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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fan reaction was predictable. For ShellySue at TWoP:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) Channeling of money to visual and away from storytelling

b) Loss of community ties

c) Characters with few ties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Jenkins The Movie or How Does Fandom Happen?

Around the same time as Teenage Paparazzo first appeared on HBO, I was participating in a Social Media week event billed as a "Fanthropology" workshop here in Los Angeles, hosted by Cimarron Digital, and intended to share insights with area media makers about how they might productively reframe their relations with their fans. I was asked to deliver some opening remarks as a "fan expert" and then join a panel of entertainment bloggers as they talked about their relations with the media industry. My fellow speakers were:

• Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net movie blog, Owner and Executive Editor
• Brett Erlich of Current TV, host of The Rotten Tomatoes Show and the Webby Award winning Viral Video Film School segment on infoMania.
• Babette Pepaj, CEO of BakeSpace.com, the Webby-award nominated largest food-themed social network, which has created social campaigns for Desperate Housewives, Julie & Julia, Grey's Anatomy, It's Complicated, Ugly Betty, etc.
• Scott Perry, New Music Tipsheet music blog founder
• Eloise Hess, 15on15, 15-yr-old Creator, Producer, Host. 15on15 is a live music, video web series and music blog which has interviewed bands including Dead Man's Bones, Local Natives and Titus Andronicus @15on15
• Jovana Grbic is the Creator, Editor and Creative Director of ScriptPhD.com, a blog and creative consulting company focused on science and entertainment

and the event was moderated by Digital LA founder Kevin Winston and Cimarron's Kristen Olson.

How Does Fandom Happen? from Cimarron Digital on Vimeo.

Stitched through the discussion was a power point presentation created by the Cimarron Digital team which explored the stages through which the media industry fed and responded to fan interest surrounding the emergence of a media property.

Much to my amusement, the slides were organized around Henry Jenkins the Movie. A highlight for me was a photoshopped image that shows what the more or less appropriately aged and built Bruce Willis would look like wearing suspenders, glasses, a grey beard, and my alternately bald and shaggy pate -- that is, in the branded, trademarked, and copyrighted persona of Professor Jenkins which I sometimes play in the media.

Here's part of a synopsis created for the rather unlikely Henry Jenkins vehicle:

In the Summer of 2011, America's attention is held in thrall by the 24/7 news machine, focusing on the deterioration of the Space Station and last-minute rescue attempts to remove the scientists and experiments aboard it before it potentially crashes to earth. For Henry Jenkins, however, business goes on as usual in preparing to attend the San Diego Comic Con... until a mysterious woman leaves a mildew-ed, yellowing packet of papers in his office containing an ancient prophecy predicting the space station's crash, and suggesting that only George Takei can stop it. He brushes it off until reaching Comic Con and discovering the situation is dire: not only are several major cities threatened by the crash, but the suggestion of sabotage has the makings of an international incident. As San Diego is one of the cities under threat, organizers have curtailed activities in cooperation with local authorities.

Though he dismisses his own concerns as foolish, the product of an idle mind, Henry is compelled to find George Takei and show him the papers. Despite being a respected professor, he can't even get close; Takei's people won't let Henry see him, and the papers are scattered. He can only recover a few, but as he does, he realizes that the George Takei depicted isn't the George Takei of today, but of 1967, during Star Trek's second season. Confused and frustrated, and figuring someone has played a practical joke on him, he makes his way out of the exhibition hall, colliding with a young woman in steampunk gear, Sally. The papers go flying again, but this time he leaves them. Sally picks them up and returns them to him anyway, and noticing their content, offers to help him with his "time travel problem."

Of course, he's still going to need Takei - otherwise he won't be able to find his past self. So Henry waits for an opportune moment during the Con and grabs Takei, stuffing him into an elaborate costume to avoid detection. When Takei wakes up, they're in the basement of a San Diego hotel with Sally and her steampunk friends. One of whom is suspiciously military-looking. He hands them a couple of devices that don't look anything like steampunk technology, and, before Takei can object, zaps them back to 1967. No explanations, instructions, or anything. Just zap!

Takei is furious. He immediately attempts to kill Henry in an epic fight, before calming down and remembering he's a pacifist. Henry shows him the few papers he has left, and by his reaction, it becomes clear that they mean something different to George than to Henry. He immediately recognizes the nickname of a man he met in 1967 called "The Dreamer." He doesn't know what he has to do with it, but he agrees to take Henry to where he was when he met The Dreamer... The Monterey Pop Festival in San Francisco. But neither one of them has a car...

I don't know about you but I'd certainly buy multiple tickets to that movie and almost certainly grab it when it came out on DVD! Your stakes might be a bit lower than mine, but still, you can surely see why this movie would generate buzz. We might call it William Shatner In Love With Himself or as the Hollywood team preferred, The Redemption of Sulu.

As it happens, I do not know George Takei, but I did have a chance to moderate a panel featuring the Star Trek actor at MIT where he was taping narration for a game in which he played one of my faculty colleagues, Shigeru Miyagawa, so sometimes reality is almost as strange as fiction. At the time, our biggest concern was heading off likely audience questions that might attempt to out the still closeted Star Trek performer, though today, he's a poster child for gay marriage in California.

For the presentation, the Hollywood types had mocked up everything from Tweets and Facebook updates to blog posts, suggesting how the fan community would respond to news about the production -- from its initial announcement through to subsequent announcements and promotions. The goal was to prod the panelists into reflecting on the ways that they, as entertainment bloggers, interfaced with the publicity machine surrounding a major studio release. They did a very effective job at simulating the courtship dance between producers and fans, including unauthorized leaks (and strategies for dealing with them) and fan objections to race-bending casting decisions as well as more carefully controlled PR releases. Below are a sample of the materials generated for this event.

As the presentation's narration explains:

A film is in social media as soon as it's announced - because today, that announcement always occurs through an online news source. An aggressive social media strategy means you leverage every drop of content, using it when it will be most effective. As soon as you announce a film, there will be people - we call them "bleeding edges" - that will be looking for information. Setting up channels for information early establishes the studio as an accessible and important news source.

Their presentation worked through how the studio gradually reveals information about the production, how it responds to fan speculation and gossip, how it fuels and expands audience interest, and how it incorporates grassroots intermediaries into the information flow. It is a strategy designed to build buzz and cultivate but not regulate the growing fan base around this property. I've included some samples from their slides below.

How does fandom happen

All in all, I felt they did a plausible job of modeling fan response, including how the fan base emerges from existing fan communities, how interest gets expressed initially through speculation and later through various kinds of cultural production, how fans develop a sense of ownership over the property and sometimes doubt the legitimacy of the people producing it, and how this buzz may or may not translate into box office success.

After all, Scott Pilgram went through this entire cycle only to disappoint its producers, though I have argued this has as much to do with inflated budgets leading to inflated expectations. After all, if Scott Pilgram was a small budget indie film (on the same level as the comic on which it was based), it would have been fantastic to see it ranked fifth in that week's box office, where-as seeing a highly touted major studio release there was a devastating disappointment.

After all of this excitement, I will now go back to my normal life as a mild-mannered, absent-minded, and over-worked USC professor who wants to make the world safe for participatory culture. But you never know when I may get pulled back into duty as a time-traveling adventurer or when I may find myself being played on screen by Bruce Willis. When duty calls, I hope to have the smart folks at Cimarron Digital build the PR campaign for my big screen adventures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How New Media is Transforming Storytelling: A New Video Series

Kurt Reinhard from the Institut für Theorie, Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, recently posted on Vimeo a fascinating series of short videos on the future of storytelling. The videos juxtapose the perspectives of some key thinkers in this space, including Clay Shirkey (NYU), Joshua Green (UCSB), Ian Condry and Nick Montfort (MIT), Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation, Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling, and, hmm, Henry Jenkins (USC), among others. Each video is between five and ten minutes long and tackles some of the ways that shifts in the media environment are changing the nature of stories and storytelling. This opening installment sets the stage with a broad overview of the nature of media change.

Storytelling Part 1: Change of Storytelling from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

Here's a segment that deals specifically with the issues around transmedia storytelling and entertainment.

Storytelling Part 3: Transmedia from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

This one deals with storytelling in relation to social networks.

Storytelling Part 4: Potential of Social Media from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

Another explores collaborative production of stories through processes like crowdsourcing.

Storytelling Part 5: Collective Storytelling from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

And this one explores issues of motivation within participatory culture.

Storytelling Part 8: Motivation to Participate from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

I certainly intend to use these videos in my own teaching. Indeed, I am using segment one to launch my Medium Specificity course later today. There's a real power in hearing the voices of people who are so passionate and thoughtful about the nature of media change and its impact on the kinds of experiences we are able to share with each other.

The video series is intended to call attention to the launch of a new collaboration between European institutions to explore the processes, practices, and literacies surrounding stories and storytelling. Beyond Reinhard's own people at Zurich, he says that the following other researchers are going to be contributing to this project:

* Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Verena Kuni

* European Institute for Participatory Media Berlin, Jasminko Novak

* Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Axel Vogelsang

* University of Zurich, Chair of Marketing and Market Research, Wolfgang Kotowski

* Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Jörg Huber

* coUNDco Online Marketing Agency Zurich, Florian Wieser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biography

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

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

The Night Of a Thousand Wizards

It's 1:15 AM and the natives are getting restless. Young lasses dressed as British school girls are bumping and grinding to "Let's Do the Time Warp Again!" in front of the Three Broomsticks pub. Us older folks have taken to the benches outside the Owl Post, watching the festivities with wistful eyes. Harry and Voldermort have locked arms together and are skipping through the streets of Hogsmeade. And the Buttertbeer is flowing freely tonight!

This is the Night of a Thousand Wizards -- well, in the end, when they got some more guest passes, it ended up being something like 1.7K wizards, but who is counting. Altogether, more than two thousand hard core Harry Potter fans have come to Orlando to attend Infinitus 2010, which the organizers described to me as the largest gathering of enthusiasts of J.K. Rowling's franchise ever.

And as a result of arrangements made before they even started construction on The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, they've been invited into the park after hours (from 11-1:30 or thereabouts) to see for themselves what Universal's Islands of Adventure had constructed. My wife, Cynthia (my photographer) and I are embedded journalists amongst the fans --and I put it that way because while I consider myself a serious enthusiast of the Harry Potter world, I do not know a fraction of what most of the people around me know about the series. For the past three summers, I've come to speak and spend time with these fans and each year I come away with a deeper respect for their knowledge, their commitment, their creativity, and their passion.

There have been discussions at the past few conferences about whether the fandom will survive the completion of the current film series, which wraps up with the two part version of Deathly Hollows all too soon, and how they are going to make the transition to a world where there will be no new Rowling-sanctioned Harry Potter content. Anyone who questions the strength and commitments of these fans must not have heard that the Harry Potter Alliance, an activist/charity group which has used Rowling's world as a platform for their own civic activities, had just won $250,000, beating out more than 200 other organizations, in an online competition to show support, sponsored by the Chase Manhattan Bank.

For tonight, at least, as people are singing Wizard Rock songs on the boats transporting them from the hotel to the theme park, as they are parading through Seuss Landing, across the Lost Continent, and into the Eight Voyages of Sinbad auditorium, there's no question in anyone's mind that Harry Potter fandom is here, loud and strong. As I look around the auditorium waiting for the program to begin, I see Snape dancing in the aisles and I see Harry and Voldermort, not yet the BFF they will become before the nights over, staging their own duels in front of the crowd. They don't need anyone from the park to entertain them.

But I see something more -- I see the fans who have spent more than a decade editing websites, writing fan fiction, organizing conferences, producing podcasts, performing and recording their own Wizard Rock songs, and creating activists organizations, all gathered together in one place and one time to celebrate what they had built together from the resources that Rowling, Scholastic Press, and Warner Brothers has provided them. There will be no Muggles in Hogsmeade tonight! We are indeed all Wizards here!

If there was a mainstream journalist in the house, they would no doubt have had trouble seeing past the costumes: that seems to be where the line between the fan and the mundane world comes. Not every fan wears a costume but the wearing of costumes seems to be where the nonfans start to draw the line, start to look at us as strange, so for the moment, look past the costumes and think about what the people in this room have created around a book they cared about and the costume just becomes another extension of the creative spirit.

The conference organizers had to negotiate hard for the fans to be allowed to wear the costumes into the park that night. Universal didn't want there to be any confusion between who the "guests" were and who the "cast members" were -- largely for liability purposes. They wanted to demarcate who worked there and who played there. The fans were to wear their membership bags at all time, but in the end, the fan organizers were allowed to bend the rules for this one night and the fans were invited to come dressed as they wished, a hodge-podge mixture of characters, some named, some generic, from the world Rowling created.

Before the fans even arrived in the park, they had an emotionally intense experience. Lena Gabrielle had written and Mallory Vance had directed an original musical depicting the final battle from Deathly Hollows, which was performed by a large cast of amateur and semi-professional performers, many of whom had surprisingly strong voices and acting skills, and the rest made up in spirit for what they lacked in polished. The play should not have been anywhere near as good as it was. A Soul number performed by the Death Eaters after the presumed death of Harry Potter was a highlight here. And tears were flowing (mine among them) as certain key moments of loss and transformation were restaged for an audience that knew the original book inside and out. There were more than thirty named characters in the production and this crowd knew each of their stories well. Watching this, I had a clearer sense of the challenge the filmmakers are going to face in turning Deathly Hollows into a feature, given the sheer density and intensity of its final chapters.

Now, inside the Sinbad auditorium, there's a little bit of friction. The Park's PR people and designers have plopped themselves in front of the room clearly wanting to hear the fan's praise for the years of work which went into the design, development, and construction of this attraction. And they get plenty of appreciation from the crowd. But they also get a bit more than they expected, given that your best fans are also often your sharpest critics.

They've basically brought us to a holding area while they finish sweeping the regular guests out of the park and making the Hogsmeade area pristine and clean. Cluster by clusters, the fans are walking down the aisle and pushing out the doors again -- they don't want to wait, they want to get inside as soon as possible. Sure, they want to hear about the design process which included substantial contributions by the production designers and art directors, not to mention the cast, of the Warner Brothers films. But most of them have already seen the promotional videos that have been circulating on the web and on television for months. They already know this stuff. What they want to do is come and spend as much time as they can in the Wizarding World area which these guys have built for our entertainment. (And I am hoping as I watch this that the designers know what a compliment this really is). Enough words, time to play.

Others, however, have some questions to raise. For one thing, because this is Universal, where most of the attractions are thrill rides, the rides have weight and size limits, and some of the folks gathered here are not going to be able to ride them. There's a humiliating process outside several of the rides where people get stuffed into a cart to see if they can lower the protective rails over their bodies. Fandom is a place where people of all shapes and sizes are accepted, while the Wizarding World has more exacting and discriminating standards which leave some of the participants feeling crushed (literally and figuratively). Keep in mind also that height requirements will leave many of the books' youngest fans waiting outside, though there are not very many of them in the house tonight.

Others are expressing the usual fan concerns about continuity issues -- how is it that Ollivanders, the wand shop, which the books and films tell us is in Diagon Alley, gets included in Hogsmeade, while the Novelty Shop there is Zonko's Joke Shop, the Hogsmeade establishment rather than the more fan friendly shop owned by Fred and George Weasley. And all the park can say is that this is the way Rowling wanted it and that she authorized Ollivanders to have a branch office closer to the school, which just never got mentioned in the books.

Others are expressing their concern that so many of the dishes created for the park -- from Pumpkin Juice and Butter Beer to Chocolate Frogs, Candied Humbugs, and Gummy Skulls -- are confections which should be off limits to people with diabetes and other diet-based concerns, while the park designer explains, not fully convincingly, that there is less sugar in Butterbeer than in some of the things served at Starbucks and tells the fan who had expressed the health concerns about the high sugar content that she should simply indulge herself for the evening. (As a Diabetic myself, I wasn't very pleased with the suggestion that we can just opt out of our conditions.) Just when it starts to look like this could get ugly, the program ends and people start to move through the gates and past the Hogwarts Express train and into the streets of that enchanted village.

Make no mistake about it. This is a magical place. Some of the fans spoke of weeping the first time they entered this space. Others described it as a kind of homecoming as they were at last able to enter a world they had previously known only through their imagination. Suddenly, it became clearer that The Wizarding World is not about rides and attractions: it's about an environment which conveys through sights, sounds, taste, smell and touch, which makes tangible what had felt so vivid in our minds before, and as the fans said again and again all night, they really cared about the details. You can sip the Butterbeer (a concoction which mixes Root Beer and Butterscotch); you can smell the steam coming out of the train; you can feel the speed of a Quidditch match; you can see the wonders of the magical school; and everything is accompanied with the movie's soundtrack.

Please do not quote me Baudrillard's comment that Disneyland is fake so it can trick us into believing the rest of America is real. Don't pull out Umberto Eco's discussion of "Hyperreality" and the ways that the "absolute fake" is realer than the real. These are, to put it bluntly, pseudo-insights.

Everyone here knows that Hogwarts isn't real. What would it even mean to create a "real" Hogwarts. At best, they can judge this environment for its fidelity to the details of the film -- and that's a set of criteria which comes up frequently here. Even there, the analogy is not right. As we are told, the film producers never made a large scale version of Hogwarts -- what we see is a combination of models and digital effects and some isolated sets. There never was a full reconstruction of Hogsmeade -- we don't get to wander its streets and see from one end to the other in the films.

But just as often the fans are talking about how it "feels right," how it achieves a kind of emotional integrity, which fits their impressions of the world where one of their favorite stories is set. This is where the postmodernists get it wrong. They start with a basic contempt for the content of the stories represented in the theme park and so they do not invest themselves deeply enough in the experience. For them, it is about surfaces and empty signifiers. There's nothing empty here -- all of the details matter here and are meaningful in relation to the books and the fantasies they inspire.

For the people here, the park is a play set, and I mean this in two senses. First it is a site of play -- a invitation to flesh out this world through their own creative and imaginative acts of performance. The Wizarding World is something like the action figures I discussed in my essay on He-Man a few months ago. And second, it is a set -- a place where they perform, where community rituals can be staged.

I don't like to draw analogies between fandom and religion, since the comparison is always misleading, especially given the historic association of the word, fan, with false worship. But let's think of this as a ritual space. When tribal communities dance wearing clay masks and straw costumes, they re acting "as if" they were the animal spirits. The performance is a recognition of shared beliefs and mutual emotional experiences. They've all worked to construct the costumes so they know that they are not "real" but it does not diminish the emotional intensity of the experience.

Cornel Sandvoss has proposed we use the concept of "Heimat", "homeland," to describe the kinds of emotional experiences when fans are allowed to visit spaces associated with the production of their favorite programs. For Sandvoss, we experience this Heimat when we visit these places through texts or physical places. That seems a very good concept for talking about what these fans, myself among them, were experiencing -- a sense of coming home. I like this analogy because it pulls the intensity of experience out of the realm of the spiritual and plants it much more appropriately in the realm of the cultural.

Hogworts is a special place in the utopian imagination of the fan community. For many who grew up reading the books, it represented a vivid alternative to their own school experiences, a space where their gifts were recognized and valued, where learning served a higher purpose, where they were part of a community that grew to feel a deep commitment to each of its members, and where their acts of resistance to unreasonable authority had a larger significance. As they grew deeper into the fandom, they set their stories here and fleshed it out with their own imaginations: it is a space they created through their own ink, blood, and tears. And it was also a shared space which became associated with close and lasting friendships and a larger sense of collective identity. And this space, however over-commercialized, represents the closest the community is going to come to an actual homeland.

One of the great things about the design of the park is that once you are inside the Harry Potter area, you don't see outside it -- you can't see the other attractions and areas; nothing jars you from the immersiveness of the experience. Well, very little. It is a typically hot and muggy night in Orlando. During the day, the sun can broil your flesh through your SunScreen and at night, you are going to be soaked with sweat no matter what you do, so there was something pretty amusing about the piles of snow on the roofs of the Hogsmeade buildings or the Snow Wizard and Snow Owl (pun no doubt included) which decorates one of the spaces. The snow looks real but unless they pumped substantial air conditioning into the open air attraction, it isn't ever going to feel quite real.

But you can wander past the various shops mentioned in the books, looking through the windows to see the wands, the Quidditch equipment, a display showcasing Prof. Lockhart's books, the Owl Post Office, the Boars Head on the wall of the pub, and a display for Puking Pestles which features a green-faced victim spewing an endless flow of purple vomit. Go inside the Hogwarts castle and you will pass through Prof. Sprout's greenhouse, Dumbledore's study, the halls full of talking paintings, and the dorm space where the Gryffindor Students live. And then you enter an intense, multimedia experience, which combines digital effects, cinematic projections, and physical models, to send you flying through the Chamber of Secrets, past the Whomping Willow, into the Forbidden Forest, and across a Quidditch match in progress. Here, you are lead on by Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter, in new footage shot specifically for the attraction. It is intense and jolting, but oh so very immersive.

I can't tell you about the other two rides, both of which are roller coasters, since I am a notorious roller coaster wimp, and I spent much of my time wandering the streets, watching people, and yes, buying stuff. I was personally disappointed that most of the merchandise targets fans of the two Houses most often discussed in the books -- Gryffindor (Harry, Hermione, and Ron) and Slytherin (Draco), but under-represents the two other houses (Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw.) I have been sorted several times -- an important ritual inside the fandom -- and have always ended up Ravenclaw (Luna Lovegood's House) so I have to dig around to find a Ravenclaw banner to take back for my office. This is certainly an area where the park's priorities could better allign with those of the fans.

The park has made a conscious decision not to feature impersonators of the major characters here. Since they involve the film's actors in the rides and presentations, they did not want to try to recast them with street performers in the park. So one of my favorite moments came when I saw a row of Beauxbatons, who were hired to pose for photographs with guests, taking great pleasure in being photographed next to fans dressed as Snape, McGonigle, Sprout, and some of the other Hogwarts teachers. This is the moment that the Park management had feared where the lines between staff and guests were starting to break down. Indeed, everywhere I looked, the working staff was getting into the spirit of the evening, asking the fans questions, trying to learn the lyrics to Wizard Rock songs, showing off their own knowledge of the mythology, and otherwise, paying respect to how much the fans knew and loved these stories. In practice, the staff were themselves fans -- even if they hadn't been before they got these jobs -- as they had come to spend so much time inside this park.

If the park is empty, except within the rides, of the characters from the series, the shops evoke moments from the novels -- for the most part, happy parts when they went on holiday down to the nearby village, where they congregated over food and drink, where they stuffed themselves with candy, and where they played pranks on each other. In many ways, Hogsmeades functions for the characters much as it functions for us as tourists -- as a place to escape your fears and worries. Rowling does a good job establishing this space and then gradually as the series continues, introduces threats and dangers here, showing how the evil that can not be named has penetrated even the safe spaces in the students' lives, leaving them no escape to do battle. But the Hogsmeades here is not a dark place -- indeed, it has been removed from a narrative context. The park is structured around places and not events. We see no signs that the Dark Lord may be returning. And that frees us to construct our own stories here, much as fans construct their own stories on the blank screen and share them through cyberspace. There is such a strong contrast between the emphasis on character and incident in the play we saw earlier this evening and the emphasis on place and activity here, yet we need to realize how much the fans bring the characters, the stories, the events, with them where-ever they travel.

When it came time to leave, there was some experience of trauma. Some of the fans grumbled it was like being thrown out of their home. But many of them were already making plans to come back.

Here's a final treat -- a photograph shot at the China Pavilion at EPCOT. One of the men depicted in this image is the author of the above blog post. The other is a subtle impersonator. I leave it to the reader to decide which is which.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Big Brazillian Adventure

Of the foreign language editions of Convergence Culture, probably the best selling one was the version published in Portuguese and distributed primarily in Brazil. Thanks to the support of Mauricio Mota and the Alchemists, a transmedia company which works in Rio and Los Angeles, my book has stimulated enormous interest in that country, with companies such as Globo and Petrobras buying hundreds of copies to give to their employees and clients as Brazil seeks to better understand the digital age at a moment of deep cultural and technological transition.

Why Brazil? Two primary reasons: First, Brazil is at the center of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), countries which economists believe are going to be dominant economic (and I suspect, cultural) powers in the 21st century. These are countries on the rise, countries which have embraced new media and are surfing it to gain greater influence over the planet. Much as China has gained greater visibility in recent years through the Olympics and the current Shanghai Expo, Brazil is positioned to gain wider attention by hosting the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years. It is a country with a strong digital infrastructure and thriving creative industries.

Second, unlike the United States, Brazil has held onto strong folk and participatory traditions, despite the rise of modern mass media. Seymour Papert famously used the Samba Schools as his illustration of how informal and community based learning works and that example has stuck in my head from my early days at MIT:

If you dropped in at a Samba School on a typical Saturday night you would take it for a dance hall. The dominant activity is dancing, with the expected accompaniment of drinking, talking and observing the scene. From time to time the dancing stops and someone sings a lyric or makes a short speech over a very loud P.A. system. You would soon begin to realize that there is more continuity, social cohesion and long term common purpose than amongst transient or even regular dancers in a typical American dance hall. The point is that the Samba School has another purpose then the fun of the particular evening. This purpose is related to the famous Carnival which will dominate Rio at Mardi Gras and at which each Samba School will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. This segment will be an elaborately prepared, decorated and choreographed presentation of a story, typically a folk tale rewritten with lyrics, music and dance newly composed during the previous year. So we see the complex functions of the Samba School. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; the lyrics sung between the dances are proposals for inclusion; the dancing is also the audition, at once competitive and supportive, for the leading roles, the rehearsal and the training school for dancers at all levels of ability.

From this point of view a very remarkable aspect of the Samba School is the presence in one place of people engaged in a common activity - dancing - at all levels of competence from beginning children who seem scarcely yet able to talk, to superstars who would not be put to shame by the soloists of dance companies anywhere in the world. The fact of being together would in itself be "educational" for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. From time to time a dancer will gather a group of others to work together on some technical aspect; the life of the group might be ten minutes or half an hour, its average age five or twenty five, its mode of operation might be highly didactic or more simply a chance to interact with a more advanced dancer. The details are not important: what counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the Samba School.

My Student Ana Domb Krauskopf recently wrote a fascinating white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium on Techno Brega, a form of popular music in regional Brazil, which operates under a radically different model of production and distribution which is being studied by many in the Free Culture movement.

If you accept my premise that digital participatory culture is what happens when we apply folk culture logic to the content of mass culture in an era where we have expanded capacities for circulation, then it makes sense that digital culture is going to take a very different shape in Brazil than in the United States. Given this history, my work seems especially resonant with Brazilian readers and I am feeling a strong tug to spend more time in that country.

I spent the last week and a half of May in Brazil, speaking with several key players there in the efforts to make the country a key digital player, including Petrobras, the leading oil company, and Globo, a key media producer and distributor. While I was there, I was interviewed by half a dozen or so of the leading print and television journalists.

The key event during my stay in Rio was a talk to creative workers inside Globo's Project, their primary production facility on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of a truly spectacular cluster of mountains and on the edge of the rain forest. I was consistently impressed in Rio by the ways that the natural world was fully integrated into the life of the city.

I was able to go to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain and look down on the city. Scattered throughout Rio are massive outcroppings of exposed rock -- to call them mountains, though they are mountain sized, does not really capture the oddness of these protrusions. They are much closer to Stone Mountain in my native Atlanta (of course without the carvings of Confederate generals!) than anything else I had ever seen. The city is wrapped in and around these mountains. In some cases, the Favela run up the sides of mountains. The more desirable land is at their foot. They are contained by the beaches and oceans that surround much of the city. And threaded through these pockets of development remain large forests. The effect is close to the technological utopian conception of the city as an integrated environment where nature and technology can co-exist. It is hard to go far in Rio without confronting the natural world and the companies where I spoke were very overt about their commitments to Green policies.

The event at Globo was simply spectacular. The production people had turned a soundstage into what can only be described as a set. Not only had they taken a key motif from the cover of my book and blown it up to the size of a wall, adding in massive television screens on either side, but they had taken other elements from the book's design and decorated the entire hall. It was packed with hundreds of people who wanted to learn more about convergence and transmedia. And the event was being webcast and live-blogged so the words were being transmitted to many who could not be physically present. I presented an opening talk on transmedia which drew upon my recent He-Man essay and my 7 Principles of Transmedia Storytelling paper, both of which have already been shared on my blog, and ended with some thoughts about future challenges confronting transmedia producers which I hope to share with my readers soon.

Afterwords, I was joined on stage by Mark Warshaw, who had developed transmedia for Heroes and Smallville and now is a key partner in The Alchemists, and Florish Klink, a recently minted graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program who is becoming the group's Chief Participation Officer (their expert on fan relations). And we were hit with all kinds of thoughtful questions from the audience, questions which showed just how carefully they had listened and absorbed the insights from my work and how much they were thinking through the future of media in their country. In some ways, they are a step behind developments in North America -- for example, the DVR has not yet come to Rio -- but they are learning the lessons of the early adapter countries and will be ready as they reinvent their media system for the 21st century.

Afterwards, we went on a tour of the production facilities. In many ways, they resemble the classic film studios of the Golden Era of Hollywood, except that they are managed by digital dasebases. So, there are large backlots and vast sound stages. We were shown, for example, a scale reconstruction of a Sao Paolo shopping mall which was used as the setting for a youth-oriented telanovela.

And we were driven through a lovingly recreated neighborhood from the south of Italy which is the setting of another of their popular series. I am posing here with Mauricio Mota and Flourish Klink from The Alchemists.

We toured a vast warehouse holding props which were in storage from previous productions and could be called up from the database when needed for new series and another warehouse where costumes were stored, organized by the decade where the stories were set. Alongside the storehouses, there was a factory of workers sewing new costumes to be used, often in just a few hours, on one or another of the projects they were filming and there were construction crews that could build and breakdown sets on a daily basis.

We walked through the soundstages and saw Passione, a telanovela, being shot. We met briefly the young and very attractive stars Mariana Ximenes and Reynaldo Gianechinni, who have been called the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt of Brazil. And we were able to watch them shoot a scene from an upcoming episode, standing in the booth with the director as they swapped between five cameras which were filming the scene. It was one of fifteen scenes for the series that were scheduled to be shot that day amongst ten or so settings in the studio devoted to Passione's production. The scenes were shot out of sequence 4 or 5 episodes at a time to allow them to complete their needs of a setting, break it down, and make way for the next setting, all in the course of a 1-2 day period of time. The folks with us who worked in Hollywood were astonished at both the attention to detail in the production design but also the efficiency of the operation over all.

(Next Time: Down Argentina Way)

The Hollywood Geek Elite Debates the Future of Television

Editor's note: It looks like we were sent two copies of the same segment. We are tracking down the missing piece of this and will get it up as soon as possible.

Earlier this spring, Denise Mann from the University of California-Los Angeles and I organized a panel of showrunners and other transmedia experts to speak at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference which was being hosted in our city. The industry participants were Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof from Lost, Tim Kring from Heroes, Javier Grillo-Marxuach from The Middleman and Day One, Kim Moses from Ghost Whisperer, and Mark Warshaw (The Alchemists) who developed online content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place.

We wanted to bring the smartest people we knew from the entertainment world face to face with leading film, television, and media researchers for a conversation about the future of entertainment. In some ways, this was a mini version of what we do with the Futures of Entertainment conference on the East Coast and the new Transmedia Hollywood conference on the West Coast.

Today, I am able to share with you the web-version of that program. Part of what is fascinating about this exchange is how much these producers of cult television shows are thinking and rethinking their relations with their audiences, trying to understand how to court and hold active and engaged consumers in an era of competing media options and multiple delivery platforms. The value of fan participation runs through this conversation.

SCMS presents: Transmedia Storytelling in the Digital Age from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

SCMS presents: Transmedia Storytelling in the Digital Age Part 2 from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Below, I've included some transcribed highlights from the event. But so much is conveyed by the emotional tone and stylistic self-presentation of the various participations, which include the two head guys from Lost who had flown in just the day before from shooting the final episode in Hawaii. We didn't get any real spoilers but we did get to understand their thinking and sense the glow they had after finishing this key phase of their work.

Ironically, their shows have all ended. Heroes and Ghost Whisperer were canceled in the latest wave of network decisions and Day One never reached the air. Without knowing it, we captured a moment of transition in American television.

In a recent Variety article, you were quoted as saying that all of Lost's loose ends will not be wrapped up or answered in the series finale. Other sources are reporting that ABC is interested in keeping the Lost franchise alive after the finale. Are those two bits of news related? That is, does leaving loose ends have to do with sustaining a franchise beyond the series' completion?

CARLTON: Most of these things are very narrative driven for us and it's a hard thing to try to articulate specifically when we want the audience to understand that every small little niggling question will be impossible to answer watching the show. Our goals as storyteller were to tackle the big questions and try to bring the story to a satisfactory resolution. But if you're wondering who's the guy is, etc, you're not gonna get that answer in the series. The story we were telling in Lost, we planned to end on May 23rd, we have no plan to do any kind of sequel or spin off, anything. We set out to tell the story of the most significant thing that happened. Telling the story was our ability to negotiate with ABC in the 3rd season of the show. Now we're bringing the story that we plan to tell to a conclusion. Now that said, we've also acknowledged that we're not the owners of Lost. It is owned by the Walt Disney company and it is an incredibly valuable franchise. Worth billions as opposed to millions of dollars. And we completely understand that the Disney company will choose to continue to make money under the Lost franchise at some future point...

There's no way when you tell a story that you can tie up all the loose ends, there are many creative minds who'll come stories to ABC and propose to take Lost, using franchise label in the future, and that's great. The story we wanted to tell was that tv series and that ends in May.

The previous transmedia series you worked on--Smallville and Heroes--both had strong ties to the comic book realm--one directly from comic books, and the other owing a lot to the comic book tradition. Melrose Place is on the other side of the spectrum. Has the difference in genre affected where the online stories come from? Or do you find that teen soap lends itself as much to a transmedia story as the sci-fi fantasy genre?

MARK: It's definitely different. You have people who want to get immediately after online and play games. But that's part of why I jumped out of the Melrose Place thing, and we're doing other things kind of that side of the spectrum. If you look at the spectrum, all, at the core, it's about extending a narrative and dipping into the fandom. On a soap opera, there's tons of different worlds and relationships to dive deeper into. That's a really rich photogram for telling transmedia stories. So it was really fun to dive in there, instead of feeding people with the ways to get your light saver. This is fun to go into the most stylish person on Melrose Place's cast and go into her closet, and learn about stuff she had in her closet. Or the diaries, you can just dive deeper. These are just fertile places to make buckets to tell stories. It was a very fun challenge and I think that anything with a story has a good place to go in the transmedia world.

CBS is primarily known for an older demographic which, stereotypically, is not known for frequenting the web. Yet Ghost Whisperer has thrived beautifully both on the network and online. What did you do to make the series and its online components accessible and appealing to an audience that is normally not attracted to this type of content?

KIM: I think that first of all CBS demographics has changed in the last 5 years that we've been on the air. At first when we started with Friday night and Ghost Whisper, we made the announcement for CBS, my partner and I knew we had a math problem, which was 82% of all the shows that had been launched on a Friday night since the X Files which was 10 years prior had not gone to its second year. And before that we had run a show Profiler which was on a Saturday night, so we knew what the challenges were. And we had been working for about 4 years before Ghost Whisperer got ordered, and we were working at the intersection of the Internet had some amazing discoveries when we were doing Profiler, that we were able to continue on and then fold onto our experience with Ghost Whisperer. So what we did was that we created this thing called the "Total Engagement Experience", which is a model that Professor Jenkins and I have talked a while about....CBS had never done this before. We also felt that moving into the 21st century, that our obligation is just developing, pitching and selling tv shows and delivering the film was not the end of our obligation as executive producers and showrunners. Our commitment to any network and studios that we've worked for is...to deliver the audience as well. And I believe that going into the future of tv and feature films, everybody is gonna need to get on board with that, and figure out how to deliver an experience, as opposed to just something that you watch, because we are in the experience era. So when we had layered that out for CBS, and our approach, unlike the CBS at the time, was to go out and find our audience, and court them, and create a playground for them so that they could experience the Ghost Whisperer world rather than just watch. And then, bring them back to the tv show in a very gentle way, that became very successful. Because what we built was a very, very loyal audience, not just a substantial audience on a Friday night, but a loyal audience, which has... this whole thing has served as a model for us to moving forward in the business. And be in the 21st century. It's an important time to do it.

Many academics are describing a push in popular television towards more "complex narratives" (longer story arcs, greater seriality, larger ensemble casts, and so forth) and you represent some of the series which are most often held up as illustrating this turn. What factors do you see leading towards these developments? What obstacles have made it harder to shift television in this direction?


JAVIER: I think that part of the reason why shows are becoming more complicated and novelistic and all that is also the fragmentation of media. It's crucial in that. All of a sudden you have a venue like AMC which can put on a show like Mad Men. And you know, Mad Men is beloved, it's critically loaded, it's a fantastic show, but it only needs to hold onto an audience of about 2 to 3M people in order to make it or not, and then sell a bunch of DVDs and all that. So when you've got networks that are able to hold shows at lower margins, I think there's more room for experimentation. It's a fragment of the audience that watches Law & Order, but they're loyal and they'll watch the show, and that model keeps repeating itself. You'll get Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad... which are deeply serialized. And I think that the network follows suit on that. The network looks at those shows and says: "why don't we have a show like that" and they try to put those shows on the air as well. And then, you got a show like Lost that succeeds for having that kind of longitudinal storytelling and I think that there're a kind of chicken and the egg thing going on, but at the same time, the climate for that wouldn't exist if you didn't have a vastly fragmented media where more experimental shows are able to survive for longer periods of time.

TIM: The whole idea of the serialized show, I mean it hasn't caught on, in a way, Lost and Heroes and things like that seem to be paving the way for these... it's not really caught on cause there's this season so many procedurals are back in favor. And the whole model, one of the dirty little secrets of serialized tv is there's usually a attrition right. You've got a lot of people who come at the beginning and as it goes on, it gets harder and harder to watch, and harder and harder to stay fans of. The upside though is that you get a tremendous ability to have and hit big, you also have the ability to sell DVDs. It used to be that the rerun and the syndication would pay for most of the back ends, for 95% of the show, and this is now being sort of changed, almost exactly percentage wise to foreign sale and DVD sales. And that's where shows like Lost and Heroes do really well. Now that we're in a year round programming, we're reruns are no longer part of the normal network programming. These shows that run at 16 episodes become actually a viable way to program a season.

DAMON: I think that the key thing that a serialized show had going forward is... there's a "what's gonna happen next factor", that doesn't exist on Law & Order, CIS, or this idea that basically you watch Heroes on a Monday night or Lost on a Tuesday night, and it ends, and that's a serialized: what's gonna happen next? What do I do right now on Tuesday night, the show's over? I wanna go somewhere and I wanna find out water coolers that used to exist in my office and now that water cooler is your computer. You go to it, and you can find whatever community you want to, and you not only disassemble the episode that you just saw, what does it mean and the grand skim of the overall story that they're telling, and the overall world that I'm in, but now I'm gonna try to project, and in the case of Lost it's "let's figure out, let's come up with theories." In the case of Heroes, it's a little bit more of a cliff hanger scenario: what's gonna happen next? That idea was such taboo. Tim and I were working on a show called Crossing Jordan and from 2001 to 2004, and I come up with Carlton and both procedural shows / but the word serialized was such a dirty word, because re runs were disaster. And Alias was successful, so we asked ourselves what does Alias has that we don't have, and the answer is: a fandom, and a serialized storyline. You get activated. This idea that a serialized storyline invites the audience in. It basically says: "what do you think?" it's something that non serialized shows do not do. Law & Order doesn't care what you think. They don't! but the fact that Lost and Heroes seem to care, go and basically solicit the opinion of fans saying "what do you think", that can only happen I think on a show with a sort of serialized spine to it.

TIM: The serialized genre sort of lends itself to this social currency is your knowledge of the show. So that becomes what you trade on. If you're able to know one more thing than the guy next to you, you're slightly cooler than the guy next to you. So if you give the audience a chance to dive in deeply, there are always these people who will dive as deeply as you invite them in.

JAVIER: When I was a network executive in the mid 90s, one of the heads of research for NBC came and talk to us, and one of the things that he used to say is that "why is Stay By The Bell so successful?" when it is so hooky and so corny? And he said look: the audience is fragmented, into two very big pots: either there's 20% of your audience is A audience. This is the taste making audience, the audience that goes online, the audience that buys new clothing, the audience that does all of these stuffs. And there's your B audience, that is your audience who's content to go and watch a self contained show, have a laugh and then leave. And the funny thing was that some networks wanted to have A audience cause it would get that magazine cover, some people wanted the A audience, and NBC was going for the B audience at that time. And I think that there's a sweet spot which is sort of where Man Men is right now, with challenging serialized show, but they can have that audience and that's all they need. They don't have the pressure, which Lost had for its first 3 years. They're trying to get to that more mainstream audience without trying to alienate the one audience and I think that the success of Lost and Heroes is in a way, countered to that social wisdom.

The media industry talks often about the value of "audience engagement." And your series are often cited as having produced particularly engaged audiences. Can you describe the relationship you've created with your consumers and what value you place in their active participation around the franchise?

CARLTON: We very consciously try not to write the show outwardly but write the show inwardly. I mean we started basically this Lost just sitting around in my office every morning, we'd have breakfast and just talked about story [...] We stuck with that same methodology all the way through. We were working in the office until 11pm yesterday for the finale of the series, and we've kind of kept that same protocol. Now the advent of the Internet has provoked profound differences of what you can do as a storyteller. I mean for us, we were actually kind of building Lost and at the beginning, one of the things that we found ourselves doing was that breaking a lot of fundamental rules of television, which was: we had a large cast, a sprawling complex narrative, and we infused that narrative a lot of intentional ambiguity. I think we were influenced in a certain way by European filmmaking; this idea that we'd give a chance to make up their mind about certain narrative aspects of the show and it get the audience talking about the show really evoked a sense of discussion and the Internet became a place where people gathered. I remember actually when Javier and I went to this fan event at the Hollywood renaissance hotel the first year, and there were these people who'd flown from all over the world, who were kind of happy to see us, but they were more happy to see each other. They had created an online community. Lost was the catalyst for that community, but the community transcended the show very quickly and there were people who got married, there were relationships that were formed, it was a way of sort of finding a shared interest, but that shared interest ultimately was transcended by the relationships between all these people, and there was all the people from the Fuselage who were basically all meeting each other for the first time. That was really an interesting experience to see that, and I think that over time, we have used the Internet as a way to gage what the responses to the show. Usually we're so far ahead, it doesn't influence the storytelling. Now of course we're done pretty much with the writing of the show, so any surprising responses now, the ship has sort of sailed... The other sort of example we cite al the time is Nicky and Paula. The fans were clambering and saying: what about those other people, there's always those other people on the beach. We see them, they never talk, who are they? So we were actually influenced by the audience to make a narrative decision that actually backfired. So we actually said, "well okay, " [ laughs ]. We started to write those two characters and it felt wrong, but people wanted it, and then, we realized it was kind of a disaster. And then we decided to burry them alive. And the audience was in that same cycle, but they were behind us. We came to that realization week by week, and then the audience was sort of reacting because they were seeing episodes, it was like looking at life from a distance star, when the event had already occurred. But it was something we did because of the fans and then they hated these characters and then they were happy when we killed them, and they thought it was their doing.

TIM: It's an amazing process when you're in this loop with the fandom. As the writer's room, you often emulate, or you basically mirror the fan base. When you start to feel you've gone too far with the story line or not gone far enough, and the characters are working for you, sure enough, it sort of mirrors the same reaction that the fans have except we're still three or more months ahead when... so, you often want to say to people "wait, and see: we're getting exactly to the place where you are" and this whole idea of how to communicate with the fans... it's very interesting. When Damon and I did Crossing Jordan, there was this "one way street" that you had. You pushed the narrative out in the world and two or three months later people saw it, and if people liked it they sort of voted with their Nielsen box.

CARLTON:You got a Nielsen number, that was the entirety of your feedback.

TIM: Yeah, that was it. So the feedback loop was really a one way street. Then the Internet created this two way street where you immediately had an obligation to the fans who were connected to the show. And all of the transmedia components of the show become that part of the show that allows them to have a more immediate feedback.

JAVIER: yeah but the thing is that no matter how mediated you are, and how much of a two way street of communication you have, you're inviolate right as a storyteller, is the right to hold on to your ability to give the audience what it needs rather than what it wants and to be the judge of that, right or wrong! And I think that especially in the early days of the internet, it became very porous, because there was an oversize reaction to Internet reaction to shows. And then you realize: wait a minute, this is still an audience of 10,000 people who read Television Without Pity, and maybe 20 who post on the board. So I think that we're kind of cycling back to a place where storytellers were less likely to be swayed cause we have a better understanding of what that audience is and what our rights as storytellers need to be.

DAMON: There's this incredible Catch 22 that exists, exactly on the point that everybody is talking. And I'm sure you experienced it too, which is: the question that Carlton and I get asked by far, above any other mythological question on the show is: are you making it up as you go along? People ask us that question, they want the answer to be "absolutely not". We have a big binder, we open it up, we go "hop", we're completely functioning by our plans. However, then they also say to us: "do you guys ever go on the boards and listen to what the fans have to say?" and they want the answer to that question to be "yes, absolutely". Now these two things are in direct opposition to each other. Because, unless the fans are saying exactly what's in the binder, which of course, they wouldn't be, so they want us to be making it up as we go along, they just don't want us to admit to it. And they want us to listen to their feedback, ... we're all in the gladiator arena: they're there, and they're giving us the thumb up or down. They want the gladiator to look to them to decide who lives and who dies. And when we kill characters which are popular, they get angry at us, and when we kill characters which are unpopular, they cheer us. And that's the game.

KIM: Last year season 4, we killed Millie's husband and there was a huge push back from the audience. The thing that's valuable for us on the Internet is we're all subjected to testing. Even if you're in your 4th or 5th year, they're still testing the show, and the network and studios are giving you numbers and responses. The testing group is not that big. On the Internet, it's a very, very democratic voice. And that's really exciting. It can be dangerous at time, but I mean (we got death threats, ...) but it's also exhilarating where you're taking your show. And so, I would say, had we done this 10 years ago, when the Internet wasn't what it is today, I don't know what would have happened to our show. But because we did it, we knew that there was gonna be push back, but we also had a plan for it. We were able to go on the Internet and court the audience, and explain to them that there was more coming and that he was going to be a ghost... and it was a great experience. And CBS called us at one point and said "what are you guys doing over there, you're affecting all of our websites, it's because your fans have taking everything over". As you guys know, that happens. And that was very exciting for us. But it is very valuable. Even if you don't act on what you're getting, it's valuable to take the pulse yourself rather than have it filtered through different kinds of agendas.

The television industry is struggling with the reality that consumers are pursuing the content they want through means other than broadcast television - both legally through iTunes, Hulu, and other such sites, and illegally through Bittorrents. How does this reality impact the way you approach your series? One recent study, for example, found that many television series, including several represented on this panel, were watched by more people illegally than legally.

CARLTON: The Internet has kind of changed the world of distribution internationally. So now Lost has moved closed to a day and day model that's basically what's happened to the theatrical film business, to avoid piracy and to capitalize on sorts of marketing campaigns that aren't just now national but international.... TV used to be sort of a gentlemany business where you'd open the show here, and then a foreign buyer would come over and they'd look and they'd watch, and they'd see how it'd do. And then months, sometimes years later, the show would actually run there. Now, because of how the world has shrunk because of the Internet things have gone much more day and day. So we've actually changed.... So this year... each episode of the show has to be done 5 days earlier in order for it to be sent all around the world....One of things that's come up in China too is that there was a race amongst pirates in China to dub the latest issue of Lost. And they were telling me that within 48 hours of the broadcast on NBC, there would be fully dubbed versions of that episode of Lost on Chinese websites. And I was like: these guys are doing it for free! You guys are professional dubbers, why is it taking you 3 months to dub a show? And it was hard to argue with that. So they've actually really shrunk the window of time, and we're on a couple of days later on the English speaking territories, and really the window in terms of dub territory is going down. The studios are doing this for two reasons: one is primarily policy, but secondly, the ability to sort of capitalize on global marketing initiatives which reconnected these ARGs. All the ARGs that we've done have been done in constant with international broadcast partners. Around the world it contributed money and resources to these Internet things. And actually the Internet component of Lost has significantly impacted the actual way in which the show itself ended up being distributed.

TIM: The interesting thing is that the networks, are in a sense, they shoot themselves in the foot a little bit by driving these audience towards these alternate platforms. Heroes, we show commercials where we promote coming to the website, to NBC.com, coming there to be able to watch the show online with extra content and commentary etc. so we're actually incentivizing the audience to go to these different platforms and the fact that you can watch the show on your DVR where you want it and when you want it, without commercials, or watch online with commentary or content, we are incentivizing this audience to go and find another places. Heroes was the number 1 downloaded show last year, Lost right there with it. And the general attitude of the networks towards this massive audience that's out there has been to stand on the sideline and heckle these people when, in fact, these are people who actively sought these shows out. They went some place and actively pirated the show. These are fans that should be embraced, and, somehow, figured out how to monetize. An interesting thing would be product placement as a way to sort of create favor with the network. The interesting thing about that is that when we do a Nissan product placement in the show, those 55 million people who download our show illegally are all getting a Nissan commercial. So in some way that may be the solution there.

JAVIER: Activity creates fertility--especially when you're dealing with a niche show like The Middleman. If people are downloading it illegally in China...my God, please do! Because, ultimately, what I find is that, the more people talk about the show, the more other people will end up buying the DVD. Eventually, anybody who looks at a pirated copy will tell somebody to buy the T-shirt or the DVD or the keychain, and the money will come back to us. I mean that's something...I'd rather have the show I work on be seen, and, frankly, given the way that the studios have dealt with the royalty compensation for writers on alternative platforms...I'm so sorry about your pirating problem, really!

He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia

The other day I flew back to Cambridge at the request of Scot Osterweill, the research director for The Education Arcade, in order to participate in the Sandbox Summit, a fascinating gathering of game designers, toy makers, television producers, children's book authors, and educators drawn together through their shared interests in "how media is changing our play and how play is changing our media." I had been asked to give a keynote address which would share some of my thoughts about transmedia entertainment in a way that might be relevant to people who were shaping children's culture. As I was pulling my thoughts together for the talk, I stumbled onto an article in I09, one of my favorite blogs about geek culture, which listed the "ten most unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys." I shared the blog post with my son, now 29, who had grown up as part of the "He-Man" generation and we both took great pleasure in realizing that he had at one time had almost all of their examples in his collection and that we both remembered all of these toys. There was, for example, Moss-Man, an action figure covered in green fuzz; Stinkor, an action figure that smelled and looked like a skunk; and Mosquitor, an action figure which contained a red blood-like fluid.

And I began to ponder why these toys had been such a memorable part of his childhood and what it meant that the generation of young men and women who were, in many cases, controlling the production of transmedia entertainment had come of age playing with this particular media franchise. In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.

Peggy Charren, who formed Action for Children's Television and lobbied the Federal Communication Commission to regulate childrens programming, would have had an explanation. At the time, she argued that Heman and similar programs were simply "half hour commercials" which had no redeeming value, because they "blur the distinction between program content and commercial speech. Children are attracted to the concepts of the shows and don't fully understand the selling intent behind them... [This has become] a gold mine to station managers and toy manufacturers, but a commercial nightmare to most parents." She and her allies argued that the stories and characters, she feared, were being sacrificed in order to turn the cartoons into advertisements for tie-in toys and as a consequence, these toys were going to stifle youngsters' imaginations. Charren's critique of these toys has taken deep roots among the professional classes, as was reflected by the many different ways these concerns got evoked by speakers at the Sandbox Summit. I do not mean to make light of these concerns, though I have also always found myself resistant to the language used to critique these toys, which often assumes that the play around these fictional narratives necessarily reproduces the terms of the original stories without creating a space for the child's own imaginative contributions.

There is no denying that Mattel had a clear commercial interest in producing the program and extending our experience of watching the show into a line of associated toys. And the same can be said of contemporary transmedia entertainment content which is often funded by the branding and promotional budget for the media property. Minimally, transmedia extensions are selling the "mother ship." Often, they are creating alternative sources of income - they are products in their own right just as the He-Man dolls are.

Yet, I don't think we can reduce the experience which young people had playing to He-Man to simply the selling and buying of commercial commodities, however distasteful such toys seem to many academic parents. After all, all of us have bought many commodities in our lifetime, most of which we forgot as soon as we had consumed them, yet these particular toys have become part of the shared memories of my son's generation in part because they were tokens of stories and entertainment experiences which were deeply meaningful to them. More than that, though, these toys became resources for their own imaginations, tokens which they used to claim a space for themselves within the stories.

Whether they fully recognized it or not, when media producers sold these toys to our children, they also told them things about the nature of the story - the story you saw on the screen was not complete and self contained; these characters had a life beyond the stories we've been sold and told, and what happens next is literally and figuratively in the hands of the consumer. These toys were in effect an authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.

Children have long played with the core narratives of their culture, as might be suggested by the fact that Tom Sawyer played Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables King Arthur, and Meg of Little Women Pilgrim's Progress, each central stories of their own time. In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional stories, but it does not follow from this that children's play with narrative was none the less meaningful to them as a way of trying on adult roles and asserting their own ability to build on and revise core stories that matter to them.

As a father during that period, I have vivid memory of the intense pain of stepping barefoot on some molded piece of plastic when I was called into my son's bedroom at night to comfort him about a bad dream. I'd pick up the plastic shield, sword, or pick ax, and grumble, "grrrmble snarl Teela" and my son, a stickler for details, would correct me, "No, Dad, that belongs to Sorceress." These details mattered. I often reflected at such moments (or at least I did when the pain of my punctured flesh subsided!) on the ways that this attachment to distinctive shields, say, mirrored the detailed descriptions of the shields and weapons of the different Greek heroes found in Homer, suggesting that heraldry in some forms remains an active element in stories across history.

The accessories were extensions of the characters, reflections of their personalities, artifacts of their stories, and signs of their capacities for action. Each character was connected to every other character through complex sets of antagonisms and alliances and each character bore their own mythology which could become the point of entry for a new as yet unrealized story. He-Man was teaching his generation to think not just about individual stories but about the process of world-building and part of the pleasure of collecting these toys was to demonstrate their mastery over the lore of these worlds.

In some cases, the characters would be deeply embedded in the aired episodes and in other cases, they would exist only in the background or only in one episode and often these were the characters most vividly remembered because they became the child's own possession, their backstory fleshed out from their own imagination, their personality constructed from their own playful performances. Each of the characters had different personalities (and thus demanded different voices) and over time, you would learn their verbal ticks, the quirks of their personality, and the sound of their voice, even though no two children would necessarily perform these characters in the same way. We might think of these characters as in effect avatars, an extension of the child into a virtual or imagined world, and see these constant shifts between personalities as a predecessor of what we would describe as identity play in adolescence.

Of course, the performance doesn't end there. The child themselves might become He-Man or some of the other characters through Halloween dress-ups and the web is full of yellowing family photographs of children of my son's generation physically embodying the heroes of their programs. Their mothers (or in my son's case, their grandmothers) might be coaxed into decorating birthday cakes with images copied from He-Man coloring books. And those lacking coloring books (or possessing artistic temperaments) would draw their own pictures of these characters which gave another tangible form to their fantasy lives. My son wrote countless stories which he dictated to his mother and I about He-Man and in the process, he moved from playing with physical objects to playing with words and with the basic building blocks of narratives.

In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmnation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figures, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books, each of which gave us a chance to learn a little something more about Eternia, Castle Grayskull, and the other places where these stories took place.

And of course, He-Man was only one of the many media franchises which were producing action figures. My son collected figures from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and the World Wrestling Federation, not to mention a smathering of Transformers, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and many other toy lines. Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories, which might involve meet-ups and cross-overs unlikely to occur in commercial media (though there was at least one DC comic where Superman and He-Man combined forces) but almost inevitable once kids got their hands on the toys.

Sometimes an action figure would stand in for another character not yet acquired much as an actor plays a fictional role and in other cases the pleasure was in experimenting with the boundaries between texts and genres, with the mixing of characters forcing them to rethink the scripts. The cross-over points to the generative dimensions of this action figure play - the ways that kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.

I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son's imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.

So, is it any surprise that as this generation has grown older, they have continued to use these stories, characters, even the toys themselves as resources for their own creative expression? The web is full of amazing fan art in which artists lovingly recreate the assemblage of action figures and accessories they enjoyed as a child, much as earlier generations of artists sketched or wrote stories about the stuffed toys of their childhood imagination. (Think Winnie the Pooh or Raggedy Ann and Andy for earlier kinds of toy focused stories.)

There is a whole genre on YouTube of action figure movies, movies which may lovingly recreate the specific images the filmmakers remembered from the source material but may also playfully evoking the mixing and matching of characters that were part of toyroom play.

This same aesthetic of action-figure cinema gave rise to Adult Swim's successful Robot Chicken series, which also mixes and matches characters or recasts them to achieve desired effects. Here's one of their spoofs of the He-Man characters.

And I am particular fan of the web-based Skeltor Show, which remixes and remasters footage from the original He-Man cartoons for irreverent comedy.

All of this suggests that these toys left a lasting imprint on the imaginations of the generation that grew up playing with them.

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.

In that sense, the action figure is very much the harbinger of the transmedia movement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Fans Become Advertisers: Smallville Becomes Legendary

When we hear that fans are rallying support behind a favorite television series, we might imagine the letter writing campaign in the late 1960s which kept Star Trek on the air; we might imagine fans of Jericho sending crates of peanuts to network executives; we might even picture fans of Chuck organizing a large scale "buycot," getting people to purchase foot long sandwiches at Subways to show their enthusiasm for the series. What we probably do not picture is fans raising the money to support and air their own commercial paying tribute to the star of their favorite series. So, I was impressed when I received this press release the other week:

Smallville fans have funded a professionally-filmed tribute commercial for the CW leading lady Allison Mack and her tv character, Chloe Sullivan, to air this Spring in Los Angeles before this season concludes. Starring on Smallville since 2001, Ms. Mack has gained a large and devoted fan base as one of the CW's most beloved stars. For the completion of her 9th year on the series, Smallville fans decided to celebrate Allison Mack and her tv character, Chloe Sullivan, with a commercial project entitled Legendary. Scripted and funded entirely by fans, this first of its kind tribute ad was filmed in Los Angeles in late February. In the capable hands of the director, Jon Michael Kondrath, cast and crew created a tribute ad focusing on who Chloe Sullivan is and what she means to Smallville fans. The ad highlights milestones in Chloe Sullivan's journey from her introduction as a high school student in Smallville to being hired at the Daily Planet as well as becoming Clark Kent's confidante

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I wanted to know more of the story behind this project and reached out to Maggie Bridger, who is one of the organizers, to learn more about how fans have been able to mount such an ambitious undertaking and to explore with her what it's implications might be for future forms of fan activism.

Your project represents a unique example of fan-supported and generated advertising in support of a commercial television program. What are you trying to accomplish here?

We are hoping to celebrate our adoration for a character whom we feel serves as a positive representation of a heroine in popular culture and in fandom. Part of it is about gratitude for DC Comics, Warner Brothers, the CW, Smallville Productions and Allison Mack for bringing us Chloe. The other part of it is about showing that we love Chloe and want to see her as the series goes forward.

Why Chloe Sullivan? What does this character mean to you?

Chloe Sullivan represents the meeting of two worlds---the fantastic and the ordinary. We watch her and see the journey of a driven career woman who, from her first days at her high school paper through her career at The Daily Planet and beyond, has served as a role model for many of us. A lot in our group started watching the show and Chloe Sullivan when we were still in high school and college. We have doctors and lawyers and grad students among us. Chloe didn't make us into those, of course, but she was a girl out there in the media who was going through our same journey. She gave us hope and confidence. If she could accomplish her goals, then we could. That common drive was how Legendary was conceived in the first place.

When we watch Chloe Sullivan, we also see a woman who has been asked to play above her head. She's smart; she's capable. However, she's still a normal human who is dealing with a world of superheroes and aliens. She stands shoulder to shoulder with the future Superman and with the Green Arrow and the rest of the Justice League and she does it with her wits and will. It's inspiring.

Can you describe the process you've gone through to produce the advertisement?

Sleeplessness?

In all seriousness, it's been a long process. We started with planning back in January. The executive producer, Liz De Razzo, called me about this idea she had. We all clearly love Chloe and had felt some disappointment over her reduced screen time this season. This commercial came to Liz as a way to draw some attention onto fans' love for Chloe Sullivan and the actress who plays her, Allison Mack.

We worked in a whirlwind---getting funds raised, auditioning actresses, recruiting the crew, and getting details assembled. We got legal finalized about 24 hours before shooting time.

It was a marathon!

Then we went into post-production. We did extra fund raising to obstain money for sound mixing. Again, it's been a two pronged process. I've been working a lot with the fandom as a whole while Liz, our contact in Los Angeles, has done the amazing on-the-ground work. She's been the one leading this through editing by the very talented Avi Quijada.

Where are you at in terms of meeting your goal for this project?

Currently, we are finishing our sound mixing and score for the completed edit. We will be sending it off via our air agency to KTLA this coming week. We had a lot of goals going through this process. One was to get the commercial shot and finished and we're almost there with post-production. The next was to get funds and purchase air time on KTLA, the Los Angeles CW affiliate. Again, we're finalizing a deal with them.

However, while these initial goals are finishing up, we have a bigger goal---taking the Legendary commercial to other markets. We're eying WPIX, the New York affiliate, and would love to air there as well. It all depends on funds!

How many people have contributed - time, ideas, money -- to make this all work?

I have honestly lost count.

It's not just the online Chloe fans who have contributed. It's also the production company, Rekon, and the crew. There's the director Jon Michael Kondrath and the actresses. Then there's been other producers added to the project and all those involved in post production and securing air time. It's really grown into an amalgamation of fans and professionals in Los Angeles dedicated to make Legendary come to life. Without Liz, we never would have been able to do all this. She blended her fandom love and her real life connections in the industry and made this happen.

What has been the biggest challenge in terms of pulling this together?

Murphy's law. I have to be honest and admit that something unexpected always comes up. If you budget out X amount for a project like this, I think it'll probably double or triple by the end. I know it has for us. The other huge problem is distance. That's a unique aspect of online fandom. While many Chloe fans are from the United States, we also have a large international community. Our script writer lives outside of Tokyo; one of the copy editors for our press releases and our website is in Australia; I live in the Deep South on central time and Liz, of course, is in Los Angeles. It's been hard coordinating virtual teaming meetings for a time we could all make it. Basically, it took me and Megan Butler, our script writer, being insomniacs to pull it off.

I definitely received my share of 1 A.M. phone calls from L.A.!

Do you think this is a model other fan groups can or should follow -- not only in terms of paying tribute to characters but also as a way of increasing the visibility of favorite programs?

Well, I'm not sure yet. As far as increasing visibility for favorite characters and for favorite programs, I hope this is an exciting new direction. I know we've all seen fans send in favorite items like peanuts for Jericho or the Tabasco bottles for Roswell as well as putting out Variety ads. I think fan ads, even if it's specific like for an actor/actress or a character, can change how marketing is done. It can help form a partnership in a new way between shows and their fanbases.

But I do have to preface that with "not sure yet." We've had some luck so far with Legendary. In a month, the vimeo preview vid has had over 3,000 hits. We've had supportive blog coverage and twitter notice. I'm not sure what the larger print or television media will think of it when it hits airwaves. I hope they love it as we do. Similarly, I don't know what the network's reaction will be yet. Again, I hope it's all positive. This project is our baby and we are extremely proud of it. I guess, then, that you'd have to ask me again in about six months, if I think this is a model that should be emulated.

I do have to say one thing. I don't think this will catch on completely as a "save our show" type of campaign. I know that Jericho, Farscape, and I believe Star Trek: Voyager fandoms have done fan sponsored commercials for their favorite shows. I'd say it's an iffy proposition, not just because it might fall flat but because it takes a long time. The fundraising, the coordination of efforts, getting a crew and such...it all takes more time than I think the average canceled/on-the-bubble show has before its final death throes.

However, if you're asking me if I'd love to see commercials for Dr. Temperance Brennan or for Cara from Legend of the Seeker, then why not? Bring on the love for favorite characters. Bring on another Jericho-style commercial. It might not make complete waves in the industry but it shows fan love and devotion matters and that's extraordinary to me.

Maggie Bridger is an aspiring graduate student in developmental psychology at a university in the Deep South of the United States. Always interested in fandom studies, she's been published in Slayage, the online journal of Buffy studies. She is currently working toward her masters doing research hippotherapy and autism. One day, she hopes to also be able to write a scholarly piece on fandom campaigns, citing Legendary as a prime example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

experience.

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

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

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

ludic narrans, playful stories.

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

Hollywood Goes "Transmedia"

"At the heart of the entertainment industry, there are young and emerging leaders (such as Danny Bilson and Neil Young at Electronic Arts or Chris Pike at Sony Interactive) who are trying to push their companies to explore this new model for entertainment franchises. Some of them are still regrouping from their first bleeding-edge experiments in this space (Dawson's Desktop, 1998) -- some of which had modest success (The Blair Witch Project, 1999), some of which they now saw as spectacular failures (Majestic, 2001). Some of them are already having closed doors meetings to try to figure out the best way to ensure more productive collaborations across media sectors. Some are working on hot new ideas mased by nondisclosure agreements. All of them were watching closely in 2003, which Newsweek had called 'The Year of The Matrix,' to see how audiences were going to respond to the Wachowski brothers' ambitious plans." -- Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006).

I've been so busy dealing with end of term matters that I have not yet had a chance to publicly acknowledge here the extraordinary news that the Producers Guild of America has officially recognized the title of "Transmedia Producer." Here's how the official prose defines the concept:

A Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms: Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative Commercial and Marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as repurposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms.

A Transmedia Producer credit is given to the person(s) responsible for a significant portion of a project's long-term planning, development, production, and/or maintenance of narrative continuity across multiple platforms, and creation of original storylines for new platforms. Transmedia producers also create and implement interactive endeavors to unite the audience of the property with the canonical narrative and this element should be considered as valid qualification for credit as long as they are related directly to the narrative presentation of a project.

Transmedia Producers may originate with a project or be brought in at any time during the long-term rollout of a project in order to analyze, create or facilitate the life of that project and may be responsible for all or only part of the content of the project. Transmedia Producers may also be hired by or partner with companies or entities, which develop software and other technologies and who wish to showcase these inventions with compelling, immersive, multi-platform content.

To qualify for this credit, a Transmedia Producer may or may not be publicly credited as part of a larger institution or company, but a titled employee of said institution must be able to confirm that the individual was an integral part of the production team for the project.

By all accounts, Starlite Runner's Jeff Gomez, a long time friend and a key thinker/creator in the transmedia space, has been a key player behind the scenes lobbying the Guild to accept this new classification. The specifics of the definition of transmedia is still being debated widely, including this interesting piece on the responses of people who would be eligible for the new title and this one from long time crossmedia advocate Christy Dena. The Guild is already saying that video games were excluded from the list of potential media by oversight and that it will be amended soon to include games. Dena has raised two important criticisms of the definition -- the idea that work must straddle at least three media (disallowing projects which integrate in deep and meaningful ways only two platforms) and the emphasis on storylines as opposed to other potential kinds of transmedia experiences.

The reality is that our definition of what constitutes transmedia is still very much evolving, as can be witnessed from the various discussions of the concept at the Transmedia Hollywood: S/Telling the Story conference, which was organized in March by Denise Mann of the UCLA Producers Program and myself. As we brought together people from across the media industry to discuss these emerging trends, we found some included all forms of franchise entertainment as transmedia and others had much narrower definitions which insisted that the different media platforms be integrated to tell a single story. There was disagreement about the value of various proposed terms, including not only transmedia, cross-media, and "deep media." There were recurring disagreements about transmedia as a mode of content as opposed to a mode of marketing. And finally, transmedia's aesthetics was still being defined and with it, the issue of whether this is something really new or an expansion of long-standing practices. Around the edges, you could hear hints that transmedia should be extended from a focus on storytelling to a more expansive understanding which includes notions of performance, play, and spectacle that can not be contained within a more narrative-centric definition.

From the beginning, transmedia has been a site of experimentation, innovation, and exploration at the heart of the mainstream media. Many of us have seen the signs of transmedia practices emerging from some time -- mostly taking shape around forms of marketing because that's how such projects could get funded, mostly reflecting the logic of a more integrated media industry with strong economic imperatives for creating entertainment experiences across platforms. Yet, the phrase "transmedia" (and its various counterparts) have created a space where aesthetic and cultural concerns can re-enter the discussion. If media artists are going to be pushed to extend their offerings across platforms, shouldn't they be thinking about how these practices can be exploited to create richer aesthetic experiences, to support the creativity and engagement of fans, to deepen the meaningfulness of the stories and performances they are staging?

As such, the transmedia discussion has always moved across registers and as a consequence, needed to be expansive, to include anyone who wants to engage with these topics and who is willing to put these ideas into practice. While the Transmedia Hollywood conference drew criticism from some quarters for having too elastic or "vague" a definition of its core concept, this very expansiveness is what allows us to bring many different voices to the table, to map diverse kinds of experiments, and to promote new innovations and explorations. From my perspective, there is a use within the academic world for clearer, more precise definitions, but there is also a value more generally for a more slippery conception, at least while we are still undergoing such rapid evolution. My hope is that the definition and borders of the concept will be debate everytime two or more transmedia advocates have gathered.

I respect the value of a Guild having a clear definition of what transmedia is, and from where I sit, the PGA definition is as good a one as we are going to get right now, but I also hope that we all do what Dena did in her blog post and push back on any attempt to too quickly formalize the limits or boundaries of this practice.

For those who missed the Transmedia Hollywood events, I am happy today to share with you the webcasts of the panels. We hope that these programs provide a useful resource for people in and around the media industry who are stilling trying to make sense of "all this talk about transmedia entertainment."

9:45--10:00 am

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC

10:00--11:50 AM

Panel 1: "Reconfiguring Entertainment"

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, University of California Humanities Research Institute (Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media; Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life)

Diane Nelson, President, DC Entertainment

Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Naughty Dog Software (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)

Nils Peyron, Executive Vice President and Managing Partner, Blind Winks Productions

Jonathan Taplin, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; CEO, Intertainer.

John Underkoffler, Oblong, G-Speak (Technical Advisor for Iron Man, Aeon Flux, Hulk, Taken, and Minority Report)

12:00--1:50 PM

Panel 2: "ARG: This is Not a Game.... But is it Always a Promotion?"

Moderator: Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Panelists: Ivan Askwith, Senior Content Strategist, Big Spaceship (clients include NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life, and Wrigley)

Susan Bonds, President/CEO and Alex Lieu, Chief Creative Officer, 42 Entertainment (I Love Bees, Dead Man's Tale, Why So Serious?, Year Zero)

Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK (Star Wars; Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture; The Bladerunner Experience; Using the Force; Batman Unmasked)

Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Nine Inch Nails, Pirates of the Caribbean II)

Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero)

3:00--4:50 PM

Panel 3: "Designing Transmedia Worlds"

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: David Brisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Drug Store Cowboy)

Danny Bilson, THQ (The Rocketeer, Medal of Honor, The Flash, The Sentinel)

Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

R. Eric Lieb, Partner, Blacklight Transmedia. Former Editor-in-Chief, Fox Atomic Comics; & Director of Development, Fox Atomic (28 Weeks Later; Jennifer's Body; I Love You Beth Cooper)

Louisa Stein, Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program, San Diego State University (Limits: New Media, Genre and Fan Texts; Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture)

5:00--6:50 PM

Panel 4: "Who Let the Fans In?: 'Next-Gen Digi-Marketing'"

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: J.D. Black, Vice-President, Marketing, Sony Imageworks Interactive (digital campaigns for Surf's Up, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, 2012, District 9, The Boondocks)

John Caldwell, Professor, UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/Television Work Worlds; Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television)

Alan Friel, Partner, Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP

John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office, New Regency Productions (marketing campaigns for Saw 1 & 2, Crash at Lionsgate; The Blair Witch Project at Artisan)

Roberta Pearson, Professor, University of Nottingham (Reading Lost; Cult Television; The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches)

Steve Wax, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Campfire (HBO's TrueBlood, Audi's The Art of the Heist; Discovery Channel's Shark Week marketing adventure, Frenzied Waters).

Hip Hop Goes Transmedia (Part One)

Transmedia Entertainment keeps getting more and more buzz these days -- and so over the next handful of installments, I am going to be sharing with you a range of different perspectives on the concept. Today, I am running the first of two installments showcasing the work of Marguerite de Bourgoing, one of the USC students who took my transmedia entertainment class last fall. de Bourgoing has been developing a grassroots media franchise, LAstereo.tv, which deploys YouTube and social network sites to showcase the Los Angeles hip hop scene. de Bourgoing represents the Trojan spirit at its best -- a social and cultural entrepreneur who is taking what she's learned as a media maker and deploying it to serve her larger community. de Bourgoing shared some of this work with us during the class and I've wanted her to talk about it for my blog since. In this account which follows, she both shares some of the videos she's been producing and also talks about the way LA Hip Hop artists are using new media to expand the community around their live performances. It's a perspective on transmedia we don't hear very often here and further helps us think about the impact of media convergence on our culture.

Hip Hop Goes Transmedia: Seven Laws

by Marguerite de Bourgoing

Hip hop by essence is a fertile terrain for transmedia; born from the practice of sampling (borrowing a beat and reusing it in a different context), it also incorporates dancing and graffiti. As those aspects evolved they have become more independent, but contemporary hip hop trends like jerkin (from L.A) remind us how intricate style, music and dance still are.

With LA Stereo we document the current LA scene characterized by a strong rise of independent artists. Up and coming artists are using digital means to communicate directly with their fans, taking in hand their own marketing, using that power to leverage distribution deals or cut out the middle man. In parallel the independent practice of the arts is flourishing around that movement leading to what some are calling an "L.A renaissance". New digital means of expression enable the genre to multiply itself and evolve across different platforms. LA Stereo is a translation of that broader movement broadcasting everything hip hop in L.A. The team is made of a DJ (Val the Vandle), the tastemaker, a photographer (Kasey Stokes), the eye, a rapper (Belvi), the lyricist and thinking head, a journalist (Rebecca Haithcoat), and a filmmaker (myself) also the producer.

Here are the seven practices of transmedia inspired by my observation of this movement in the past year or so.

1. Spread your brand: Open Mic

Hip hop today feeds from both an active online and offline presence that contaminate each other. A good performance generates new fans who in return will follow you online to know what you are up to. Similarly a well-presented project with a good backing from blogs and other artists will generate a strong online buzz that in turn should translate in a greater attendance. In any case both online and offline are crucial to get the word of mouth going. In hip hop every artist is its own brand (for lack of a better word) with an active online presence that started with MySpace a few years ago and today culminates with Twitter. Twitter more than Facebook is a fertile terrain for transactions of all sorts: business, artists to artists, fans to artists, artists retweeting other fans. It's used for promotion, casual conversations, to express opinions, and indicate what the artists are up to. Independent artists control that aspect of their communication. Many artist are avid experimenters using gimmicks such as bubble tweet, twitpic, but also tumblr, blog and other devices. That online presence extends itself to file sharing. The music is now available online, often for free, as artists generate mixtapes or leak tracks as part of their process of reaching to fans. The bigger music labels have recuperated this practice as they also "leak" songs of established artists before the albums drop. Music videos have been re-apropriated by the independent artists as a strong visual support for the music. Many are made independently and often demonstrate more creativity than the mainstream ones. (Here's a making of Basicali's "Nobody Cares" music video that was shot in a Mac store and edited in 24 hours).

2. Keeping it real: be authentic yet marketable

Classically, hip hop feeds from an aesthetic of authenticity and yet isn't adverse to being commercialized, even for underground hip hop. Hip hop artists are pioneers in the way they have marketed themselves to brands and have used that to be successful. Run DMC years ago sported the Adidas look and Adidas ending up creating a special pair of sneaker for them. Today the LA independent rappers sport clothing brands such as Diamonds, and Crooks and Castle. The owners recognize their artistic potential and influence within the community and the artists are proud of that association. Style plays a big role in hip hop therefore it's natural that clothing brands are amongst the first to sponsor hip hop artists. Young rapper Skeme for instance is developing his own hat with Nicky Diamond. This association often stems from the artist's originality as they express their own individuality. Taking it all the way, some artists develop their own merchandise, like group U-N-I who despite being courted by record labels have so far decided to go independent, and created a line of hats, that they promote in turn by wearing them on the cover of their album.

3. Be the change you want to see

After the Obama election: the biggest transmedia movement to date, arguably any successful transmedia franchise is a movement. For an artist/group to be successful it is important to strike your audience's imagination with something bigger than yourself. The idea of unity has always been a strong theme in hip hop. Today a movement is emerging in California dubbed the "New West" or the "LA Renaissance". Many of the current artists or groups endorse that idea of movement whether it is consciously or not. This translates in the names choices from Pac Dic (Pacific Division), to U-N-I ( you and I), or even El Prez (short for el president). They promote a new kind of cool as revealed by "Mayor" the new LA anthem "Just another day out in sunny LA there's dealers in the streets and the coppers don't play, got my 501 jeans, my crew neck sweater saggin in my pants cuz i don't know better (....) feelin so good i think i might run for mayor".(Pac Div) It's in response to what the LA hip hop - west coast- was known for: inventing the very successful gansgta rap franchise. Well today the new generation, who was mostly under ten during the LA riots, has swapped this image for a more chilled and hedonistic approach. Instead the LA rappers are some of the biggest spokespersons for the "Cali lifestyle". It's part of what the LAX Paper Boys recently called the "just be cool" (JBC) attitude and that they were able to show when they organized in a very short amount of time, a benefit concert for Haiti with all the actors on the LA hip hop scene.

4. Collaborate

While hip hop is notoriously an individualistic expression, the collaborations give depth to what is otherwise an individualistic expression, and independent rappers are no exception. They need to support each other to attain their common goal. Collaborations often have the strategy of reaching out to each other's followers. Beefs (verbal fights) are equally standard and entertaining in hip hop but fans also like to see artists united and collaborating. This goes back to the idea of movement. The idea of collaboration is exemplified in the rapport producers have with artists (who make the beats and often the arrangements for the songs). The DJ is also often the third element to the association, Producers in hip hop are mainly their own persons, and while many producers have a special relationship with one or several artists, it is by no means exclusive. All hip hop albums with hardly any exception, feature other artists.

El Prez in one of the interviews he gave us, was comparing the scene to superheroes in comic books, aware that the fans like to see the artists get together. Indeed to push the comparison there are different factions of superheroes that also interact with each other more or less loosely. For a fan spotting the cameos in the music videos is part of the construction of this mythology. Watching the video of an up and coming rapper artist like Fashawn (who chose his name because he wanted it to sound like a superhero), it is fun to spot how many artists briefly appear, showing the wide backing he has amongst the hip hop community.

To fin out more about LA Stereo you can find us on Twitter @LAStereotv, become a fan on Facebook, subscribe to our Youtube channel and join the community http://www.lastereo.tv.

Marguerite graduated from Oxford University and the Sorbonne Paris IV, with an M.A. in Art History and in Philosophy. She then worked for two years at the Cinémathèque française in Paris where she developed a passion for cinema. During this time she assisted Marc Riboud, a photographer from Magnum, with whom she explored the language of documentary. She moved to London where she lived for six years, working as a Production Coordinator on factual programs, before joining Discovery UK in the programming department. Recently Marguerite moved to L.A and completed the Annenberg Online Communitites Program MA at USC to define and develop new audiences online, particularly for documentaries. She's currently developing her own franchise LA Stereo.tv with the help of her team: documenting the rise of the independant hip hop scene, and urbansalt.com with former classmates: curating the LA street style.