Changing the Game: An Interview on Games and Business with David Edery and Ethan Mollick

Editor's Note: The election has come at a particularly intense moment in my life. I plan to run a more extensive reflection on the role that media played in shaping and responding to the outcome but I have not been able to write it yet. I expect to post it early next week. For the moment, let me say that this early "Obama Boy" could not be more delighted with the outcome but fears that all of the "transformational" language got used up on tuesday night, leaving us with no new adjectives to throw out there.

Around the Comparative Media Studies Program, there's been considerable discussion over the past few weeks about the decision of the Obama campaign to advertise in an Xbox 360 game, Burnout Paradise. The topic is the perfect intersection between our researchers focused on games, branding, and civic media, and reflects an ongoing conversation we've been having on the blog and elsewhere about Obama as the candidate for all platforms. If convergence culture can be described as a world where every image and idea flows across the maximum number of media platforms, acquiring meanings and value and attracting new participants at each step along its trajectory, Obama's people have embraced the full range of new media -- from mobile phones to social networks, from virtual worlds to video games -- in their effort to reach and mobilize young voters.

Hoping to get some further insights into this story, I reached out to David Edery and Ethan Mollick, the authors of a newly released book, Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business. Both Edery and Mollick are alums of MIT's Sloan School of Mangement; Edery was involved with us while still a graduate student, was briefly on our staff, and has continued to be an affiliated researcher on our Convergence Culture Consortium since he has graduated. As experts on current trends around games and advertising, I was curious to see what they would have to say about the Obama ads:

The Obama campaign's decision to advertise within the Xbox 360 game Burnout Paradise is notable for being, to our knowledge, the first time a presidential candidate has ever taken advantage of advertising opportunities within a retail video game. The ads appear as billboards by the roadside, and contain the message "Early voting has begun" and "voteforchange.com" in addition to Senator Obama's photograph.

The message on the billboards seems to indicate that the Obama campaign was hoping to achieve a very specific outcome: give young adults who support Obama, but who perhaps lack the drive to vote, a nudge in the direction of the ballot box. More interestingly, the Obama campaign may also have been hoping to send a subtle message to gamers and young adults in general: "this is a candidate who understands technology and new media, isn't afraid of it, and doesn't intend to demonize it." If the latter was indeed a part of the campaign's strategy, it worked out brilliantly, because the Burnout/Obama advertisements received a tremendous amount of mainstream and game industry press. Whether you played Burnout or not, if you're a highly engaged gamer, odds are you heard about the Obama ads.

So in-game advertising and US presidential politics have converged. Is this a particularly important milestone for the in-game advertising industry? Perhaps, and perhaps not. After all, plenty of Fortune 500 companies have beaten the Obama campaign to this milestone, and are in fact experimenting with games and advertising in far more interesting ways. But there's no doubt that this *is* an important milestone for the game industry in general. It suggests that a US presidential candidate has recognized, for the first time, that gamers are an important voting group.

As they note, businesses have been using games as platforms for branding, advertising, and corporate training ever since the first platform games were released. Changing the Game offers a cogent overview of the thinking shaping current corporate strategies for deploying games as well as offering some thoughtful and forward looking recommendations about how companies can be even more effective in deploying these new media platforms towards their interests. There are plenty of lessons here which will also be helpful to those developing serious games or otherwise using games for pro-social ends. And there's much here that needs to be understood by the media literacy community if it wants to help young people understand how branding impacts the games that they play.

In this two part interview, the authors share their insights about games and advertising, the use of games as platforms for training, the value and limits of virtual worlds for corporate purposes, and the potential of games as tools for gathering collective intelligence and sparking user-based innovation.

The central premise of your book is that there are significant benefits for companies that recognize that games can be "more than just a diversion." What do you see as the primary rewards of integrating work and play? How do we confront a tendency in our culture to see play as the opposite of meaningful employment?

The primary reward of integrating work and play is happier, more effective employees. The problem is that when most people hear that claim, they immediately assume you're making the old, tired argument that games are good solely because taking a break from work is good for productivity. While many studies have purported to prove the latter, the latter is not what we are focused on.

In Changing the Game, one of our major arguments is that games can be used, not as breaks from work, but as enhancements to work. There's ample evidence that games can be used to cost-effectively train employees and to motivate them. We found great examples in the health care industry, the high tech industry, and (not surprisingly) the military, to name a few. And as we note in the book, it's rather remarkable how many managers struggle to maintain acceptable productivity levels when they control an employee's paycheck, while many game developers have found ways to make *us* pay *them* for performing tasks that seem remarkably like work. (We really don't want to know how many hours we personally spent crafting virtual armor and other items in World of Warcraft...)

Fortunately, great examples of the constructive power of games are starting to find their way into every corner of American life. Public schools are bringing Dance Dance Revolution machines into their gyms to combat the obesity epidemic, and millions of Americans are bringing Nintendo's Wii Fit into their homes. Educators are hearing about the incredible sales of games like Brain Age and realizing that maybe play and education *can* go together. These things have little to do with work, so we don't spend much time discussing them in the book, but they are helping to change the way people think about games, in general, so they certainly merit mention!

You open the book with some acknowledgment of some of the social policy debates surrounding games, including a consideration of video game violence and media effects. Many media reformers use the analogy to advertising to explain why they believe that games may have negative impacts on the people who play them. If advertisements may shape consumer behavior, they argue, games must have an influence on players. As someone who has reviewed the research on the impact of advertising on consumer decision making, how would you respond to this analogy?

What many media reformers don't understand is that games are powerful advertising (and educational) tools in large part because they can be used to communicate a persuasive message or lesson to a *highly involved* audience. People playing video games are not passive, mindless zombies... on the contrary, they are quite consciously engaged. They have to be; otherwise, how can they win the game? Anyone who doubts this should pick up an Xbox 360 controller and try to play a stereotypical first person shooter (like Call of Duty 4). These games are incredibly complex -- most first time players have trouble just figuring out which buttons to press, much less successfully navigating the entire game. Winning many video games is anything but easy.

At any rate, our point is that because gamers are quite consciously processing gameplay -- because they are NOT mindless zombies -- they are not being "brainwashed." And this is apparently what the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) determined after performing their own extensive study of video games, in which they noted: "far from having a potentially negative impact on the reaction of the player, the very fact that they have to interact with the game seems to keep them more firmly rooted in reality. People who do not play games raise concerns about their engrossing nature, assuming that players are also emotionally engrossed. This research suggests the opposite; a range of factors seems to make them less emotionally involving than film or television."

All that said, we prefer not to simply cite research in a situation like this, because critics of video games have their own body of (in our opinion, questionable) research to respond with. So why not stick with the cold, hard facts? The U. S. Secret Service recently examined each of the 37 non-gang and non-drug-related "targeted" U.S. school

shootings and stabbings that took place from 1974 through 2000, including infamous incidents such as the Columbine massacre. They found that there is no "profile" of a school shooter. In fact, only 1 in 8 of the perpetrators studied by the Secret Service showed any interest in violent video games. Given that in the same time frame, the vast majority of school-going males were playing video games, how can critics continue to claim any sort of correlation between games and school violence?

What factors are leading towards the increased interest in advergaming and product placements in games?

Put simply, it's getting harder and harder for advertisers to reach their target audience with traditional advertising. Games are an increasingly popular medium that is well-suited to carry (and to be) advertising, so why wouldn't advertisers by interested?

What does marketing research tell us about good and bad approaches to integrating brands into games?

We wrote two whole chapters on that, so it's difficult to boil down into a couple paragraphs. Rather than tackle every point, let's address the most important one. As we noted earlier, it all comes down to a question of involvement. When a person is highly involved in an aspect of gameplay, they are thinking very actively about it, and they aren't likely to forget it later on. In such situations, an advertisement really needs to not only make sense within the context of the gameplay, but to fundamentally enhance the gameplay experience and communicate a useful message to the player. Otherwise, what you get is an annoyed player whose experience is disrupted, and who therefore forms negative associations with the brand.

Imagine that you're watching a James Bond movie. Q tells Bond that he's got a great new car for him. They walk into the secret lab, and a shiny Ford Pinto is waiting there. That's an example of a product placement not fitting into the context of the entertainment media. But let's take this further. Imagine instead that the car is a sporty BMW. That's more like it! But what if the sporty BMW never broke 30 miles an hour during the entire movie? That would be an example of not communicating a useful message. The idea here is that you have a highly involved gamer on your hands. They are actively processing the information you are putting in front of them, and they probably aren't going to forget it. So, not only should you be extremely careful not to put

something in front of them that simply doesn't make sense (the Ford Pinto), but you should also make sure that what the player can do with your product placement actually communicates a message you're interested in communicating as an advertiser.

Conversely, there are moments in gameplay that are not highly involving. When players run past a billboard in a virtual sports stadium, they are focusing on the action in the stadium (i.e., an offensive play in a football game) -- they are not focusing on the billboard. The football game is highly involving; the billboard is not. Those low-involvement advertisements -- which we call "peripheral" advertisements -- are a good place to put simple ad messages like logos and short slogans. These advertisements don't have the ability to convey a complex, persuasive message that

consumers will generally recall, but they do have the ability to simply increase our familiarity with a brand, and that has its own significant benefits.

DAVID EDERY is the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and a research affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a regular speaker at game industry events such as GDC, has published numerous articles on the topic of game development and the business of games, and maintains a personal blog called Game Tycoon.

ETHAN MOLLICK studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also conducting a large research project on the game industry. He has consulted to companies ranging from General Mills to Eli Lilly on issues related to innovation and strategy, and has worked extensively on using games for teaching and training, including on the DARWARS project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

How We Help Spread Political Messages...

Today's entry is being cross-posted to our new website for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a joint venture between the Comparative Media Studies and the Media Lab. The website will regularly receive blog posts from all of us involved in the center, will showcase new projects developed by our researchers, and will otherwise offer a guide to the ways people are using new media technologies to strengthen civic engagement at the local level. Check it out and tell us what you think.

I'm scarcely "General Betray-us" yet Moveon.org has declared war on me!

Or so it seemed when I opened my e-mail the other day and discovered that a former student (actually, now multiple former students) had sent me this customized video from the leftward leaning political organization, suggesting what would happen if I didn't vote for Obama. Of course, the jokes on them! -- I voted early since I will be speaking in Eugene, Oregon early next week and then racing back to Boston to watch the returns. If you are depending on my vote to put the guy over, it's already in the bag. Trust me, America, I'm not nearly as bad as this attack ad would seem to suggest.

Of course, what I'm doing right now -- sharing this video with you -- is precisely what the organization was hoping would happen. This is a beautiful example of how spreadable media is contributing to this campaign season. In Convergence Culture, I described the efforts of True Majority, a political organization founded around the principle of "serious fun," and how they had built playful campaign videos (like one where Donald Trump fires W.) in the hopes that people would pass them along to their friends and family members. Research suggests that political messages are far more effective if they are delivered by someone you know and so the challenge is to get average citizens excited enough about political media that they will help to circulate it.

Four years ago, the activists were using the term, "viral media," and I suppose they still are. If I had my way, the term and "memes" along with it would be retired from our vocabulary of talking about how media circulates. There's something sick and unhealthy about the concept of viral media. The term, "viral" operates off a metaphor of infection, assuming that the public are unwilling carriers of messages -- yet I doubt very much that the students who sent me this video were in any sense unwilling or unknowing about what they were doing. The concept of "viral media" strips aside the agency of the participants who are sending along this video for their own reasons -- in this case, a mixture of political zeal and personal affection and probably some sense that I would find the video intellectually interesting. The term, "meme," implies that culture is "self-replicating" rather than actively reshaped by the choices made by individual consumers and subcultural communities.

So, the folks at MoveOn probably thought they had created "viral media." In fact, they created a powerful example of "spreadable media." What makes it powerful is that they made it easy for individuals to customize the content of the video to make it more personally meaningful or more important, to make it meaningful in specific social contexts, to make it meaningful in relation to their social networks. The content is playful and fun; there's a certain fascination with the mechanisms which imprint personally significant names over the repurposed video content; there's some delight in seeing myself praised by conservative pundits and even by George W.

As we pass this content along, it facilitates conversations among friends and it allows us to signify to each other our mutual recognition and respect for the civic rituals which surround the political process. When people send me this video, they intend it as a gift -- which is to say, they intend it to reaffirm the social ties we feel towards each other. Its circulation is certainly meaningful on Moveon's terms -- they hope that I will not only affirm its message but pass it along to someone else -- but it is also meaningful on our terms which may be quite different. I could, for example, construct and send one to my socially conservative brother (as a friendly ribbing from Blue America to Red America) and he might pass it along to his friends at work (expressing outrage against what left-wing organizations are saying about that closet socialist and Moslem). And so the process continues.

We've been spending a fair amount of time through the Convergence Culture Consortium reflecting on the properties of spreadable media over the past year. One CMS graduate student, Sheila Seldes, applies this concept to the free circulation of Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising over at the Convergence Culture Consortium's blog and we will be discussing the concept of "spreadability" at the Futures of Entertainment III conference Nov. 21-22.

The political use of spreadability is particularly interesting: while media companies are clearly ambivalent about our ability to take their content and spread it among our friends, political campaigns actively solicit our help in moving their message throughout our social networks. Indeed, much of the emerging literature on civic engagement suggests that such social networks may be replacing the kinds of social organizations which Robert Putnam saw as at the center of American civic life. Most political organizations rely on us to relay meaningful content to others in our friendship circle because they lack the money to launch an all-out media blitz around their message (Obama's "shock and awe" advertising strategies for the final weeks of the campaign is a notable exception.) I believe that if we study the circulation of political content, we may develop a better understanding of the mechanisms which encourage spreadability and the kinds of choices consumer/citizens make when they decide to pass a video along to their friends.

So, here's another fascinating example of spreadable media content. While it lacks the built-in capacity for customization, it has the added feature of a certain kind of "remember when" nostalgia. This video specifically reminds us of the original Whazzup Budweisser Beer commercial from 2000. I'm sure that it's still stuck in your head if you were at all conscious in 2000 but here's a copy if you want to go back and compare notes.

The original spot has a special place in the literature on "viral media." Aired during the Super Bowl, the spot became an instant classic, one that people spoke about, but more importantly, one which was widely parodied across a range of digital communities. And each time we saw the soundtrack of the video applied in a new context -- members of the Clinton Administration, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Superfriends, and so forth -- the core branding message got repeated. Bud certainly spent a lot of money for the initial exposure but then many people furthered their promotional aims by sending a succession of pastiche videos along to their friends.

So, part of the power of the new video is that it reminds us of our own role in spreading the original video. it helps that the original video came out during the 2000 campaign which George W. Bush in the White House and thus represents an ideal marker of the passing of time and of what has happened to America over those eight years. The soundtrack implicitly asks us whether we are better off now than we were eight years ago and demands to know what we are going to do about it. The frat boy humor of the original video evokes a more carefree time (suggesting "goofing off" with college friends) as a contrast to the adult responsibilities and dire consequences which confront these same characters today. Even our annoyance over being reminded of the "Whazzup" campaign also can be directed towards a president who famously uses fraternity style nicknames for the members of his administration, as Oliver Stone's W has brought back to everyone's attention. Nostalgia is often a spur for the circulation of spreadable media content but in this case, memories of the past are designed to provoke a particular kind of historical consciousness.

Or let's tackle a final set of videos which have been spreading over the final weeks of the campaign. The first is a video where someone re-purposed footage of John McCain for comic effect: in this case, the video draws a parallel between McCain's mannerisms and those of a particular super-villain much beloved by comic book fans. The analogy between McCain and the Penguin is one that I've seen surface many different ways in recent weeks, but never more effectively than in this video. And the video works because it gives us a new comic frame through which to interpret McCain's mannerisms.The video doesn't offer us a deep political analysis: at best it allows us to put a name on something which might have been unnerving us all along. Whatever meaning it carries comes, however, from the social transactions which occur around us, through the ways that circulating the video to others reaffirms our own political commitments and links them to deeper social ties.

The Penguin analogy, however, may also allow us to make sense of this other video which has been circulating without much explicit commentary -- an excerpt from the 1966 Adam West Batman series featuring a debate between Batman and the Penquin. For people of my generation, this video carries enormous nostalgic value. This is a much valued segment of our childhood imaginary. Yet, the repurposing of this footage right now forces us to read the scene through a totally different lens and in turn, the content of the video gives us layer upon layer of satirical commentary on the recent Presidential debates. Once again, this is content I've felt compelled to share with my students, my friends, my family, and now, my blog readers for a variety of different reasons. I am not an unwilling or unknowing participant in this process; this is not "self-replicating" culture; there is simply a powerful alignment between my social goals and the political agendas of those who have excerpted and recirculated this content.

Thanks to John Campbell, Kelly Whitney, and Joshua Diaz for calling these examples to my attention.

A House United: How are Cultural and Political Preferences Related?

Earlier this year, I wrote a post for the PBS Media Shift Idea Lab blog, answering "What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?." The post was a reaction to a Communication Forum conversation I moderated between Cass Sunstein (Infotopia), now a legal advisor to the Obama campaign and his fellow Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks). One of the CMS graduate students had tried to get the law professors to reflect on the political uses of popular entertainment and I sought to expand upon that issue here. Here's part of what I wrote:

While ideological perspectives certainly play a role in defining our interests as fans and media consumers, they are only one factor among others. So, we may watch a program which we find entertaining but sometimes ideologically challenging to us: I know conservatives who watched The West Wing and laugh at The Daily Show; I know liberals who enjoy 24 even if they might disagree about the viability of torture as a response to global terrorism. Television content provides a "common culture" which often bridges between other partisan divides within the culture, even in the context of culture war discourses which use taste in popular media as a wedge issue to drive us apart.

So, a fan group online is apt to be far more diverse in its perspectives than a group defined around, say, a political candidate or a social issue. This is not to suggest that fan communities do not form firm consensus perspectives which block some other ideas from being heard, but they form them around different axis -- such as desired sets of romantic partnerships between characters -- which may or may not reflect ideological schisms. There may be rich discussions, then, about the philosophy of education which should rule at Hogwarts, just not on which character constitutes the most appropriate life partner for Harry Potter.

At the same time, the nature of popular culture means that it continually raises social, political, and ethical issues; popular media projects something of our hopes and fears and as such, it provides us a context for talking through our values.

Two recently released studies shed further light on the relationship between our cultural preferences as fans and our political commitments as citizens, suggesting that our media consumption habits may break more sharply along political lines than I might have previously imagined.

The first comes from Nielsen IAG which looked at the ways cable viewership broke down according to political preferences. Specifically, the research is conducted as part of their ongoing effort to understand the nature of media "engagement." As they explain in their blog, "Engagement" refers to the amount of attention paid to a television program by the average viewer. Nielsen measures TV engagement by questioning a representative panel of viewers about their recall of specific telecasts' content."

Their research suggested that those programs on cable which received the highest overall engagement scores also received the most "bipartisan" interest -- meaning that they attracted and "engaged" viewers from across the political spectrum. Yet, they also identified some programs whose viewerships broke decisively along ideological lines.

Among those programs attracting the greatest Democratic viewership were: The Colbert Report (Comedy); The Deadliest Catch (Discovery); It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX); Ax Men (History); Tin Man (SciFi); My Boys (TBS); and I Love New York (VH1).

Among those programs attracting the greatest Republican interest were South Park (Comedy); Cash Cab (Discovery); Damages (FX); Battle 360 (History); Doctor Who (SciFi); The Bill Engval Show (TBS) and Rock of Love With Bret Michaels (VH1).

Among those programs attracting the greatest interest among independents were The Cleaner (A&E), Real Housewives of Orange County (Bravo), The Next Food Network Star (Food), HGTV Design Star (HGTV); Army Wives (Life), The Hills (MTV), What Not to Wear (TLC), and Saving Grace (TNT).

It is significant that the study was conducted using cable-based programing. Historically, cable has been associated with narrow-casting strategies which target specific demographic groups and niche communities, while network television has adopted a broadcast or "consensus narrative" model which seeks to appeal to the broadest possible viewership.

Personally, I am a little surprised that I watch more shows on the Republican list (Damages, Doctor Who) than on the Democratic list (The Colbert Report). This takes me back to all of those old jokes that "my Tivo thinks I'm gay." Now, the Nielsen company thinks I'm Republican. But this brings us back to my original point that even where shows do seem to skew towards particular ideological perspectives (I suppose we can read Damages as expressing an outrage over the abuses of "trial lawyers" or Doctor Who fans make see John McCain as a bit like a Time Lord in that he had been an eyewitness during many other historical periods), they never absolutely break down according to purely ideological commitments and that makes them a particularly vital space for us to have conversations about our hopes, ideals, and values as a nation.

The Second Study was conducted by the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center and Zogby International and released Sept. 19 2008. Their key finding was that consumption of entertainment properties broke decisively along political lines, though again, not absolutely. As their press release reported, "While 22% of conservatives said they 'never' enjoy entertainment that reflects values other than their own, just 7% of liberals felt the same way. At the other end of the scale, just 11% of conservatives said they 'very often' enjoyed programming that ran counter to their personal philosophies, compared to 20% of liberals and 18% of moderates who said the same thing." Their research identified House as "one of the very successful TV shows with almost an equal number of adherents across the political spectrum."

The report divided Americans into three different taste communities, Reds, Blues, and Purples. Here's part of their description of each:

Reds

Reds are the largest ideological group in the U.S. They tend to live close to other family members and they're much more satisfied with their spiritual, family and personal life than the rest of the nation. ....Reds tend to get their news from cable TV and radio, and they much prefer Leno to any other late-night programming.... Their favorite fictional TV shows are House and CSI; their favorite summer movies were Indiana Jones and The Dark Knight.

Blues

Blues are the second largest ideological group in the country. Almost all of them think the U.S. is on the wrong track, and they are far more likely than the rest of the country to be unsatisfied with their personal, family, business and social life. They are more tolerant of the media than other Americans, but they are more likely to get their news from comedy shows than from any of the network TV newscasts. More than any other group, they get their news online, and they use Wikipedia.... They like The Dark Knight and Iron Man, and their favorite TV show is 60 Minutes. Many Blues dislike reality programming - more than Reds and Purples. For late-night, they prefer The Daily Show.

Purples

Purples are the smallest ideological group, and in many ways they fall between the Red and Blue camps.... Like Blues, most get their news from the Web, but they are more likely than any other group to use the Web to find information about celebrity gossip, TV shows, movies, games, music, fashion, shopping, books, relationships and sports. Purples are more likely than Reds or Blues to say playing games and listening to music is the most enjoyable thing to do online. Unlike Blues, Purples prefer MySpace to Facebook (it's a tie for Reds).... Purples say watching TV is their favorite leisure time activity, and their top three shows are Law & Order: SVU, 60 Minutes, and CSI. Purples like reality programming more than any other group, and American Idol is their favorite. They prefer Letterman and Leno over all the other late-night programs.

Those of us who have read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction shouldn't be surprised to learn that tastes operate as a system: those of us who share a significant number of preferences in common are more likely to find overlaps on other preferences, even those which superficially seem unrelated. Here, it is clear that political and cultural preferences are closely aligned, especially as they relate to openness to embrace new ideas or to experience works which reflect a "foreign" perspective.

Here are a few other data points from this research which I found particularly interesting (text taken directly from the Center's Press Release):

• Fox News wins the prize for the most politically divisive TV channel (70% of conservatives watch it daily and only 3% of liberals).
• Over 82% of conservatives say they never watch MTV. The only other station from our list that they watch less is Univision (84%).
• Who has a sense of humor? Not only do liberals give Comedy Central a big thumbs up (31% watch it daily, compared to 6% of all other respondents), you are more likely to find them watching comedies than moderates or conservatives.
• Out of 15 TV and film genres, "arts" emerged as the one with the highest positive correlation to liberal viewers and the highest negative correlation to conservative viewers. In other words, while 48% of liberals prefer arts programming, only 17% of conservatives do. At the other end of the scale, less than 5% of liberals say they do not like the genre at all, compared to almost 25% of conservatives.
• Out of 15 musical genres, conservatives were more likely than the rest of the respondents to listen to only two of them: country and gospel. What genre are they least likely to listen to, compared to the rest of the respondents?...World music is also the music genre where we see the greatest difference between conservatives and liberals.

Given this data, here's the fun question to discuss over lunch today: If this presidential election represents a moment of political realignment, what impact will it have on the entertainment programming which gets produced and consumed over the next few years? And for that matter, might House turn out to be, ironically, the series which teaches us all how to get along? Or turning the lens around, does your fandom attract more red, blue, or purple viewers and why? Talk among yourselves -- but also talk to someone who believes differently than you do.

Thanks to Joshua Green for calling the Nielsen study to my attention.

I Have Seen the Futures of Entertainment ...And It Works!

For the past two years, the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT has been happy to offer its Futures of Entertainment conference, bringing together key thinkers from academia and the media industry in substantive conversations about trends which may change popular culture as we know it. You can sample discussions at the 2007 conference of such topics as Fan Labor, Cult Media, Advertising and Convergence Culture, Metrics and Measurements, Academic-Industry Relations, and Heroes: From 'Appointment TV' to "Engagement TV.' This year's event will be held at MIT on Nov. 20-21 and we are opening registration for the event as of today.

Here's what you can expect this year:

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

This year's conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium's new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year's panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

Confirmed speakers for this year's conference include: Kim Moses - Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, Javier Grillo-Marxuach - The Middleman, Lost, Medium, John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press), Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Alex McDowell - Production Designer, The Watchmen, Kevin Slavin - Area/Code, Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press), Donald K Ranvaud - Buena Onda Films, Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), Gail De Kosknik - UC Berkeley, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre, Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com, Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting, Mauricio Mota - New Content (Brazil), Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing), Sharon Ross - Columbia College Chicago, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (WileyBlackwell), Nancy Baym - University of Kansas, Personal Connections in a Digital Age (Polity Press), Alice Marwick - New York University, Vu Nguyen - VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com, Lance Weiler - Director Head Trauma and The Last Broadcast, Gregg Hale - Producer Seventh Moon and The Blair Witch Project with more to come.

Friday, November 21

Consumption and Value

Where does value come from in the media evolving media landscape? In a medium rooted in the popularity of content, who or what is the source of media value? Does it lie in the properties themselves, or in what people do with these properties? Do creative companies create value or does value creation also occur on the consumption side, as audiences discover hidden potential in existing properties, make their own emotional and creative contributions to the mix, and spread the brand to new and previously unsolicited markets? Might we also see value as originating from those who simply sit and watch? "Attention" can be thought of as a core product produced by media companies - under advertiser-supported models, media properties attract audiences whose attention is sold to advertisers seeking to reach groups of people. While this is not always the case, the increasing significance of product placement suggests even goods sold directly to audiences are subsidized by the sale of their attention. Especially with the rapid emergence of user-created content, can we consider audiences participants in the creation of the value media properties hold? How do we account for the non-monetary value of media properties? How should gains from media value be distributed through the networks of creatives who collaborate in its production?

Panelists to be announced.

Making Audiences Matter

Audiences seem to present a constantly moving target. Migratory, skilled at avoiding advertising, and increasingly looking like producers, working out who the audience is and what they are doing is an evolving challenge. How do we create better relationships with audiences who look less like "consumers"? In a media landscape that looks to increasingly value broad distribution over concentrating attention, how do we uncover audiences and connect them with content? What does an "engaged" audience look like, and how do you know when you've got one? What do you do once you've found one?

Panelists include: Kim Moses, Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer; Gail De Kosknik, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre (with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington), UC Berkeley; Kevin Slavin, Area/Code; Vu Nguyen, VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com

Social Media

Moving lives online, creating conversations across geography, connecting with consumers - how is social media defining the current entertainment landscape? As people not only put more content online, but conduct more of their daily lives in networked spaces and via social networking sites, how are social media influencing how we think of audiences? Video-sharing platforms have changed how we think of production and distribution, and Facebook gifts point to the value of virtual properties, how are these sites enabling other processes of production or distribution practices. Spaces where commercial and community purposes intertwine, what are the implications for privacy, content management, and identity construction of social media? How have they impacted notions of civic engagement?

Panelists include: Alice Marwick, NYU; Joe Marchese, socialvibe.com; Amber Case, Hazelnut Consulting.

Cutting Global Deals

The Internet has altered transnational media flows, making it easier to move content across national and geographic boundaries, but complicating the economic structures that support these flows. How do we manage global distribution in the current context? What is the impact of the Internet on the interactions between local audiences and globalised content? What is the role of international audiences as taste-makers, and what can that tell us about making content relevant to multiple local audiences? How do we balance international distribution windows with audiences who move content themselves?

Panelists include: Donald K Ranvaud, Buena Onda Film; Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in a Digital Age (Polity Press), University of Kansas; Mauricio Mota, New Content (Brazil).

Saturday, November 22

When Comics Converge

The last few years have seen a steady expansion of comic book creators, characters and audiences into a range of different mediums. Television programming to successful Hollywood franchises seem respectful (mostly) of the source material. The graphic novel and the short run series have burgeoned and been mainstreamed. Comic-con has expanded to a key event for the entertainment industry. Many established producers in other media are looking towards comics as a platform for creative expression or for extending their narratives (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and Supernatural, for instance.) What contributions do comics make to convergence culture? What makes comics such a rich recruiting ground for new content or creative talent? Why are other media producers so aggressively courting comics fans?

Panelists include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman); Alex McDowell, Production Designer, The Watchmen; Alisa Perren, (Co-editor with Jennifer Holt) The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing), Georgia State University.

Franchising, Extensions and Worldbuilding

Media convergence has made the complex intertwining of multi-platform media properties more and more common-place, yet the creation of storyworlds that extend beyond a single text is not a recent development. With a history that includes sequels, spin-offs, and licensed products, what is the future for the media franchise? Is there a material difference between creating media franchises or transmedia properties? What is the role of television programs or films in anchoring wider narrative franchises, especially when they extend beyond media and into the "real world"? What is the significance of the creative individuals who contribute to franchises, including creatives, professionals, and fans?

Panelists to be announced

At the Intersection of the Academy and the Industry

What are the challenges of bringing the academy and the industry together? How do we negotiate working across these two worlds?

Panelists include: Amanda Lotz, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), University of Michigan; John Caldwell, Production Culture (Duke University Press), UCLA; Grant McCracken, Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press).

More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks, but surely our line-up is already strong enough that you will not want to miss this event.

Coming Soon: The Second Part of a Three Part Interview With Danny Ledonne

Inviting Our Participation: An Interview with Sharon Marie Ross (Part One)

Increasingly, television invites our participation. Some shows, like American Idol, do so through explicit calls to share our thoughts and reactions. Some shows, such as Lost, do so through their deployment of serial structures which demand a particular kind of attention that we associate with cult media. In Convergence Culture, I talk about building entertainment properties to be cultural attractors (drawing like minded people together) and cultural activators (giving these networked audiences something to do). In the recent book, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet, media scholar Sharon Marie Ross identifies as range of "invitational strategies" in contemporary television which encourage our participation as fans. Beyond the Box is an important contribution to our understanding of convergence culture, an exciting example of what happens when scholars effectively blend research methods including political economy, fan studies, and close textual analysis, which have historically been set in opposition to each other. Ross is able to understand not only what draws fans to such programs but also to explain what fans mean economically to television producers at the current moment of media in transition. I read this book with great gusto, delighted to find a kindred spirit, and pleased to see this further elaboration of the affective economy surrounding contemporary broadcasting.

I am pleased to be able to share with you this interview with an up and coming media scholar. Here, she not only lays out some of the book's core ideas but she also applies them to some very contemporary developments in Broadcasting, such as the Writer's Strike, the Gossip Girl phenomenon, and the release of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible.

Throughout the book, you write about what you call "invitational strategies" surrounding cult television series. Explain what you mean by this term.

The term "invitational strategies" actually emerged from a conversation among me, Janet Staiger, Amanda Lotz, and Matt Hills. I had started with "interpellation" but that didn't quite work for what I was trying to capture in terms of what I see emerging in TV and the Internet. What I've seen, across several genres, is a mode of address (sometimes explicit and sometimes less obvious) where producers/writers, and marketers also at times, create stories (which can encompass the show plot itself, and also how a show is marketed and how a show works with Internet addendums) that reach out to viewers/readers and "prod" them to become a part of the storytelling process. The goal is to have the reader become actively engaged and also to elicit among readers a feeling (and I mean "feeling" emotionally) that the story belongs to them in a significant way. This can run from overt invitations (asking viewers to vote or chat online or buy something) to organic (where a viewer is already likely to be engaged and the invitation is embedded more deeply in the plots) to obscured (where the invitation seems "hidden" and those outside the experience might not see any behind-the-scenes constructing of an invitation at work). I think organic is becoming dominant. The key element is that the reader feels as if those creating the story want their input and involvement in some way--and the reader has the power to refuse the invitation, accept it, bring along a guest, drop by or stay and really party (etc.) A definite two-way event (though as we know, the host ultimately decides what is available for consumption and what the hours of the party might be...I find myself slipping into more metaphors, but hope this explains it!:)

As a fan, I kept asking myself whether we really needed any kind of an invitation or whether fan culture might emerge around any program. You seem to suggest that

some texts are more "inviting" than others and more open to exploring alternative forms of audience participation. How important is that solicitation, whether implicit or explicit, to sparking such responses?

I do think invitations aren't necessary for people we think of as fans ( a category that is murky in and of itself). Those who become a fan on their own are ready to jump in and especially use the Internet to create their own forms of involvement. However, I do think fans respond to invitations when offered in the right way--not too confining, being key. This is especially true of more cult like shows like Lost or Dr. Who or even soaps. An invitation is appreciated as it shows deference to fans--but that invite better not preclude already established ways on interacting. For those for whom "fan" still connotes "horrors" of geekdom and over-investment, an invitation might provide the legitimacy needed to allow them to overcome the stigma of fandom and become involved in similar ways with a show. So many people still think of TV and the Internet as "guilty pleasures" that can slip into unhealthy involvement, and an invitation suggests that any involvement they then engage in is distanced from those societal fears of falling in too deeply...

Throughout the book, you draw heavily on research on soap operas to try to explain the kinds of responses surrounding reality television and cult dramas. What do you think television critics miss by trying to discuss the complexity of contemporary television without dealing with soaps?

Oh--sooo very much! As far as I'm concerned, soap operas (with their roots in also comics and Dickens' serials of yore) are the fundamental form of storytelling. Think about it: a story that keeps going--that will always be there for you no matter what stage of life you're in or what kind of mood--and even persists if you leave; a story that responds to the times and milieu of its viewers; a story that reacts to viewers' desires to some degree...and that requires careful attention without holding you too much to account. When critics dismiss this genre (often via its lower production values and its association with women) they overlook its core pleasures, which aren't about missing out on excitement in one's own life, or having little to do with one's day. The pleasures are about storytelling in its most basic sense: someone tells you a little bit about this person and their life, and you consider it in relation to your own; then you can consider further in relation to those around you--especially those who have also been told the story. And then you can spin the story outwards--what might happen next and why. I believe that humans inherently need stories to empathize with others, plan their futures (individually and as cultures), dream dreams, etc. Soaps tap into this need--and I think it's a healthy need. Contemporary TV that doesn't seem like a soap can often replicate this appeal using soap-like strategies of narration (interruption, open-endedness, current events and mores at work, sprawling plots to follow sprawling casts). If we as critics try to explain the appeal of modern shows without acknowledging their roots in this form and its seriality, we not only do a disservice to history (of the medium), we also are ignoring an understanding of what stories offer human beings. And at an academic level, how can we teach why a show has appeal or how a show needs to be written to have appeal without understanding a genre that has existed since pre-TV? I think scholars have often ignored the soap connection because academia shies away from things emotional in favor of the rational and formulaic...yet stories are all about emotion and psychology because humans are all about emotion and psychology. There are things in life and the world we don't always understand; seeking the answers is what makes us human. Stories (when done well) tap into this--and soaps especially have gloried in basic human questioning. (Why do people stop loving us? why do relatives die? what am I here for?)

You describe your own experiences in viewer activism around Buffy as paving the way for some of your intellectual interest around this topic. What did you learn through your fan involvement and how did it inform your work on this book?

Oh, very very much is indebted to Buffy!! I became a fan "on my own" and this show spoke to me as a woman, a scholar, a feminist, a lover of TV...It tapped into so many of those human questions mentioned above...I had loved TV before, but this was my first real experience as a fan beyond soap operas proper. I found myself fascinated BY myself (ha ha--narcissism reigns always among scholars!). How could a TV show--especially one so initially disparaged--allow me to grow as a person and as a teacher and scholar? How could such a show appeal to so many different kinds of people (as I eventually discovered)? After focusing on this and Xena initially, I began to see other shows that did the same for other groups of viewers--from wrestling to sports to reality TV. Was there something connecting such disparate groups and such disparate styles of TV programs? And given the role of the Internet with Buffy fandom and the role of Joss Whedon in becoming involved with fans online (and off), was there something about this new medium that was bringing together these areas of culturally "disconnected" forms of storytelling? As I started working on this book, Buffy always served as a barometer of sorts. How was Buffy fandom different and how the same from say American Idol or The O.C.? How did the structure of the show differ and not from other shows? How the content/themes? How the role of the producers and critics? I began to see the storytelling connection as fundamental to linking different things that seemed so very different...In the end, does a show call out to people in such a way that they feel a personal connection AND ultimately a social connection to other people? Last, via my involvement with Buffy fandom both personally and as a scholar, I began to see at work the real role and impact of cultural biases against genres and fandoms and to become fascinated by what can get in the way--and also aid and abet--people's willingness to embrace a story as having true value and meaning in life--to embrace "entertainment" as something that serves a purpose.

One of the most talked about examples of "viral media content" this summer was the online distribution of Dr. Horrible. How might we see this experiment as an outgrowth of Joss Whedon's long-term engagement with his hardcore fans?

Definitely an outgrowth! (Loved it, by the way...) Dr. Horrible is a fascinating example of so many themes in my book coming together (after publication, of course! That's always the way...) People who had come to respect Joss Whedon as an auteur came to this text; along with those who loved Buffy or Firefly; and those who love Neil Patrick Harris and How I Met Your Mother; those who follow viral videos...and of course it was a by-product of the writers' strike that was immersed in the Internet's relationship with TV. Some heard of it through friends, some online, some via Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide...So on the one hand, while its success was rooted in Joss Whedon's awareness that his fans are out there and always looking for new work from him and that they will seek work in untraditional forums, on the other hand the success was also a product of the Internet becoming a more acceptable venue for storytelling in the ways in which I have been discussing it and the ability of the Internet to draw together "unheard of" combinations of fans. In short, when someone reaches out with a personal story (and it was pretty personal to pull this off when a strike was going on), people will respond in kind with personal attention.

You discuss teen television as one genre that reflects contemporary youth's expectations of participation. What have current teen shows, such as Gossip Girl, learned from the earlier experiments in "teleparticipation" you discuss in the book?

This is funny--I was watching Gossip Girl all summer while pregnant and began loving it as a junior Dynasty. Having interviewed Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage about The OC and hearing about their travails with the show and Internet fans and FOX, I definitely was looking for signs of the old (good use of soap strategies, attention to the role of new media communication) and signs of the new (how to attend to fans without cowtowing to them, how to not spill all of a story too soon). And there I am, watching a week ago, and I see a brief funny bit in which pre-teen girls accost Serena and Dan (the main couple) in the park, offering their totally contradictory two cents about whether or not the couple should stay together, etc. And Serena and Dan became Josh and Stephanie: we hear you, we admire your interest and your new media involvement (hearing about the couple's troubles via the Gossip Girl blog)--but back off! The story is still unraveling and if we listen to all of you, it'll all spiral into meaninglessness as a story. This reminded me so much of my interview with them, in which they discussed the many different groups of fans they were dealing with, and how trying to keep up with all of their demands ultimately robbed them of their power to deliver a story they were connected with. You can't please everyone--but you should listen at the very least.

Teen shows make it tricky--there are so many different social audiences invested, with differing needs and desires. But the teen demo is so very new media savvy, you need to be able to keep up with their interests--and their skills as readers. I see Gossip Girl skillfully negotiating this demo with its older demo (18-34) by weaving in new media more deftly to the plots, by heeding online talk--but ultimately by the producers laying claim to their role as storytellers. (vs. story-givers--where you totally hand the story off and abandon ship.) It will be interesting to see if 90210 follows suit and if Smallville can survive its core Lex/Clark fan base now that Lex is gone (too early to tell). But I think the teen demo is so key to success with many shows that producers are definitely working harder to listen to them, and reach out to them online and via script. The key thing is can they do this without sacrificing their own creativity and their own needs as storytellers? (I think we often forget that writers, even in L.A., are humans too--driven to tell stories for very personal reasons and not solely driven by profit. It's a mean business and no one sticks with it without really loving it.)

Sharon Ross is an assistant professor in the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches courses in the areas of TV history and critical theory and her research focuses on issues of television reception; this semester she is excited to be teaching a 5 week intensive seminar on a single script from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is the associate editor of the journal for the International Digital Media Arts Association and co-editor with Dr. Louisa Stein of the anthology Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. She has too many "must see" TV shows to mention but highly recommends Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother this season.

What Happened Before YouTube?

G'day Mates. The following op-ed piece, which I co-authored with John Hartley, appeared yesterday morning in the Sydney Morning Herald. The text is a mash up of two pieces -- one by me, one by Hartley -- which will appear in a forthcoming book on Youtube being written by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green and due out by the end of this year. I am here in Brisbane, Australia this week participating in a conference being hosted by Queensland University of Technology's Center of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The conference's theme is "Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons." And this editorial is a pretty good representation of the core themes of my talk. I want to place YouTube in a larger historical context and in the process, to call attention to the conscious decisions being made by a variety of groups to Youtube or not to Youtube, rather than treating YouTube as the origin point for participatory culture and as the inevitable hub around which all amateur media making orbits. The plentitude of YouTube can leave us with the sense that everything and everyone is there, not inviting us to ask questions about which groups have opted out or been excluded and why, or to question whether YouTube represents the best possible model for supporting participatory culture. The longer version of this piece contains an extended discussion of some of the choices being made in the fan vidding community around these issues and describes some of the concerns that the history of women's role in remix video may be written out of the history of YouTube. All of this was informed by conversations I've had in and around USC's DIY conference earlier in the year.

I have long regarded the Creative Industries program here as a sibling of what we are doing in Comparative Media Studies. I have featured a number of QUT folks in the past through my blog -- Alan McKee, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. They are doing extraordinary work in the areas of civic media, new media literacy, participatory culture, intellectual property law, globalization, and creative industries, that is, on many of the themes which also animate our own work at MIT. It's been great to be here so far, getting to know more of the researchers at the Center and what they are doing, and cementing relations with long time friends and colleagues.

YouTube: home port for lip-syncers, karaoke singers, trainspotters, birdwatchers, skateboarders, hip hoppers, small time wrestling federations, educators, third wave feminists, churches, proud parents, poetry slammers, gamers, human rights activists, hobbyists. It gets 10 hours of new content every minute.Where did all that come from?

There is much that is new about YouTube, but there is also much that is old. The emergence of `Do-It-Yourself' cultures of all kinds over the past several decades paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of new media. YouTube has gone from nowhere to cultural ubiquity in a couple of years because we already know what to do with it.

Among its precursors were the zines of the political and cultural avant garde of the 1970s and 80s, closely tied to the growth of punk rock and the emergence of `Riot Grrl' feminism. They were also part of a much larger history of amateur publishing. In the case of the science fiction fan community, this could be traced back to the 1920s.

And these DIY or DIWO: `do it with others' impulses spilled over from print zines to include the production of mix tapes and home videos.

Modern cyberculture can trace its roots back to the 1960s, with `people's radio,' early video activism, underground newspapers and comics; all efforts to deploy low cost media tools and practices towards alternative ends.

Many early netizens explicitly embraced the value of participatory culture. These utopian pioneers would greet YouTube's amateurs not as mindless kids but as the fulfilment of their own hopes and a validation of their predictions.

The rhetoric of the `digital revolution' has assumed that new media displace the old. But YouTube exemplifies what Henry Jenkins calls a `convergence culture,' with its complex interactions and collaborations between corporate and grassroots media.

YouTube does not so much change the conditions of production as it alters the contexts of circulation and reception. Amateur, activist and avant garde works now reach a larger public. Yet, many of those earlier advocates remain skeptical that a commercial firm like YouTube can truly enable alternative politics. If we want to see a more democratic culture, they argue, we need anti-corporate outlets, greater diversity among participants, more debate about whose work gets seen and how it is valued.

But as Geekcorps founder Ethan Zuckerman says, any medium sufficiently powerful to enable the distribution of cute cat pictures can also, under the right circumstances, be deployed to bring down a government.

Right now, people are learning how to produce, upload and circulate content. What happens next is up to us all. With YouTube, there is almost infinite scope for creative content and new ideas to be produced by just anyone, without the need for avant

garde leadership, expert filtering or institutional control. The so-called `long tail' of self-made content is accessible to anyone near a computer terminal.

While most people can read, very few publish in print. Hence active contribution to science, journalism and even fictional storytelling has been restricted to expert elites, while most of the general population makes do with ready-made entertainment.

But the internet does not distinguish between literacy and publication. So now we are entering a new kind of digital literacy, where everyone is a publisher and whole populations have the chance to contribute as well as consume.

We can certainly use the internet for daydreaming, mischief and time-wasting, but it is equally possible to move on to other levels of functionality, and other purposes, including science, journalism and works of the imagination. You can already find all this on YouTube.

If we see YouTube as operating without a history, we erase the politics behind those struggles to prepare the way, and we may end up accepting far less than what we bargained for, or what might be possible if we participate.

By reclaiming what happened before, we will have a basis for judging how well YouTube really is serving the cause of participatory culture and the growth of knowledge among all sections of society. We may also find openings for `a critique, a goal, a community, and a context' of the kind that motivated earlier DIY media-makers.

As they say in The Matrix: `I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.'

Professor Henry Jenkins co-directs the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tomorrow he will speak at the Australian Research Council Centre for Creative Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology, where Professor John Hartley is the research director.

"What Is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part Two)

What criteria should we use to evaluate good and bad remixes?

I think that, as with any work of art, the criteria for judging whether a remix is 'good' or 'bad' is largely subjective and what some people passionately love, others will think is a complete waste of time. I believe there is no artistic work in existence that everyone on planet earth would unanimously agree is 'good.'

Having said that, for the purposes of the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, I have set some general criteria for the public and for the judges to use as guidelines when rating the videos. These are overall impact, which will account for 50% of the marks, creativity for 25% and communication for the remaining 25%. If you were to analyse a video remix that is generally accepted as being 'good', for example Titanic 2: the Surface by Robert Blankenheim, we can see that the video is exceptionally well produced, so much so that you could easily believe that is a genuine trailer for a new Titanic movie! The basic idea behind the piece is very clever and well executed on every level. Personally, I think that believability is a recurring theme in many of the most popular and well received video remixes. For these types of remixes, it is a huge challenge to convince the viewers that what they are watching is real. There is a long history of people messing with media channels to communicate a message effectively, e.g. Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast and I feel that speaking to an audience in a language that they are intimately familiar with, e.g. movie trailers, is an excellent way to communicate a message. The Adbusters movement have been 'culture-jamming' for decades, mostly in the medium of print, but I expect a lot of video remixed work to emerge in this niche in the future.

But what about 'bad' remixes? Well, it is fantastic to see that so many amateur video makers are trying their hand at producing video remixes, however, as with every art form, the ratio is usually about 10% quality, 90% garbage. The ratio holds true in the case of video remixes. Here is an example of a particularly poor effort, but hopefully the creator will stick at it and improve as they produce more work. Having said that, production skills are not necessarily the be all and end all. Sometimes, the idea is strong enough to bring the video popularity even if the production values are not 100%.

An interesting debate has sprung up around so-called 'YouTube Poop' videos. To some people, these types of videos seem to make no sense, are offensive and are even difficult to watch. People said similar things about punk. Personally, I think that YouTube Poop videos are some of the most potent examples of remixed videos out there, and although they may not be attempting to communicate a particular underlying message, bearing more resemblance to stream-of-consciousness poetry, they have their own artistic merit. But I am certain that many people would consider them to be 'bad' remixes.

The statement above implies that you think the current influx of remixes and recuts is a product of shifts in the technological environment. Yet, we could point to a much older history of cut-ups, collages, montages, scratch video, fan video, running back across much of the 20th century. Remix was part of 20th century life well before digital tools and platforms arrived. What factors do you think have given rise to our current remix culture?

I agree with you that remix itself is by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, it dates back as far as we can trace human history. The earliest example I am aware of is the anagram, which is essentially taking the building blocks of a word, i.e. the letters, remixing them into a new order that creates a new word and a secondary meaning and association by connecting the first word to the newly formed second word. There have been examples of remix in every creative art since time immemorial. For example, in art, the obvious one is collage. In music, folk music was spread by word of mouth, and so when one person would learn a new song from someone else, they would often apply their own variations to it, essentially remixing it to suit their own style.

In more recent times, in the history of recorded music, music remixes date back at least to the 1950's, when Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman remixed Orson Welle's War of the Worlds with various musical snippets. In the world of film and video, recuts and remixes have been in existence since the art of editing was invented. Some of the most well known filmmakers that experimented in the field of remix and montage as far back as the 1920s include the Russians, Sergei Eisenstein and his mentor Lev Kuleshov. Joseph Cornell and Hans Richter also experimented in the genre in the early part of the 20th Century.

The distinct difference between the work that was produced by these masters and the video remixes that we see today on Total Recut and YouTube, are that now the tools of production have been democratized. What was once an art form confined to professionals who could afford expensive film-making equipment and distribution companies with established networks and connections, is now affordable to the majority of creators in the western world. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection today can produce and distribute their work for costs close to zero. Every new computer comes shipped with editing software, video content is widely available on video sharing networks like YouTube and the Internet Archive, and it is easy to reach a potentially large audience by uploading your video to one of these sites.

The net result is that the medium is evolving. Video remix includes everything from movie trailer recuts, political parodies, music mash-ups, subvertisements, fan made vids, machinima, overdubs and many others. There is no doubt in my mind that many other sub-genres will evolve as more and more people begin to experiment in this area.

In your thesis, you suggest that video recuts are "stifled by overzealous copyright owners who are over-protective of their work." What can you tell us about current legal responses to the remix community? Are there any signs that the studios are becoming more accepting of remix culture as remixes become more widespread on sites like YouTube and are finding their way back into commercial media channels?

Of recent times there has been a serious crackdown on video sites like YouTube where copyright owners have made claims of copyright infringement and the videos have been taken down, in compliance with the DMCA. Unfortunately, many remixed videos that legitimately make fair use of copyrighted content are being caught in the crossfire of outright piracy. I feel it is very important to highlight the distinction here as this is possibly the number one reason why the remix community gets targeted and bullied by 'overzealous' copyright owners. If somebody rips an episode of Lost from DVD, for example, and uploads five ten minute segments of the episode to YouTube unchanged and without permission, this is piracy and should definitely not be condoned. ABC Studios would be completely within their rights to request that YouTube remove these infringing videos from their site. However, if someone were to sample small clips from various episodes of Lost, recut them, add effects and overlay a soundtrack from the classic 80's TV show The A-Team, this would clearly be a fair use of the copyrighted material.

Unfortunately, the filtering technology that has been developed to track copyrighted material cannot distinguish between these different types of videos, and fair use video remixes are being wrongfully taken down from YouTube every day. One of the problems here is that the creators of these ingenious videos are unaware that they are within their rights to file counter notifications against copyright infringement claims that they believe to be false. In my own case, I had three of my remix videos removed by the BBC, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which led to my YouTube account being disabled. Three strikes and you're out. Each of the videos were less than three minutes long, and the use of copyrighted material in them was clearly fair use. I filed counter notification claims with each of the allegators through YouTube, which is a relatively straightforward process. The BBC conceded that my video was a fair use and the other two companies did not respond within the DMCA time limit and so my three videos were put back up and my account was reinstated.

I am certain that there are many other people out there who have had similar experiences but did not realise they could do anything to get their videos put back up. I would encourage anyone who feels that their work is fair use to file counter notifications and to make sure that their videos are put back online. Alternatively, they can upload them to Total Recut!

On a more positive note, I have noticed a trend among some of the larger media corporations that suggests that they are becoming more accepting of user generated remix videos that sample from their copyrighted material. Some, including Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and Warner Bros have even dabbled with remix contests of their own to coincide with the release of their movies including School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly and Rambo. We have also recorded a significant exponential increase in the number of video recuts being uploaded to the web every day and less being taken down, which suggests that more people are getting interested in the area and that copyright owners are beginning to realise the potential benefits of allowing, and possibly even encouraging their fans to play with the content they produce.

In my opinion, video remixes are a free form of advertising for copyright owners and also create more devoted fans of the original work. In a few years, we will all look back and it will be mind boggling to think that big media companies tried to stop fans of their content from creating remixed videos that actually served to promote the original work, as well as being entertaining pieces in themselves.

Your site features a space for political remixes. Do you see remix as an important form of political speech?

I personally feel that remix is one of the best ways for people to voice their opinions and increase their chances of being heard. What better way is there of communicating how you would like George Bush to act than to literally change the words that come out of his mouth? With the current build up to the presidential elections in the United States, we are seeing and hearing a lot of media surrounding the actions and words of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. A plethora of remixed videos have sprung up with Obama , Clinton and McCain as the subjects. I think that having the tools to be able to create videos like these and express personal opinions to a wide audience is extremely empowering for individual users in the digital age. Members of Obama's campaign realise the potential power of grass roots creativity and a video contest has been hosted this month by the folks at moveon.org with a view to creating a 30 second spot for the presidential candidate that will air on national television. No doubt, many of these will be video remixes and we look forward to seeing the finished pieces.

Many people use political parodies as a way to highlight the issues that particular politicians are facing and suggesting courses of action. When Tony Blair was considering his resignation as Prime Minister, a fantastic remix appeared illustrating Blair's internal debate. Another classic video that has done the rounds is the Blair Bush Endless Love remix. This video is interesting in that it pokes fun at the perceived notion of the apparently odd relationship between a submissive Tony Blair and a dominant George Bush.

I have tried my own hand at one or two political remixes in the past. Being from Ireland, I decided to poke a little fun at the two candidates for the Irish General elections last year, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, the two candidates for Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the country at the time. One video showed Enda Kenny as if he was auditioning for American Idol and coming up against a decidedly unimpressed Simon Cowell. The other clip showed Bertie Ahern as if he were pitching a business idea in the Dragons Den I think it is very important that citizens of a country can air their views about their political leaders, and I feel that video remix is one of the most powerful ways to do this.

What are your hopes for the future of remix culture? How do remixes relate to the larger Free Culture movement?

I see remix gradually becoming more mainstream and more widely accepted as a creative form in its own right. Ever more examples of commercialised remix are appearing on our TV and computer screens every day. Many people involved in remix culture detest the idea of the commercialisation of this type of work as they see it as a grass roots, perhaps even rebellious movement, and one that gives a voice to the individual. I don't see this going away. Even if a lot more commercial remix work is created, the tools that enable individuals to transform and recreate the media and culture around them and the new channels of free distribution that enable their work to reach huge audiences are here to stay. My hopes for the future of remix culture would be for this type of work to seep into all walks of life. I would love to see even more educational institutions adopting it as a technique of learning, for example, asking students to create a remixed video about George Washington rather than handing in a written report. In the professional arena, I would love to see more video remix artists being headhunted by studios based on the remix work they showcase online or being commissioned to create new work.

Before this can happen, however, remix artists need to stop being afraid of frivolous legal threats. A large number of remix artists are very careful about revealing their true identities online and use anonymous alter-egos for fear of being sued. I would hope that remix artists will eventually feel as though they don't need to do this anymore, as it could be stifling potential opportunities for them. The copyright issues surrounding remix work are a headache for everyone interested in freely expressing themselves using digital media. Of course, fair use enables the use of small samples of copyrighted material for non-commercial purposes, but I envisage new business models emerging around copyright cleared remix work in the not too distant future.

In terms of the larger Free Culture movement, there are many people and organisations doing fantastic work to help combat the ongoing problem of corporate greed that has seen the copyright term extended to a ridiculous degree in the latter half of the 20th century. Organisations such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Social Media, the Convergence Culture Consortium and FreeCulture.org are all doing incredible work to prevent the scales from tipping too far in the wrong direction and of course individuals, such as our judging panel for the Total Recut Video Remix Challenge, provide invaluable insights through their written and spoken words that help to raise much needed awareness of the issues surrounding remix culture.

We are hosting the Total Recut Remix Challenge primarily to the same end, and we invite anyone with an interest in this area to enter the contest and help us to raise awareness of the changes that need to take place so that we can build a society where copyright owners are fairly rewarded for their artistic labours and artists can freely express themselves by drawing inspiration from the culture around them. Every voice counts.

"What is Remix Culture?": An Interview with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher (Part One)

Several weeks ago, I announced here that I was serving as part of a panel of other "remix experts" as judges for a video competition being hosted by the website, toralrecut.com. Participants are being asked to submit videos which address the question, "What is Remix Culture?" The contest is intended to help educate the public about the debates surrounding remix, copyright, and fair use. As someone currently developing a teacher's strategy guide for teaching remix in the context of high school literature classes, I am very interested to see what kinds of materials emerge from this competition. The submissions will become visible on the site soon and the public is being encouraged to help rank the submissions. In the spirit of sparking further conversation around the issues the contest is exploring, I asked Owen Gallagher, the mastermind behind TotalRecut, if he would respond to some questions about the contest and about remix culture more generally. Alas, his responses got lost in my dreaded spam filter and are just now seeing the light of day. In this two part conversation, he explains why he created the site and sponsored the contest, identifies some of his favorite videos, and offers some insights into the politics and aesthetics of remix video.

Here's a brief bio Owen shared with us:

Owen Gallagher (28) is a graphic, web and digital media designer, an accomplished musician and a graduate of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland with a first class honours Masters degree in Design Communications. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he has been travelling around the United Kingdom and the United States for the past 12 months as part of the NCGE / Kauffman Foundation Global Scholars Entrepreneurship Program. Gallagher is the founder of TotalRecut.com, an online social networking community for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups that facilitates online collaboration between video artists. Total Recut has been shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards including the Golden Spiders Awards, the NICENT 25k Awards and the BBC Innovation Labs.

Gallagher is the CEO and Creative Director of GDG Interactive, a web design and development business based in Ireland. In his spare time, he dabbles in video art and has created a number of political video remixes that received significant media attention in his home country. He is an avid piano and guitar player and has composed and recorded over 100 songs as well as performing in various bands since he was 16. He is a qualified music teacher and has taught piano and guitar to a number of students. He has also acted as a part time Assistant Lecturer of Design at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland teaching web design, flash animation and digital video production.

Gallagher is passionately involved in remix culture and has a particular interest in Intellectual Property law as it applies to creative content. His Masters thesis, entitled 'Video Recuts and the Remix Revolution: Whose Rights Are Being Infringed?' explores some of the issues surrounding the appropriation of previously published content, focusing on the delicate balance between copyright and freedom of expression.

What can you tell us about your new contest? What are its goals? What kinds of videos are acceptable?

The Total Recut Video Remix Challenge is a contest that we are hosting to try to encourage people to think about the issues around remix culture and creating remixed media. We want people to create a short video remix that uses footage from any source to communicate the message: 'What is Remix Culture?' The video can be anything from 30 seconds to 3 minutes long. The idea of the contest is to produce a series of videos that raise awareness and help people to more clearly understand what is going on in the world of digital content creation, remix and intellectual property. Ideally, the videos will be educational and will communicate a clear message but we essentially want our entrants to be creative and portray what remix culture means to them. The prizes include a laptop computer loaded with all of the software needed to create high quality remixes, a digital camcorder, a digital media player and lots of Total Recut goodies.

The contest began taking entries in May and judging will begin in June. We have an exceptional judging panel of some of the elite thought-leading personalities involved in remix culture today including yourself, Larry Lessig, Pat Aufderheide, Kembrew McLeod, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. The contest is open to everyone so I would encourage anyone who is even slightly interested in video remix to put a video together and enter the contest in May to be in with a chance of winning.

The Video Remix Challenge was an idea that developed out of my Masters project at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, which was very much focused on Remix Culture and intellectual property issues as applied to the digital creative arts, in particular, online video production. As part of the project, I developed a basic version of the Total Recut website and set up a small scale video remix contest where the idea was to create a 60 second PSA commercial using found footage to portray a particular theme e.g. Environmental Issues, Safe Sex or Drug Abuse. At the time, I was also working as a part time lecturer, teaching an interactive design class to undergraduate students at the University of Ulster, so I decided to use the students as guinea pigs and get them to produce a remixed video for their project, which had to be entered into my contest, as a requirement of their design brief. It worked like a charm and the end result was over thirty highly creative remixed videos on a diverse range of socially conscious issues which the students themselves rated and commented on, before a small judging panel decided on the final winners. Following the success of this contest and the ongoing development of Total Recut as a whole, I decided that I wanted to try and host a larger scale contest. My original idea was to try to open it up to other Universities in the U.K. and Ireland and build from there, but it has now scaled to the point where it is open to anyone who wants to enter. The basic premise of the Video Remix Challenge is to create a short form video remix that portrays what 'Remix Culture' means to you, using found footage from any source.

The reason this is such an interesting theme to pursue is because of the ongoing debate about copyright and freedom of expression in the developing landscape of user generated digital content. This is a debate that a lot of people feel very strongly about. There are extremists on both sides, some advocating the complete freedom of all content and others fighting tooth and nail to extend copyright terms and protect their assets. Then there are those who are trying to seek a middle ground - a balance between these two opposing views. This is where Total Recut and this contest reside.

The current landscape places too much emphasis on the copyright owner's control over how their content is used and leaves little room for new artists to exercise their rights to freedom of expression. However, a free-for-all where all content is free would result in no compensation for copyright owners, which would mean less incentives for people to produce new creative works. The balanced approach enables copyright owners to make money from their work, but also enables other artists to freely use samples from the entire pool of creative works to express themselves. This contest encourages people to draw inspiration from the culture around them, from the culture they grew up with and to use these images and sounds to produce something innovative with a brand new meaning.

The goals of the contest are to generate a number of creative video pieces that will help to raise awareness of these issues and perhaps help to educate people about the true nature of copyright, which is to promote the production of new creative works for society at large, by providing creators with a degree of protection over their work for a limited time. This message has been twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition by the likes of Disney and some of the larger corporations that own the copyrights to most of the content out there. Instead of creative works existing to benefit society, some of the corporations feel that creative works exist to make more money for them, for as long as possible. That is why they lobby for copyright term extensions and unfortunately, they have historically been successful in these attempts.

Ironically, many of Disney's most successful works are based on Public Domain stories, which they would not have been able to create in the first place, had the original copyright owners tried to exercise the kind of control that Disney now displays over their works. There is an excellent educational remix video created by Eric Faden of Bucknell University, that uses short samples from Disney movies to communicate messages about copyright and fair use. Here's the link.

In terms of the types of videos that are acceptable in our Video Remix Challenge, we are encouraging our entrants to be aware of, and exercise their fair use rights. The Center for Social Media at the American University of Washington have some excellent resources and guidelines. We are also encouraging people to use Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed material in their work, many of which can be found at the Internet Archive and Creative Commons respectively.

The videos will first be rated by the public and whittled down to the ten best videos, which will then be given to the judges to decide on three winners. We are very excited to see what kind of work will be produced. Going by my previous contest, there will be quite a mix of quality in terms of production skill, but sometimes the best ideas simply shine through.

Tell us more about Total Recut. How did this site come about? What are your overarching goals? What kinds of resources does it offer the remix community?

I remember very distinctly when I came up with the idea for Total Recut. I was lying out in the sun in Portugal, contemplating what I might consider putting forward as a proposal for my then upcoming Masters Degree, and the idea came to me. I wanted to create a collaborative environment for artists to be able to take existing media, remix it in some way and produce something completely new.

My interest in remix stemmed from an early age - I have always been into collage and mixed media and studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland before undertaking my Design degree in Donegal, but even before that, I always remember playing with toys as a young boy. My brother and I were the proud owners of many Star Wars figures and vehicles, Transformers, Thundercats, MASK, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Action Man and a whole host of other toys from various movies and TV shows. Our games always consisted of us combining these different realities and storylines, mixing them up and making up our own new narratives. It was not unusual to have Optimus Prime fighting side by side with Luke Skywalker against Mumm-Ra and Skeletor. So, from a very early age it seemed completely normal for me to combine the things I loved in new ways that seemed entertaining to me. I think that my generation and those younger than me have grown up expecting this sort of interaction with their media, on their own terms.

The idea that some corporation can tell you that you are not allowed to play with media seems ridiculous and wrong. Unfortunately, there are many who seem to believe that their control over how content is used should be absolute and unquestioned. I created Total Recut as a way to gather people together who believe that we, as a society, should be able to freely build on the works of the past. If this is successfully prevented by corporations, the practical result is that people will stop making new things out of old things for fear of being sued. Innovation will chill and the overall quality and quantity of new work being produced will be lower. Luckily, there are millions of people who refuse to accept the corporate line and they are continuing to produce new work, despite the veiled shallow threats by overzealous copyright owners.

So, when I was considering how to practically put a community of this nature together, my initial idea was to create a site for digital artists - I had the idea of taking public domain paintings and posting the images on the site, cutting them up into squares and then asking participants to choose a square each and reinterpret it in their own style. The remixed square would be uploaded to the site again and the end result would be a very interesting collaborative collage of styles inspired by the work of an artistic master.

Through my Masters research, I realised that one of the hottest technologies at the time was online video and so I decided to refocus the project to centre on remixed video work. I discovered a thriving underground community of video producers who were creating work as diverse as movie trailer recuts and machinima to remixed political parody and mashed-up music videos. One of the first remixed videos I saw was a movie trailer recut, created by Robert Ryang, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, 'The Shining', which casts the classic horror in a completely new light. Another amazing video remix that I came across early on was a political piece created by Chris Morris where segments of George Bush's State of the Union speech were recut to create a new narrative. Some of the most technically accomplished and entertaining remixes I have seen were created by a Parisian remix artist called Antonio da Silva, known online as AMDS Films. He created a number of remixes, one of the best of which is Neo vs Robocop.

So, I set about creating a site 'for fans and creators of video remixes, recuts and mash-ups that provides resources and collaborative opportunities for video remix artists in a social networking environment.' The end result was Total Recut, but the site is constantly developing. Each week, something new is added or changed based on the feedback from our members and advisors. The main focus at the moment is the Video Remix Challenge but we have a plethora of new ideas and potential directions of where we are going to steer the site in the future.

The site works on a number of different levels. Primarily it is a place where people can find and watch entertaining or thought-provoking remixed videos. Our current categories are Movie Trailer Recuts, Political, Machinima, Advertising, Educational, Music Videos and Others. This category list is by no means exhaustive and we are looking at adding to it in the near future.

Secondly, the site acts as a showcase for video remix artists, to enable them to put their work in front of the eyes of a receptive audience. We also provide a growing library of Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed video work for people to download and remix in their own projects. We are working on developing our Tutorials section, which will eventually become a 'Remix Academy' with courses and grades for people to learn everything they need to know to produce a video remix. Information and links to literature and websites about remix culture, intellectual property issues and key players in the scene are included in the Remix Culture section. We also provide remix tools where users can gain access to video editing software, conversion tools and video downloading software. The community section includes a blog, forums, user profiles and job opportunities. Virtually every aspect of the site is set up to be similar to a wiki environment, which essentially means that all registered members have the ability to add things to the site or update information about any of the content.

With regard to long term goals for Total Recut, we would love to build up the community to the point where we are considered the primary online location for people to find the very best in video remix work and talent. We intend to host more regular contests and provide links between our remix artist members and potential employers. As the site scales up, we intend to take it global and offer a multilingual version of the site to accommodate the Asian and European markets and eventually become a truly global community website for remix culture.

You write, "Video recuts...are a new art-form enabled by the convergence of emerging technologies." How do you respond to those who ask whether remixes and recuts are not creative because they build on the works of others rather than working with original material?

This is an area in which I have a huge amount of interest and have considered pursuing as a research area for my PhD - the origin of originality. It is of particular interest to me because I am what I consider to be an 'original content creator.' I write songs and lyrics using nothing but my mind, a pen and paper and a guitar. Are my songs original? If I use a combination of different chords and a variety of words to create sentences that rhyme, am I not using elements that have been used by other people in the past? What makes my songs original, in my opinion, is the unique way in which I composite the words, chords and melody. In this way, every song is created using the basic building blocks of language and music, but combined in a slightly different way.

Coming from a Graphic Design background, I often come across other designers who are adamant that their work is completely original. The nature of a Graphic Designer's work is to combine elements from different sources in creative ways to produce new pieces of work. Similar to a collage artist who takes pieces of different photos, images etc and brings them together to create new meanings. Is the finished piece not original because it is made up of building blocks from a variety of sources? In the same way, when a video remix artist combines pieces of video from different sources in new ways to create new meanings, is this not original and innovative?

Yes, remix artists build on the works of others. But do so-called creators of 'original material' not build on the works of others also? Would you consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to be an original piece of work? Even though the idea was based on a story by William Painter, which was based on a poem by Arthur Brooke? No matter how far back you go in the origin of a piece of work, you will find that the idea was built on or inspired by the work of someone else before it. I consider remixed videos to be original works. The finished piece is more than the sum of its parts.

More Transmedia News

I've been meaning to do another post on this topic for a while. First, I was inspired by a story in Fast Company, sent to me by Jesse Alexander, which described a gathering of Hollywood's fan boy elite to talk about the futures of cross-platform storytelling:

Tim Kring, the lanky, goateed guy at the head of the table, created Heroes, NBC's hit television show about superpowered people. To his right, in a black hoodie and narrow black-framed glasses is Damon Lindelof, cocreator of Lost, ABC's island-fantasy juggernaut, as well as producer of next year's eagerly anticipated Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams. Across the way is Lindelof's buddy Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of Heroes (formerly of Lost and the pioneering she-geek hit Alias). Nearby is Rob Letterman, the self-described nerdy director of DreamWorks' next mega-franchise movie, Monsters vs. Aliens. He's chatting up video-game creator Matt Wolf, who's developing a project with Alexander....The long-haired bearded guy pouring straight bourbon is Ron Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel's acclaimed reimagining of the classic series. The guy eating pizza on the couch is Javier Grillo-Marxauch, a veteran producer of Lost and NBC's paranormal series Medium, who's now having his own fantasy graphic novel, Middleman, turned into a series on ABC Family.

so, how come I never get invited to parties like this?

The article goes on to introduce the concept of transmedia entertainment and to suggest that it is one of the hotest topics in the entertainment world today:

"In five years," Kring is saying, "the idea of broadcast will be gone."

"Right," says Lindelof. "Instead of watching Heroes on NBC, you'll go to nbc.com and download the show to your device, and the show will be deleted as soon as you finish watching it -- unless you pay $1.99; then you get audio commentary. You enhance it. It's like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side." ...

In the analog era, such efforts might have fallen under the soulless rubric of "cross-promotion," but today they have evolved and mashed up into a new buzzword: "transmedia." The difference is that cross-promotion has nothing to do with developing or expanding an established narrative. A Happy Days lunch box, in other words, does nothing to advance the story of Fonzie's personal journey.

While such merchandising campaigns still exist, transmedia offers one big plot twist: X-ray vision. Today's audience, steeped in media and marketing, sees through crass ploys to cash in. So the Geek Elite are taking a different approach. Rather than just shill their products in various media, they are building on new and emerging platforms to expand their mythological worlds. Viewers watch an episode of Heroes, then follow one character's adventure in a graphic novel. They tune in to Lost, then explore the island's twisted history in an online game. It is this "transmedia storytelling," as Alexander puts it, that ultimately lures the audience into buying more stuff -- today, DVDs; tomorrow, who knows what.

The article offers a pretty good snapshot of where the industry's thinking is at in terms of transmedia properties and certainly offers an up date on my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture.

This week, the New York Times reported on the plans to release a suplamentary dvd to more or less coincide with the release of the Watchmen movie next year:

The second film, tentatively called Tales of the Black Freighter, follows a side Watchmen storyline about a shipwreck and will arrive in stores five days after the main movie rolls out in theaters. The DVD will also include a documentary-style film called Under the Hood that will delve into the characters' backstories.

Those of you who have read Alan Moore's original graphic novel will recognize both of those titles as materials which are complexly woven into the narrative, offering us a glimpse into the way popular culture might have evolved -- towards pirate comics -- in a world where superheroes are real (Black Freighter) and a sense of the ways superheroes might be covered as cultural celebrities (Under the Hood). As the producers have striped down Watchmen for the screen, they have pushed these elements to the margins. In another era, they would have been left on the cutting room floor, but instead, they are becoming the backbone of Warner Brother's transmedia strategy for the film.

The article also noted:

In addition, the studio plans a dozen 22- to 26-minute Webisodes to help make the complex story easier for the uninitiated to digest. Called "The Watchmen Motion Comic," it will be a panel-by-panel slide show of the graphic novel narrated by an actor.

Keep in mind that Warner Brothers was the studio which sponsored the Wachowski Brothers's transmedia development around the Matrix franchise.

All of this suggests how central transmedia entertainment has become to the thinking inside Hollywood today. So it is great to have a chance to share with my readers some insights from a real master of this practice.

Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (Part Two)

How important do you think hardcore fans are to the success of genre entertainment? How do such fans create value around your properties?

As exemplified by the efforts of many recent genre producers, the cultivation, validation and celebration of fandom are vital to the success of any genre rollout. It's interesting to note that two major genre releases in 2007, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass were both released with either limited or no transmedia components designed to immerse a potential fan base into the fantastical worlds of the films--no one was indoctrinated into the fiction--and both failed spectacularly.

Genre fans are passionate. Passion is the least expensive and most powerful driver behind any endeavor. Passion can punch holes through the wall of noise that is media culture, it generates curiosity and leadership, and the passion of a base of fans can help to keep producers and creatives "honest"--forcing them to remain true to the core messages, themes, mythology and characterizations of the story world. Passion generates value, because it draws attention and is often quite infectious.

What do you see as the downsides of generating such passionate consumers?

On the other hand, passion can be blind and judgmental. Fan zeal can threaten to "box in" a property, potentially stunting its growth. It can generate negative "buzz" around a project, which can leak into media coverage and plant seeds of doubt in the general audience base. Despite the attachment of a well known director in George Miller for Warner Bros. upcoming Justice League super hero production, for example, many fans have expressed doubt around casting and story issues that have leaked to the fan media. These have raised concerns in the studio strong enough to postpone the start of production until after the Writers Guild of America strike ended. The delay allowed for the production to take a lower profile and for script and casting choices to be amended. Whether or not this will help the production remains to be seen.

As some of these genres have become more commercially viable, the San Diego Comic Con has emerged as an important media marketplace. Can you speak to the role this gathering plays in the marketing of your properties?

Comic Con International in San Diego plays a more and more pivotal role in heralding, marketing and launching new genre efforts. In the midst of negotiating with executives at The Walt Disney Company for a job working with one of their largest franchises, Starlight Runner took them on a tour of the Comic Con exhibition floor. Many of the "worlds" we helped to develop were on spectacular display: Mattel's Hot Wheels universe, the fantasy realms of Magic: The Gathering, high priced back issues of Valiant Comics, and the announcements for new video games and comic books based on Turok and our own "Team GoRizer" at Disney's own booth! Suffice to say, a deal was quickly sealed!

Each year, Comic Con attracts well over 100,000 "gatekeepers," fans of niche, cult or genre entertainment who make it their business to spread the word about the newest and coolest content to their friends and acquaintances both in their home communities and on the Internet. It used to be that one of these gatekeepers would have a circle of five to ten contacts back home to whom he or she would convey what was best about the convention. Now in the age of social networking and pop culture web portals, that number has multiplied exponentially. Add to this the mass media coverage given to Comic Con and content producers can reach untold millions through it.

The Christian community might be read as another kind of niche public for media properties -- often alienated from mainstream content, deeply interested in providing alternative forms of entertainment for their families. What are the challenges of reaching these consumers, and can their tastes be reconciled by the demands of the mass audience?

Like any niche audience, the Christian community wants to enjoy entertainment that reflects their values and sensibilities. Interestingly, the classic Hollywood ethos reflects Judeo-Christian values: good usually wins out over evil, the hero triumphs after embracing the just and moral path. The problem is actually rooted in how the studios choose to communicate with them.

When Disney and Walden Media reached out to the Christian community to promote The Chronicles of Narnia, what was interesting was that this was a property filled with supernatural beings, witches, magic and violence. However, the studio played up the film's allegory as evocative of the stories and themes of the New Testament.

Quite the opposite happened with The Golden Compass, another children's film that also portrayed supernatural beings, witches, magic and violence. Instead of bravely strategizing a plan and communicating to the Christian community that the film could be used as a tool to discuss vital issues such as faith, false prophets and the abuse of religious power, New Line Cinema chose to downplay those elements of the film and avoid contact with religious leaders. The result was suspicion and distaste for the film among smaller Christian organizations that leaked into the mass media, creating unease with the film among the general population. The film failed in North America.

In short, the entertainment industry is still grappling with how to properly market broad content to the Christian community niche, let alone content specifically designed to appeal to their personal experience.

To extend the religious metaphor of "cult media," do you see cult fans as playing a particularly important role in proselytizing for the content, "evangelizing" the brand?

Fan "apostles" often play an instrumental role in spreading the word and drawing attention to niche content. Many studios and publishers of genre entertainment are currently developing programs to secure relationships with the fan community (or various subsections thereof). While this is not easy to do and often brings on headaches large companies would rather avoid, it is becoming inevitable. After all, without evangelists, how can new religions (or tentpole franchises) spread?

Some have suggested that media producers with strong niche followings might be able to develop alternative distribution models for their entertainment content, marketing their properties directly to the public through subscriptions or downloads, rather than negotiating with networks or film studios. How realistic do you think this scenario is within the current marketplace? What do you think are the obstacles of establishing such a direct relationship between producers and their fans?

There has never been a better time to explore and establish alternative distribution models for niche entertainment content, but these opportunities are still not easy to exploit and may not last forever. It takes a cocktail of money, talent, timing and pure luck to build a major head with direct digital distribution of entertainment content, particularly if your resources are limited compared with those of a Hollywood studio or entertainment firm.

Of course, we've seen recording artists (Coldplay), independent filmmakers (The Blair Witch Project) and amateur content producers (Ask a Ninja) do just that, but it's still a long shot and remarkable resourcefulness is necessary to cut through the noise enough to generate global distribution that generates a reasonable return.

Starlight Runner views alternative distribution models as a means to launch a new property, particularly one with "cult" qualities, in an effort to build buzz, develop a fan base and establish proof of concept. This is a killer combination that can help producers leverage more equity and creative control over their properties after larger partners such as movie studios or media conglomerates move in.

The Nickelodeon smash TV series The Naked Brothers Band, for example, started out as a low-budget indie film making the rounds at small film festivals, before the producers established a web site that offered the film's songs as downloads and sparked a modest but intensely loyal fan following. Nickelodeon took note and granted the production a sweet deal in return for the rights.

Even now, tools and models are being devised that will more readily enable niche content producers to connect directly with their potential audience. Fans want to participate and express themselves, and producers must accommodate them with structures that will allow for guided user-generated content, story material that dovetails with the current storylines set in-canon, and perhaps one day, the opportunity to touch and interact with the canon itself.

Talking Transmedia: An Interview With Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (part one)

Jeff Gomez, the chief executive officer of Starlight Runner entertainment, spoke at Futures of Entertainment last fall as part of a panel discussion on Cult Media, which also included transmedia creator Danny Bilson, Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander, and Gordon Tichell from Walden Media, the company which produces the Narnia films. Not surprisingly, given I was moderator, the session quickly became a geek out festival mostly centered around issues of transmedia entertainment. You can enjoy the podcast of the event here. As we were preparing for the session, we distributed a set of questions to the speakers, some of which were covered during the panel, some of which were not. Gomez recently wrote to send me his further reflections on many of those questions in the hopes to continue public conversation around recent developments in transmedia entertainment.

Here's a bio on Gomez:

As the Chief Executive Officer of Starlight Runner Entertainment, Jeff Gomez

is a leading creator of highly successful fictional worlds. He is an expert

at cross-platform intellectual property development and transmedia

storytelling, as well as at extending niche properties such as toys,

animation or video game titles into the global mass market.

After establishing himself in the tabletop adventure game industry, Jeff

helped to develop the super hero universe of Valiant Comics, adapting its

characters and storylines into videogames for Acclaim Entertainment. Jeff¹s

first transmedia effort was for the Wizards of the Coast trading card game

Magic: The Gathering, where he dramatized the mythology of the cards in an

elaborate storyline across a series of comic book titles, web sites and

videogames.

Jeff conceived and co-produced one of the most successful transmedia

storylines of the decade with Mattel's Hot Wheels: World Race and Hot Wheels

Acceleracers comic books, video games, web content and animated series for

television. He has gone on to work with such blockbuster properties as

Pirates of the Caribbean and Fairies for The Walt Disney Company, James

Cameron¹s Avatar for 20th Century Fox, and Happiness Factory for The

Coca-Cola Company.

Jeff has also spoken at M.I.T.'s Futures of Entertainment conference and

given his seminar, Creating Blockbuster Worlds: Developing Highly Successful

Transmedia Franchises, to the Game Developers Conference, New York State Bar

Association, International Game Developers Association and the Producers

Guild of America, as well as to such corporations as Disney, Fox, Microsoft,

Coca-Cola, Scholastic, Wieden+Kennedy, and Hasbro.

Jeff Gomez can best be reached at jeff@starlightrunner.com.

Let's start by examining the concept of "cult media." What does this phrase mean to you, and do you think it accurately describes the kinds of projects you've worked on? Why or why not?

To me "cult media" is exemplified by the slow crumbling of traditional media content aimed at huge swathes of the population, down to the more contemporary approach of designing content to engage subsections of that population or even smaller "niches."

My company Starlight Runner works on "cult media" in that we work on projects that already have mass appeal or have the potential to reach mass appeal, but what those projects always have to begin with is a specific genre appeal that almost guarantees an extremely loyal core "niche" audience.

Starlight Runner also consults with movie studios, comic book and fiction publishers, and videogame developers to take their niche or "cult" content and prepare it for extension across multiple media platforms. In this case, we are acting as transmedia storytellers, developing and producing "cult" properties for exposure to a much larger audience.

The idea of cult media historically referred to films that appealed to a fairly small niche of consumers. But many genres, which once were regarded as cult -- fantasy, science fiction, superheroes -- have emerged as increasingly mainstream. What's changing? What accounts for the mainstreaming of niche media?

There are five factors that seem to be contributing to the "coming out" of cult media:

1. Baby boomers and gen-X'ers weaned on the explosion of pop culture spurred by the proliferation of television and movies in the aftermath of World War II have come of age and taken control of the entertainment industry. Naturally, they have a strong desire to recreate what they loved and share it with others who've had similar cultural experiences.
2. Genre product such as science fiction serials and horror films, which had been relegated to Saturday matinees and second or third billing in movie theaters, could now be given A-list treatment. The new moguls and visionaries could now apply top grade production value to this content, and hire marquee talent for it, secure in the knowledge that genre fare is more than likely to turn a profit. In the international market, a growing hunger for action and genre content could boost domestic failures into profitability.
3. Attention to quality extended to storytelling. Filmmakers, comic book writers, genre novelists and their ilk were better educated and more interested in stories that conveyed better character development and stronger verisimilitude. Star Wars was fueled by the work of Joseph Campbell.
4. Genre content became more reflective of the mood and politics of the time, and therefore resonated more powerfully with mass audiences. Note the nuclear spawned monsters of the 1950s, the "acid trip" sci-fi of the '60s, the terrifying "evil children" of the early '70s, the "gee whiz" hope ofStar Wars and Close Encounters later that decade, the political morass and moral ambiguity of Battlestar Galactica currently.
5. Like no other time in history, devotees of this type of content have complete access to one another via the Internet. Fans whose imaginations are fired by these stories make a deep and lasting connection with them. They become "specialists," intensely knowledgeable of the property, the way that sports fanatics memorize the accomplishments and statistics of their favorite teams. These fans become "apostles" for the property, devoting time, effort and creativity in celebrating the story and characters, collecting ephemera and licensed extensions of the brand, celebrating it with others of their ilk. They form the property's core fan base, which in turn fuels the continued success of the brand.

What do you see as the challenges of generating content that appeals to both niche and mass publics at the same time?

Like any good story, content designed for genre-lovers or niche markets should contain strong characters, evocative issues and clear, accessible throughlines. Story arcs must be designed from the outset to feel complete and deliver on their promise.

Also importantly, the audience needs to be able to appreciate and enjoy the content as it is presented solely on the driving platform of the trans-media production. With Heroes, for example, the driving platform is the television series. Much of the success of the franchise hinges on the audience finding the show exciting, intelligible and complete.

What the producers of Heroes are doing quite well is in providing fans of the show with a far more expansive experience of the fictional universe of the show on the complementary or orbiting platforms of the trans-media production. This additional content is presented in the form of web sites, graphic novels, prose fiction, etc., and this material all takes place within the canon of the Heroes chronology. So fans are provided with the level of depth, verisimilitude, sophistication and complexity that they crave, but casual viewers are not required to seek it out to enjoy the show.

When the two approaches cross over, we have seen the potential for pop culture phenomena. The media's coverage of "The Lost Experience" for example, conveyed the fact that there was a greater architecture to the fictional universe of the Lost TV series than was originally suspected. The excitement generated by the trans-media components of the show helped to boost broad interest in it. The same can be said of similar approaches for both the Batman: The Darknight and Cloverfield feature films.

Also powerful on the home front, as families gather to watch Heroes, a teen fan of the show might recognize a peripheral character making her first appearance on a given night's episode as one he originally read about in the online comic. So our fan takes on the role of gatekeeper for the show, filling in family and friends on the backstory of the character, and giving them a greater appreciation of the show with his "exclusive" knowledge, and making the whole experience more entertaining.

In short, depth and complexity are built around the show, rather than weighing it down by presenting it front and center.

What kinds of trade-offs have to occur in order to broaden the appeal of media properties?

Studios and entertainment companies are now learning that fewer and fewer trade-offs are necessary to broaden the appeal of niche or "cult media" properties. Contemporary audiences are now primed for high quality genre entertainment across all media platforms. So long as marketing efforts place focus on a driving platform, the launch platform and complementary content can be used to build anticipation, educate audience "gatekeepers" about the property, and enrich the overall experience.

There may be trade-offs, however, when it comes to the level of depth and complexity of the core property and how interdependent the driving platform content is with complementary content. The Wachowski Brothers ran into difficulty with the mass audience reception of the second and third Matrix films, because the films were hard to understand without a working familiarity with the characters and storylines of the orbiting platforms (graphic novels, video games, direct-to-video animation). Hence, at this point in the evolution of transmedia storytelling, it is still vital to present a full and complete entertainment experience within each component of the rollout.

It should be noted that niche productions such as alternate reality games don't tend to bother with these distinctions, trusting the sophistication and intense loyalty of their audience to follow plotlines and story nodes back and forth across multiple media platforms almost indiscriminately. I believe that some day soon, web-based alternate reality games and experiences will evolve into much more accessible and dynamic productions, playing a vital role in transmedia storytelling.

What are the risks involved in alienating the base of your audience?

Franchises are built on the energy and loyalty of their hardcore fan bases. While these bases are often a fraction of the size of the total audience, they are indispensable, because they are vocal, passionate and active. A tiny fraction of the genre television series Jericho sent tons of jars of peanuts to the network that had just cancelled the program--moving them to reinstate the series. A small group of fans that gathered at conventions and shared amateur publications centered on the original Star Trek series managed to bridge the period between that series' cancellation and the Star Wars-inspired relaunch of the franchise in the late 1970s.

When the producers of the television series Enterprise publicly stated that the show was being designed for a much wider audience than previous incarnations of Star Trek, and exhibited this intention by altering the shows music cues, pandering to sexual titillation and (perhaps most egregiously) ignoring at will the established continuity and thematic tone of the fictional universe, the result was a gradual erosion of the franchise's core fan base. Without the approval and loyalty of "Trekkers" there would be no reason for the greater audience to stick around.

The original Crow graphic novel and feature film generated an extremely loyal fan base. But with the second feature, producers chose to ignore the fictional rules and tenets set down by the original work, and so the franchise experienced the first of what would become many fractures. Dubbing the property an "anthology franchise" that could be wildly altered based on the vision of individual artists and storytellers, the producers continued to build and deconstruct The Crow into smaller and smaller pieces, each with its own dwindling following. They chose to place the needs of their artists above the integrity of the mythology of the universe--a mythology that the fan base deeply cared about. The property now languishes in limbo.

Still More Toy Stories...

In what can only be perfect timing, I got e-mail this weekend from Damon Wellner of Probot Productions. Probot was one of the groups of Star Wars DIY filmmakers I discussed in Convergence Culture and continues to be a leader in the space of action figure cinema. Wellner shared their most recent production, Raiders of the Toy Box, which is being released just in time for the new Indiana Jones movie, and it's a great example of what Probot does. This amateur or semi-professional action figure filmmaking anticipated the emergence of commercial series such as Robot Chicken, as I suggested a while back here in the blog. Even more interesting to me was a press release describing some recent developments for the Probot producers:

Probot Productions was founded in 1998 by former Emerson College film students, Damon Wellner and Sebastian O'Brien, as an experimental attempt to create a universe of "living" toys, and to lampoon Hollywood with its own merchandise. Probot's world of Toy-Cinema was hatched out of the elaborate action-figure battles staged by Damon, Sebastian, and their toy collecting friends. Their first project, ALIEN 5, was made with no editing facilities, so the entire movie had to be shot in sequence, and edited in-camera, a painstaking process which took 6 months to complete. The resulting 22 minute video was finished for under $150....

Probot's epic Star Wars parody, PREQUEL, caught the attention of Hasbro, Inc. makers of the Star Wars toy line. Impressed, Hasbro commissioned Probot to produce recreations of scenes from the Star Wars Saga for their website. Probot met the challenge of reproducing the cinematography and effects shot-for-shot, using 4" action-figures. To help achieve this, the in-camera effects were enhanced in post-production with CGI elements, resulting in a unique blend of old and new-school styles. The video has had a resurgence as a hit viral-video on YouTube, and as a featured video on MySpaceTV, with over 420,000 views so far.

Since relocating to Hollywood in 2000, the team's production values have soared. Damon has learned more about the professional techniques of visual effects, miniature photography, and pyrotechnics, while working freelance for visual effects companies. Damon assisted the model-makers and pyrotechnics crews for big budget Hollywood features including Hellboy, Resident Evil 2, and The Punisher. Probot's 2004 release, ALIEN 5², a 30 minute sequel to ALIEN 5, was the culmination of all they had learned about storytelling and effects. Until now.

While the company continues to release a steady stream of new Toy-Cinema viral-videos each year, Probot's latest project, a feature film titled, The Gibbon, promises to take the company to the next level. It is a co-production of Cinefile Video, and after 18 months of pre-production, the film is in production now. The screenplay is an entirely original concept and story by Sebastian O'Brien, and is being shot and directed by Damon Wellner. The budget, just under $30,000, while microscopic by Hollywood standards, will be enormous in the microcinematic world of Probot Productions.

The entire cast consists of custom-designed, 7" scale action-figures, sculpted by a corral of talented sculptors and action-figure customizers. The original story combines elements of super-hero comics and classic monster movies. Probot's effects team will be pushing the envelope of Toy-Cinema with a newly developed technique by the director to digitally animate the character's faces. The result will be a truly unique film that will be hard to categorize, but easy to enjoy!

Thanks to my young nephew, Jacob Benson, I wanted to share another delightful example of how childhood play is giving rise to new forms of participatory culture -- in this case, through the use of hand puppets rather than through the animation of action figures.

"The Mysterious Ticking Noise" is my favorite of a series of episodes of an amateur produced Potter Puppet Pals series. It's hard to explain why this one brings a smile to my face but it just does.

Sometimes My Kids Seem Like a Bunch of Kangaroos!

This past week, I contributed a post to In Media Res, a site which I have mentioned several times before, where academics share clips of contemporary and historic media content with critical commentary. Each week, In Media Res adopts a specific theme and invites in five scholars who come at that theme from different angles. Last week's theme was "Toys," and the result was an interesting series of explorations of how toy branding and advertising connects to issues of gender, practices of childrearing, collector culture, and transmedia entertainment. Raiford Guins, State University of New York, Stony Brook, extends Roland Barthes' analysis of the move from wood to plastic in toys to examine collector culture and the practices which are designed to preserve value by keeping toys in their original packaging. Caryn Murphy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, shares a segment from Good Morning, America on Disney's "Princess" franchise, which she reads through a consideration of media conglomeration (reflected as much by what the piece doesn't say as in what it does). Derek Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison, shares some early animated commercials for G.I. Joe, which he describes as a prototype for the subsequent cartoon series; interestingly, these spots were developed for Marvel's G.I. Joe comics in order to skirt regulatory restrictions on the use of animation in toy commercials, representing one of the few times that comics have been directly advertised on television. And Avi Santo, Old Dominion University, shares some examples of cross-universe branding -- advertisements for Underoos and for action figures which mix and match characters from several different media companies, a practice common enough in actual play but far less common in the marketing of franchise related toys. As for my own piece, I've reposted it below since I thought it would be of interest to my regular readers. It is closely related to a series of essays I've been writing off and on for the past decade on post-war children's culture and its relationship to permissive childrearing. If you are interested in this line of investigation, you can find an essay on Benajmin Spock's ideas about child sexuality in The Children's Culture Reader, on Doctor Seuss and debates about the family as a seedbed for democracy in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, on the ways Hank Ketchem's Dennis the Menace retooled the "Bad Boy" tradition in The Revolution Wasn't Televised, and how Lassie got retooled to reflect shifting understandings of childhood and parenting in The Wow Climax. Someday, I hope to pull together a book which deals with the figure of the boy in the striped shirt as an embodiment of a particular conception of boyhood which shaped the baby boom generation. Needless to say, this involves looking closely at media texts, toys, and cultural practice which shaped my own boyhood through a historical and cultural lens.

"Sometimes My Kids Seem Like a Bunch of Kangaroos!"

These three commercials from the 1960's suggest the roles popular culture played in promoting some of the core premises of what I am calling Permissive Child Rearing Doctrine, a set of ideas most closely associated with Dr. Benjamin Spock, but which were shaped by a much broader array of post-war advice literature.

Writing in the 1950's, Martha Wolfenstein saw the shift from a culture of production (with its demands for discipline and regimentation) to a culture of consumption (with its expectations of a "fun morality") as a major force shaping child-rearing practices in the twentieth century. The emergence of permissiveness in the postwar era, she argues, was partially a response to the expansion of the consumer market place and the prospect of suburban affluence, both themes which should be clear from these sample commercials. Permissive conceptions of the child embraced pleasure as a positive motivation for exploration and learning. The home was being redesigned to accommodate children's impulses and urges. The family was being redirected from a Father-Centered to a Child-Centered model. Fathers were being taught to become tolerant and indulging playmates for their children. Mothers were being instructed to deploy pleasure to get children to do what was expected of them.

All of this is wonderfully summed up in this Madison Avenue fable of a mother who sees her pogo-stick-playing children as kangaroos bouncing through her kitchen. A previous generation would certainly have believed that they could, in fact, "change" their family through discipline and regimentation; she's being told, instead, to change her floor wax and otherwise create a space which can tolerate their rambunctiousness.

Similarly, consider the ways that Trik-Trak assumes the children will be able to play "all over the house" and that their father will be happy to have their toys racing under his feet even as he reads the evening newspaper.

The Dick Tracy radio watch commercial extends the children's play environment from the home into the entire suburban neighborhood, reflecting the freedom of movement experienced by the post-war generation. Sociologists in the early 1970's estimated that suburban boys enjoyed a free range of 1,200 yards while their sisters might travel only 760 yards without adult permission.

By the end of the decade, conservative cultural critics, such as Spiro Agnew, will be blaming Spock for the counterculture's anti-authoritarian views, suggesting that anti-war protestors should have been spanked when they were little boys and girls. Later child-rearing experts have rejected "permissiveness" in favor of more "authoritative" models for the relations between children and adults, insisting that adults need to set firmer limits on what happens in their homes. But, in the early 1960's, these commercials were selling permissiveness as much as they were selling particular toys and products.

We can see these assumptions at play from a historical distance. But, how are contemporary models of child-rearing impacting the ways children's toys are designed and marketed?

Links, Links and More Links...

I have been pulled in so many directions lately that I've been having trouble finding time to blog about everything that has been happening. So consider this post as a chance to catch up on some materials which may be of interest to my regular readers. A few weeks ago, I joined my CMS colleague Beth Coleman for a conversation about virtual worlds, hosted by the MIT Club of Boston and webcast to alumni around the country. You may recall that Coleman and I were two participants in a three way conversation with Clay Shirky about virtual worlds a while back. Coleman is in the process of writing Hello Avatar!, which is intended as a primer about virtual worlds. She regular writes about such topics over at her Project Good Luck Blog. The fine folks at the MIT Alumni Office offer a streaming version of the conversation. And Ravi Mehta, VP of Publishing for Viximo, a virtual goods start-up, has posted a thorough and perceptive account of the event over at Virtual Worlds News

Those of you who have been engaged by my recent posts on "The Moral Economy of Web 2.0" might be interested in the podcast of a recent colloquium CMS hosted which focused on "viral media." Berkman Center Fellow and C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf moderated a candid converation with Natalie Lent from Fanscape and Mike Rubenstein of The Barbarian Group. The session offers some rich insights into the thinking behind contemporary branding and advertising practices.

For those of you more interested in the world of games, check out this podcast of our event last week with Dennis Dyack, the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Under Dyack's direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. In this podcast, Dyack discusses his views on why video games may represent the 8th Art and describes some of the thinking going into their Too Human trilogy, currently under development. This event was sponsored by the MIT-Singapore GAMBIT Lab.

You might also be interested in listening to recordings of two other recent events hosted by the MIT Communications Forum:

A conversation with John Romano, writer and producer on more than a dozen shows including Hill Street Blues, Party of Five, and Monk as well as creator of Class of '96, Sweet Justice, and Michael Hayes.

A discussion of the globalization of contemporary television featuring CMS's co-director William Uricchio, Utrecht University's Eggo Müller and University of Nottingham's Roberta Pearson.

Both events are moderated by David Thorburn, the director of the MIT Communications Forum.

Coming up soon: two events jointly hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and the Center for Future Civic Media: one featuring a conversation between Cass Sunstein and Yochai Benkler; the other a program on Youth and Civic Engagement (which features Lance Bennett, editor of Civic Life Online: How New Media Can Engage Youth; City Year's Alan Khazei; and MTV's Ian V. Rowe).

The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part One)

I wrote the following essay on the cultural politics around web 2.0 with Joshua Green, a post-doc in the CMS program, who is speerheading the Convergence Culture Consortium and who is my partner in crime in organizing the Futures of Entertainment conferences. Green came to us from the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology. This paper blends work out of Queensland on creative industries with work out of MIT on Convergence Culture. Green is currently completing a book manuscript about Youtube with Jean Burgess, who was interviewed here at my blog earlier this year. The Moral Economy of Web 2.0:

Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins

"The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence....The lesson: Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era." -- Tim O'Reilly (2005)

" please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.

you make all the content. they keep all the revenue." -- Bash.org

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, fans were emblematic of audience resistance (Jenkins,1992; Fiske, 1989), understood as actively appropriating and transforming mass media content as raw materials for their own cultural productions. Mass media depicted fans as living in the shadows of mass culture (if not the basements of their parent's suburban split-level houses), and media companies saw their tastes and concerns as "unrepresentative" of the general population. By the early 21st century, fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued, if still imperfectly understood, by media companies interested in adopting Web 2.0 strategies of user-generated content, social networks, and "harness[ing] collective intelligence." (O'Reilly 2005)

This new talk about "putting the We in the Web" (Levy and Stone 2006) was initially embraced as granting consumers greater influence over the decisions that impacted the production and distribution of culture. By 2007, contradictions, conflicts, and schisms have started to appear within the Web 2.0 paradigm around the imperfectly aligned interests of media producers and consumers.

Consider, for example, FanLib.com, a start-up company that included established media players such as Titanic producer Jon Landau and entertainment lawyer Jon Moonves as advisors, and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh as Chairman (Jenkins 2007a). FanLib began by hosting officially sponsored fan fiction competitions around The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer. Soon, the company sought to become a general interest portal for all fan fiction, actively soliciting material from leading fan writers, deciding not to solicit prior approval from the studios and production companies. The company's executives told fans they wanted to promote and protect fan fiction writing and informed initial corporate investors that they would teach fans how to "color within the lines." When fans stumbled onto the corporate pitch online, there was an intense backlash which spread across blogs, LiveJournals, and various social networking sites.

Fans raised a number of objections. The company wanted to profit from content fans had historically circulated for free (and adding insult, they refused to share the generated revenues with the fan authors). This debate revealed a rift between the "gift economy" of fan culture and the commodity logic of "user-generated content." At the same time, the company promised to increase the visibility of once cloaked fan activities, thus, fans argued, heightening the legal risk that media producers would put the entire community under closer legal scrutiny. (There has been an unofficial truce between fans and producers: most producers weren't going after fan fiction sites as long as they didn't intend to make money off of what they created.) Yet, FanLib.com denied that it bore any legal responsibility to defend fan writers against cease and desist letters from studios and networks. All of this fit within a growing debate about whether corporate distribution of user-generated content constitutes a form of unpaid outsourcing of creative labor, contributing to the downsizing of internal production teams (Scholz and Lovink 2007). These fans refused to be the victims of corporate exploitation, quickly and effectively rallying in opposition to FanLib and using their own channels of communication to inflect damage on its nascent brand. At the same time, Fanlib.com did attract more than 18,000 participants (personal correspondence with Chris Williams, March 2008), including both those new to the world of fan fiction and thus not part of existing communities and those who, for whatever reason, felt disenfranchised from the existing fan fiction groups (Li, 2008).

This example shows how media companies are being forced to reassess the nature of consumer engagement and the value of audience participation in response to a shifting media environment characterized by digitization and the flow of media across multiple platforms, the further fragmentation and diversification of the media market, and the increased power and capacity of consumers to shape the flow and reception of media content. The result has been a constant pull and tug between top-down corporate and bottom-up consumer power with the process of media convergence shaped by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms and in corporate boardrooms.

Mass media are increasingly operating in a context of participatory culture, but there is considerable anxiety about the terms of participation. Some media producers adopt what we are calling a collaborative approach, embracing audience participation, mobilizing fans as grassroots advocates, and capitalizing on user-generated content. Others adopt a prohibitionist posture. Frightened by a loss of control over the channels of media production and distribution and threatened by increasingly visible and vocal audience behavior, some companies tighten control over intellectual property, trying to reign in the disruptive and destabilizing impact of technological and cultural change. Most companies are torn between the two extremes, seeking a new relationship with their audiences which gives only as much ground as needed to maintain consumer loyalty.

This essay focuses on the resulting reworking of the "moral economy" that shapes the relations between producers and consumers. "Moral economy" refers to the social expectations, emotional investments, and cultural transactions which create a shared understanding between all participants within an economic exchange. The moral economy which governed old media companies has broken down and there are conflicting expectations about what new relationships should look like. The risks for companies are high, since alienated consumers have other options for accessing media content. The risks for consumers are equally high, since legal sanctions can stifle the emerging participatory culture.

To understand this debate, we must bridge between the historically separate spheres of audience studies and industry research. Industry research - at least within academic circles - has taken a top-down approach, emphasizing the power of media companies and the impact of the decisions they make upon the culture; audience research has historically taken a bottom-up approach, emphasizing audience interpretation and cultural production read in cultural rather than economic terms. The result has been two conflicting claims about the current state of our culture: one emphasizing media concentration and the narrowing of options; the other emphasizing the expansion of grassroots participation. This essay proposes to read these two trends against each other and in doing so, provoke a conversation between two sets of literatures - one derived from business research, the other derived from cultural and media studies. This conversation, in our case, is a literal one, since many of the ideas here emerged from work done through the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, which facilitates regular dialogues between academics and industry insiders. This conversation also reflects the increased focus on social and cultural factors, even among tech industries, as people come to grips with the implications of "web 2.0." This conversation might also be understood in global terms as this article combines work done by American researchers interested in "convergence culture" with that done by Australian researchers focused on "creative industries" and "produsage." Historically, both audience research and industry studies have concentrated on single media industries rather than examining trends which cut across different media sectors and platforms. Our contention is that this research increasingly needs to adopt a comparative or transmedia approach because of the increased flow of media content and audiences across every available platform and the speed with which developments in one media sector impact thinking in every other corner of the entertainment industry.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

"We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling

"We had so many stories to tell and there was only so much room in the TV show -- so we decided that we could tell these alternative stories in the comics. The stories could be deeper, broader and reveal more secrets about our characters. It was also a way to tell stories that would be otherwise unproduceable on our show." -- Aron Eli Coleite and Joe Pokaski on the Heroes comics.

From time to time, I have used this blog to point towards key steps in the evolution of what I have been calling transmedia storytelling. For a good overview of the concept, check out my Transmedia Storytelling 101 post. Here's part of my definition:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.

This concept has been more fully developed through a series of recent CMS thesis, which you can access on line: Ivan Askwith discusses Lost as an example of how media extensions can be used to enhance audience engagement; Geoffrey Long discusses the aesthetics of transmedia entertainment with a focus on the Jim Henson corporation; Sam Ford explores how transmedia storytelling might expand the reach of contemporary soap operas; and Alec Austin develops an approach to genre conventions which helps to explain the interplay of different elements in a transmedia system.

My thoughts have returned to transmedia entertainment having recently read the graphic novel edition of the first season's comics for Heroes, which comes with a wonderful Alex Ross cover, and which includes an interesting conversation between Executive Producer Jeph Loeb and series writers Aron Eli Coleite and Joe Pkaski about the impulses which led them to use comics to build out the world of Heroes on the web. This post is also inspired by the conversation which I had with Heroes producers Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw at the MIT Communications Forum a few weeks ago. The webcast version of that exchange can not be found on the web and includes rich discussions of how Heroes fits within larger industry trends that stress "engagement" rather than "appointment" television.

Comics have emerged as a key vehicle for constructing transmedia narratives -- in part because they cost less to produce and are thus lower risk than developing games or filming additional material. (See my discussion of the contributions of comics to the Matrix franchise in Convergence Culture.) So, in the past year alone, we've seen Joss Whedon turn to comics to create a "8th season" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we've seen Supernatural generate comics designed to flesh out some of the backstory of the Winchester brothers, and we've seen Battlestar Galactica use comics to fill in the gaps between seasons in the series. Of these, however, Heroes was the only series to be releasing comics on a weekly basis via the web to coincide with the rolling out of the series episodes, resulting in comics that are much more fully integrated into the flow of the series narrative. Indeed, I felt a bit at a disadvantage reading these stories in a book form without reviewing the series episodes on DVD at the same time.

Many of us feel that the Matrix franchise took the concept of transmedia storytelling too far, too fast, to achieve reasonable embrace from a mass viewership. There were gaping holes in The Matrix films which could only be filled if you had spent time with the comics, the game, and the anime. And the production company had not done an adequate job in educating the public about the integral role of these other media channels to the experience as a whole. I hear this again and again from people who read Convergence Culture: they liked the first Matrix film but were turned off by the sequels because they didn't seem to add up to anything and they had no idea that most of these others series related materials existed.

In the interview about the comics, Coleite and Pokaski took a very different tactic:

Our first rule going in was that you didn't have to read the comic to enjoy the show, but it created an enhanced experience if you did. On the other side, we wanted people who did watch the show and read the comic to feel rewarded -- that they were taking part of something larger and give them real emotional and important stories -- not just fluff or filler.

And of course, the presence of the comics are signaled within the television series itself. By the start of the second episode, we've seen Hiro reading 9th Wonders comics, which, within the fiction, is produced by Isaac Mendez, and learn that the comics may hold a key for understanding what's happening. Hiro repeatedly consults the comics to discover what he needs to do next and to make sense of his mission, much as other characters are studying Issac's paintings to foretell and hopefully escape their fates.

And of course, there's such a clear fit between comics and the content of Heroes that it would be a crying shame if they had not sought to integrate comics into the series in some way. Yet, if Heroes draws upon the superhero medium, it does not fit within the mainstream of that genre, at least as it is currently constituted within the comics marketplace. Heroes pushes into a darker, more psychologically nuanced, more "realistic" and less fantastical version of the genre which is much more likely to be published by Image or Dark Horse or Vertigo or Wildstorm than by DC and Marvel's main flagship series.Jeph Loeb (the series producer) and Tim Sale (the comics artist who creates Issac's paintings) ,u>have worked for both DC and Marvel, but in that work, they have combined their distinctive look and themes with mainstream characters like Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man. It's amusing that DC published the Heroes graphic novel when they would almost certainly have turned down Heroes as a comics series if there hadn't been a successful television series (not to mention some high powered artists and writers attached.)

While there are certainly some segments in the anthology of Heroes stories which do not rise above "fluff or filler," most of the stories do achieve some degree of emotional impact -- at least for those of us who are already invested in the characters -- and in that sense, the stories function very much like very good fan fiction -- fleshing out secondary characters, filling in back story, and providing "missing scenes" which round out the action depicted on the screen. The stories are told in what the authors call a "Haiku style" -- that is to say, "short and purposeful, every panel meaning something", offering complex stories in five page installments. Essentially, the writers broke down the pages of a monthly comic into a series of shorter chunks and rolled a chunk out every week as opposed to delivering the whole each month. In some cases, the story is completed in five pages, like the back of the book segments in a classic superhero comic, and in other cases, the stories get serialized over multiple installments. As you read through this first volume, you can see the authors experiment with the benefits of longer or shorter chunks of narrative and the center of gravity moves towards greater serialization as this volume continues.

Early on, they clearly saw the stories as providing a bit more character development given the sheer number of new characters they were introducing at the launch of an ensemble cast serial drama. For example, the first story, "Monsters," fleshes out the relationship between Mohinder and his father: disturbed by folktales about Kali, Mohinder seeks explaination from his father, who tells him "the world is an amazing place, Mohinder, but there's no such thing as monsters." And the boy comes to trust his father's scientific perspective. The man develops greater doubts as his confronts the aftermath of his father's death in the course of a story which would have offered fans their first hint of "Sylar." The artwork offers a vivid representation of the competing world views of science and religion which would be hard to convey through most other media, offering competing and yet simultaneously visible representations of the same event. The second story, "The Crane," takes us back to Japan, where we learn about Hiro's relationship to his grandfather, who had survived Hiroshima, providing a vivid link between his culture's past and the explosion which he must work all season to prevent. And the third, "Trial by Fire," shows Nathan Petrelli deploying his powers to rescue a woman from a burning building, hinting at a heroic side of a character who is consistently depicted as self-centered on the series.

There are some key scenes which overlap between the comics and the television series, enough that we can see how the parts fit together, but for the most part, the comics stories take us different places and tell us different things. Yet, the stories reflect back on what takes place in the series at a much deeper level than say, the Star Trek comics I read as a boy, which shared characters but no real plot points with the aired episodes. In the old model, the comics stories weren't allowed to change anything meaningful about the relationships in the series and thus, the stories remained relatively shallow in terms of their implications for the characters. Here, because the writing of the comics is closely coordinated with the writing of the series, the comics are much more interwoven into the unfolding of character information on the aired episodes. In some cases, they hint at things that television viewers may not discover until later in the run of the series, offering a degree of foreshadowing. In other cases, they provided deeper insights into character's motivations in key scenes, much like a flashback might function in a traditional screen narrative. In effect, the author's off-load certain aspects of narrative construction into this alternative medium, offering a richer experience to those who venture there.

Several of the stories, in true superhero comic fashion, show us how characters, such as Parkman and Isaac, discover their powers. "Hell's Angel" shows us the moment when H.R.G. first adopted Claire, rescuing her from the rubble of a burning building, constituting a classic example of the kind of "missing scene" which is so often left for fans to create on their own. It was clear from my time with Alexander and Warshaw a few weeks ago that they were both fans, who shared our communities love for back story and character development and fascination with an ever-expanding and richly-detailed fictional world.

As the series unfolds, the comics provided additional backstory, suggesting things about the older generation's pasts which have still not been fully revealed on the air, despite a growing focus on the inter-generational drama in Season 2. So, for example, Mark Warshaw's multipart "War Buddies" series shows us the first meeting between the Petrelli patriarch and Linderman during the Vietnam War. The story contributes a great deal to our understanding of these two key characters who had until that point remained largely in the shadows.

The biggest revelation to those who have only watched the series is how central the figure of Hanna Gitelman ("Wireless") is to the comics. I scarcely remember the character from the aired episodes, to be honest, but she emerges here as perhaps the most compelling character, with a good third of the comics devoted to fleshing out who she is, where she comes from, what her powers are, and how she relates to H.R.G. Gitelman's ability to access and navigate across media makes her an ideal personification for the series's own transmedia impulses and she becomes a role model for consumers who are being asked to connect together meaningful bits of information across multiple sources in order to construct a fuller picture of what's going on here. In the interview, the authors stress that they can show things in comics -- "Fire. Space. Polar Ice Caps. Jungles of Africa. Battles with Indian gods and confrontations with Australian rock formations" which would be hard to film, if not prohibitively expensive for a television series. As they exclaim, "there is no limit in this format" and so clearly they wanted a character they could totally own and do with what they wanted. Her presence on the television series might be read as a reward for the comic's readers who go into such scenes with added expertise, though the character remains marginal enough to the series that it doesn't really matter to most viewers if they don't know that her grandmother was a resistance fighter in Germany during World War II, that her mother was a fighter pilot in the Israeli military, or that Hanna was raised in an orphanage in Tel Aviv.

Within the industry discourse, such experiments in transmedia extension are still primarily understood through a language of "promotion." Indeed, this issue of what constitutes new content and what is purely promotional is at the heart of the current Writer's Strike in Hollywood. These comics make a real creative contribution to our experience of Heroes, enhancing our intitial encounters with these characters, providing core aspects of backstory throughout, and even developing characters who live more on the comics page than they do on the screen. We are still groping to find an aesthetic language to describe and evaluate these kinds of stories; this needs to be understood by all involved as an artistic experiment, an attempt to understand how storytellers can more fully exploit the potentials of convergence culture.

For more background, Gamasutra offers a good summary of the transmedia panel at Futures of Entertainment 2, which featured not only Jesse Alexander from Heroes but also Danny Bilson, producer of games, comics, films, television series, and starlets, Jeff Gomez from Starlight Runner, and Gordon Titchell from Walden Media, producer of the Narnia films.

Jason Mittell's reflections on Heroes in the aftermath of the MIT Communications Forum and Futures of Entertainment events sparked some interesting comments from Heroes creator Tim Kring.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

Sometimes a class project takes on a life of its own. I asked the students in the CMS graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to work on teams and report on a contemporary media phenomenon, reading it against some of the theories about media change we have been studying so far this term. A team of our incoming graduate students -- Kevin Driscoll, Xiaochang Li, Lauren Silberman, and Whitney Trettien -- decided to focus their energy on examining the ways that Soulja Boy, a teenage hip hop phenomenon, used a mixture of social network sites and YouTube to push his way up into the top music charts.

A key to his success turns out to be his active encouragement of fans to sample, remix, mashup, and perform his "Crank Dat" song through whatever media channels they want. Our Convergence Culture Consortium is focusing this year on understanding what we call "spreadable media," arguing that the era when value was created by "stickiness" is giving way to one where media gains new value through grassroots circulation. If it doesn't spread, it's dead! And the best way to insure the spread of media is to give over greater control to the audience, to increase their emotional stakes in your success.

As the students discovered the vast array of different people out there who were performing "Crank Dat," they wanted to get into the act. And so they got a camera, borrowed some lab coats, used their social network accounts to draw people together, and staged their own music video, which now circulates via YouTube.

As it happened, I stumbled by between meetings, just in time to watch them lining up to dance on the dot. I stayed for a bit trying to master the for-me very challenging dance steps. I always seemed to be zooming like superman when I was supposed to be doing the pony walk. Unfortunately, the real Professor Jenkins doesn't have any of the moves that my avatar enjoys in Second Life. But, I enjoyed watching my students gamble and shake a leg.

To my pride, they showed their budding skills as public intellectuals, having managed to get the Boston Phoenix out to cover the story. Here's some of what the Phoenix reported on the unfolding scene:

In the summer of 2006, DeAndre Way, then 16, combated summer boredom in Batesville, Mississippi, by writing songs with Fruity Loops digital-audio software. He borrowed a cousin's video camera and filmed dances to accompany the music. Thanks to YouTube, Way's choreography quickly turned into a Southern dance craze -- particularly centered around a steel-pan-drum-fueled number called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."...

This past Wednesday, a day after the release of Soulja Boy's debut album, Souljaboytellem.com, a dozen or so MIT grad students and professors gathered on a circular lawn beside Building 54 at 5:30 pm, blasting "Crank That" from a small gray CD player set on repeat. Some of the group were clad in lab coats and thick glasses as they repeated (and videotaped) the dance -- a crisscrossed jump in place, followed by a few shakes and stomps, a breast stroke-like arm spread, and four jumps to the left and right. "This will single-handedly transform the coolness factor for MIT," commented Henry Jenkins, co-founder of MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program, as he observed nearby.

The meeting of Soulja enthusiasts was organized by students -- including Kevin Driscoll, a/k/a Lone Wolf, a local DJ and former computer-science teacher -- from a CMS graduate course in media theory. Driscoll's lawn-dance party was more than just a way to add a video to the vast library of "Crank That" tributes. He hypothesizes that "Crank That" is a unique bullet point on the dance-craze timeline, symbolic of a shift in dances' virility and how they spread.

"It's by the power of the dance craze that [Soulja Boy] was picked up by a major label," says Driscoll. "It demonstrates how resources like YouTube and MySpace can be these enabling technologies, even for kids, really." The MIT Soulja Boy videos are now on YouTube (and up to about 400 views each, at press time) making them perpetuators of the very trend the participants are studying. At least it's not the Macarena.

Ever since, I've been talking up Soulja Boy as perhaps the most powerful success story we have so far of someone who taped the power of grassroots convergence to break into the commercial mainstream. Check out for example some of my comments about the phenomenon during my keynote address at our recent media literacy conference, organized by Home Inc., which were posted by Bill Densmore

One of the students on the project --xiaochang li-- wrote up her perspectives on "Crank Dat" and what she calls "Hustling 2.0" for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog and I wanted to pass this along to my readers. Next time, I will share her thoughts about how Soulja Boy's most recent music video might be seen as a textbook illustration for how convergence culture works.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

xiaochang li

A little while back, Kevin, one of my colleagues here at MIT, brought the Soulja Boy YouTube phenomenon to my attention while we were discussing an upcoming project.

Fast forward to October: Soulja Boy is fending off Britney Spears and Kanye West on the Billboard Top 100, and you can now watch a rag-tag team of MIT grad students, researchers, affiliates, and Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Movement, crank that. (CMS program director Henry Jenkins even joined in the learn the dance, but sadly had to run off to something undoubtedly important before the video was shot.)

A little bit of context for those who have somehow managed to miss this craze: Soulja Boy produced his own tracks and uploaded videos of himself performing the dance onto MySpace and YouTube. People everywhere started doing their own versions and putting up their own videos, and the whole thing snowballed until people like Beyonce started incorporating the dance into her stage show. By that point, everyone from underground rap magazines to The Atlantic was talking about Soulja Boy.

Beyond the novelty of seeing everyone from Winnie the Pooh to a bunch of vaguely coordinated MIT students doing the "Crank That" dance, the rise of Soulja boy is an interesting exploration of self-promotion in the digital landscape.

Many groups have taken to social networks and video sharing as a means to self-promote, but, as anyone who has ignored dozens of friends requests from bands on myspace.com knows, the effectiveness of all these efforts is inconsistent, at best.

Part of the problem is that there isn't a significant shift in the way in which the

content is presented. Bands produce the same types of videos and promotional materials, except now they're accessible through YouTube instead of MTV. There's little consideration of the unique expectations and practices within these spaces.

In that way, Soulja Boy, who has described computer access as the turning point in the

development of his career, was far better equipped to handle his own online promotion

than any major label executive. In a move that was described on Artist Direct as "Hustling 2.0," Soulja took advantage of the fact that people were already downloading material from other artists, renaming his files as popular songs in order to spread his content. He also has a number of videos which use the particular video blogging aesthetic of YouTube to help brand him as a personality.

This gap in understanding between major media and cultural practices of user-generated content channels is mirrored in the official music video for "Crank That," wherein rap impresario Collipark good- naturedly mocks his own ignorance of the flourishing Web 2.0 phenomenon around Soulja Boy. The whole video, in fact, runs almost like an advertisement for the age of convergence culture, as the dance propagates over multiple channels of distribution, morphing and evolving from streaming video to mobile devices and ultimately ending up in the "real," physical world, and Soulja Boy steps away from his Webcam and chat windows to accept his record deal.

As Kevin pointed out in his blog, he takes the sign of major label recognition more like an award instead of an opportunity, payment for a job already well-done. On that note, it's interesting how the spelling varies between "Crank Dat" on many of the fan produced videos and some of the marketing on Souljaboytellem.com and "Crank That" on the official record, like a linguistic marker to differentiate the D-I-Y phenomenon from the standardization of the song and its incorporation into the established entertainment industry.

Check out the range of videos in the Soulja Boy

universe:

Soulja Boy's YouTube

channel, where you can see the original dance video, the official video, and the

instructional video, in addition to a number of fan videos and clips of celebrities

doing their own versions of "Crank That."

A fairly comprehensive collection of all the audio variations on the song that have appeared. My favorite might be the Folgers Coffee version.

A blog devoted solely to videos of the many, many versions of the dance. Note how the spellings vary from video to video.

When Xiaochang's post appeared on the C3 blog, she generated some interesting responses from the hip hop blogosphere. Check out:

ttp://www.ohword.com/blog/852/crank-dat-white-girl-the-soulja-boy-lesson-plan

http://www.prohiphop.com/2007/10/to-understand-s.html?cid=87651522

Growing Up in the 1930s: How Media Changes Our Relations to the Past

I like to tell people that I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. Stop! Before you update my Wikipedia entry, please note that I am speaking metaphorically and not literally. Despite my gray beard and despite how I feel on some Monday mornings, I'm not really that old! I was born in 1958! But a number of things happened in my mid-childhood which utterly fixated my fantasy life on the mid-20th century.

For one thing, when my grandmother died, I was helping my parents go through her old house and we found a trunk in her basement crammed with 1940s Life magazines (along with a range of other publications of the era). As a kid, I would spend hours going through the magazines, looking with fascination at pictures of Jitterbug contests, reading articles about the Blitzkrieg, or most interestingly, looking at old advertisements and wondering what archaic candybars had tasted like. The magazine covered everything -- from the most important political and military events of the era to the most mundane aspects of everyday life and taught me to see social and cultural history as the essential backdrop against which to make sense of the big events that dominate our history classes. I would grill everyone older than myself about the world of their childhood, trying to find out what it was really like to live in the past.

Second, I was nearsighted and we didn't know it until I was deep into elementary school and for that reason, I didn't really enjoy contemporary movies very much. They were just a big blur for me. I'd get lost in big movie theaters. My mother would send me out to go to the bathroom by myself or to get popcorn and I'd be unable to find my way back to her, wandering through the theater staring at the faces of people and not recognizing anyone. But I loved to watch movies on television, sitting close to the screen, and would from an early age beg to stay up and watch Academy Award Theater to see vintage movies.

Adding to this, there was a children's show in Atlanta in those days called Tubby and Lester; it's hosts modeled themselves on Laurel and Hardy; and instead of cartoons, they would show Our Gang, Three Stooges, and silent slapstick comedies, all of which I became passionate about and just as importantly, I developed a mastery over, tracking down every book I could get on old movies, and play acting their adventures in my backyard. In the afternoons, I would race home from school to catch the afternoon creep show screenings of old Universal horror films, read Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and practice my monster walks. I got in a knock down fight with my best friend that sent us both to see the Principal over my preference for Bela Lugosi's Dracula over the then heart-throb Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows).

My Seventh Grade term paper tried to retell the entire history of the Hollywood movie industry in 10 pages. My father, to his dying day, accused me of having rewritten the same term paper ever since. It became the way he understood what it meant for me to be a media scholar.

Then, there was music. I would beg my parents to play their old 78 records of swing music -- especially those of Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters -- and much preferred these sounds to anything my contemporaries were listening to. I recall with horror when I accidentally cracked a vintage recording of Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra doing "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

And last but certainly not least, there was radio. I was lucky that an Atlanta radio station for a few years experimented with doing classic radio all day, all the time. I'd listen to early soaps in the morning before going to school, listen to children's shows and adventure serials in the afternoon when I got home, and laugh over classic comedy in the evenings when my friends were watching prime time television. On Sundays, there was the Lux Radio Theater and Mercury Theater and other great drama series. I listened to anything and everything, intrigued by the old stories and in love with the crackle of the old recordings and what they did to what Roland Barthes calls "the grain of the voice."

All of this made me exceedingly odd to my classmates, who could not understand my interests in any of this, and probably contributed to making me a social pariah in my adolescent years, but all of it also made me who I am today. When I first started dating the woman who would become my wife, my future father inlaw would grill me about trivia of the period. I think I won his approval by linking a particular line back to The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. After a while, we would talk passionately together about the culture of the depression and the Second World War as if we were there, as if this had been a shared experience.

It was no accident that my undergraduate thesis dealt with films of the depression or that my PhD dissertation centered on vaudeville and early sound comedy. The popular culture of this era was my early love and still spills over into some of my current projects -- see my posts on Vaudeville and YouTube, on Charlotte Greenwood, on Retrofuturism and the 1939 World's Fair -- and look forward to an essay I'm currently developing on the so-called "vulgar modernists" of the post-war period (with a particular emphasis on Harvey Kurtzman, Spike Jones, Hellzapoppin, and Tex Avery).

The fact that I read the period across all of these media platforms, probably contributes to my current interest in adopting comparative approaches to media studies. I was able from the start to draw connections between magazines, films, radio shows, and music of the period in a way which was not yet locked within the medium specific disciplines which structure how formal education talks about such matters. I was, as I said in the first sentence, able to "live" in the 1930s and 1940s because I was able to re-experience such a complex web of media representations from the era, all at the same time, and trace connections between them. I knew what the period looked like; I knew what it sounded like; I knew how it thought; I knew what made it laugh; the only thing I couldn't do was taste those candy bars and other products I saw in its advertisements or heard discussed on radio commercials.

Why am I telling you this? After all, most of you are here for my posts about contemporary cultural matters, about digital media and transmedia storytelling, about web 2.0. and I almost never get any comments on those posts that deal with older media materials. More's the pity. I tell my students that we really can't understand where media is going without knowing where it's been and there are many clues to understanding the complex cultural grid constructed by modern media by making it strange, by visiting the media systems of other cultures (whether around the world or in our own past.)

Today, I am writing about this because I wanted to share my excitement over discovering the Old Time Radio Catalog website. OTR was a company I remember from my youth. My mom and dad used to give me a treat by buying LPs of vintage radio shows from this company via mail order as birthday or Christmas presents. But at the time, they sold a single episode for the price of an album. Well, today, thanks to new technologies and new ways of clustering our experience of media, the company now offers full or near full runs of classic series in Mp3 format for the absurdly low price of 5 dollars per disc. (Longer series require multiple discs, but many series fit within a single disc.)

Several things are coming together here to reshape our access to and experience of Old Time Radio. First, there is the MP3 format itself, which makes it possible to fit so much content on a small disc, which can be cheaply reproduced and shipped by mail. It makes it possible to sell radio in bulk.

Second, there is the modern phenomenon of the boxed dvd set of television series, which shapes our expectations to be able to watch (or in this case, listen to) the complete run of a series in order and thus fuels our expectations for encyclopedic mastery and plentitude. Why would I want to listen to a single isolated episode when it is possible to own it all, consume it all. Suddenly I am back in Atlanta in the mid-1970s when it was possible to listen to an episode a week of Fibber Mcgee and Molly or follow along in the serialized adventures of Lum and Abner or I Love a Mystery. Old Time Radio, like television, was a long form medium and you can only really appreciate it by living with its characters over time and watch them grow across episodes.

Third, there is the web itself. In my earlier discussion of retrofuturism, I talked about the ways that the web was making it possible for fans of vintage media (just like all other kinds of niches) to find each other, for people to assemble and share archives (like the wonderful folks who are making early sound comedy and musical numbers available via YouTube), and which are allowing us to pool our knowledge about past popular culture in one spot (as in the rich entries in Wikipedia on some of these classic media texts.)

The Old Time Radio site takes full advantages of the web, most spectacularly by offering samples -- full length episodes -- of most of the shows which it sells. Each day, they showcase a particular program from the collection, often an episode which aired on that date originally, so you can enjoy holiday themed episodes on the right days. You could spend countless hours just rummaging through the catalog, listening to one or another of their vintage broadcasts. The first thing you would discover is that they have everything there -- the wartime lectures of Bertram Russell, the sermons of Father Coughlin, full broadcasts of key baseball games, the FDR fireside chats, a fascinating collection of movie advertisements from the radio era, old game shows -- and not just the comedies, dramas, and science fiction shows which most often characterize the collector culture around vintage radio. There are two fascinating recordings which capture a full day's broadcasts on a particular station -- one showing how America got the news about D-Day and the other showing the progression of a much more typical broadcast day -- which allow us to experience the flow of programs and place individual genres within their larger programming context. There are also sets organized around particular performers -- Will Rogers, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Robert Benchley, Orson Welles -- which allow us to trace their movement across programs. There's a smattering of programming from other countries, particularly British and South African radio. And there are sets which bring together the innovative broadcasts of particular radio auteurs, such as Norman Corwin or Arch Obler, who represented some of the key innovators in the medium. But at the heart of it, there are the classic series -- 116 episodes of Henry Aldrich, 274 episodes of Burns and Allen, 939 episodes of Jack Benny -- which suggest just how long lived some of the great shows really were and how they captured and responded to such a large period of the history of the 20th century.

I have spent several hundred dollars so far buying up some of these collections. I haven't listened to everything I've bought yet. My life hasn't allowed me to give myself over so fully to my passions. But everything I have listened to so far has been of surprisingly good quality. In some cases, I am re-engaging with old favorites. In others, I am making new discoveries or listening to shows that have long fascinated me but have been impossible to access before. I compare it to that moment when TNT first went on the air and the network was indiscriminately dumping anything and everything from its vast archives on at wee hours in the morning, not sure what would connect with contemporary viewers.

For me, as for many consumers decades older than me, it is a return to the world of my childhood and I had to share the experience with my readers.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty One, Part One): Barbara Lucas and Avi D. Santo

INTRODUCTIONS ADS: I am an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. This is my second year out of graduate school. I graduated in 2006 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Radio-Television-Film. My dissertation focused on corporate authorship practices in managing transmedia brands prior to conglomeration. Basically, I analyzed how cultural icons like Superman, the Lone Ranger and Little Orphan Annie were licensed across media and merchandising sites and how their inter-textual meanings were managed. I also looked at how authorship rights were articulated by corporations over properties whose economic success rested on their seeming authorless and iconic. At ODU, I teach classes on critical race theory and media, international media systems, superheroes and US culture, and authorship and discourse. I am a co-founder of the e-journal Flow (http://www.flowtv.org) and current co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

Outside of academics, the first job I ever wanted was to be a soap opera writer (apologies for not using the term "daytime melodrama", but they were just soap operas when I was a teenager; a term that likely contributed to my eventual embarrassment over truly persuing this vocation). I watched Another World obsessively throughout my teens. I am a huge comic book dork. I primarily read revisionist superhero narratives that play at established conventions of the genre, but my pull list ranges from Fablesto Y The Last Man. Favorite TV of the moment: Battlestar Galactica, The Boondocks, My Name is Earl, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway.

BL: I have an MA in English from Case Western Reserve University with a concentration on British Renaissance literature and am a member of the adjunct faculty and Lakeland Community College. However, I've been a fantasy, horror, and (to a lesser extent) science fiction reader since I was a child. It wasn't until I was an adult that I returned to my passions as a field of study as well as one of pleasure. I have been a regular presenter at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (www.iafa.org), and I'm the Division Head for the new Community and Culture in the Fantastic Division that focuses on fan fiction and culture, video game theory, hypertexts, viral marketing, RPG's, ARG's, folkloric and sociological approaches to the fantastic. Basically, my division deals with new and emergent texts, texts that are non-traditional in nature. The deadline for this year's conference, held in March 2008 is close, and I am still accepting papers. I have calls up at the UPenn website. They can also be accessed at http://community.livejournal.com/ccfantastic/.

Outside of academic and corporate lives, though intersecting with my academic interests, I write fantasy fiction and poetry. I am interested in comics and graphic fiction and tend to be an eclectic reader who can bounce between Sandman (Gaiman's version),Preacher, Age of Bronze, Gloom Cookie, and A Distant Soil with no problem. The one genre I tend to avoid is "mainstream" superhero comics. I am the sort of gamer geek that feels like she is cheating on her Playstation when she is playing games on her Xbox. My television watch list includes Heroes, Pushing Daisies, 24, Project Runway, Top Chef, Lost, and Dexter (though my hectic schedule often results in my falling behind and catching up once I get the DVD's).

My primary scholarly focus the last five years or so has been on fan culture and fan fiction, especially slash fiction. My work primarily involves complicating early monolithic assumptions about slash fiction and slash fans, assumptions that have seen it as another sort of romance writing. While that notion does fit a lot of the work that is being produced, it works less well when considering fringe writing such as dark fiction or BDSM fiction, which shatters or explodes traditionally romantic (a la romance novels) notions. Like many aca-fans who work in the fan studies area, I practice what I study. I co-moderate a The Lord of the Rings fan fiction community and write fan fiction myself. My article (co-written with Robin Reid and Eden Lackner) "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh," which appeared in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, looks at the erotics of writer/reader and writer/writer interaction during the composition and circulation of collaboratively written erotic slash fiction. Perhaps we can talk a bit about collaboration processes?

EROTICS OF COLLABORATION

ADS: I'd love to hear more about your findings here. What are the relationships of the authors to the text they are slashing versus one another? Are the characters/stories being reworked the object of erotic fascination or is it the sharing process?

BL: It is a combination of the two. Not all slash stories are erotic in nature, by that I mean the level of graphic description of the relationships depicted in them; however, writers tend to focus on characters and actors (in media fandoms) that they themselves find attractive or arousing. This explains the tendency for writers to follow characters across films or series, adding new fandoms as their objects of fannish interest add to their resumes.

Fans do play with sexuality through slash and het fiction, expressing their own desires, which they perhaps show more frankly because of the distance they achieve through filtering them through fiction, fiction that is (at least on the surface) about male characters.

There is even a further distancing in that the fictions are not entirely theirs; they are borrowed. I don't mean to suggest that there is a simple correspondence between the desires expressed in fics and those of the fans. Certainly, some fics reflect nightmares (e.g., rape fics and dark fics) and others simply explore modes of desire the fan may be curious about but would not ordinarily want to engage in. If horror fiction provides its audience with ways to confront fears and terrors while remaining safe and sheltered from them, erotic fiction does the same with desire, and many fans use it as a means of playing with desire in that way.

The sharing process itself is also erotic, something that we talk about in the "Cunning Linguists" article. The more erotic content, sensuality and/or sexuality, a story contains, the more likely the writer is to get feedback that is flirty, passionate, and erotic in nature from her readers. However, I do not believe this is a hallmark of slash fiction so much as it is of erotic fiction. I am on several lists with professional writers of romantic erotica, and the commentary from their fans tends to be similar in nature. They are also similar in that romantic erotica featuring male/male relationships is very popular with female readers. Romance publishers like EllorasCave and Samhain Press, to name a few, have male/male fiction title lines. These are, for the most part, communities that are by and for women.

ADS: Is there less slash fiction written about female characters, or is the erotic relationship between writers and readers different? In the past, I've frequented a CSI fan-fic site that featured a lot of different romantic pairings, including lesbian pairings like Sarah-Catherine. These stories ranged from BDSM narratives that either punished one or both characters for their "frigidness" or celebrated their non-traditional femininities to stories that softened one or both characters in ways that conform to very traditional constructions of femininity.

BL: There is going to be a much higher percentage in Xena fandom than there is in Buffy and more in Buffy than in The Lord of the Rings. Within more mainstream publishers of professional romance/erotica, the same trend applies. In fact, while they welcome male/male stories, they specifically state that they are not interested in female/female stories. Again, these are spaces where the creators and audience trend female. While this tendency has been criticized as straight women fetishizing gay men, that reading is far too simplistic.

The percentage of femslash in fandoms definitely varies according to fandom, and the sorts of themes particular to it does as well. Most of the femslash I have read (and I will confess to not having read great quantities of it) tends to focus on friendships between women that deepen as an erotic component is introduced to them, which is, in essence, the most classic and traditional pattern for slash fiction. The feedback I have read on femslash stories tends to follow the same pattern as that for male/male slash, and the works I am familiar with tend to be single-authored rather than collaborative.

Overall, the collaborative writing process tends to be erotic in nature. Not all collaboration is erotic, but long-term collaborations between writers, as many are, that focus on producing erotic texts tends to knit levels intimacy between the writers as those same forces work on their characters.

In the parts of fandom I move in and study, fandom wife relationships develop between two women who are writing fic, especially erotic fic, collaboratively. The women really become "partners," a perspective that applies to their own relationship and how it is seen from the outside by other fans. While fandom wives can simply be good and fast friends, there are dynamics to the relationship that are not unlike those in a romantic relationship. A certain sense of possessiveness develops between the partners, and jealousies often arise if one partner wants to go on to write with someone outside the relationship. From what I've observed, a goodly percentage of fandom wives go on to other fandom wifely relationships when/if their current one ends.

The endings to such relationships tend to be messy and to be played out in front of the rest of fandom. I have been witness to several spectacular fandom wife marriages and divorces. In one, one partner lived on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast. The East Coast partner actually moved across the country to move in with her fandom wife, and their fandom divorce (spurred on by one's complaints that the other did not spend enough time with her and spent too much time online) ended up splitting many of their online friends between them.

ADS: This fandom wife dynamic you describe is fascinating, partly because of the gendered terminology fans use (are there no fandom husbands or fandom life-partners?), but also because it sounds so normative, even as it so clearly challenges assumptions about coupling.

BL: I agree. In fact, when it comes to tensions in fandom, some of the more fascinating ones exist between subversion and normativity, between exploding or reinforcing the status quo. Male pregnancy fictions are a good example of this. On one hand, they completely disregard the limitations of biological gender and are in a unique position to question and critique heteronormative assumptions about family. However, few fics actually do this. Instead, they reinforce many of the most pervasive, traditional, and heteronormative ideals, including ones that insist that jointly producing a child is the ultimate validations of a loving relationship.

ADS: My assessment is likely influenced by my own position within the academy, but I tend to read fan collaborations/the building and sharing of community as simultaneously desirable and fraught with tensions. This seems especially true when dealing with particular fan practices like collaboratively writing and sharing slash fiction, especially the more "taboo" kinds like BDSM or dark fiction, which not only refocus attention on particular relationships within media texts but also subvert power hierarchies (or call attention to them in new ways). The subject matter is often sexual and the sharing of fantasies that stretch the boundaries of what the official corporate authors of the text would find permissible (its amazing how lax many corporations are about fan-fiction until it "crosses a line" that has more to do with taste than profits - though these are often conflated in corporate rhetoric) seems to meld with the thrill of challenging cultural assumptions about "good taste".

For me, I see the conflation of breaking both legal and moral laws as part of the erotics here. Intellectual property law certainly cheats by trying to delimit how the public uses their cultural icons, so there is a thrill in ignoring these rules. Authorship is still largely imagined in official discourses as either a solitary act of creation or a corporate practice (Joss Whedon may be a genius, but we all know he didn't write every episode of Buffy. He had a writing team that was subject to some sort of rational assembly-line type production practice). Thus, fan collaboration seems to break down those dichotomies as well, making creation a shared experience that obfuscates the production process in favor of focusing on the content being shared. Finally, since cultural icons are often popular heroes in the Bennett and Woolacott sense that they are ever changing figures that embody (and neutralize) shifting cultural anxieties, the ability to play with these figures and tease out one aspect of their personas both unravels their function of preserving the status quo and actively engages the larger meanings of the icon, effectively shifting the tensions they are intended to manage. This seems simultaneously empowering and subversive, even as it confirms the middlebrow pleasures these icons/texts normally prescribe as desirable. The more I write here, the less I feel I know about the erotics of fandom, since I seem to have reduced this down to an instructional manual.

BL: The tensions between desirability and frustration apply to any collaborative endeavor. They are particularly acute for writers because our work is such a solitary labor. Collaboration adds a social element that can be a source of energy or vitality and a source of drama and anger. Naturally, building a community, fannish or otherwise, is also a collaborative venture.

I do not quite agree with your point that more taboo forms of expression necessarily represent tension points in fannish communities. In slash fandom, readers and writers tend to cluster around specific character pairings and specific kinks. For example, there are many slash fans who enjoy male pregnancy (MPREG) fictions. This is an acquired taste, one that has a loyal fanbase. Fans who do not share the same fascination avoid such fictions. Unless they are like me and decide to write papers on them. One of the icons I have on my LiveJournal says, "You have your kinks, and I have mine," which is often the prevailing attitude among fans. This is not to say that eruptions over personal kinks never happen, but they are not common in my corners of fandom. While we can talk about "slash fandom" as it was a monolithic entity, a more accurate way of looking at it would be as more discrete groups who crystallize around different discourses of desire.

ADS: I agree with you about the acceptance/celebration of different kinks that goes on in fan communities. I was thinking more of tensions that arise in relation to normative ideals. One's choice of kink is always in some way informed by knowledge of the social rules and the pleasures/ consequences of breaking them.

BL: Those tensions are actually playing out right now around a holiday fic exchange called Yuletide. The exchange cuts across fandoms, and this year includes over 1,200 participants. The first day of signups happened at the end of the Jewish high holidays, and one fan complained about this (even though signups lasted two weeks and there is no incentive for signing up early). The argument spiraled out into a debate about how fans will often organize events on Saturdays and resist the same on Sundays. The same sorts of complaints are voiced over these normative ideals, which tend to see slash fandom as female, heterosexual, white, and American.

ADS: As for how these ideas seem to connect with academic practices for me, the tenure process has made it very clear to me that single authorship is valued over collaboration. The denial of the community except as rational audience sitting in judgment transforms collaboration into a fetish for me, where new modes of academic publishing can reinvigorate community and focus on the processes of creation rather than the final product. Though a stretch, perhaps, I can definitely see these practices as erotic because they are both taboo and because they place emphasis on the act itself (no longer either masturbatory or a peep show where I show my body [of work] to an audience that I cannot see but I know is looking and judging me) rather than the final product (the money/tenure shot). The work I've done on MediaCommons and Flow are both informed by a deep sense that current academic publishing practices are limiting, but also that there is a liberating freedom that comes from sharing. Do I imagine fan community practices like slash fiction writing as similar? Somewhat. As media scholars, we typically seek to alter/challenge/tease out a text's meanings/underlying ideological assumptions/ institutional logics and constraints. Many fans do this as well, but they get to do this in forms that seem more like play (even though a lot of work often goes in to these creations) and sharing. Of course, part of this is the projection of my desires onto fan communities.

I'd imagine this works quite differently for non-tenure track faculty and as these discussions have clearly shown, there is a gendered component to these categories, with more women found in non-tenure track positions. I also know from working in a Comm department where half my colleagues are social sciency types who regularly co-author works that they find nothing erotic or exciting about collaboration. At best it is functional, at worst frustrating. They tend to fetishize the solo authoring process as much as I worship at the alter of community-building.

BL: I agree with the social science folks: collaboration on academic work is, well, it's work. It lacks the element of play and fun that is so much a part of fannish experience. Fandom can be serious play, but a portion of it, the part that poaches from and tests the canonical source texts, is playful. The relationships and intimacy between community members is often not, and tensions between fans who consider their experience all play and those who take their community and interactions more seriously do crop up.

I think attitudes about academic communication and community are shifting, like all things in academia, they will move slowly. I credit the Internet with this. As more scholars interact online in listservs and blogs and email, the more their interactions include personal and professional discussion and the more we become invested in each other as individuals. We move beyond being collections of ideas and methodologies. I have a personal blog (which is badly in need of updating) linked to my ICFA division blog. When I met one of my presenters on video game theory at the conference last spring, he immediately asked how my mother (who had been having health concerns, something I wrote about in my blog) was faring. It took me aback until I worked through to, "Oh, you read my blog." At that moment, our sense of community was built on more than our shared ideas, interests, and work.

ADS: This is very encouraging. I hope you are right.

STRETCHING THE CANON VERSUS CANONICAL FIDELITY

ADS: As you can probably tell, I am not a fan scholar per se. My interests are in the collective authoring practices and authoring constraints that accompany popular icons like superheroes. Within this lens, I tend to focus on how contemporary IP companies like Marvel Comics engage with fans and negotiate the various fan iterations of popular heroes in fan fiction, fan art, and various other collective knowledge initiatives. I also look at the ways that fans police the boundaries of authorship as often as they challenge them. I have studied the ways that superhero fan communities will often reject unauthorized stories as unprofessional, non-canonic, and out of continuity, while embracing certain professional writers and artists as part of the fan community (even as these individuals work for the very institutions seeking to police the meanings of popular heroes)

BL: Your experiences with the superhero communities and fan practices is very interesting to me, because there isn't quite the same sort of border policing in slash fandom. Perhaps it is because slash fans realize they are teasing very submerged meaning that is usually not intended out of the source text. That is, we accept we are going to be stretching canon, which makes it easier to accept some other distortions to or challenges of the source texts. However, there is a constant tension that exists between official canon and fan-defined canon/fanon. This permission to play with canon has its limits, and fans are not usually going to respond well to texts that totally shatter major canonical expectations, unless the work is clearly parody or crackfic.

At the same time, as texts grow more complex, defining what is canonical gets more problematic. In real-person fiction, for example, when the canonical source text is a person's like and persona, what defines canon? Some would say there is no such thing. I am not one of them. Canon tends to be an amalgamation of facts about an actor (or musician or sports figure), interviews with actors, commentary by colleagues, reading public persona and presentation, and a dose of the persona of fictional characters that actor has played in various roles. It is definitely something that is assembled, ordered, and prioritized by fans (and often contested by them) much more actively than canon in a fictional work is assimilated.

When we look at other texts that spill across media boundaries, the question of defining canon becomes even more complex as levels exist. Fans of Heroes, for example, can produce texts based on the canon of the television series, but they do so without having the benefit of additional information about characters that is revealed online in the Heroes digital graphic novel. If a fan wants to write about a character like Hana Gitelman, the woman who can mentally "hear"/intercept and communicate wirelessly, they have to access the digital graphic novels (soon to be released in a hardcover version), as her character is developed in cyberspace, not in the series. Hana also breaks out of the confines of the canonical television narrative by interacting directly with fans. My sister (who firmly insists she is NOT a fan) prowls the Heroes message boards and has signed up to get text messages from Hana on her cell phone.

ADS: Differences within communities over the rigidity or flexibility of the canon seems a valuable conversation. Of course, this is a question of degree, not an either/or scenario. Comic book/superhero fans definitely write fiction (general and slash) that potentially challenges the official continuity of their hero's universes, even as they also hotly debate what ought to be counted as canonical. My experience has been that many superhero fans privilege the officially produced stories over fan variations. Of course, this has a lot to do with the particularly close and incestuous relationship the comic book industry has historically cultivated with its fan base since the late 1960s. Henry Jenkins points out how over the past two decades the comic book industry has put out many elseworld-type variations of its own products, essentially creating in-house the narrative multiplicity that many fans otherwise create (with obvious limitations on certain subject matter). Partly, this can be seen as an attempt to reign in fan efforts to stretch the boundaries, but it is also partly an acknowledgement of those fan desires that many other media texts/ properties continue to deny.

Moreover, because the barriers for entry have usually been lower (and are still perceived to be) for the comic book industry, the perceived lines between creators and fans are blurred, so that many comic book writers and artists are not just fan-favorites, but marketed as fans themselves. I think this does two things: One, it reassures fans that their fantasies are being catered to because the people who create these texts are just like them (my point here is not whether this is true or not, but the way that the discourses of authorship and fandom that circulate blur the insider/outsider status so central to other fan community creative practices). Two, they encourage a detailed knowledge of the official continuity (and its official derivatives) because there is still the sense that this type of knowledge might be rewarded with a job or some similar form of cultural access. Thus, fan creations that push too far against the canonical grain are often devalued because there is a sense that this not only alienates the industry but also that there are already fan-insiders challenging that canon with an official stamp of approval. This seems similar to your assertion of the limits of fan openness to texts that shatter canon entirely without coding itself as parody or crackfic.

Of course, I am also massively oversimplifying what is often a very contentious and charged relationship between superhero fans and creators. What I wonder is, as digital authoring tools become more easily accessible, will we see this relationship shift with other media texts, as fans are both actively courted as potential creators by the industry and fan practices become increasingly integral to industry branding strategies? If television series started offering alternate variations of their plots (like those alternate universe episodes that occasionally pop up) would this change fan writing practices? And, of course, given the disparity within the industry in terms of gendered access to creative power, would there be a change along those axes?

BL: I think we are already starting to see the beginnings of a fan/creator convergence. In order to overcome the mid-season hiatus ratings slump, Heroes is set to produce 30 episodes. A number of them will be one-shots, focusing on a new hero not integral to the overall story arc of the series. Fans will get to weigh in on favorites, and the favorite will become a regular part of the cast. This very limited and restrictive sort of collaboration (where the boundaries and control is still rather firmly in the hands of the creators) is something that should fuel fan production, especially if a beloved hero is not renewed and fans want to continue his/her story.

While the new technologies offer fans more creative possibilities, I do not see creators giving much access to their power to fans in significant ways. However, I do see fans offering fellow fans more sophisticated (and competitive) alternatives to the creators' products. I'm thinking here of shows like Hidden Frontier, a Star Trek fan film series that released their episodes on the web and made the focus on the series the relationships between the characters, some of whom were gay. Of course, creators will likely take note of other popular and visible fan alternatives and popular ideas and themes may work their way into the creators' works.

If You Attended the Forrester Consumer Forum...

I spoke on Friday to the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago and promised the crowd that I would use my blog to provide some links for further reading on some of the topics I presented. First, let me provide a pointer to our upcoming Futures of Entertainment conference. This event is run with a talk show format and is designed to bring together cutting edge thinking from across many different media sectors. Many of the issues I raised in my remarks -- including the discussion of how to value fan contributions or how to build communities around media properties -- will be discussed in depth at this event.

Second, I wanted to suggest that you check out our Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Every day, our students and staff share their thinking about the trends that are impacting the world of branded entertainment. For example, this week's posts analyze:

Soulja Boy and the Crank This phenomenon

Radiohead and the Digital Distribution of Music

New Metrics for Evaluating Audience Engagement

Television on the Web

For more information on the ideas presented in the talk:

Check out this podcast of a recent talk given at MIT by Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance.

This post deals with the connection between Robot Chicken and action figure fan cinema.

This post deals with the controversy surrounding FanLib and the conflict between user-generated content and the gift economy that shapes participatory culture.

This post deals with how Four Eyed Monsters has used new media to rally audience support.

This post deals with Wizard Rock and Harry Potter as niche media..

This post deals with Colbert and the politics of spreadable media.

The line from the talk which seems to be most reported by other bloggers was the suggestion that any technology which enables us to share cute cat pictures can also be used to bring down governments or corporations. I wish I had come up with the line, but I cited it back to Ethan Zuckerman's comments at a recent MIT Communications Forum on Civic Media. Here, you can find a podcast of the event.

Here are a few other posts that might interest you:

Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

Transmedia Storytelling 101

Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture

So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

Oreos, "Wal-mart Time", and User-Generated Advertising

And of course, there is no substitute for reading my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Great meeting you all. I hope you stick around and enjoy our ongoing discussions of convergence and participatory culture.