else can use.

We've come to understand the danger of monocultures. They're inherently unstable, because when they fail they do so with catastrophic results. (Remember Wall Street in 2008.)

A diverse ecosystem, by contrast, isn't as threatened by individual failures, because the parts of the ecosystem are less dominant. If the dominant food variety fails, we can end up with a serious food shortage, or worse. If a few big banks can kill the global economy when they fail, similar forces are at work.

In a diverse and vibrant agricultural system or capitalist economy, the failure of a specific crop varietal or business is tragic mostly for the farmers who planted it or that business. It doesn't cause a wider catastrophe.

That's the kind of news/information ecosystem we need, and which is coming. It's why I'm optimistic.

You have historically been a key advocate of citizen journalism, but here,

you are also offering some important cautions, calling for citizens (as

readers and news producers) to take greater responsibility over the

information they are exchanging. Is this a shift in position or a shift in

emphasis?

It's much more a shift of emphasis. I was cautious about quality in my last book, which some folks misconstrued as an uncritical celebration of citizen media. I continue to celebrate the fact that so many more people are creating media, but while the quantity is surging, it would be crazy to declare victory when it comes to quality.

In the book, you advocate what you call "slow news." Can you explain this

concept and why you think the speed of current journalism is partially to

blame for the circulation and perpetuation of myths, rumors, and other

inadequacies?

I've been a fan of the "slow food" movement for some time (even if I don't adhere as well as I should to its ideas). Slow news, a term that was coined in this context by Ethan Zuckerman, is the notion that we should not hurry to assume we know what's actually happening, certainly not when we're getting news at the rapid pace we hear and see it today.

When you combine the amount of information pouring over us with its high velocity, the need to take things a little more slowly - as information providers but especially as info consumers - becomes obvious. And it's not just random blog posts and tweets that can lead us astray.

We need only look to last January's horrific shootings in Tuscon, Arizona, for evidence. NPR and a number of other news outlets (most relying on NPR as a source) reported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died in the supermarket parking lot. She had not died, as we learned fairly quickly.

My own approach is to force myself to consider how sensational a report is along with how soon it comes after the alleged event. And the closer it is to the event, the more I put it in a category of "interesting if true" - with emphasis on "if".

I recognize that this goes against human nature to some degree. But if we can persuade ourselves to keep in the back of our minds that sliver of skepticism, we'll be fooled less, at a time when the consequences of being fooled are growing.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

Dan's latest book, Mediactive, aims to encourage a better media supply in part by creating better demand -- to spur people to become active media users, as consumers and participants. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People was the first to explain the rise of citizen media and why it matters. Dan also writes an online column for the Guardian and blogs regularly at Mediactive.com.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. From 1994 until early 2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

August 26, 2011

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Three)

August 26, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

As you describe the many kinds of anxieties, uncertainties, disappointments, and frustrations which surround technology in everyday life, it sounds like many people are unhappy with current configurations and most have harsh judgments of the uses of new media by others in their friends and family, yet few people are breaking out of the patterns you describe. Why not?

I think that we are at a point of inflection. Our lives are enmeshed with our new technologies of connection and ever more so. We now have more experience of what this means for us as individuals, for our relationships with our families, with our parents, with our children, with our friends, with our neighbors. We are coming to a greater understanding of what this means for us as politically, both in our own country and globally.

It has taken time for people to understand where life with this new kind of technology has brought them. Things came to them one gadget at a time. A phone, a navigation system, a way to listen to music, a new way to read books, books "on tape" became something else . . . . and now we catch up to the idea that positioning and navigation translate into surveillance and that using social media as though it were a neutral "utility" ignores important issues about privacy and ownership of personal data.

I don't think that we grownups who "gave" this new communications regime to our children thought it through on several of its critical dimensions. What is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? These are not easy questions. But they are starting to be questions that people are thinking about. They begin to have concrete meaning as people come to a new kind of life and have enough experience to take its measure.

On the simplest level, when I talk to parents who realize that it makes them anxious to walk to the corner candystore with their child without taking their cell phone, who cannot go to the playground with their child without bringing their e-mail enabled device, who text in the car while driving with their children in the back seat, it seems clear to me that we are not at a point of stable equilibrium. These people are not happy.

So my qualified optimism about change comes from my sense that the people to whom I have been talking are not happy and are genuinely searching for new ways of living with new technology. I hear more and more about "Internet Sabbaths" during which families disconnect for a day or a weekend. Some families modify the Sabbath and declare two hours a day as off-the-grid family time.

There is no option in which we give up on our new devices. They are our partners in the human adventure. What we have to do is find a way to live with them that is healthier. A digital diet that is better for our health and the health of our families. It took a long time for Americans to learn that a diet high in sugar and processed foods was not healthy. It is going to take a long time for people to develop strategies, individually and collectively, to live with our new technologies in the most healthy way. But the stakes are high and we can get this right.

Your book describes a world where technological demands often supersede human needs, yet you are insistent that you are not anti-technology. So, what do you see as the gains which new media have brought into the culture?

In the domain of communications technology, one of the things that excites me the most is when technologies of the virtual enhance our experiences of and in the physical real. So, ironically, one of the earliest uses of the Internet as a social media, how MeetUps were used in the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, remains an inspiration to me. People "met" online for a political purpose and then "met up" in the physical world. They did not fool themselves into thinking that political action consisted of just giving money online or visiting a website and leaving a "thumbs up" sign on it.

MeetUp continues in this tradition as do many other online groups that organize in the virtual and connect in the physical. We have seen this play out on the most dramatic scale in political life where despots may be challenged by groups brought together by social networking in all of its many forms.

I am often asked this question: "You are so critical of social networking. But what about Egypt" My criticism of social networking boils down to the necessity for us not to redefine the social as what the social network can do. The social encompasses a great deal more. This is not to put the social network down, it is simply to put it in its place. So there is no conflict between the magnificence of what the social network can do for the overthrow of tyrants and how it can get in the way of the development of teenagers who need to engage with each other face to face.

On a personal note, I recently attended a reunion of my fifth grade class. This was the fifth grade class from PS 216 Brooklyn. This fifth grade class would have never had a chance of meeting had it not been for Facebook. One person from the class had been connected with several others and then searched Facebook for a few more names she remembered. Those people remembered a few more names. Within six months, our fifth grade class was on the roof terrace of the Peninsula Hotel in New York. It was a small miracle. It was a gift, a profound gift. Yet in the annals of the social network, my story is banal.

You suggest that we are using new media to deal with the anxiety of separation. Is this separation anxiety itself a product of our reliance on technology or is it a reflection of, say, the increases of divorce and mobility in American culture over the past several generations? Are there ways in which the use of social media is a rational response to those social and cultural disruptions, allowing for old friends to remain in contact despite geographic distances or for separated parents to remain active parts of their children's lives?

I think it is easy to make distinctions in this domain. A parent who uses social media to keep up with a child living away from home or a child who uses social media to keep up with a parent in a different city - one recognizes and respects these cases when one sees them. My concern is with very different kinds of cases. Parents who cannot tolerate their eight year old child not having a cell phone. Children who have developed a style of relating that I characterize as "I text therefore I am" or "I share therefore I am."

To put it too simply, things have moved from a style of relating where one thinks: "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, the act of sharing a nascent feeling becomes part of the constitution of the feeling.

The problem is that when we use other people in this way, as needed elements on the path toward our having our feelings, we can move toward a misuse of others. We are not relating to them as others but as what psychologists call "part objects." We are using them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.

This takes the notion of an "other directed" self to a higher power. Our technology supports a culture of narcissism digital-style. It is a kind of self that does not tolerate being alone. And yet, psychology teaches us that if you do not teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. We are forgetting this lesson in our culture of hyper-connection. These kinds of anxieties of connection are different from the "rational responses" to staying in touch to far-flung family and friends.

In your discussion of Chatroulette, you talk about "nexting," while elsewhere, you describe "stalking". First can you explain the two concepts and then tell us what you see as the relations between them? Is the indifference to others implied by Nexting the flip side of the kinds of obsessive interest in other people's business online represented by stalking?

What both nexting and stalking have in common is the objectification of people who we meet on screens. We do not consider them in their humanity. They have a profound similarity. And this, too, is one of the major themes of Alone Together: we are at a moment of temptation. It is to treat machines as if they were people and to treat people as if they were machines.

In what ways has the persistence of information online forced you to revise earlier arguments about the potential to protean plays with identity? It seems these days, on the internet, everyone knows you are dog and many know what dog food you eat.

Henry, this is beautifully put. My earlier enthusiasm for identity play on the Internet, for what Amy Bruckman called the Internet experience as "identity workshop" relied heavily on the work of psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Erikson wrote about the developmental need for a moratorium or "time out" during adolescence, a kind of play space in which one had a chance to experiment with identity. In the mid-1990s, I wrote about the Internet as a space where anonymity was possible and where one could experiment with aspects of self in a safe environment.

Today, adolescents grow up with a sense of wearing their online selves on their backs "like a turtle" for the rest of their lives. The internet is forever. And anonymity on the Internet seems a dream of another century, another technology. People still use game and virtual world avatars and social network personae for identity play. But the expectation of a parallel, distinct, and anonymous virtual life is no longer a clear starting expectation.

It cannot be. Many of these experiences begin by registering with a credit card.

You are skeptical of the value of the term, addiction, to describe some of the kinds of behavoir you criticise in the book. What do you see as the limits of addiction as a way of understanding what's going on here?

No matter how much the metaphor of addiction may seem to fit our circumstance, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. It does not serve us well. To end addiction, you have to discard the substance. And we know that we are not going to "get rid" of the Internet. We are not going to "get rid" of social networking. We will not go "cold turkey" or forbid cell phones to our children. Addiction--with its one solution that we know we won't use--makes us feel hopeless, passive.

We will find new paths, but a first step will surely be to not consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance, but to acknowledge that in our use of networked technology, we have incurred some costs that we don't want to pay. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. As we consider all this, we will not find a "solution" or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. There is time to make the corrections.

You describe your book as an attempt to start a conversation. What has been your sense so far of the conversation which it has generated? What have people misunderstood about your book?

I wrote Alone Together to mark a time of opportunity. So for example, the essence of my critique of the metaphor of Internet "addiction" is that it closes down conversation, because it suggests a solution that no one is going to take. Addictive substances need to be discarded. We are not going to discard connectivity technology.

We need to form a more empowering partnership with it, one that shows (for example) greater respect for our needs for privacy, solitude, times of non-interruption. In some areas the need for empowerment has reached a state of great urgency, for example, in the area of privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, has declared privacy to be "no longer a social norm."

In Alone Together, I question such assumptions. Privacy may not be convenient for social networking technology, but it seems to me essential to intimacy and democracy. This is one of the conversations I wanted to contribute to. Others include conversations about child development, connectivity, autonomy, and narcissism. I think one of the most important sentences of my book is "If we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely." I want people to talk about this when they give their eight year olds smart phones.

And yet much of the reaction to Alone Together criticizes me as though I have told the world to "unplug." As though I have accused technology of causing a new epidemic of mental illness. And as though I have said that technology is making us less human. I have been portrayed as an anti-technology crusader. Reviewers analyze why someone like me, someone who was once on the cover of Wired magazine, could now, not "like" technology. Commentators talk as though technology and I were dating and I, capriciously, have decided to cheat on him.

This rhetoric points to a serious problem. Technology is not there for us to like or not like. Our job is to shape it to our human purposes. When you say a technology has problems that need to be addressed, people are quick to interpret you as saying that it offers nothing. In Alone Together I write of "necessary conversations" that lie ahead. I wrote the book in the hope of sparking some of them. I'm glad that people are talking. But sometimes it can be hard to know if you are in a conversation if people are shouting.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

August 24, 2011

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Two)

August 24, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

In many ways, both of us have been profoundly shaped by our time amongst MIT Students. And you wrote very explicitly about MIT hacker culture in The Second Self. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of MIT as a testing ground for your ideas?

I don't see MIT as a testing ground for my ideas. I would say rather that MIT is the place where my ideas are most challenged because there is a tendency at MIT to want to see human purposes and technological affordances as being one. Technology has purposes; technology is made by people. Technology and people are at one in their purpose.

From my point of view, every technology offers an opportunity for people do ask: "Does this technology serve human purposes?" and this is a wonderful thing because it enables us to ask again what these purposes are. We are well positioned to create technology whose purposes are not in our best interests. And then, it is time to make the corrections.

So, from this point of view, I find that my favorite sentence in my books is "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think that the Internet is all grown up." From my point of view, this is a distortion of perspective, one that is very common at MIT. From my point of view, we are in early days and it is time to make the corrections.

Perhaps the greatest ongoing difference of opinion I have had with close colleagues at MIT has been about the meaning and prospect of sociable robots. I take a very strong position in Alone Together that nanny-bots and elder-care bots who pretend affection are seductive. And that my research shows that we are vulnerable to them. We are alone with them, yet we feel a faux-intimacy with them.

Indeed, the arc of the book is that with robots, we are alone and feel a new intimacy. In our new mobile connectivity, we are together with each other, and yet experience new solitudes.

I worked on my studies of sociable robots with colleagues at MIT who are some of the most brilliant and creative developers of sociable robotics. We had deeply-felt, serious conversations about the purposes and possibilities of these machines. Some think that their ultimate significance will be profoundly humanistic. I'm listening, but I am not convinced. Conversations with robots about love, sex, children, the arc of a life - in other words, about human meaning - to me, this has no meaning. These are things that the robot has not experienced. These are not appropriate topics for conversations with robots. So, being at MIT has kept me more aware than I would ever have been about the broad differences of opinion in what the purposes of machines can be.

I took you to task, ever so mildly, in my blog a while back about some of your comments about MIT students and multitasking in the Digital Nations documentary. You can see what I said here. I wanted to offer you a chance to respond to my arguments.

I most often run into our disagreement about multi-tasking in the context of parents who say, "Well, is it so bad if I text while my kid is in the kitchen with me; my mom used to do the dishes while I hung around?" Or, "My dad used the read the newspaper when we watched sports on TV; what's the difference between that and my doing my email while I watch sports with my son on Sunday?"

Having interviewed the children who feel abandoned by their parents, who feel almost desperate for parental attention, has led me to do a lot of thinking about the kinds of attention that digital devices require. We don't give them the kind of attention we gave to doodling or to a newspaper or for that matter, to cooking or watching TV. We are drawn in in quite a different way. This is made apparent when I interview teenagers who say things like "When I was little I used to watch Sunday football with my dad and we would talk. Now, he is on his BlackBerry and he is in the 'Zone.' I can't interrupt him." Or, stories, many stories of daughters who come into the kitchen to hang out with their mothers and find them texting and cannot make eye contact with them and who are shushed away. I observe parents and children in the playground with children desperately trying to get their parents attention; parents are absorbed in their devices and cannot "multi-task" attention for their kids.

So, I think that the narratives we use to think about our students multi-tasking in class needs to be informed by the nature of what it is to absorb oneself in digital media. Beyond this, I am persuaded by the research that suggests that when we multi-task, our performance degrades for each task we multi-task, even as we receive a neurochemical reward for our multi-tasking. So, through no fault of our own, our biology has us feeling better and better even as we do worse and worse.

I do think that smitten by what computers enable us to do, we have allowed multi-tasking to seem like a twenty-first century alchemy. I think that classrooms, will soon be in the position of being the places where uni-tasking is taught, places where students learn to concentrate and where, additionally, they learn to cultivate the capacity for solitude.

I think that the two learning skills that are in the most jeopardy in our hyper-connected world are the ability to concentrate on one thing and the capacity for the kind of solitude that replenishes and restores.

I am going to be running a summer-long conversation on this blog about the value of the autobiographical voice in cultural criticism. You have now edited a series of books where people share autobiographical reflections on what you call evocative objects. Can you explain what you mean by evocative objects and what you think is the contributions of these kinds of reflections?

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are "betwixt and between" standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.

Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called "transitional objects." These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of "mind meld" when using software, saying things such as "When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen." Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one "hears" psychodynamic issues, one "hears" family history, one "hears" a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not "just" tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

You describe both children and the elderly being drawn to robots as companions. In your discussion of social networking sites, you seem to accept the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants, implying that generational differences matter in response to those technologies. Do these same differences matter in talking about human relations with robots?

There are of course important differences in how people who grew up with a given technology appropriate it in contrast to those who adopted it in adulthood. But what most fascinates me these days are common vulnerabilities of grownups and younger people, both in the area of communications technology and in the area of sociable robotics. I did many interviews with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are willing to entertain the idea of a robot that might love them, care for them. But certainly, the sensibility of the "robotic moment," the idea that we are ready for robots that might care for us is most apparent among the young.

Their science fiction and imaginative toy and game worlds suggest to them that robots may soon be in a position to teach people how to love; they have a way of thinking about the nature of aliveness that considers objects with a new pragmatism. That is, previous generations talked about computational objects as "sort of alive" or "kind of alive." This new generation talks of computational objects as "alive enough" to do certain jobs. Robots are thus considered "alive enough" for the job of care and companionship, at the limit, alive for affection.

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Henry Jenkins