The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling (Well, Two Actually. Five More on Friday)

Across the next two weeks, we will be rolling out the webcast versions of the sessions we hosted during the recent Futures of Entertainment 4 conference held last month at MIT. (see Monday's post for the session on Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer). Many of the conference sessions were focused around the concept of transmedia entertainment. The team asked me to deliver some opening remarks at the conference which updated my own thinking about transmedia and introduced some basic vocabulary which might guide the discussion. My remarks were largely off the cuff in response to power point slides, but I am making an effort here to capture the key concepts in writing for the first time. You can watch the recording of the actual presentation here and/or read along with this text.

Many of these ideas were informed by the discussions I've been having all semester long within my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at the University of Southern California.

Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn: Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling

[Electronic Arts game designer] Neil Young talks about "additive comprehension." He cites the example of the director's cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: "That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending...The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?" -- Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collides (2006).

I first introduced my concept of transmedia storytelling in my Technology Review column in 2003 and elaborated upon it through the "Searching for the Oragami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling" chapter in Convergence Culture. For me, the origami unicorn has remained emblematic of the core principles shaping my understanding of transmedia storytelling, a kind of patron saint for what has emerged as increasing passionate and motivated community of artists, storytellers, brands, game designers, and critics/scholars, for whom transmedia has emerged as a driving cause in their creative and intellectual lives. We all have somewhat different definitions of transmedia storytelling and indeed, we don't even agree on the same term - with Frank Rose talking about "Deep Media" and Christy Dena talking about "Cross-media."

As Frank has put it, same elephant, different blind men. We are all groping to grasp a significant shift in the underlying logic of commercial entertainment, one which has both commercial and aesthetic potentials we are still trying to understand, one which has to do with the interplay between different media systems and delivery platforms (and of course different media audiences and modes of engagement.)

Whatever we call it, transmedia entertainment is increasingly prominent in our conversations about how media operates in a digital era - from recent books (such as Jonathon Gray's Show Sold Seperately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts and Chuck Tryon's Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence) to dedicated websites (such as the Narrative Design Exploratorium which has been running a great series of interviews with transmedia designers and storytellers) and websites created by transmedia producers, such as Jeff Gomez, to explain the concept to their clients. We are seeing senior statesmen across multiple disciplines - from David Bordwell in film studies to Don Norman in design research - weigh in on the aesthetics and design of transmedia experiences. All of this influx of new interest invites us to pull back and lay out some core principles that might shape our development or analysis of transmedia narrative and to revise some of our earlier formulations of this topic.

Six years ago, fans and critics were shocked at the idea of transmedia as they first encountered what the Wachowski Brothers were doing around The Matrix. Now, there is almost a transmedia expectation, as occurred when fans of Flash Forward complained recently because the series introduced a Url on the air and then only provided impoverished extensions to those fans who tracked down the link. Have we reached the point where media franchises are going to be judged harshly if they do not sustain our hunger for transmedia content?

Let me start with the following definition of transmedia storytelling as an operating principle: "Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." Some of what I will say here will complicate this conception of a "unified and coordinated entertainment experience," as we factor in the unauthorized, grassroots expansion of the text by fans or consider the ways that franchises might value diversity over coherence in their exploration of fictional worlds.

We should be clear that narrative represents simply one kind of transmedia logic which is shaping the contemporary entertainment realm. We might identify a range of others - including branding, spectacle, performance, games, perhaps others - which can operate either independently or may be combined within any given entertainment experience. During the conference, Nancy Baym asked us to think about when and how music has gone transmedia. We struggled to come up with examples - everyone of course immediately latched onto the ARG created around the Nine Inch Nails; I proposed the Comic Book Tatoo where artists and writers used Tori Amos songs as their inspiration. The question looks different, though, if we ask about transmedia performance, because most contemporary musical artists perform across multiple media - minimally live and recorded performance, but also video and social network sites and twitter and...

We might also draw a distinction between transmedia storytelling and transmedia branding, though these can also be closely intertwined. So, we can see something like Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader as a extension of the transmedia narrative that has grown up around Star Wars because it provides back story and insights into a central character in that saga. (Thanks to Geoffrey Long for this example) By comparison, a Star Wars breakfast cereal may enhance the franchise's branding but it may have limited contribution to make to our understanding of the narrative or the world of the story. The idea that Storm Troopers might be made of sugar sweet marshmellow bits probably contradicts rather than enhances the continuity and coherence of the fictional world George Lucas was creating.

Where does this leave the Star Wars action figures? Well, they represent resources where players can expand their understanding of the fictional world through their play. Minimally, they enhance transmedia play, but in so far as coherent stories emerge through this play, they may also contribute to the expansion of the transmedia story. And indeed, writers like Will Brooker and Jonathon Gray have made compelling arguments for the specific ways these toys expanded or reshaped the transmedia narrative, adding, for example, to the mystique around Boba Fett.

While we are making distinctions, we need to distinguish between adaptation, which reproduces the original narrative with minimum changes into a new medium and is essentially redundant to the original work, and extension, which expands our understanding of the original by introducing new elements into the fiction. Of course, this is a matter of degree - since any good adaptation contributes new insights into our understanding of the work and makes additions or omissions which reshape the story in significant ways. But, I think we can agree that Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet is an adaptation, while Tom Stoppard's Rosencranz & Guildenstern Are Dead expands Shakespeare's original narrative through its refocalization around secondary characters from the play.

My own early writing about transmedia may have over-emphasized the "newness" of these developments, excited as I was to see how digital media was extending the potential for entertainment companies to deliver content around their franchises. Yet, Derrick Johnson has made strong arguments that the current transmedia moment needs to be understood in relation to a much longer history of different strategies for structuring and deploying media franchises. Indeed, when I head to University of Southern California each morning to teach, I am given a forceful reminder of these earlier stages in the evolution of transmedia entertainment in the form of a giant statue of Felix the Cat which has sat atop a local car dealership since the 1920s and has become a beloved Los Angeles landmark. Felix, as Donald Crafton, has shown us was a transmedia personality, whose exploits moved across the animated screen and comics to become the focus of popular music and merchandising, and he was one of the first personalities to get broadcast on network American television. We might well distinguish Felix as a character who is extracted from any specific narrative context (given each of his cartoons is self-contained and episodic) as opposed to a modern transmedia figure who carries with him or her the timeline and the world depicted on the "mother ship," the primary work which anchors the franchise. As I move through this argument, I will connect transmedia to earlier historical practices, trying to identify similarities and differences along the way.

1. Spreadability vs. Drillability

At last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, we unrolled the concept of "spreadability" which is the central focus of my next book, which is now being written with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadability refered to the capacity of the public to engage actively in the circulation of media content through social networks and in the process expand its economic value and cultural worth. Writing in response to that argument, Jason Mittell has proposed a counterveiling principle, what he calls "drillability" which has some close connection to Neil Young's concept of "additive comprehension" cited above. Mitell's discussion of drillability is worth quoting at length here:

"Perhaps we need a different metaphor to describe viewer engagement with narrative complexity. We might think of such programs as drillable rather than spreadable. They encourage a mode of forensic fandom that encourages viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the compleity of a sotry and its telling. Such programs create magnets for engagement, drawing viewers into the storyworlds and urging them to drill down to discover more...The opposition between spreadable and drillable shouldn't be thought of as a hierarchy, but rather as opposing vectors of cultural engagement. Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities."

A key phrase here may be "necessarily" since we've seen that helping to spread the message may well be central to enhancing viewer engagement and may encourage further participation - as we've seen in the past few weeks where the release of Susan Boyle's album, more than six months after the participatory circulation of her original video, has broken sales records this year, swamping by something like seven to one the release of an album by American Idol winner Adam Lambert.

Yet, Mittell invites us to think of a world where many of us are constantly scanning for media franchises that interest us and they drilling down deeper once we find a fiction that captures our imagination. Both potentials may be built into the same transmedia franchise, yet they represent, as he suggests, different dimensions of the experience, and there may well be cases where a franchise sustains spreadability without offering any real depth to drill into or offers depth and complexity without offering strong incentives to pass it along through our social networks. More work needs to be done to fully understand the interplay between these two impulses which are shaping current entertainment experiences.

2. Continuity vs. Multiplicity

I mentioned earlier that some of my recent thinking about transmedia starts to challenge the idea of a "unified experience" which is "systematically" developed across multiple texts. It is certainly the case that many transmedia franchises do indeed seek to construct a very strong sense of "continuity" which contributes to our appreciation of the "coherence" and "plausibility" of their fictional worlds and that many hardcore fans see this kind of "continuity" as the real payoff for their investment of time and energy in collecting the scattered bits and assembling them into a meaningful whole. We can see the elaborate continuities developed around the DC and Marvel superheroes as a particular rich example of the kind of "continuity" structures long preferred by the most dedicated fans of transmedia entertainment.

Yet, if we use these comic book publishers as a starting point, we can see them pushing beyond continuity in more recent publishing ventures which rely on what I described in my contributions to Third Person as a logic of "multiplicity." So, for example, we can see Spider-Man as part of the mainstream continuity of the Marvel universe, but he also exists in the parallel continuity offered by the Ultimate Spider-Man franchise, and we can see a range of distinctly separate mini-franchises, such as Spider-Man India (which sets the story in Mumbai) or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (which stands alone as a romance comic series for young female readers). And indeed, some of these experiments - Spider-Man India, the DC Elseworlds series - use multiplicity - the possibility of alternative versions of the characters or parallel universe versions of the stories - as an alternative set of rewards for our mastery over the source material.

Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives, and comics publishers trust their fans to sort out not only how the pieces fit together but also which version of the story any given work fits within. We can compare this with the laborious process the producers had to go through to launch the recent Star Trek film, showing us that it does indeed take place in the same universe as the original and is part of the original continuity, but the continuity has to be altered to make way for the new performers and their versions of the characters.

This pleasure in multiplicity is not restricted to comics, as is suggested by the recent trend to take works in public domain, especially literary classics, and mash them up with more contemporary genres - such as Pride and Predjudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, or Little Women and Werewolves.

The concept of multiplicity paves the way for us to think about fan fiction and other forms of grassroots expression as part of the same transmedia logic - unauthorized extensions of the "mother ship" which may nevertheless enhance fan engagement and expand our understanding of the original. For those franchises where there is a strong desire to police and preserve continuity, fan fiction can be experienced by producers as a threat, something which may disrupt the coherence of their unfolding story, but where we embrace a logic of multiplicity, they simply become one version among many which may offer us interesting insights into who these characters are and what motivates their behavior.

In my class and at the conference, this concept of multiplicity has been experienced as liberating, allowing us to conceive of alternative configurations of transmedia, and lowering some of the anxiety about making sure every detail is "right" when collaborating across media platforms. My key point, though, would be that there needs to be clear signaling of whether you are introducing multiplicity within the franchise, as well as consistency within any given "alternative" version of the central storyline.

TO BE CONTINUED

From Cool Hunters to Chief Culture Officers: An Interview with Grant McCracken

One of the high points of our recent Futures of Entertainment conference was a presentation by Anthropologist/Consultant/Blogger Grant McCracken on his new book, Chief Culture Officier: How to Create a Living Breathing Corporation. McCracken is a lively and engaging speaker and one of the most provocative thinkers I know when it comes to addressing the social, cultural, technological and economic changes shaping the world around us. McCracken has long been part of the brain trust behind the Convergence Culture Consortium and he writes an exceptional blog, This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. I had a chance to read Grant's book in draft form and have been eagerly awaiting its release because of the conversation it is going to spark both within universities and within corporations about the value of cultural insights for modern business and where those insights were likely to come from. When we launched the Comparative Media Studies Program a decade ago, one of our early backers encouraged us to train our students for jobs that didn't have names yet -- jobs which depended on their ability to think across media and to understand the intersection of culture, technology, and industry. Through the years, many of our best students went into industry, often into jobs created around their expertise and talent. Recently, we've called them "thought leaders." I've seen these same kind of students through the professional programs in Annenberg and the Cinema School at USC. I constantly meet prospective students with this kind of vision for their future, but so far, few academic programs have embraced this alternative professional trajectory for their students or have developed curriculum which encourage a more applied perspective.

McCracken proposes a new title, "Chief Culture Officer," and argues that the most powerful companies in th world need to have people in the top ranks of their leadership whose primary job is to attend to the culture around them. While some may disagree, I would contend this expertise is most likely to come from programs in media and cultural studies, anthropology, and other branches of the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. It certainly is not the expertise fostered in most business schools. If we take McCracken's arguments here seriously, they have implications for how we train our students -- not limiting them for an increasingly constipated academic job market but giving them the background and experience they would need to navigate through a range of other sectors being impacted by media change. And it also has implications for how companies think about their consumers, how they anticipate new developments and how they pay respect to more stable, slower changing aspects of their culture.

All of these issues surfaced during the panel discussion which followed Grant's presentation. Respondents included am Sam Ford - Director of Customer Insights, Peppercom, and C3 Research Affiliate; Jane Shattuc - Emerson College; and Leora Kornfeld - Research Associate, Harvard Business School. The moderator was William Uricchio, chair of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. You can watch the video of the event here.

I was lucky enough to get Grant McCracken to address some of the key issues in the book in an exclusive interview for this blog conducted earlier this fall. Here, he lays out some of the key premises of the book and its implications for how companies and universities think about the future.

What do you mean by a "chief culture officer" and what role would such a person play within the modern corporation?

Corporations have been notoriously bad at reckoning with culture. They manage the "problem of culture" with ad hocery of many kinds. They call on ad agencies, consultants, gurus and cool hunters and, when all else fails, the intern down the hall. But there is no single person and, worse, there is no senior manager. Even as culture grows ever more dynamic, various, demanding, and participatory. So that's my argument: there ought to be someone in the C-Suite who's job it is to reckon with culture and to spot the opportunities and dangers it represents.

Your professional training was in anthropology yet you've spent much of your career as a cultural consultant. What kinds of advice have companies sought from you? What has been the biggest adjustment you've had to make from anthropology as it exists in the university to ethnography as a basis for making business decisions?

Sometimes I am supplying the ethnography, and this means quizzing consumers about how they see the world. This is culture from the bottom up, as it were. Sometimes I am supplying anthropology and this means reporting on the categories, distinctions and rules that make up our culture. This is culture from the top down, so to say.

As to the adjustment, it was a horrible slog for awhile, like riding uneven circus ponies. But eventually my academic self and my consulting self found a way to work together. There are moments of surprising coincidence and the interactive effect can be terrific. And then of course you find a way to respect the demands of Christ by forgetting Caesar (and the other way round.) The good news is that consulting forces a grueling pace of problem solving that builds skills for one's academic work, I think. And vice versa.

You cite "Cool Hunters" as enemies of the Culture Officer. What are the limits of the current "cool hunting" process and how does it lead companies astray?

The trouble with cool hunters is that they are a little like cats. Cats have more rods in the retina than we do and this gives them the ability to see movement better than we do. The price that cats and coolhunters pay for this adaption is that they are not very good at seeing things when these things are still. Which is a too elaborate way of saying cool hunters are maximally responsive to culture in motion and disinclined to take an interest in culture when more static. Actually, we can go further than this. Cool hunters are generally pretty hopeless when it comes to the deeper, slower and more static aspects of culture. They don't even appear to know that they exist. If one had to guess at a metric only something like 30% of our culture is fad and fashion. That means the better of our culture escapes the grasp of the cool hunter and the corporation who relies on him/her.

What is the argument for embedding cultural expertise within the company rather than outsourcing it through some kind of consulting firm?

There are two problems with hiring in culture expertise. Culture is increasingly various and changeable. Corporations are increasingly complex and changeable. To find the fit between them takes an exquisite knowledge of both. Hiring culture knowledge in gives the corporation a collection of partial views as rendered by people who may or may not understand the corporation. No corporation would dream of handling finance, technology, human relations this way. It's something that has to be done in-house to be done well.

What should humanities programs be doing differently in order to fully prepare their students for the position of chief culture officer?

Humanities programs turn out to be the heroes of the piece. It gives people the frame-shifting, assumption-jumping, intellectual nimbleness they need to reckon with the complexities of culture and the corporation. We spend a lot of time these days looking at new developments and asking, "is this something or nothing really?" and if it's something, "Ok, is this X1, X2 or notX at all?" The liberal arts are wonderfully good at cultivating this gift. Certainly, engineering and finance create formidable intellectual abilities. The most fluid, the most elegant mind I trained at the Harvard Business School was a product of the British military. So, clearly, many cognitive styles qualify. But the humanities have a certain advantage. They seem to endow people with the pattern recognition the CCO needs. Of course, the humanities have problems of their own. Postmodernism has turned many minds to mush.

One model for cultural analysis which has gained some traction in the corporate world is Eric Von Hipple's concept of the lead user. Von Hipple encourages companies to use early adapters as test-beds for their products, often looking there for insights which may allow them to innovate and refine their offerings. How does this model align with your claims for the value of ethnographic perspectives in the board room?

Lead users are useful. The trouble is they are so enthusiastic about an innovation they are perfectly happy to make any adjustments necessary to adopt it. And as Geoffrey Moore says, this makes them a bad guide to the larger market of later adopters. These people expect the innovation to conform to them. And this takes another order (and probably another round) of product development, which development must be informed by our knowledge of the cultural meanings and practices in place. Without cultural knowledge, the innovation cannot "jump the chasm" to use Geoffrey Moore's famous phrase. (All of this is Moore's argument.) Ethnography is especially useful as a way of discovering what this culture is.

You write about the "Apollo Theater effect," as you try to explain the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers. Explain. Why may we be outgrowing the concept of consumption?

I take your lead here, Henry. As you demonstrated so early and so well, more consumers are becoming producers, and this makes us as Apollo theatre audience of us all. Because we make so much culture, we have become more observant and critical, and less passive in our consumption of other's productions. And on these grounds I've suggested that perhaps its time that we start called "consumers" "multipliers." I except your wisdom here: "if it doesn't spread, it's dead."

Some companies are now monitoring Twitter to try to see how consumers are responding to them. What are the strengths and limits of this approach?

This is a good and necessary idea, as a way of spotting emergent concerns around which consumers are organizing themselves. On the other hand, Twitter is very like a key hole. It's hard to see very much and unless we follow up with some more thorough inquiry, we are missing a great deal.

Many executives assume that cultural knowledge is "intuitive," something they absorb by growing up in a culture. Yet, you are arguing that cultural knowledge requires a certain kind of expertise. Why is intuition not enough?

Intuition is indeed the instrument by which we often deliver cultural insights, but it is also a way for the corporation to diminish cultural intelligence by calling them "soft" "vaque," and "impressionistic." As we become more expert, more professional and more disciplined about our study of culture, I hope we will encourage a new comprehension of what culture knowledge is and how it adds value.

Does the cultural knowledge companies need become even more of a challenge as companies start to do business on a global scale?

Indeed, this is a challenge. How do we speak to several cultures and many segments with a single voice. There is a global culture in the works. It will be a long time coming, but it is coming. But as you and others have pointed out, the real opportunity for the world of communications is to move from the monolithic message to the nuanced, multiple one. We can speak to many communities with many voices, and this really takes a virtuoso control of knowlege and communication. The good news is that as we engage more consumers in acts of cocreation, they will help.

You've argued for advertising and branding as activities which are involved in the management and production of meanings. How would branding change in a world where more companies had chief culture officers?

Yes, that's my hope, that the presence of a CCO would make the corporation better at the production and management of meanings. At some point, I think, our destination must be this: a living, breathing corporation, that fully participates in and draws from and gives to the culture around it. We will have to teach the old dog many new tricks to make this possible. Old asymmetries and boundaries and assumptions will have to be broken down. The good news is that many of the old models are just not working and the corporation in its way has always been keenly interested in what works. I'm hoping the book will help a little here.

Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Big Hair, Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management, Flock and Flow, The Long Interview, Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, and Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now an adjunct professor at McGill University. He has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board.

How Do You Sell an Artsy Board Game?

Part of the pleasure of relocating to the University of Southern California has been the chance to meet a whole new cast of characters, to discover just how intellectually diverse and interesting the students are here -- especially when you factor in that my classes attract students from across the two schools, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and the School of Cinematic Art --- where I have an appointment. It has always been my pleasure to help introduce some of my students to my readers and give you a glimpse of the kind of conversations that take place in my classroom. A few weeks ago, James Taylor, a student in my Transmedia Entertainment class, booked time during my office hours and came in bearing a beautifully crafted box, proceeded to unpack a game board and pieces, and asked if I wanted to play. We had a great conversation about his project -- The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands -- and the thinking behind his design. What I got a glimpse into was someone who was turning the oft-neglected and modest craft of designing board games into an expressive artform. The game was one which encouraged us to reflect on the nature of play, of representation, and of gender. It was a delightful and engaging provocation, and I wanted to share it with you now. I got even more interested when I asked him what he planned to do with his game and he described the process by which he was putting the game onto the market via a microfinancing website. I thought even those of you who are not into games might enjoy learning more about the new kinds of entrepreneurship which are emerging within a networked culture.

Microfinance and the Market for Independent Board Games

by James Taylor

The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands is a fantastical board game with a rich history, an unusual narrative, and surreal Victorian-style artwork. It is a board game that sits comfortably at the intersection of art, logic and literature. It pushes boundaries and opens critical discussions in each of these realms: the board art needs to stand on it's own, but also remain subservient to the game play; the story provokes questions of gender, desire, master-servant relationships, reliable narration, and the permutations of the game over a questionable 200 year history; and the game itself has a rule set that structures a peculiar mode of courtship.

Yet, can a small, provocative game ever make it in the (somewhat stalled) American board game industry? Is there a market for small, art-house board games?

How the Game Works -

"The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI) is an absurd logic puzzle about crossing bridges. The bridges determine how many people can cross. The gentlemen are each trying to strain the group in order to converse with Lady Ashley alone."

It is worth noting that the game is based on an old riddle. In the riddle, a farmer is trying to cross a river in a canoe with a fox, a chicken and a sack of corn. He can only take one at a time so he has to carefully plan his trips back and forth, without ever leaving the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the sack of corn. TGSSI is a two-player game with a similar feel. Each of the gentlemen characters is trying to speak with the lady Ashley alone, and must use the bridges to constantly separate and recombine the group. A mathematician friend of ours calculated about 300,000 possible arrangements for the pieces on the board.

Matters of Academic Interest -

Art & the Dilemma of Perspective -

After refining the rules for several months, I met with the board artist, Dan Gray. We knew we wanted a top-down view of the islands, because that's what's best for the game-play. But we quickly found that a matter-of-fact, top-down view of the islands wasn't visually interesting - we were losing a lot of the detail and character of the locations by only showing them from above. After some thought, we decided it would be best to take a lesson from the cubists, and crack the perspective in order to accommodate the top-down play-view, while also managing to include the buildings, monuments, and ruins of the islands at mixed angles. The scale of the locations is also mixed. (For example, the octopus is bigger than the cathedral and the boat is larger than the volcano.) The result is a gameboard with a rather warped perspective. It is a top-down vantage point of the islands as though seen through a piece of wavy, distorted glass, and this distortion for the board would later serve as the inspiration for the themes of distortion that run throughout the narrative.

Making the Game British -

There were two reasons for making the game British. Looking back, it now seems like an obvious choice because of the high level of politeness built into the rule structure (the group typically moves together as a matter of decorum because it would be impolite for a character to walk off in a different direction), but there was another reason as well that had more to do with the objective. The core mechanic of the game is about stepping aside with a lady - and this is an objective that can be read the wrong way, to say the least. In light of this complication, we insisted on the word "Gentlemen" in the title, to squash any accusations of underhanded intentions. Given the high-level of social decorum, and the word "Gentlemen" in the title, the game just seemed British, so we decided to run with it.

Questions of Gender and the Focus of Desire -

At first glance, the game appears to be a simple, perhaps ridiculous, love story in which two men are competing for the attentions of Lady Ashley. Simple enough. But questions of sexism are distributed, alleviated and then further compounded throughout all of the materials of the game. The representations of gender are contradictory because these questions are mixed with questions of the reliability of the character descriptions and the permutations of the game over it's 200 year history. Whether the game is played in a male-centric universe is a fertile ground for debate.

Soon after opening the box, a player will discover that no one controls the female characters. The rules state: "the Ladies move on their own turn and move independently of the group." The phrasing (deliberately) implies that the girls are aloof and disinterested, that they do not care about this and have other places to be. But the problem of gender is unavoidable: if no one controls the Lady characters, then they do not have creative agency. Instead, they move along a set path. The question of gender in the rules sends the players outwards to explore the character booklet.

According to the narrative materials of the game, it was invented by two wealthy (and perhaps mildly insane) gentlemen living on an island. They devised the rule set. This means that we are not looking at the "official rules" of a courtship, by any means, but rather we are looking at what two gentlemen, in their paired delusion, imagined those rules to be. The gentlemen characters are ridiculous enough that it's hard to take them seriously. If they weren't getting gender right, then, well, nor were they very adept at anything else. Jules is a manufacturer of distorted glass and Hodge's "maps might find their best place in a childrens' coloring book." Again, the theme of distortion (originating with the game board art) runs deep throughout the narrative and the game.

A more nuanced look at gender and desire reveals even more. At the end of the character booklet, Jules suggests to Hodge that they should save themselves the "legwork" of chasing after her. He suggests that Hodge "draw up a map of these islands" so that they may resume in the "cool shade of representation." The implication here is that Hodge (the cartographer) drew up a map to serve as the game board, and that Jules (the manufacturer of distorted glass) provided the melted marbles for the pieces. The final image in the character booklet shows them playing the board game. At this stage, Lady Ashley is nowhere to be found. She has been pushed out of the frame and nearly out of the scope of the game. In the image, it is as if the two gentlemen are content to compete with each other over her as an imagined trophy and this might have been the case all along. Is Lady Ashley simply a cipher in order for the 2 gentlemen to keep score with each other? Or rather, is she a canvas on which to paint their affections for one another? Once they reach the stage of playing out the courtship as a board game, one gets the sense that the game is less and less about her.

To determine if the game is in fact sexist - if the world is in fact a male-centric universe - we can find more information in the descriptions of the characters. As we know, Lady Ashley is described as an absent-minded wanderer. This is not a particularly empowering, or redemptive view of the female character, but it's hard to say whether the narrator's description is at all reliable. On a page of direct quotations, Lady Ashley states: "I simply find it odd, that not one person on these islands has asked me even a single question ... Yet clearly I am in the middle of something..." So if we can trust this quotation, and if no one has asked her a single question, then how can we possibly believe the narrator's three-paragraph description? Especially when there is evidence that contradicts even his basic description. A publisher's footnote from a 1925 version of the game reads:

According to the partial memoirs of J.T. Trotwood, there was indeed a Lady Ashley who briefly visited these isles. In reality she was a naturalist commissioned by the British Royal Society to collect flower specimens.

This is a more empowering view of her, but without a firm grounding in truth, one can simply not say who (between the narrator and the gentlemen and the multiple editors) is providing trustworthy information. If in fact there was a Lady Ashley to visit these islands, her true identity might be lost forever under a history of unreliable male narration. While gender remains an issue, perhaps it is easiest to allay the concerns of sexism by discounting the men. The epitaph introducing the game seems to speak on Lady Ashley's behalf. It reads,

"When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

The Layers of Story -

Owing to the loose "facts" of the game, it is quite difficult to determine the exact history, or even to count the number of diegetic layers. However, a rough estimate turns up between six and eight layers of story. We start with the original competition on these islands that was played (on foot ) by crossing bridges to speak with the lady. Because it is hard to say if there was ever a woman on these islands, the second diegetic layer is possibly what Jules and Hodge imagined in order to occupy their time. We know that at some point, the gentlemen decided to sit down and create a representation of the game, at which point Hodge drew up a map of the islands and Jules provided the pieces. Later on, the game and several historical documents from these islands were discovered, and the game was brought back to England and published by Edward B. Tickert. 100 years later I myself played a beat-up, depleted copy of the game in a pub in England and decided to seek out more information (which makes me perhaps the 4th or 5th diegetic layer.) Long-story short, I acquired the rights to republish the game. The players who buy the game are acting out the roles of Jules and Hodge as they play, well, the characters Jules and Hodge in the game. Finally, if I pass the game to a larger publisher, they will create yet a seventh layer of editorial commentary; and if we include essays and comments about the game to be included in the box...then the public discourse becomes yet another layer.

The game's history relies on an elaborate, interlocking web of historical documentation surrounding different episodes in the game's discovery and development. The layers of the game create the following epistemological paradox: one can only sort through the facts of the game's history by referring to other questionable facts of the game's history.

Much like Freud's dreams, every element followed will lead to another significant element in a vast web of significance.

Going Transmedia -

There is a nice array of transmedia elements surrounding the game. Perhaps most noteworthy is the upcoming documentary, in which several historians and professors discuss the origins of the game and it's 200 year history. We wanted to build up a rich environment of critical discourse surrounding the game. We wanted to tease out the details of this absurd British colony in the midst of which the game was created. In essence, we wanted to take a simple game and discuss it not only as a historical artifact, but also as a game based on a real events. The fun in the short documentary is in taking a fantastical game and discussing it as a very real representation of an antiquated courtship. It's an anthropological approach to a strange, fictional culture.

The documentary about the islands gestures toward the game, while the game raises questions that demand further exploration in the documentary. Both of them point to other media properties. Kim Moses (co-producer of The Ghost-Whisperer TV series on CBS) describes this type of cross-referencing media as an Infinity Loop.

Marketing, Micro-funding & KickStarter.com -

Basically, on our financial budget, it doesn't make sense to print 500 copies of the game unless we know we have 500 buyers.

We have chosen to assess the level of public and investor interest in The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands by posting it to a microfunding site called Kickstarter.com. On this site, people can preorder the game, or become benefactors. If there is enough interest in the game from the public, then we will move forward and print the first 500 copies.

According to the website, "Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." They advertise their website as a way for project creators to "pool" their social networks and turn them into an micro-investment community. It is highly encouraged on the site to offer incentives for different levels of investment.

Another unique aspect of kickstarter is that it is all or nothing. People who post projects set a funding goal for the project. If the goal is met in the two-month time period, everyone who contributed is charged the amount that they pledged. But f the goal is not met, no one is charged, and the project receives no money to move forward. The website offers three reasons for it's sink or swim approach:

1. It's less risk for everyone this way. If you need $5,000, it can suck to have $2,000 and a bunch of people who expect you to be able to complete a $5,000 project.

2. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don't receive the support you want, you're not compelled to follow through.

3. It motivates. If you want to see a project come to life, it helps to spread the word.

The site encourages creative marketing, and necessitates spreading the link to the site as far as possible. Here are the things they encourage potential project creators to consider:

1. How will you tell people about your project? The key to a successful project is asking your networks, audience, friends and family for help. Kickstarter is a tool that can turn your networks into your patrons; it is not a source of funding on its own.

2. Rewards are very important. Offer something of real value for a fair price. And more experiential rewards, things that loop backers into the story, are incredibly powerful. Most of the successful projects include them -- take a look around the site and you'll see some great examples. PS: Three or four reasonably priced rewards seems to work quite well (think of it as S, M, L, XL).

3. Include a video. It's more personal.

4. Be clear and specific about your project's goal.

5. And finally, when it comes to your funding goal, raise as little as you'll need to move forward. Projects can raise more, but never less.

In order to preserve the integrity (and strangeness) of The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI), we have found this micro-investment site to be the best approach. We are selling a fantastical board game with a deep, rich story across multiple platforms. Moreover we are selling it in a country that has slim-to-no independent market for board games.

It seems that the game could find it's home in high-school or college classrooms, but one can't help but notice that studying games is not a common practice in our education system. But why is that? Perhaps this last question is better left to someone more qualified to answer it.

James Taylor is graduate student in Interactive Media at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Resisting the current of digital media, he has chosen to work primarily with board games. You can order the game here.

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you some of the work being done by Harvard University's Web Ecology Project, specifically focusing on the use of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran Elections and around the death of Michael Jackson. Through qualitative and quantitative research, the team is seeking to develop a better understanding of the flow of ideas through the social networking world and how different participants exert influence on Twitter. My respondent last time was Dharmishta Rood, who I worked with when I was back at MIT. Today, I am showcasing the research being conducted by three other researchers on the Web Ecology team -- Erhardt Graeff, Tim Hwang and Alex Leavitt. I asked them each to share some of their current research and explain why they think it can contribute to our understanding of the new media environment. For more on the Web Ecologies Project, check out Alex Leavitt's recent post on the Convergence Culture Consortium Blog. Erhardt Graeff: One of our hopes for Web Ecology is a fusion of quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying social media phenomena. Our goal of constructing a scientific framework for tackling quantifiable data online is only possible when we recognize the cultural contexts. In Web Ecology, we see the formalization of these contexts as web ecosystems such as LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter.

Inspired by the ethnographic work of a number of researchers, including danah boyd, Mimi Ito, and Keith Hampton on Netville, we are beginning to profile individual social media networks. We call the outputs of our research "Web Ecosystem Profiles". The goal of each profile is to characterize the cultural landscape of a web ecosystem. As you might expect, much of this is done through participant observation.

Of course, the boundaries of each ecosystem are negotiable as in any study of a community. More importantly, a web ecosystem's state is in constant flux with users joining and leaving, new features being introduced, and memes propagating the network. Thus, Web Ecosystem Profiles must be dynamic documents. And to guide our work, we rely on a few of the central tenets of Web Ecology, first laid out in Reimagining Internet Studies:

• Interdependence: code and users are part of an inseparable aggregate web phenomenon;

• Boundedness: the web is constrained by various forces and configurations;

• Significance: content on the web retains inherent value.

Here is an abbreviated version of the outline we are currently using to build profiles. The full version is on our wiki (requires registration):

• Introductory Overview of the Ecosystem

• Common language for discussing components of the ecosystem

• "Typical" reasons that users register / access the ecosystem

• Technical affordances / Constraints of the ecosystem

• Requirements of site usage

• Landmarks of the ecosystem's evolution (e.g. eternal septembers, jumping the shark)

• Defined user cohorts

• Ecosystem-specific lexicon

• Phenomenology of 'Typical' Sessions in an Ecosystem

• Describe general experience of using the site

• Key use cases

• Possibilities for Quantitative Analysis

• Introduce available APIs

• List of atomized site components / activity that could be quantified (e.g. tweets, likes)

• Documentation of successful and unsuccessful approaches to this ecosystem

The last section is unique to the quantitative research Web Ecology hopes to undertake. On Twitter, this is easy because they provide a very open API, with decent documentation, and also the forms of interaction are easily quantified. For Twitter, a web ecosystem profile is particularly useful to help formalize the documentation of unconventional use cases (see excellent examples in danah boyd's draft of "Tweet, Tweet, Retweet"). Charting all the different ways users retweet can enable a better quantitative study of retweeting behavior by ensuring that we: 1) catch all of the various forms of retweets and 2) understand what the different forms might signify.

A more straightforward use of a Web Ecosystem Profile is when a social network has not been explored by many researchers. A few weeks ago, fellow Web Ecologist Seth Woodworth started to use the profile framework to document aspects of LibraryThing, which no one else in our community was using at the time. Did you know that the key demonym in the community is a "thingabrarian", or that one unconventional practice is the creation of fakester libraries for popular, dead authors?

Web Ecosystem Profiling is at a very early stage of preparation. But we believe the need for a peer-produceable way to continually document the contexts of social media phenomena is obvious and immediate. Hopefully, a larger community of researchers are willing to contribute and offer feedback.

Tim Hwang: The Era of Social Media has gifted us with two Big Ironies. First, there's the Big Irony of Business, where extensive practical experience with communities online hasn't successfully translated to the emergence of a science (or even a cluster of useful, concrete reliable methods) around building vibrant social spaces on the web. Second, there's also the Big Irony of Academia, where massive amounts of data, talent, and research on the dynamics of social networks fails to make it into informing the day-to-day practice of businesses (or, indeed, the popular discourse).

In both worlds, the irony is the same: we do in some sense have the key information right in front of us (either in terms of practical experience or reams of qualitative and quantitative research), but a notable lack of ability to convert it into specific, actionable knowledge.

Indeed, this has led us to kind of a sorry state, where good people -- some seriously sharp, brilliant people -- can spend hours talking about the really beautiful research about the social nature of the web. But when the key questions come down the pipe, "So what can I do to foster a community?," "So what factors are responsible for promoting the propagation of culture?," most folks are reduced to wandering generalities and the mantra-like suggestion that the person in question should really consider starting a Twitter account. Where we should be sifting through the available data and offering specific ideas, we've largely only got vague philosophies and anecdotes. Depressingly, the Emperor has no clothes. At the point we're sitting, he's not even really the Emperor, either.

And perhaps most scarily, there's a kind of superstition I feel that's starting to circle around the research, a suspicion that the whole idea of digging deep with data and getting scientific with our prescriptions is, in fact, a largely misguided idea. Social media expert Chris Brogan recently wrote about the quantitative side of things:

I'm writing this from a conference full of researches [sic]. They are all talking passionately about numbers, and I get this. I understand that they're passionate about exacting a science out of the crazy data of human passion. And yet, part of me thinks that numbers often serve us as little life rafts. [...]

We cling to numbers. In business, we use numbers as our primary gauges. But in relationships, we don't. Right? Do you count who hosted the holiday party and do you measure just how delicious the meal was on a chart? (If you do, I take it you like sleeping on couches.)

And he's dead on. But about the wrong point. It's true: you're are in fact a serious jerkface if you behave in the robotic way he's talking about. But we probably wouldn't , for example, blame the host for meticulously keeping track of what people liked and didn't like -- and using it to plan the menu for the next holiday party. This is a simple way of saying that, rigorous exploration isn't bad when it improves our results in a real way. And so, the responsibility for the flaw in Chris' voiced skepticism doesn't fall on him at all. I think it's a natural response to the failure of the research to actually step up to the plate and deliver some implementable knowledge beyond the generalities. If all of our experience and hard data can't come to anything practical, it's easy to believe that it might not be a worthwhile approach to rely on.

So how do we finally step up to the plate? And, before we get to that: how did we get here?

Largely, I'm willing to argue that the Big Ironies have emerged because there's no good space where people can playtest, experiment, and rapidly iterate on a variety of strategies, particularly where influencing the social space online is concerned. There's no good place to measure success, or even compare various approaches against one another to assess their usefulness. There's no way to prove that your methods and data mining can actually produce repeated success. Without that kind of lab, it's tough to take insights from both the research and business world, and try them again and again. Without trying and trying again, we never get to know how information might actually be transformed into useful, applied knowledge.

One of the big projects of the web ecology community has been to see if there's a way of providing that exact environment. Specifically, we've been talking about the concept of competitive games, and the fact that they provide the ideal social structure that we're looking for. Games create repeatable scenarios, allowing us to identify and test a given situation over and over again. Competitive games require measurable goals, and a structured way of assessing success. Finally (and, perhaps best of all) games are good experimental zones, places to try out tactics and strategies on low stakes.

Add the involvement of real people and social structures to take it out of an abstracted lab scenario, and you've gotten to an experiment that we're starting to undertake, something we call social wargaming.

The general premise is simple: beginning with a "battlefield" population of users (who are unaware that a game is going on -- indeed, revealing the existence of the game is against the rules of the game), teams compete to effect specific changes in their behavior. This goes from as simple as getting a social network to pass around a piece of content, to as complex as attempting to bridge the structural gaps between two unconnected clusters of users. We're starting out with single platforms, but the eventual idea is to level up to testing the ability of teams to create certain effects across various networks, and in the social ecosystem of the web as a whole.

The open, implicit challenge is equally simple, though perhaps provocative to the point of being considered trolling: if you're really so good at understanding what culture and community online is all about, if you're really so good at "engaging communities" and being a "trust agent," why not put the money where the mouth is and see if you can't straight up just do it?

The first iteration of this game, entitled "Triangles," builds around this premise. Essentially, teams are given a "terrain" of contested target users to study on Twitter that are connected in some way. The competition is for them to start fresh with an "ego account," which will compete with other groups to create as many tightly linked triangles of connection between their account and two other target users in a short period of time. Over a series of games, we can also change up the terrain and rules to ask other questions -- what tactics work best when trying to build new connections in an already tightly interconnected social group? Can robots achieve the same results as humans in fostering certain types of behavior?

The rules in more depth are available here (Social_Wargaming_Triangles.txt,) and we're actively looking for participants who want to play a role in this. First round begins November 20th, and will be running during the first week of December. Definitely drop an e-mail to tim@webecologyproject.org, if you'd like to be involved. And, with any hope, we're hoping that the outcome of this gaming will be something in actuality quite different that just mere entertainment: experiments towards forging an applied science of cultural and community spaces online.

Alex Leavitt: A primary goal of the Web Ecology Project aims to analyze how the relationship between social networking platforms and its users affects and is affected by the cultural practices of online communication and community building. To approach this goal, we had striven to establish a set of first principles for the Web on which to base our future research. Our analyses of influence on the Web usually started with these first principles. For example, the smallest units of communication might be a page view or a click. Using these measurements, how could we make declarative statements about how people interacted in mediated spaces like Twitter (which structure communication based on how the programmers design the platform)?

However, designing first principles proved a bit difficult, and when I wrote "The Influentials" I realized that we would have to shape sets of "elementary particles" (like chemical atoms and molecules) per each system. Basically, because each platform controls the possible modes of communication, first principles for Facebook are inherently different than those of Google Reader, for example. For Twitter, the platform analyzed in "The Influentials," these elements begin with the ordinary tweet, out of which we see related particles, like replies, retweets, and mentions.

For the elements on Twitter, I established an operational definition of influence (meaning that our analysis is ultimately separated from any theories of influence previously researched in academic circles). Tweets became actions on which replies, retweets, and mentions were enacted. Thus, we organized our arguments around influence as those messages sustaining a large amount of responses.

The focus on response is key to our results. The Web Ecology Project has attempted to respond to extremely generalized analyses of social media phenomenon, particularly with large amounts of quantitative evidence to support our claims. In "The Influentials," we wanted to criticize those analyses of influence that had primarily focused on follower counts, which of course are important; however, if a user has 10,000 followers and none of them respond to the user, then can we claim that this user is influential? Of course, we couldn't ignore follower counts, so we included equations and calculated graphs that accounted for both responses and numbers of followers, to weigh users that had smaller follower networks.

Probably the more interesting aspect of our initial analysis of influence of Twitter lay in our categorization of the cultural practices that lay underneath these interactions between popular users on Twitter and their followers. We split the ten users into three groups: celebrities, news outlets, and social media analysts. For the most part, the trends show that the members of these groups act fairly similarly (with discrepancies, of course, usually based on the number of followers).

The under-appreciated piece of our research ended up being our visualizations. We generated a colorful graph that illustrates the density of tweets and responses for each user in our report. It's intriguing to analyze our statistics visually, because you can occasionally pick out exceptional instances of response explosions. Although in our visualization our code could not parse out which responses corresponded to which original tweet, we can suppose that most of the wild groups of responses that follow occasional tweets are immediate responses that eventually ebb away.

To move beyond this initial, basic analysis of influence on Twitter, we would like to look closer at the networks of followers behind these mega-users. Looking at hypothetical extremes hints at the problems we might foresee in future research: If a user has a follower network that responds at an ordinary rate, but each of those users have extremely active responding networks (ie., the original user's secondary follower network), then that certainly affects how we might provide ratings or levels of influence for specific users.

Erhardt Graeff is a Lead Researcher and Developer for the Web Ecology Project, and also a social scientist and entrepreneur with an MPhil in Modern Society and Global Transformations from Cambridge University and a couple of bachelor's degrees from RIT. In addition to researching social media, he has studied rural internet use and social capital, digital divides, e-government, networked public spheres, and new media literacy. Beyond the Web Ecology Project, Erhardt is the Director of Technology and Strategy for BetterGrads, a startup aimed at preparing high school students for college life, and is a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, studying OER and the political economy of the textbook industry.

Tim Hwang is the Director of the Web Ecology Project and an analyst with The Barbarian Group -- where he works on issues of group dynamics and web influence. He is interested in building a science around measuring the system-wide flows of content and patterns of community formation online. He is also the founder of ROFLCon, a series of conferences celebrating and examining internet culture and celebrity. He currently Twitters @timhwang, blogs at BrosephStalin, and is in the process of watching every homemade flamethrower video on YouTube.

Alex Leavitt is a Lead Researcher for the Web Ecology Project. His interests include geographical, linguistic, and transnational subcultures; the hybridization of popular culture and online humor; and the emergent cultural practices of (un)controlled online social networks. Alex also works as a research specialist with the Convergence Culture Consortium in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT, and has previously worked with the Digital Natives Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School). In addition to his weekly articles on the Convergence Culture blog, Alex writes long-form about Japanese popular culture at The Department of Alchemy and short-form on Twitter (@alexleavitt).

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part One)

Anyone who has read my blog long knows that I am not big on counting things. Some of it is that I have math anxiety -- a serious vulnerability for someone who spent the first 20 years of his career at MIT! Some of it is that I think people often act as if counting things is the same thing as analyzing things or that the only things that count are things that came be counted. I often wage a one-man struggle against the push to quantify the universe -- perhaps as if (arbitrary science fiction reference warning) the world would end if we could just capture all of the billions of names of God. That said, I am finding myself mellow more than a little now that I am at USC, am watching my former graduate students struggle to grasp quantitative methods, and getting to know some of my office mates and colleagues who count things for a living. And there is a particularly value in trying to understand the scale on which certain changes in our communication environment are occurring -- at least to capture some order of their magnitude. And that's why I have been following with some interest the emergence of a research team at Harvard focused on understanding Twitter and its place in the "web ecology." Many members of the team are graduate students I worked with in a range of capacities during my time at MIT and have come to value their insights into digital media. Their data is already helping me to reframe some of the thinking I am doing about spreadable media and knowing how many people come to this blog now through my tweets, my bet is that you will find what they are doing interesting as well. In this first installment, the responses come from Dharmishta Rood, who I met through the Knight news challenge a few years ago and who took several of my classes during my final year at MIT. I featured one of her essays on the blog last spring. Next time, she will be joined by some other members of the research team.

What do you mean by web ecology? What does the name of your group tell us about the assumptions guiding your research?

We summarize our research by the statement that Web Ecology studies the relationship of the nature of data and the behavior of actors on the internet.

Web Ecology as a field, rather than focusing on the Internet from various fields such as Sociology, Humanities, Business or Media Studies, focuses on the Web itself, combining methodologies from multiple, often interrelated disciplines, to decipher activity online both quantitatively and qualitatively. In our personal research practices we frequently use large-scale data mining to inform our research questions and to further our understanding about the cultures and communities evident online. In addition to providing quantitative analysis about the social layer of the web, we see our role as Web Ecologists to provide tools for other Web Ecologists in an open manner for the community of researchers. We also see the advantageous position of this type of resarch for businesses interested in marketing and online presence.

What can you tell us about the core methodology you are applying to understanding how Twitter works?

We try to break down Twitter into quantifiable interactions. We understand that there are many factors outside of Twitter--both time specific, such as breaking news, the hour of a TV show or a holiday, but also new trends and information being spread throughout the web. We try to look at all of it within the ecosystem of Twitter itself. At Web Ecology we try to look at what we can measure--namely retweets, mentions, @replies, #hashtags and common keywords within the sea of tweets.

We understand that the web is constrained by various forces and configurations. Rather than a utopian or deterministic perspective, Web Ecology recognizes that the web is not limitless or truly divorceable from various geographic, social, historical, and other realities.

Web Ecology endorses the systematic creation and testing of models, which leads us to a heavily quantitative approach, that can then be paired with a qualitatitive exploration of these findings. We also don't overlook Internet phenomena as transient cultural fads--we see cultural creation on the Internet as impartially as possible, and also that code and users are part of an inseparable aggregate web phenomenon.

Some of your earliest results dealt with the role of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran elections. What kinds of data emerged from your investigation? What did that tell us we didn't already know about the twitter traffic surrounding these events?

Our report cites much of the popular media that both creates the term yet also criticizes the hasty declaration of a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran.

Using 12 keywords and hashtags, we found that 58% of relevant twitter conversation did NOT contain the common hashtag #iranelection. This allowed us to get a much more comprehensive overview of the Twittersphere during the Iranian election.

One of the most interesting findings to emerge out of the report were these two facts in conjunction: The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets and one in four tweets were retweet of another user's content, showing that the users who tweet the most are not always the most influential.

You've also looked at the Twitter traffic following Michael Jackson's death. What similarities and differences did you find in the discussion surrounding these two events?

Similarly to the Iran election, with Michael Jackson's death on Twitter there were many keywords. One of the most interesting findings was the trajectory of each event over the Twittersphere. In the case of Michael Jackson's death, there were over 279,000 tweets within the first hour of mainstream news reports of Jackson's death, whereas with the Iranian election, there were 2,024,166 tweets total (over eighteen days), but never more than 17,500 tweets in any given hour. These tweets fluctuated during times of unrest.

Since the excitement on twitter decreased over time, especially after the first hour, the type of content was inherently very different. We spent time hand-coding tweets (in the Social Science sense, having individuals read and analyze the tweets according to certain metrics) rather than strictly doing data analysis. The Michael Jackson report sought to understand sentiment on Twitter, rather than the trajectory of a real-time event spanning many days.

How important is retweeting to the ecology of the web?

Within twitter specifically, retweeting is only one of the many ways people can interact with content. It becomes important when new audiences see content from users they do not follow, but another important feature of Twitter is search. Users following a particular topic of interest can come across new content to consume and share.

What do you think Twitter is doing that is different from other kinds of social networks?

Twitter allows users to follow one another asymmetrically, meaning that users do not have to follow those that follow them. From this an interesting dynamic emerges wherein follower counts are meaningful in a separate way than the number and type of people a user follows. A user is often valued more for the amount of followers--an account with immensely more users they are following than follow them is likely spam, whereas a user like Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) only follows ~300 users but has almost 4,000,000 followers.

Twitter, as it's been deemed many times over is a "micro blogging service," meaning the updates contain news and information like blogs, but with many fewer characters. This micro-update style is now a relevant part of other social networks, both during and after the increase of Twitter's userbase.

Dharmishta Rood is Director of Research Relations at the Web Ecology Project and a recent graduate Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Her work deals with large scale and interpersonal communication systems like social networks and news. These types of platforms allow users to generate and consume information in ways that further social connections and learning. She is a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner for Populous Project, a free and open-source platform for online news, holds a degree in Design | Media Arts from UCLA and is a Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media. She tweets @dharmishta and blogs at dharmishta.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates (zephoria.org)

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part Two)

Circular Nexus of Screens Why does Click Click Ranger need this complicate maneuver over multiple forms of screens, and for what purpose? In order to dissect the discursive logic behind this nexus of screens, we need to understand the current configuration of these screens in Korea.

Mobile Phones: The prodigy of Korean IT mythology.

Click Click Ranger's experiment of incorporating the mobile phone into a television show directly corresponds to the recent development of Korea's mobile phone industry in the convergent media paradigm. Since ETRI and the consortium of corporations launched the world's first commercial CDMA mobile phone service in 1996, Korea has been a step ahead in exploring CDMA based technological innovations and the latest mobile media services including mobile TV (DMB: Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and Wibro (the first wireless high-speed broadband). Following SK telecom (the major wireless network provider in Korea)'s 3G mobile content service June in 2002, Korean wireless companies have explored the diverse forms of mobile multimedia content. I conveniently categorize content for mobile phone into two types: "migrated mobile content" which refers to repurposed and repackaged content from conventional media and "original mobile content" that is initially produced for mobile screen devices such as mobile cinema and mobile drama)(Ok, 2008). In the midst of industrial effort to find the 'right' content for mobile screen, these new hybrid forms of moving images explore the aesthetics of convergence that continues and at the same time disrupts the conventions of existing media forms. Mobile TV has expanded the horizon of the mobile screen by combining mobile telecommunication technology and broadcasting.

While mobile phone content service and Mobile TV serve as extended venues for conventional media, the conventional media have also tried to incorporate mobile screen technologies into their formats in many different ways. Overall, the most heated concern for both parties is how to develop 'new' content that fit the condition of media convergence, which is often expressed as a 'media big bang' and 'content war' in popular media in Korea (Kim & Lee, 2005). Click Click Ranger is an early attempt to tackle this challenge on the television network side, which continued to the fever of UCC (User Created Content). Following Click Click Ranger, other television networks and popular media organizations launched similar programs such as SBS's "Uporter" system. Literally, "Uporter" means "ubiquitous reporter" and it mobilizes citizens to capture news on the street with their digital camera or mobile phone camera, which are then selectively shown through regular News shows on SBS.

Click Click Ranger's use of mobile phone imaging directs attention to the multifaceted nature of the mobile phone. Notably, MSM (multimedia short message) which allows users to attach pictures or short video clips to a mobile phone message is generally discussed as a private communication tool or a vehicle to expand private space with the combined practice of blogging. Although the formation of shared 'community'- whether it is exclusive or relatively open to the general public- has also been discussed, the prevailing assumption is on the practice of 'private imaging' among individuals. Compared to this model of private imaging, Click Click Ranger's adoption of mobile phone imaging is closer to and continues the practice of "citizen journalism" only with changed technologies- from the (video) camera and to the mobile phone-. Hence, while being true to the technological premise of the medium that provides 'personal mobility' (for the mobile rangers and citizen reporters), their mobile phone imaging resides in and further serves to reinstate the value of the public. Most of all, it is the particular use of the outdoor screen with the mobile screen that distinguishes Click Click Ranger from other home-video shows or citizen reports programs and enables it to construct a broader discourse of the 'public space' out of mobile screen usage in Korea.

Outdoor Screens

City Hall Square during World Cup Soccer in 2002

Okay. Click Click Ranger was able to find a way to connect the mobile phone to the television. Now, what makes this nexus of screens unique is the presence of the large LED screen as an integral part of the television show. Simply put, in Click Click Ranger, the large LED Screen technically functions as an additional outdoor TV to broadcast its program. Although the use of the mobile screen is also equally unconventional, the potential of mobile phones as screen media has already been explored in diverse ways. Yet the large LED screen, in spite of its ubiquity in urban landscapes of the global metropolis, has received little attention in the conventional media industry other than in the outdoor advertising business. Becoming one of the latest form of screen media, the Large LED screen not only succeeds the function of the commercial or public advertising that outdoor billboards once fulfilled but also continues the visual pleasure of the urban spectacle. Since 2000, the LED screen in Korea was moved from the category of 'outdoor advertising' to the 'LED display screen broadcasting,' becoming one of the 'broadcasting-telecommunication convergent media' that would be governed under the new broadcasting laws.

Compared to the traditional TV at home, the experience of outdoor TV is deeply conditioned by the material condition of place, as TV screen is usually an implemented part of the architectural surroundings. That is, the location where outdoor TV displays, whether it be waiting room, subway/train station or rooftop of building, tends to predetermine the content and flow of content on outdoor TV screens. At the same time, the meaning of place is also rendered by the viewer's activity of watching TV: If in Seoul, the subway station might turn into a living room momentarily for the passengers who enjoy entertainment show clips on ubiquitous screen panels installed inside the train and/or waiting area, beyond its practical functions. In Click Click Ranger, it is the symbolic meaning of 'public space' (as in the location of Seoul City Hall) that the commercial LED screen in City Hall Plaza embodies and that Click Click Ranger systematically appropriates and reproduces. Then, why is the location of Seoul City Hall Plaza crucial for linking up-to-date screen technologies?

Physically located at the busy intersection of the political and economic center of the downtown Seoul, the Seoul City Hall Plaza has served as a central place for many important national events. By running the show on the rooftop of city hall building following the fashion of 'live news report on spot,' Click Click Ranger successfully appropriates the sense of 'liveness' and intentionally adds 'moral weight - news-worthy-ness-' to the clips. This simulated urgency and liveness that supports the show's goal of being connected to everyday realities of Korea is intensified on the symbolic level since for Koreans the Seoul City Hall Plaza is the emblematic center for national identity as manifested during the World Cup Soccer tournament in 2002.

The image of the Seoul City Hall above illustrates the scene of World Cup Soccer frenzy during which, with the unexpected achievement of the Korean national team going on to the semi-final, crowds gathering in front of the large electronic screens to cheer reached the point of becoming a nation-wide ritual. The intensity and enthusiasm represented by the image of the 'wave of Red Devils' (the official name of Korean team supporters as well as the icon of 2002 World Cup) left an unforgettable impression on Korean popular imaginary. In fact, many Korean scholars agreed that World Cup Soccer frenzy in 2002 does not simply reflect interest in a national sports match but rather represents a demarcating historical moment in Korean society- a culminating point to celebrate regained national pride and strength after the collapse of the economy in 1997. More interestingly, the 2002 World Cup syndrome parallels the increasing self-awareness of Korea's position as a world- leading player in the global information technology industry.

It is not a mere coincidence that the 'mobile phone' and the 'screen' were two of the primary export products of Korea at the time. Led by the semi-conductor chip, various sorts of screens (PDP, LCD/LED screens, computer screens, and the traditional electronic screens) and mobile phones ranked among top three export products in 2005 (Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, 2005). The first pivotal moment when large LED screens came into the public media awareness in Korea was also around the World Cup Soccer in 2002, when it served as a key display venue for broadcasting the Korean national team's matches in public places. The large LED screen that Click Click Ranger deploys is one of the several LED screens that drew large crowds around Seoul City Hall Plaza. In its pilot episode, Click Click Ranger explicitly delivers this intertwined discourse of the screen and the nation. The show dwelled on the significance of City Hall Plaza by inserting clips of City Hall Plaza scenes during World Cup Soccer 2002 and charts with the statistics of mobile phone exports sales. In this way, the culturally accumulated meaning of the particular place of Seoul City Hall Plaza- a center of the civil and nationalistic ideology- enhance Click Click Ranger's attempt to replicate the sense of 'liveness' of live broadcasting and foreground the 'collective' meaning of being networked.

All Together: Networked Public in Wired Korea

Overall, Click Click Ranger represents multilayered meanings of the physical and the discursive movements of images within current Korea: images migrate from the 'micro' screen to the 'macro' screen, from private space to public space and as a result, individuals are assumed to occupy the position of citizens. For instance, in Mobile Ranger, the implication of 'private imaging' constantly changes as it travels across diverse screens: from private imaging to public exhibition on outdoor screen, and back to the private viewing on Mobile TV. In this circulation, mobile phones and Mobile TV, which represent personal screen devices, are mobilized into the formation of 'public space' by conventional media. By creating public space within the domain of private space, Mobile Ranger inevitably questions the fixity of the boundary between private and public space which is considered to be contingent on the specificity of media. When the show is eventually broadcast in mobile TV, the flexibility of the public and private space becomes more intensified. Due to the mobility given to the viewer, the previously established and spatially fixed 'public' dimension of the outdoor screen in city hall square is disrupted as the diverse viewing situations of individual Mobile TV viewers multiply the meanings of space for themselves.

In the end, Click Click Ranger's complicated exhibition process does not simply aim to increase the pleasure of experiencing images, but to foreground the very technological competency of appropriating new technologies. The realization of the idea of 'connecting' these up-to-dated screen technologies symptomatically reveals the social discourse about the importance of 'networked public in wired Korea'. Considering that mobile technology becomes a source of national pride, the cultural use of mobile technology in Korea, especially mediated through the conventional media practices, often invites the individual to the formation of national identity. Not only doesClick Click Ranger resonate with the popular techno-nationalistic discourse around the mobile and new media technologies but it also reproduces it through its construction of imagined citizen within networked screens. In this way, mobile phone imaging meets television and the outdoor screen in City Hall Plaza and in this more or less blunt self-explanatory gesture, Click Click Ranger conjures up the mobile phone exactly at the center of the 'current' Korea.

Works Cited

de Certeau', Michael, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)

Kim, Taek-Hwan & Lee, Sang-Bok, Media Big Bang: Korea changes, (Seoul, Korea: Knowledge Supply Publishing Company, 2005)

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (NYU Press, 2007)

McCarthy, Anna, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2001)

Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, "Suchiro Bon IT 2005 ( IT 2005 by Statistics)," 29 December 2005.

Ok, Hye Ryoung, "Screens on the Move: Media Convergence and Mobile Culture in Korea," ph.d dissertation, Department of Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, University of California, 2008

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part One)

I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation. She has done some groundbreaking research on the deployment of transmedia practices in Korean television, projects which have gotten very little attention on this side of the world, but which have a lot to offer as an alternative model for how mobile technologies and public space can be deployed as part of a transmedia strategy. Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television

by HyeRyoung Ok

By now we all know that the mobile phone is not simply a phone anymore. Since its introduction, the mobile phone has evolved into something that constantly broadens and transforms its boundary. Indeed, it is one of the most convergent media devices available that materializes the paradigm of media convergence. In most countries where mobile technology is widely adopted, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming a new outlet for traditional media industries responding to the "visions of wireless phones becoming hand-held entertainment centers." Yet the mobile phone's entry into the existing media environment is not a natural and homogeneous process. Continuing, disrupting, and mixing existing media practices to a newer form, rather, it came to terms with conventional media in heterogeneous ways depending on the socio-culturally specific contexts.

Then, here comes the story of the mobile phone in Korea, the country recently known as "IT powerhouse" where the adventure of the mobile phone ever continues. The mobile phone in Korea is literally a focal point where technical, industrial, and cultural innovations to explore the 'newer' forms of media service converge (see my blog posts on general review of Korean IT practices). What is particularly unique about Korean mobile culture is the continuing emphasis on the potential of mobile phones as 'screen' media. It is not surprising phenomenon considering the weight of 'screen' related - all dimensions of hardware and software - industries in Korean society. I would like to illustrate how the mobile screen is positioned in the flux of these transmedia experiments across new and old media in a culturally specific way through the case of Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, an entertainment program on channel MBC in Korea.

Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, is an interesting case that shows how the media content is designed to be produced/consumed based on the principle of "connecting" multiple forms of screens: mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor LED screen. Click Click Ranger is one of three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark which was broadcast from December 2004 to August 2005 on channel MBC - one of three major television networks in Korea. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen is used in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Although it was short-lived, this show set up a model for employing mobile phone technology thematically as well as formally into the television program format and inspired other shows in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues on the relation between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, let's begin to explore how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of 'convergence of spaces.

Click Click Ranger (aka Mobile Ranger): Capture Korea's Today

Click Click Ranger's catchphrase of "Capture Korea's today" literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to citizen reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and "mobile rangers," a group of pre-selected young college students and volunteers (in total, 100 members). Technically, mobile rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips 'in real time' to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the 'flow' of content across media (Jenkins, 2007). The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters as is illustrated in the picture above. Hence, what the viewers on a regular television set at home actually watch are alternating shots between the outdoor screen display, the MCs, and small video clips in quick-time movie format. Later on, the program re-runs on Mobile TV, particularly on the channel BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots ('hot screens') in the current mediascape of Korea as diagram below illustrates.

Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition

To the savvy viewers, who got used to all sorts of strategies to utilize the mobile phone for the television show by now, early attempt of Click Click Ranger may not look so fresh. What makes this show unique is the way in which it attempts to employ the mobile phone, an icon of personal media, in the service of constructing the 'public space' within a commercial entertainment. As a matter of fact, from the beginning, ! : Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a 'public value concerned entertainment' program. Previous and current sub-sections of the show have adopted 'human documentary' or 'news report' format in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the 'good civilian life and consciousness' in the fashion of a public service campaign. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: "Let's read books," "Let's obey the traffic sign," "Let's eat Breakfast," "Street Lessons," "Open your Eyes (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind)," "Asia Asia (Illegal worker's home visiting project)" and so on.

Partially, the show's strategy to foreground public good within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC: MBC is private but at the same time closer to a public broadcasting network. It runs as a private company but is in fact indirectly owned by the government (by KBS, a major public network) and under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. This dominant discourse of the program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents such as violation of minor civil laws, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak, elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, if the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show's host calls up the mobile ranger on the scene and runs to there to give the samaritan a reward-a golden badge.

(To be continued)

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Strange Overtures: Vodephone, Tchaikovsky, Ernie Kovacs and the "Wowness" of New Media

One of the great joys of our present moment is waking up to some delightful gift -- a compelling bit of media content -- sent to you by friends, family, or in this case, a former student (Eric Schmiedl). Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the ways that YouTube has brought back many aspects of the vaudeville aesthetic that I discussed in my first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic: The video below is a great example -- an advertisement produced in New Zealand for Vodephone which offers us a spectacular technological performance, one which calls attention to the emerging properties of our media environment in several ways.

First, of course, the video demonstrates some of the expressive potentials of mobile phones, not to mention the prospects of using digital media to coordinate signals within a complex structure. This is a compelling example of technological virtuosity. My first response was to go "Wow" and in our modern age, "wowness" is a hard earned quality. Here's what I wrote about it in my recent book, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture::

Consider the singular beauty of the word 'Wow.' Think about the pleasure in forming that perfectly symmetrical phrase on your tongue. IOmagine the particular enthusiasm it expresses -- the sense of wonderment, astonishment, absolute engagement. A 'Wow' in something that has to be earned, and in the modern age we distribute standing ovations far too often when we are just being polite, but we have become too jaded to give a wow. The term takes on a certain irony, as if it can only be uttered in quotation marks.

This immediate, visceral response makes this the kind of content you want to "spread" to others in your social network. Eric forwarded it to me; I'm posting it on my blog and sending it out through my Twitter feed; and perhaps you will like it well enough that you will pass it along further. This is at the heart of what we are calling "spreadable media." And trust me, the folks at Vodephone are not going to be heartbroken at our circulation of their commercial message. They no doubt think this video has gone "viral" -- It didn't, god forbid. But a bunch of us did decide, for our own reasons, to keep it in constant and varied circulation.

One of the ways that Vodephone has found to extend our engagement with this video has been to create a "Making Of" segment which is in many ways just as fascinating as the original. That's the great thing about technological virtuosity -- we can admire it even when the magician invites us behind the red velvet curtain and shows us how he does his tricks. I am reminded of what the French media theorists Christian Metz wrote about "trucage" or what we Americans call "special effects." That they are "artifaces" that are not so much hidden as proclaimed. When we all watch Avatar in a few weeks, we are not going to simply be immersed into the world of the film; we are going to stand back and gasp at the spectacular breakthroughs in special effects which have been publicized around the making of the film. And this fascination with how they did it will in no way diminish, may in fact increase the emotional impact of what we are seeing.

This being the age of participatory culture and interactive media, Vodephone takes this a step further on the webpage they've constructed around this advertisement, which allows us to take the basic building blocks behind this spot and remix them towards our own ends. This thus completes the process of technological amazement -- allowing us to experience first hand the delights of expressing ourselves through ringtones.

When I first saw the Vodephone spot, though, I was reminded of a much earlier moment of technological virtuosity and the vaudeville aesthetic. Take a look and you will see why.

Ernie Kovacs was a spectacular visual comedian who worked in the early days of American television. Kovacs exploited for comic effect our heightened awareness of the visual properties of this new and emerging medium. Television was not yet ambient; we had not yet started to take the visuals (which, after all, are what separated television from radio) for granted. Kovacs counts on us not being able to take our eyes off the screen.

So, why do both of these artists draw upon Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1880 composition, 1812 Overture, as the basis for their spectacular performance. I suspect there are many reasons, starting with the fact that the 1812 Overture embodies the high art status we ascribe to classical music. New media seeking to gain recognition often signal their cultural ambitions by drawing on works which we already respect from older media traditions. They do Shakespeare or Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Second, these works at the same time poke fun at the cultural hierarchies they seek to transcend -- there's something really profoundly silly about the ways they are performing or illustrating the 1812 Overture in these segment. And finally, at least in the case of the Vodephone ad, they respect the complexity of this particular composition as a way of demonstrating their own mastery over the new technologies involved. The Vodephone ad would not be nearly as absorbing or engaging if the phones were playing Chopsticks or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

So, if you want to learn more about our concept of spreadable media, check out the webinar which I will be conducting with Sam Ford and Joshua Green on Friday 6 November (from 12-1 pm EST). Registration is free!

Moving from "Sticky" to "Spreadable": The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality

Based on years of researching how and why people spread news, popular culture, and marketing content online through the Convergence Culture Consortium for the past several years , our speakers are currently working on a book entitled Spreadable Media. This Webinar will look at what "spreadable media" means, why the concept of "stickiness" is inadequate for measuring success for brands and content producers online and ultimately why marketers and producers should spend more time creating "spreadable material" for audiences than trying to perfect "viral marketing." In this one-hour session, the speakers will share the ideas and strategy behind "spreadable media" and a variety of examples of best--and worst--practices online for both B2B and B2C campaigns.

This panel will address:

-- The concept of "stickiness" and why it cannot solely be used as a way to measure success online;

-- How and why viral marketing does not accurately describe how content spreads online;

-- Why a "broadcast mentality" does not work in a social media space;

-- The strategy companies should undertake when creating material for audiences to potentially spread online;

-- Companies that have learned difficult lessons and/or gotten the idea of "spreadable media" right;

-- Trends in popular culture/entertainment one which brands should keep a close eye;

-- How "spreadable media" might apply to B2B audiences.

Cordwainer Smith Imagined Convergence Culture (and Viral Media) in 1964

Science fiction writers do not so much invent the future as they inform it. I mean inform here in two ways - first, they give us the information we need to process issues in the present moment and to therefore anticipate some likely consequences of the choices we face as a society and second, having given a vivid picture of a possible future, they inspire scientists, policy makers, and others to reshape reality to conform to their depiction.

How many contemporary technological developments emerged from designers whose imagination was incited by some science fiction novel or television series? Without Star Trek, would we have flip phones? Without Snow Crash would we have had Second Life?

I have been pondering this relationship between science fiction and reality a lot this week having recent taught some short stories by Cordwainer Smith in my transmedia entertainment and storytelling class at USC.

If you just mumbled, "Cordwainer who?," you are not alone. Smith's works are rarely cited today. Smith wrote short stories rather than novels, scattered them across a range of publications, and published many of them after his death. Even hardcore science fiction fans may know him only for his first published story, "Scanners Live in Vane," which is included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology which is often deployed in science fiction classes. The New England Science Fiction Association collected and republished his stories several years ago as The Rediscovery of Man. Maybe it's time for the rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith.

When I first read "Scanners Live in Vain" some years ago, I was stunned. The writing is challenging and vaguely modernist, especially when compared to the hard edged realism and classicism of his 1950s era contemporaries like Robert Heinlein or Issac Asimov. He thrusts you into the world of the story without much preliminaries; he relished the strange and unfamiliar elements which are dealt with it ways that are at once defamiliarizing (in that they break from our world) and familiarizing (in that they treat these strange elements as if they were perfectly normal, even banal.) In many ways, the story's focus on the fusion of man and machine, which gets depicted with ambivalence rather than dread, helped pave the way for similar representations in the early cyberpunk movement.

As I've read more of his work, I've become fascinated with the ways that he prefigured science fictions fascination with media change - digital media primarily in the case of the Cyberpunks but something very close to what I call Convergence Culture in the case of Cordwainer Smith. Consider, for example, this passage from "The Dead Woman of Clown Town" which seems to anticipate the concept of viral media:

"A bad idea can spread like a mutated germ. If it is at all interesting, it can leap from one mind to another halfway across the universe before it has a stop put to it. Look at the ruinous fads and foolish fashions which have nuisanced mankind even in the ages of the highest orderliness."

Here, Smith tries to capture the perspective of a totalitarian regime which seeks to manipulate the flow of information in order to prevent a shift in public sentiment towards the underpeople, a permanent underculture which exists of half-human/half-animals. Smith warns after a particularly empassioned speech on human rights of the need to reframe what is being said lest it undermine the established order:

"The dog-girl was making points which had some verbal validity. If they were left in the form of mere words without proper context, they might affect heedless or impressionable minds."

Published in 1964, "Dead Woman of Clown Town," can be easily read as an allegory for the civil disobedience and nonviolent protest which shaped not only the then-contemporary protests of Martin Luther King, but also a range of protest movements across Asia during the struggle against colonialism. In the story, the human, Elaine, and the dog-girl, D'Joan, lead an army of underpeople on a march which brings them into the face of armed guards, who obligingly shoot them down or in D'Joan's case, torches her alive, forcing them to confront the brutal consequences of their own discriminatory policies.

Smith's depiction is particularly concerned with the psychological experience of subordination and oppression, using for example the figure of C'Mell, the cat-woman and professional "girly-girl" (escort) in "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" to deal with the ways that the enslaved must develop much greater knowledge of the dominant group than the other way around:

"She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the women by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study. She was a girl by profession; she was human by assimilation; she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature....Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did."

Key scenes occur at the moment when the human characters are forced to experience something of the subjective experience of the lower castes, as occurs when Elaine gets linked to D'Joan through telepathy, which is understood here as a kind of radicalization process, a shift in sympathy not unlike that experienced by many white liberals in the Civil Rights era who were motivated by the burning of black churches and the slaughter of black children to rethink a lifetime of segregationist practice.

Smith's interest in the concept of information war-fare and media as a resource for political transformation can be explained by his own fascinating life story. Here's some of the details as presented by Wikipedia:

Cordwainer Smith - pronounced CORDwainer[1] - was the pseudonym used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913-August 6, 1966) for his science fiction works. Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare...

Linebarger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was Paul M. W. Linebarger, a lawyer and political activist with close ties to the leaders of the Chinese revolution of 1911. As a result of those connections, Linebarger's godfather was Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of Chinese nationalism. As a child, Linebarger was blinded in his right eye; the vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection. When he later pursued his father's interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. His father moved his family to France and then Germany while Sun Yat-sen was struggling against contentious warlords in China. As a result, Linebarger was familiar with six languages by adulthood.

At the age of 23, he received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs. While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, he began serving as a second lieutenant of the United States Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the Army's first psychological warfare section. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major....

In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies. He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), which is regarded by many in the field as a classic text. He eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves. He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War. While he was known to call himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in Vietnam, but is known to have done undocumented work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and was called upon to advise then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

In short, Smith was the consummate political insider both to global politics and to the emergence of what Eisenhower called "the military-industry complex." He brought to science fiction complex theories of communication, psychology, and political change and at the same time, grafted them onto story traditions he had absorbed from classical Chinese literature and he had learned through his global travels. Underlying his almost surreal stories, then, is a deeper understanding of the nature of power and how governments seek to shape the subjective experience of their populations.

Smith's relevance for a transmedia class is two-fold. First, Smith was a consummate world builder. All of his 32 short stories and his novel, Norstrilia, take place within a single timeline which spans more than 16000 years of future history and play out across the interconnected history of many different worlds. He depicts a future which emerges from Earth's past as our cultural traditions are revived, reproduced, forgotten, and reperformed until they have lost much of their meaning, becoming mere formalisms. In this world, he shows an acute understanding of how cultural change impacts the ways we treat each other and how we structure labor and governance. Here, for example, is a vivid passage from "The Story of Lost C'Mell," another key work in his depiction of the undermen:

"Ever since mankind had gone through the Rediscovery of Man, bringing back governments, money, newspapers, national languages, sickness and occassional death, there had been the problem of the underpeople -- people who were not human but merely humanly shaped from the stock of Earth animals. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, love and die; but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as 'homunculi' and gave them a legal status close to animals or robots. Real people from off-world were always called 'hominads.' Most of the underpeople did their jobs and accepted their half-slave status without question.... Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the lords of the Instrumentality had decreed that underpeople -- derived from animal stock -- should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their posessions and the education of their children. If they became bankrupt, they went to the poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas. It was evident that humanity, having settled all of its own basic problems, was not quite ready to let Earth animals, no matter how much they might be changed, assume a full equality with man."

As this opening passage suggests, Smith treats his readers not as outsiders to whom such worlds must be explained but rather as insiders for whom these worlds are already well known. Consider the opening paragraph of "Dead Woman" which refers not only to some of Smith's other tales but also seeks to debunk existing representations of the events depicted in (yet fabricated for) his story:

"You already know the end -- the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'Mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'Joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story -- the one behind D'Joan. This story is sometimes mentioned, as the matter of the 'nameless witch,' which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was 'Elaine,' an ancient and forbidden one."

Throughout the story, Smith offers many passages which refer outward from the current narration to discuss how the same story was told across many years, across many different media. Here are just a few examples:

"Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'Joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'Joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions."

"There are many famous painting of that scene. Most of the paintings show Elaine in rags with the distorted, suffering face of a witch. This is strictly unhistorical. She was wearing her everyday culottes, blouse and twin over-the-shoulder purses when she went in the other end of Clown Town. This was the usual dress on Fomalhaut III at that time...."

"On the actual stage the actors cannot do much with the scene of the interlude, where Joan was cooked in a single night from the size of a child five years old to the tallness of a miss fifteen or sixteen. The biological machine did work well, though at the risk of her life. It made her into a vital, robust yung person, without changing her mind at all. This is hard for any actress to portray. The storyboxes have the advantage. They can show the machine with all sorts of improvements -- flashing lights, bits of lightning, mysterious rays. Actually, it looked like a bathtub full of boiling brown jelly, completely covering Joan."

"This is the scene which we all remember, the first authentic picture tape of the entire incident."

"You all know about the trial, so there is no need to linger over it. There is another picture of San Shigonanda, the one from his conventional period, which shows it very plainly....This is all clear from the painting, and from the wonderful way that San Shigonanda has of forming them in informal ranks and letting the calm blue light of day shine down on their handsome, hopeless features. With the underpeople, the artist performs real wonders."

"And you have the real view-tapes, too, if you want to go to a museum. The reality is not as dramatic as the famous painting, but it has value of its own. The voice of Joan, dead these many centuries, is still strangely moving....The words of the trial, they too have survived. Many of them have became famous, all across the worlds."

"We know what the Lords Femtiosex and Limanono thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order and they were putting it on tape. The minds of men can live together only if the basic ideas are communicated. Nobody has, even now, found a way of recording telepathy directly into an instrument. We get pieces and snatches and wild jumbles, but we never get a satisfactory record of what one of the great ones was transmitting to another. The two male chiefs were trying to put on record all those things about the episode which would teahc careless people not to play with the lives of the underpeople. They were trying to make underpeople understand the rules and designs by virtue of which they had been transformed from animals into the highest servants of man. This would have been hard to do, given the bewildering events of the last few hours, even from one chief of the Instrumentality to another; for the general public, it was almost impossible."

Smith, thus, depicts a world where the most important stories flow across all available media franchises, get retold many times for many different audiences, with some details being encoded through cultural conventions and others distorted over time. Consider, for example, this description of a gesture which has become more cyptic as it has moved from real-world events to multiple media representations:

"The records show his appearance. He comes in at the right side of the scene, bows respectfully to the four Chiefs and lifts his right hand in the traditional sign for 'beg to interrupt,' an odd twist of the elevated hand which the actors had found it very difficult to copy when they tried to put the whole story of Joan and Elaine into a single drama. (In fact, he had no more idea that future ages would be studying his casual appearance than did the others. The whole episode was characterized by haste and precipitateness, in light of what we now know.)"

Smith's version, then, becomes not the point of origin for the story but rather a debunking of conventional versions.

Not only does he imagine the event as retold many times after they occur, Smith also depicts the events as predetermined because the figures have already become encrusted in mythology. A human intelligence embedded in a computer has run a range of simulations to try to determine how the underpeople can escape their brutal fate at the hands of the human, how they might avoid death. Out of all of the possibilities, she has discovered one which leads to the best possible outcome and she has sought to prepare her followers for that eventuality. Generations have named their children "D'Joan" and have rehearsed the particulars of their mythology so they can play the roles that are required of them. When Elaine, the witch, wonders into their warren by accident, she must be instructed in her expected role and actions, and must be continually reminded her function within the prescripted narrative whenever she seeks to exert free will. Like many of the other scenarios, this script results in the death of its key participants, yet it has the chance of forcing the issue upon the oppressors and forcing them to experience powerful emotions - the pangs of conscience and consciousness - which might lead ultimately to political change.

As we enter the climax of his story, Smith describes not only what happens but how it gets transmitted to subsequent generations, discussing what events were captured by cameras (and in some cases, from what angles) and describing which are preserved in archives, which have been subject to competing interpretations, and which have been restaged and commerated through paintings, video dramas, stage plays, songs, and prose. Such descriptions look forward to our own time when something isn't real until it has been transmitted through all available media channels:

"Fisi, in the pictures, stands back, his face sullen. In that particular frame of scenes, one can see some of the spectators going away. It was time for lunch and they had become hungry; they had no idea that they were going to miss the greatest atrocity in history, about which a thousand and more grand operas would be written."

Smith's writings, thus, anticipate our present transmedia moment and at the same time, offer a critical perspective on how stories flow across media. His own background as an expert on psychological warfare and as an adviser to the intelligence community allows him to anticipate how the spread of information can be manipulated by governments or shaped by dissent movements. In that sense, his references to alternative media presentation of his fictional events represents not simply a formal acknowlegement of the intertextual connections across all of his works but also as a critique of convergence, one written almost fifty years ago.

We might read Smith's fiction as a letter sent from his generation to ours. Too bad so few of us are reading his remarkable stories. Check them out.

To learn more about this remarkable writer, read Karen L. Helleckson's The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

He's BA-A-A-ACK!

My blog, begun at MIT some years ago, has now successfully relocated onto USC servers. And so I am now going to return to my normal blogging activities. As I do so, I wanted to use this first post to play catch up on a number of recent developments around projects that I am involved with, so today will feel like a series of announcements (many of which you already know if you are following me on Twitter).

New Media Literacies Conference

Project New Media Literacies is collaborating once again with the fine folks at Home Inc. to put together a conference, back at MIT, on new media literacy as a "21st century skill" on Oct. 24 2009. The key note speaker will be Alan November.

Here's his bio:

November is an international leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. He has helped schools, governments and industry leaders improve the quality of education through technology and was named one of the nation's fifteen most influential thinkers of the decade by Classroom Computer Learning Magazine. In 2001, he was listed as one of eight educators to provide leadership into the future by the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. In 2007 he was selected to speak at the Cisco Public Services Summit during the Nobel Prize Festivities in Stockholm, Sweden. His writing includes numerous articles and best-selling book, "Empowering Students with Technology". Alan was co-founder of the Stanford Institute for Educational Leadership Through Technology and is most proud of being selected as one of the original five national Christa McAuliffe Educators.

November will be speaking about "Digital Nation - Education in Transition to 21st Century Learning." Other participants will include Erin Reilly, the Research Director for Project New Media Literacies; Jenna McWilliams, formerly the curriculum development specialist on our team, now at Indiana University's Learning Sciences Program; Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp; Home Inc's Alan Michel; Wheelock College's Susan Owusu and Bill Densmore from the Media Giraffe Project. I wish I was going to be there, since I've very much enjoyed participating in other events in this series, but I am committed elsewhere over those dates. Here's where you can go to register.

***************

Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference

The Convergence Culture Consortium is really kicking into high gear as it is getting ready for our Fourth Futures of Entertainment Conference, which is going to be held at MIT on November 20-21 2009. I am going to be the opening speaker of the first day which centers on issues of transmedia entertainment. Speakers already booked include:

* DAVID BAUSOLA - Co-founder of Ag8

* NANCY BAYM- University of Kansas

* BRIAN CLARK - Partner and CEO, GMD Studios

* STEPEHN DUNCOMBE - NYU

* DAN GOLDMAN - Illustrator of Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing [US] and Weidenfeld & Nicolson [UK])

* NOESSA HIGA - Visionaire Media

* JENNIFER HOLT - UC Santa Barbara

* VICTORIA JAYE - Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC

* HENRY JENKINS-USC

* DEREK JOHNSON - University of North Texas

* BRIAN LARKIN - Milbank Barnard College

* JUYOUNG LEE - Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, ACE Metrix

* TRAPPER MARKELZ- VP Products, GamerDNA

* JASON MITTELL- Middlebury College

* AVNER RONEN - CEO & Co-founder, Boxee

* FRANK ROSE - Contributing Editor,Wired

* LORRAINE SAMMY - Racebending

* ANDREW SLACK - The Harry Potter Alliance

* DAVID SPITZ -Director of Business Development, WPP

* LOUISA STEIN - San Diego State University

* JORDAN WEISMAN - CEO and Founder, Smith & Tinker

* MARK ZAGORSKI- Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate Media

I am particularly excited about moderating a session on Transmedia Activism, which grows out of some current work I am doing on the ways we might bridge between participatory culture and public/civic participation. I hope to write more about this session and its underlying framework as we get closer to the event.

If you have come to our events in the past, you know how exciting Futures of Entertainment can be. If you have not, all of our previous sessions are now available as webcasts. Here, for example, is a conversation I had at FOE 3 with Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks.

We see the conference as a vital meeting ground between people working in the media industry and academics, both of whom are doing cutting edge thinking about current trends impacting the realms of entertainment. So, register now and help us spread the word.

*************

Diversifying Participation

I am also working with the MacArthur Foundation to help organize the "Diversifying Participation" conference which will be held Feb. 18-20 2010 at the University of California, San Diego. We've just announced our keynote speakers, both of whom will be well known to regular readers of this blog -- Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics), author of Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, and S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas-Austin), author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. You can read my interview with Livingstone here and my interview with Watkins here. The conference is accepting proposals for panels (in all kinds of formats) through October 30 here.

******

GAMBIT "Game of the Week"

GAMBIT, the MIT-Singapore Games Lab, is continuing to run a series of blog posts, showcasing the games which were produced during their summer program this summer. Each week, they showcase one game, including artwork, design materials, and comments from team members. If you have not had a chance to play this year's titles, you really should check them out. Several of them have already started to generate buzz across the games blogosphere and like previous titles, are certain to be competitive where-ever independent games are being shown. I had a chance to sit down with the Gambit team during a recent visit back to MIT and was as always impressed by their output, which is consistently breaking the mold in terms of the design of play mechanics, visuals, and sound. Their mandate is to stretch the limits of our understanding of what games can do. Each game serves a larger research question, but Philip Tan, the Lab's director, makes sure that the most important thing created on his watch is FUN!

***********

Understanding Superheroes

I will be speaking this coming Saturday (Oct. 24) at the University of Oregon as part of a conference and art exhibition they have organized around "Understanding Superheroes." It sounds funny to say that I am keynoting a superheroes conference -- like Aquaman couldn't make it! My topic will be "'Man Without Fear': David Mack and the Formal Limits of the Superhero Comic." While I have been writing and speaking about comics for a while, this will be the first time I've really dug deep into the formal conventions of superhero comics. My primary focus will be, as the title suggests, the work which Mack has done within the mainstream continuity of Marvel's Daredevil Franchise though more generally I will be exploring what happens when experimental and mainstream comics intersect each other. Other speakers at the conference include creative artists such as Danny Fingeroth, Kurt Busiek, Matt Fraction, and Gail Simone as well as scholars and critics such as Douglas Wolk, Charles Hatfield, Corey Creekmur, Jonathon Grey, and Matt Yockey. The conference was organized and the exhibit curated by Ben Saunders. I will be sharing my impressions of this event on my blog next week.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Three)

This is the third and final segment of my response to David Bordwell's thoughtful analysis of some of the pitfalls and challenges associated with transmedia storytelling. Thanks to David for sparking what has been a fascinating exchange, one which has forced me to sharpen my thinking about certain key issues that I am working through for my class.

Bordwell writes:

Another drawback to shifting a story among platforms: art works gain strength by having firm boundaries. A movie's opening deserves to be treated as a distinct portal, a privileged point of access, a punctual moment at which we can take a breath and plunge into the story world. Likewise, the closing ought to be palpable, even if it's a diminuendo or an unresolved chord. The special thrill of beginning and ending can be vitiated if we come to see the first shots as just continuations of the webisode, and closing images as something to be stitched to more stuff unfolding online. There's a reason that pictures have frames.

Again, I'd argue that Bordwell is describing a specific kind of filmmaking, one that may gain very little from transmedia expansion. Yet, as I said earlier, the aesthetic properties of texts that lend themselves to transmedia experience are world-building (as we've been discussing) and seriality. By definition, a serial text is not self-contained. It resolves one chapter and immediately plants the book that will draw us into the next. It is, as Angela Ndalianis stresses in Neo-Baroque, a work which pushes beyond its frame. Now, to be clear, the cliffhangers which have shaped many classic serial forms do depend on an understanding of where one text stops and another begins. But we can see this as an art of chunking rather than framing. They know how to break the story down into meaningful chunks which are compelling emotionally within themselves but which gain greater urgency when read in relation to the other installments of the story. We still have a lot to learn about how to create meaningful chunks and link them together across media platforms. As such, I am watching more and more vintage serials to see how they balance between self-containment and openness.

This may be why transmedia seems so far to work best in relation to television, which is increasingly relying on seriality (and back story) to create a particular kind of aesthetic experience, and where it is applied to film, it seems to work best for franchises which will have a series of increasingly preplanned sequels. No one would take away the aesthetic pleasures of closure and containment, but there are also aesthetic pleasures in seriality, openness, and especially, for me, a pleasure in suddenly understanding how a bit of information consumed in one medium fits into the puzzle being laid out for us in a totally different platform.

So far, transmedia texts have been most compelling while they are mid-process and have tended to disappoint when they reached their conclusion. This phenomenon may tell us something about the degree to which they rely on open-ended and serialized structures rather than the kinds of closure which is the pleasure of a different kind of fiction. The anxious fan wants to know that the producers of Lost isn't making it up as they go along, though of course, on one level, every storyteller is making it up as they go along. The hope though is for a certain level of integrity and continuity between the pieces which allows us to find the coherent whole from which the many parts must have once broken adrift.

For me, though, I am also intrigued by the moment when the story is rich with possibilities, when fan speculations span out in many different directions, and when each of us has taken the parts as resources for constructing our own fictional world. I wrote about this almost 20 years ago in response to Twin Peaks: I was much more interested in the hundreds of complex theories about who killed Laura Palmer that invested fans constructed individually and collectively than I was in the official version which David Lynch and Mark Frost were forced to add under pressure from the networks.

Bordwell writes:

In between opening and closing, the order in which we get story information is crucial to our experience of the story world. Suspense, curiosity, surprise, and concern for characters--all are created by the sequencing of story action programmed into the movie. It's significant, I think, that proponents of hardcore multiplatform storytelling don't tend to describe the ups and downs of that experience across the narrative. The meanderings of multimedia browsing can't be described with the confidence we can ascribe to a film's developing organization. Facing multiple points of access, no two consumers are likely to encounter story information in the same order. If I start a novel at chapter one, and you start it at chapter ten, we simply haven't experienced the art work the same way.

Transmedia storytellers are becoming increasingly skilled at deciding when extensions should be rolled out in relation to the franchise's "mother ship." Some plot developments do require careful sequencing. There's a pleasure to be had in watching Robert Rodriquez's Shorts in making fun of a schoolboy who claims that sharks ate his homework in an early scene and then looping back in time to discover that he is telling the truth. Even though the plot of the film shifts around the story information so we see events out of sequence, there is still a larger rationale determining why we experience these events in a particular order.

The same may be said for the difference between materials released to the web before we encounter the film or television series, which often are designed to help us manage the complexity of an unfamiliar world or an ensemble-centered narrative, and those which come later in the unfolding of the franchise. Enter the Matrix comes at a particular juncture in the film series, while the multiplayer game based on The Matrix comes only after the film series was completed and the Wachowskis wanted to cede greater creative control back to the consumers to take the world in new directions. The Battlestar Galactica webisodes , "Face of the Enemy," which came on the eve of the final season went back in time to refocus us on the character of Felix Gaeta, who had been a secondary figure for most of the run, showing us the events from his point of view and revealing previously unknown aspects of his motivation, just in time to set us up for the character to play a much more central role in the series's final year. This is why transmedia "chunks" often tell us explicitly where they fit into the larger time line and why many of us prefer to read those chunks within a narrative sequence.

So, we may simply be over-stating the degree to which the dispersal of information is open-ended. Certainly, once the information moves beyond the borders of a single text, there's no control over what order the spectator encounters it. And it may not matter in which order we encounter certain aspects of the world building. But it may still be the case that the release and roll out of transmedia content is carefully timed and structured to construct a preferred reading sequence. Geoff Long has called for navigational tools that help viewers to find relevant content and to identify at what point it fits into the unfolding of the larger transmedia story. Given this, I believe that it would be possible to do a formalist reading of a transmedia narrative which mapped the functions of different bits of information and for me, that would go beyond simply a list of joints and citations. It would simply be a task of enormous complexity. Much as Roland Barthes could apply his methods to only a small segment of a Balzac story, Geoff Long has been able to apply the narrative analysis to only a short segment of Jim Henson's transmedia texts.

Bordwell writes:

Gap-filling isn't the only rationale for spreading the story across platforms, of course. Parallel worlds can be built, secondary characters can be promoted, the story can be presented through a minor character's eyes. If these ancillary stories become not parasitic but symbiotic, we expect them to engage us on their own terms, and this requires creativity of an extraordinarily high order.

Well, yes, and these are the functions of transmedia extensions which interest me the most -- and for that matter, the ones which spark the most excitement in the industry types who seem to grasp the concepts the best. It isn't simply about the narrative; it isn't simply about filling in gaps in the plot. "Gap-filling" seems to be a special case: the parlor trick that The Matrix franchises plays with the delivery of information from the doomed Osyrus which unfolds across three different media platforms. More often, transmedia is about back story which shifts our identifications and investments in characters and thus helps us to rewatch the scenes again with different emotional resonance. More often, it is about picking up on a detail seeded in the original film and using it as a point of entry into a different story or a portal into exploring another aspect of the world. And yes, to do this well is creativity of an extraordinarily high order, which is why most transmedia extensions disappoint; they fail to achieve their full potential. Transmedia is appealing to artists of a certain ambition who nevertheless want to work on popular genre entertainment rather than developing avant garde movies or art films. It appeals to intellectually engaged viewers who are more at home with popular culture than with gallery installations.

I'm curious to hear what other transmedia critics and creators are thinking about this exchange.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Two)

Today, I continue to share my responses to David Bordwell's recent blog post on transmedia storytelling. It is worth stressing that these are still early days in the evolution of transmedia narrative practices and even earlier in terms of our theoretical understanding of those practices. Exchanges like this one have the potential to help both critics and practitioners think more deeply about these developments. Every time I step in front of my transmedia class at USC, I feel like I am playing without a net and that's what makes the classroom experience so exciting. We are really thinking through a relatively new phenomenon together. And each set of questions which get posed will push all of us to dig a little deeper. Bordwell wrote:

For one thing, most Hollywood and indie films aren't particularly good. Perhaps it's best to let most storyworlds molder away. Does every horror movie need a zigzag trail of web pages? Do you want a diary of Daredevil's down time? Do you want to look at the Flickr page of the family in Little Miss Sunshine? Do you want to receive Tweets from Juno? Pursued to the max, transmedia storytelling could be as alternately dull and maddening as your own life.

There aren't that many films/franchises that generate profoundly devoted fans on a large scale: The Matrix, Twilight, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, maybe The Prisoner. These items are a tiny portion of the total number of films and TV series produced. It's hard to imagine an ordinary feature, let alone an independent film, being able to motivate people to track down all these tributary narratives. There could be a lot of expensive flops if people tried to promote such things.

Well, actually, my bet is that Diablo Cody's penchant for snarky one-liners might have been better served if Juno had unfolded via Twitter rather than on the screen, there are many excellent comic book stories which center around the "downtime" of superheroes and thus focus on their alter egos, but I catch David's drift. I don't think that every fictional work should become a transmedia franchise, though I think the approach lends itself to a broader array of genres than simply the fantasy and science fiction franchises that have been its primary home to date.

For me, the core aesthetic impulses behind good transmedia works are world building and seriality. For this reason, the transmedia approach enhances certain kinds of works that have been udged harshly by traditional aesthetic criteria because they are less concentrated on plot or even character than more classically constructed narratives. It's long been a charge directed against science fiction works that they are more interested in mapping complex environments than in telling compelling stories. Many of my favorite SF novels -- Snow Crash for example -- break down into near incoherence by the end, yet they offer us richly realized worlds which I would love to be able to explore in greater detail than any one narrative allows. I might make the same argument about Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York: Marty got so invested in the historical background of his film that it sometimes swamps his characters and as a history buff, I kept wanting to stop the film and chase background figures down the street so that I could learn more about who they are and what they are doing. In some scenes, I was more interested in the extras than the protagonists.

I recently read an outstanding dissertation written by a recent UW-Madison graduate, Derick Johnson, who talks about "overdesign" as a principle driving contemporary media franchises: his example is Battlestar Galactica, which he suggests overflows with throwaway details which convince us that the depicted vents are unfolding in a world as rich and complex as our own. Speaking at last year's 5D event, I argued that the art director takes on new importance in transmedia franchises, becoming almost as central as the screenwriter or the director, in terms of adding to our understanding of the fictional world. We could go back to Syd Mead's contributions to Bladerunner for an example where much of our appreciation of the film stems from a complex and well considered rendering of a plausible future society. So, we can see many of the extensions around transmedia narratives as examples of this "overdesign," adding greater "texture" (to use a concept Johnson draws from Ron Moore) to our over-all experience. Such extensions may or may not add something key to the unfolding of the narrative, but they nevertheless impact our overall aesthetic experience.

All of this is to say that not every work should become transmedia, but we may not yet know enough to prejudge which works can be meaningfully enhanced through such an approach.

Bordwell writes:

film viewing is already an active, participatory experience. It requires attention, a degree of concentration, memory, anticipation, and a host of story-understanding skills. Even the simplest story gears up our minds. We may not notice this happening because our skills are so well-practiced; but skills they are. More complicated stories demand that we play a sort of mental game with the film. Trying to guess Hitchcock or Buñuel's next twist can engross you deeply. And the very genre of puzzle films trades on brain strain, demanding that the film be watched many times (buy the DVD) for its narrational stratagems to be exposed.

Here, I can only agree. Indeed, Bordwell's teaching shaped my own investment in the cognitive and social/cultural activities of film consumers, giving me a theoretical vocabulary to make sense of some of the things I'd experienced in and through fandom. I don't buy the "Lean back"/"Sit Forward" distinction offered by many transmedia advocates. That said, I do think that there is an increased awareness of audience activity driving the push towards transmedia storytelling.

Bordwell and others in the formalist tradition make a distinction between story and plot. The plot of the film is the sequence in which we encounter specific bits of information, while the story of the film is our mental construct which rearranges that information into a coherent sequence. So, a mystery may begin with the discovery of the body and work backwards (to show us the events which motivated the death) and forward (to show us how the detective put together the clues.) If we take this distinction between the sequencing and structuring of information, transmedia storytelling simply expands the scope of the process, allowing us to continue to collect and assemble clues once the specific unfolding of the film is completed.

Yet, in a networked culture, this ongoing process of information gathering, hypothesis testing, and interpetation/evaluation takes on a more profoundly social dimension. It is no longer something that occurs in a single mind during the two hours the film is unfolding; it is something which we do together, pooling resources, and comparing notes. Mimi Ito describes this as the "hypersocial" logic underlying Japanese media mix. Clearly this process is most vividly suggested by the Alternate Reality Game, where the information scavenger hunt becomes the driving force of the entertainment experience, but we can understand the dispersion of videos about the world of District 9 as also setting a similar process in motion.

Bordwell writes:

No narrative is absolutely complete; the whole of any tale is never told. At the least, some intervals of time go missing, characters drift in and out of our ken, and things happen offscreen. Henry Jenkins suggests that gaps in the core text can be filled by the ancillary texts generated by fan fiction or the creators. But many films thrive by virtue of their gaps. In Psycho, just when did Marion decide to steal the bank's money? There are the open endings, which leave the story action suspended. There are the uncertainties about motivation.....Many art works exploit that impulse by letting us play with alternative hypotheses about causes and outcomes. We don't need the creators to close those hypotheses down.

Geoff Long, a CMS graduate, has long advocated the use of the concept of "negative capability" to understand how gaps in the fiction incite certain forms of aesthetically pleasing speculations and anticipations. There is of course a complex dance between gaps and excesses where we are talking about narrative information. Johnson's "overdesign" may seem to provide "too much information" about the story world, yet for every new bit of information given, there are new spaces for speculation opened. We become like nagging five year olds who follow every explanation with a new question.

That said, most good transmedia artists know that there are certain gaps which should not be filled if they want to maintain interest in the series as a whole. There are certainly reasons to create ambiguities and uncertanties. We may offer more clues through other media, but we certainly don't want to destroy the mystery which makes such characters and worlds compelling in the first place. Fans resent the addition of information simply to close down avenues for speculation -- take, for example, the closing chapter of the last Harry Potter novel which amounted to J.K. Rowling spraying her territory telling us who married who and what they named their children even though most of that information had limited narrative impact and simply felt like she was trying to foreclose certain strands of fan expansion. In some cases, authors are better off allowing fans to create their own narratives, since the community will generate multiple explanations, much as critics will offer multiple accounts of what motivates Hamlet or Travis Bickle to do what they do.

Bordwell writes:

Storytelling is crucially all about control. It sometimes obliges the viewer to take adventures she could not imagine. Storytelling is artistic tyranny, and not always benevolent.

To me, the key word here is "sometimes." Bordwell is describing a particular kind of storytelling. It's no accident that critics of transmedia and interactivity almost always fall back on Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate their point. Hitchcock's works are certainly about control, shaping not only the sequencing of events and unfolding of information, but also playing around with the hierarchy of knowledge between the characters and the shaping of the point of view shots through which we see each moment of the film. Hitchcock famously slept on the set because he had thought all of this through before the cameras roll. So, yes, let's give Bordwell Hitchcock.

But, then give me Tim Burton, whose films are often sprawling messes, because he is so much more interested in art direction and world building than storytelling. I have limited interest in the plot of his version of Planet of the Apes, say, but I never cease to be amazed at the complex thinking which went into every aspect of the Ape cultures -- a classic example of Johnson's "overdesign" and "textures" in action. The human characters amount to cursers we deploy to navigate the fictional space and in that case, I would be quite happy to be free to explore this world on my own, digging deeper into details that don't happen to be required for the unfolding of a particular story but which deepen my experience of this imaginary culture. We can call Tim Burton a bad filmmaker because he doesn't need to exert this kind of "tryanical control" over the unfolding of information, but then how do you explain the pleasurable anticipation I have for his version of Alice in Wonderland, even though I know he will once again disappoint me as a storyteller.

So maybe Planet of the Apes is not a film I would go to the mat for. But if we shift media, I would argue that works like War and Peace or Moby-Dick or Dante's Inferno are much more invested in world-building than story-telling and that their authors seemed content to stop their novels dead in their tracks for pages on end as we wander through their fictionalized geography, trying to map its contours or understand the connections between scattered events. In both cases, what frustrates high school students who want them to get on with their stories is what has made them of lasting interest to critics who want to better understand the realms they are depicting. (It's no accident, I think, that some enterprising producer out there is trying to adopt the Divine Comedy into a transmedia franchise. Surely, that was Dante's plan all along.)

Clearly the author always exerts a certain degree of control over the unfolding of story information, but there are some authors who seek to create a more open text and others who seek to close down varying interpretations. I would say that so far transmedia storytelling has appealed to storytellers who want to open up greater freedom of interpretation rather than those who want to totally shape the reception of their work.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part One)

David Bordwell, my graduate school mentor and one of the leading figures in academic film studies, joined the conversation about transmedia storytelling the other week with a typically thoughtful and engaging entry that explored the strengths and limits of transmedia as an expansion of the cinematic experience. Personally, I read Bordwell's analysis as a friendly amendment and generous "shout out" to the work I've been doing on this topic, not to mention a timely one since it arrived on the eve of the start of my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at USC. His greatest contribution here is to raise a series of constructive objections and challenging questions any filmmaker would need to think through before moving their film -- mainstream or independent -- in a transmedia direction. To keep the conversation on these topics flowing, I thought I would respond to some of Bordwell's arguments. Bordwell writes:

Transmedia storytelling is very, very old. The Bible, the Homeric epics, the Bhagvad-gita, and many other classic stories have been rendered in plays and the visual arts across centuries. There are paintings portraying episodes in mythology and Shakespeare plays. More recently, film, radio, and television have created their own versions of literary or dramatic or operatic works. The whole area of what we now call adaptation is a matter of stories passed among media....

What makes this traditional idea sexy? ... Some transmedia narratives create a more complex overall experience than that provided by any text alone. This can be accomplished by spreading characters and plot twists among the different texts. If you haven't tracked the story world on different platforms, you have an imperfect grasp of it.

I can follow Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories well without seeing The Seven Percent Solution or The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. These pastiches/continuations are clearly side excursions, enjoyable or not in themselves and perhaps illuminating some aspects of the original tales. But according to Henry, we can't appreciate the Matrix trilogy unless we understand that key story events have taken place in the videogame, the comic books, and the short films gathered in The Animatrix.

I would certainly agree with Bordwell that transmedia storytelling does not begin with The Matrix. When Jeff Gomez (Starlight Runner) spoke to my students last week, he repeatedly used the phrase, "mythology," to describe the structure of transmedia narratives and others adopt a long-standing industry term, "Story Bible," to describe the documentation that organizes the continuity. Both metaphors pay tribute to earlier forms of branching or encyclopedic narrative. In Gomez's case, we might trace the concept of "mythology" backwards from the D&D games he played as a young man into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien who clearly conceived of Lord of the Rings as modeled on structures found in folklore and mythology. I'd also argue that C.S. Lewis's writings on stories contain a lot of great insights onto the value of telling details in fleshing out fictional worlds, suggesting that modern transmedia fans might have enjoyed a rich exchange if they were able to sit down in the faculty room at Oxford in the early part of the last century.

If I was having an imaginary conversation about the origins of this concept, I'd also want to include L. Frank Baum, who unfolded the world of Oz across a range of media platforms. What we now might read as a series of novels that fleshed out the Land of Oz began life as short films produced by Baum's studios, Broadway musicals, and comic strips. (See the recent republished edition of The Marvelous Land of Oz which collects the comic strip elaborations of his "mythology.") Indeed, you could argue that the shifts across media give the book series a kind of wacky incoherence, involving radical shifts in tone or theme, inconsistent conceptions of characters, and so forth.

I might also want to invite Cordwainer Smith, a science fiction writer who I've long been convinced was a time traveller, since his works prefigure many of the key themes and motifs of cyberpunk. Smith developed a complex and interlocking "mythology" which links together dozens of short stories published across a range of different magazines, and he specifically depicted many of his stories as "versions" or "installments" of a narrative the reader is already presumed to understand from encountering it across a range of previous media incarnations. Smith himself wrote only prose narratives, but in his fictions, he imagines explicitly how his tales would take shape on stage or television.

I would argue that the contemporary moment of transmedia has heightened our awareness of these earlier moments of authors unfolding stories across media, much as the rise of digital media more generally has led to a revitalization of the study of "old media when they were new" or the history of the book. We certainly want to understand what is new about our current push for transmedia entertainment, which to me has to do with the particular configuration of media systems and the push towards a more participatory culture.

Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, and Smith all sought to model contemporary fictions on the dispersed, episodic, yet interlocking structures of classic mythology -- creating a folklore for a post-folkloric society. And so, yes, there are going to be many resemblances to be drawn between transmedia stories, informed by these creative figures, and traditional religious or mythological works.

That said, many of Bordwell's examples above are simply adaptations of works produced in one medium for performance in another platform. And for many of us, a simple adaptation may be "transmedia" but it is not "transmedia storytelling" because it is simply re-presenting an existing story rather than expanding and annotating the fictional world. Of course, this distinction assumes a pretty straight forward adaptation. Every adaption makes additions -- minor or otherwise -- and reinterpretations of the original which in theory expands our understanding of the core story. These changes can be read as "infidelities" by purists but they may also represent what I describe in CC as "additive comprehension" -- they may significantly reshape our understanding of what's happening in the original work. Still, I think there is a distinction to be made between "extensions" to the core narrative or the fictional universe and adaptations which simply move content from one medium to another.

Bordwell continues:

The "immersive" ancillaries seem on the whole designed less to complete or complicate the film than to cement loyalty to the property, and even recruit fans to participate in marketing. It's enhanced synergy, upgraded brand loyalty.

For the most part Hollywood is thinking pragmatically, adopting Lucas' strategy of spinning off ancillaries in ways that respect the hardcore fans' appreciation of the esoterica in the property. Caranicas quotes Jeff Gomez, an entrepreneur in transmedia storytelling, saying that for most of his clients "we make sure the universe of the film maintains its integrity as it's expanded and implemented across multiple platforms." It would seem to be a strategy of expanding and enriching fan following, and consequent purchases.

As best I can tell, then, in borrowing this academic idea, the industry is taking the radical edge off. But is that surprising?

I've long ago given up trying to separate the creative and commercial motivations of transmedia entertainment, but then, all popular culture, no, all art depends on a complex balance between the two. From the start, most transmedia has been funded through the promotional budget rather than being understood as part of the creative costs of a particular franchise, even where it has been understood as performing key world building or story expanding functions. This was a central issue in the Writer's Strike a few years ago. Indeed, in so far as Hollywood has grasped transmedia, it has been in the context of a growing awareness of the urgency of creating "consumer engagement" that has been a buzz word across the entertainment industry in recent years. This is why the transmedia chapter in CC follows so closely after the discussion of "affective economics" and American Idol.

Yet, as I suggested in my recent discussion of District 9, one man's promotion is another man's exposition. Increasingly, transmedia extensions are released in advance of the launch of major franchises and do some of the basic work of orientating us to the characters, their world, and their goals, allowing the film or television series to plunge quickly into the core action. Yet, even at this level, they can do other things -- creating a more layered experience by introducing us to conflicting points of view on the action (as when we learn more about alien rights protesters through the District 9 promotional materials). Most of the people in the industry who take transmedia seriously are open about the fact that they are highjacking parts of the promotional budget to experiment with something that they think has the potential to refresh genre entertainment as well as reward viewer investments.

On another level, I'd say we are still at a moment of transition where transmedia practices are concern. Each new experiment -- even the failed ones -- teach us things about how to shape a compelling transmedia experience or what kinds of tools are needed to allow consumers to manage information as it is dispersed across multiple platforms. In some ways, the transmedia stories may need to be conservative on other levels -- adopting relatively familiar genre formulas -- so that the reader learns how to put together the pieces into a meaningful whole, much as the first jigsaw puzzles we are given as children take shape into familiar characters and do not have the challenges found in those designed for hardcore puzzlers.

(Two More Installments To Come)

From Cinema to Games: Some Fascinating Data

I received correspondence recently from a French games scholar, Alexis Blanchet, sharing some really fascinating data that has emerged from his research into the flow of intellectual property between the games and film industries. Since I am finding this data useful in teaching my transmedia class, I wanted to pass it along to others who are interested in understanding the convergence of these two key sectors of the entertainment industry. First, a little background on Blanchet. According to his blog: "I'm teaching and doing research in film studies in Paris (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense). Formerly associated with the French National Library, member of the Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines (Omnsh), I'm currently studying the cultural, economical and technical synergies between cinema and the video game."

Blanchet has identified 469 games based around film properties released between 1975 and 2008. His research encompassed more than 40 different platforms, but did not include mobile phones, which he notes results in some undercounting of games based on Bollywood films which tend to appear primarily on cell phone technologies. He also excluded browser based games, which he felt tended to be more oriented towards branding than entertainment experiences.

For most of the platforms, movie-connected games represented roughly 10 percent of their total output. But for some platforms, they represented a much larger percentage of the total product. They were 22 percent of the titles produced for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance (2001-2006), 20 percent of the Nintendo Wii (2006-2007) and 27 percent of the Nintendo Game Boy Color (1999-2003). He ascribes the centrality of tie-in games to handheld technologies to their greater targeting at younger consumers.

As this graph suggests, there has been a dramatic shift over time from games released only after the film has been successfully released towards simultaneous release. It is now taken for granted within a range of genres that there may be a market for the game even if the film itself does not do well. This situation is especially ripe for transmedia storytelling, since it lends itself well to a co-creation rather than licensing model, allowing for the game and the film to be developed side by side and for their release to be coordinated more fully than would have been the case a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood dominates the movie tie-in space representing 73 percent of the total, yet there are also European (8 percent) and Asian (4) movie tie-in games. And as already mentioned, the Asian numbers would have climbed considerably if mobile games were included in the count.

80 percent of the 134 international films which have made more than 100 million dollars upon release between 1991 and 2008 were adopted into games and of the top 20 money earners during this period, 95 percent were made into games: the holdouts were Titanic and The Dark Knight. And a Dark Knight game is finally on the way.

Franchises which extended across more than one film were especially strongly represented in his sample (and of course are also strongly represented in the list of top money earners during this period.) Of the 469 movie-based games, 231 of them were based on a franchise which had produced 2 or more films Almost all CGI animated films produced by Pixar, Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks Animation, 20th Century Fox Animation and others were adopted into games.

The most likely genres to make the transition from screen to games are: Action (236), Adventure (222), comedy (169) and Thriller (152). Those genres least likely to be made into games include documentary (2), Western (9), War (11), and Musical (23). It's worth noting that these also represent genres which are less likely to be made into films in the first place and that there are few non-film based games on the market in these genres.

Blanchet, a loyal follower of this blog, wanted to give Aca-Fan readers some exclusive content. He shared with me this graph which looks at film to game translations based around their original ratings.

For a closer look at some of the data, check out his website which includes an English language summary of his research as well as more extensive writings in French.

Blanchet should be congratulated and thanked for the hard work which went into this project. It's a real gift to our field.

District 9 (Part Two): Out of Afrofuturism?

Last time, I focused on District 9 as adopting and expanding some core strategies of transmedia branding, linking it to True Blood, Cloverfield, and the granddaddy of them all, The Blair Witch Project. I should note that about the same time that post went live, friend and Convergence Culture Consortium consultant Grant McCracken posted an interesting provocation about what's behind the success of this season of True Blood. I also should point you to the early "Save the Date" Announcement for this year's Futures of Entertainment conference which went live yesterday: an entire day of the event will be focused around issues of transmedia entertainment. This is an event you will not want to miss.

Today, I am coming at District 9 from a somewhat different angle, suggesting that it might best be understood as borrowing from and contributing to a larger tradition of Afrofuturist science fiction. You could understand the last installment without confronting any spoilers. This time I need to deal with the larger story structure of the film so there are spoilers galore. So read at your own risk if you have not seen District 9.

Over the past decade or so, there has been an emerging body of criticism and theory around the concept of "Afrofuturism." For a good introduction to this concept, check out the Afrofuturism website or watch John Akomfrah's 1996 documentary, Last Angel of History, which traces the emergence of Afrofuturist concepts through science fiction and popular music of a much earlier vintage. For other good discussions of Afrofuturism, check out the special issue of Social Text which Alondra Nelson edited in 2001. Here's a decent short definition of Afrofuturism, taken from the Afrofuturism home page:

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, music writers and cultural critics like Mark Dery, Greg Tate, Mark Sinker and Tricia Rose brought science fiction themes in the works of important and innovative cultural producers to our attention. They claimed that these works simultaneously referenced a past of abduction, displacement and alien-nation, and inspired technical and creative innovations in the work of such artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra. Science fiction was a recurring motif in the music of these artists, they argued, because it was an apt metaphor for black life and history.

Now a new generation of AfroFuturists are exploring these themes in a variety of genres: DJs Spooky and Singe in music and digital culture, Fatimah Tuggar and Keith Piper in the visual arts, Kodwo Eshun in music criticism, McLean Greaves in cyberspace, and Nalo Hopkinson in speculative fiction.

Are recurring futurist themes in these different genres just coincidences? Are they aesthetic a/effects of our millennial moment? Or have futurism and science fiction become the most effective way to talk about black experiences? How do these themes refer to the history of the African diaspora, yet imagine possible futures, futures that enable a broad range of cultural expression and an ever-widening definition of "blackness?"

Afrofuturism offers us a fascinating way of thinking about how the themes of science fiction emerge across a range of different arts, including music, rather than remaining in the space of literary, filmic, and television science fiction which have traditionally been dominated by us white guys. And as the images of science fiction circulated through those channels, they took on new shapes and meanings, becoming a set of metaphors for thinking about issues such as slavery and cultural oppression. In many cases, the alien became the vehicle through which oppressed people represent that have protected and enforced the values of the status qou. As these images took shape, they drew new artists to science fiction -- including a growing number of artists of color -- who brought these themes back into science fiction literature. A smaller number of films -- most famously Brother From Another Planet -- consciously contribute to Afro-Futurism.

It is an open question whether District 9 can be called, in the strictest sense, an "Afrofuturist" work. One way of understanding Afrofuturism would be race-neutral, refering to the deployment of a set of metaphors drawn from the realm of science fiction to understand the history and future of race relations (or conversely the borrowing of concepts from the history of race relations to envision how we would deal with other forms of difference and diversity). Many of the works most often cited as Afrofuturist texts fall into this category, including often-cited parallels to District 9 such as Alien Nation and the Planet of the Apes cycle.

Yet, in so far as the Afrofuturism movement has also functioned to call attention to the future of blackness or the responses of black artists to new tehcnology, then we might say that District 9 appropriates an Afrocentric movement and repackages it for a "mainstream" (i.e. majority-dominated) marketplace.

Clearly, as a South African born artist, Blomkamp has much to contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of apartheid and how its structures and ideologies might return should we confront alien visitors. Blomkamp has been explicit about the links between District 9 and his experiences growing up in South Africa:

It all had a huge impact on me: the white government and the paramilitary police -- the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment. Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go.Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.(LA Times)

District 9 is clearly intended to shock us out of our preconceptions about South Africa (and for that matter, about what kind of society might be central to a science fiction drama). Blumkamp wants to get past some of the defense mechanisms that have emerged through previous discussion of the conditions of segregation and poverty that have shaped the recent history of his country by telling that story through a different lens. Blomkamp displaces discussions of race onto aliens much as Art Spigelman's Maus displaced discussions of the death camps onto mice, cats, and pigs Blomkamp has every right to make such a film. Yet, it would have been nice if he had also connected his work to this larger conversation about the intersection of race and technology. Discussions of the film have rarely acknowledged the larger Afrofuturist tradition, though again Hollywood in general has rarely acknowledged its borrowings from literary science fiction.

District 9 seeks to construct a science fiction narrative which isn't about the global powers that dominate most work in the genre. It purposefully doesn't deal with what the Americans, the Brits, the Japanese, the Russians, or the Chinese are doing while aliens are visiting South Africa. True enough, Multinational United is a global organization but we see MNU embodied in the film through characters who come from South Africa. There's something really powerful about making the peripheral central, about dewesternizing science fiction. Again, a growing body of science fiction literature has made this move along time ago imagining the future from the perspectives of Eastern Europe, India, Brazil, African countries, the Arab World, Jamaica, and so forth. I picked up a recent catalog of science fiction books and was blown away by how many of them were set in the developing world as people seek ways to acknowledge a future which will not be simply an expansion of Americanism across the universe. For an excellent sampler that explores the relations between science fiction and postcolonialism, you might pick up a copy of Naola Hopkinson's So Long Been Dreaming:

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasyis an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color.

Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre "speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves."It's an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology.

The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the "third world."It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the "developing"nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into.

The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures.

Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhou

So far, film and television has lagged behind print science fiction in embracing this more global perspective -- reflecting a fear that western viewers won't be interested in a film set primarily in the developing world. So District 9 does important work in bringing this perspective to the screen.

Yet, this exclusion of first and second world powers in the film also poses questions about power relationships. It is hard to imagine, given what we learn in District 9 about the ways that the international arms industry wants to acquire access to the alien weapons, that the Americans and the other super-powers would simply step aside and let the Africans exert this level of self determination.

That said, we also have to note that District 9 falls into several of the traps critics have noted in other representations of the future of race relations in mainstream science fiction films. First, there is an over-arching logic of the film: we move from alienation from to identification with the "prawns" . The disturbing opening scenes really make them seem sub-human. The design of the aliens make them look like insects and crustaceans, neither of which typically engender compassionate or sympathetic responses. And their actions are beastial as they gnaw into meet or clammer through trash heaps. Only their eyes hint at something more soulful underneath their shells.

As the film goes forward, though, we are moved to critique the human population's treatment of the aliens. So far, so good. But in order for this to happen, two things have to occur: we have to stress the "inhuman" qualities of the human characters (through depictions of their baser motives) and we have to reveal the "human" characteristics of the nonhuman characters -- for example through the film's representation of the "Prawn" protagonist as a caring father and a loyal friend. In short, the emotional power of the film depends on a logic of assimilation: we can care about the aliens because they are more like us than we initially thought. And it depends on a logic of liberal guilt - we should care about the aliens because after all, we are treating them much as we've treated other underclasses in the past.

For me, the most disturbing moment in the film comes when Wikus, our central human character uses a flame thrower to exterminate a nest of alien eggs, laughing and bragging that they explode like "popcorn" when exposed to heat. Given what we learn later about their family attachments, it is hard to redeem the character who was responsible for this genocidal act. There is no moment of self recognition where Wikus fully acknowledges what he has done. He mostly pursues his own self interests and has only a few moments where he recognizes the stakes for the "Prawn" and aids their cause.

You can read the main "Prawn" character as the alien version of the "magic negro" found in so many contemporary Hollywood films. Hollywood believes we can tell the story of oppressed people only through the lens of more sympathetic members of the dominant group. And often, this means that the oppressed people become sympathetic to us through their mentoring and assistance to the white protagonists. District 9 is more complicated than this largely because its human protagonist doesn't ever really develop full consciousness and by the end, we understand the alien character more than he does. We start to value the alien's motivates and needs above his in the process. This is no Dances With Wolves where the white man becomes a better Indian than the "redskins" and takes over leadership of the tribe. By the end of the film, Wikus is still totally outside the alien community, but has just had a glimmer of what it's plight might look like.

The second trap, such films often to portray people of color as part of the system of oppression. So, here, we see how the Nigerians exploit the "Prawns", we see black Africans in the man on the street segments justifying the segregation or deportation of the aliens, and we see black authority figures who are part of the state apparatus working to contain and relocate the "prawn." All of this suggests that blacks would have behaved no differently than whites did if they were in a position of authority in Apartheid South Africa. It makes oppression a basic element of human nature and thus erases some of the moral culpability of previous generations for their racism. Here, again, though, the film does hint at the unequal status of whites and blacks within MNU through, for example, a scene suggesting that a black recruit is not being given the same body armor as the whites in the same expedition party.

Here's hoping these observations spark greater discussion. I suspect many of you will disagree with my criticisms of the film. I fully expect to be called "politically correct" which is the language we use to deflect honest discussions about the impact of race and racism upon culture.. District 9's cultural importance is that it provides us with new resources through which to reflect on the history and future of race relations in our world. I am not asking that the film be "politically correct": for me, it is enough that it provokes reflections, encourages conversations, and forces us to think more deeply about the world around us. Part of that discussion should resolve around lingering racial assumptions even in works which are otherwise progressive in their goals. Let me return to what I said in my opening of this two part series: District 9 is a very important film, perhaps the best released so far this year, and will make a lasting contribution to how we think about science fiction in screen-based media. But it did not "come out of nowhere" and we will understand it better if we situate it in a larger historical context.

District 9 (Part One): Can a Bench Be a Transmedia Extension?

"In a good summer, there's usually a movie that will come out of nowhere and completely wow us. This is a good summer, and that movie is District 9." -- Betsey Sharkey, Film Critic, LA Times.

Sharkey's review of District 9 is typical of those that were published in newspapers around the country. Many film critics were taken almost totally by surprise by the commercial success of this low budget film, produced in South Africa, by a first time feature film director.

Make no mistake about it -- District 9 is almost certainly the most impressive film released this summer and one of the best science fiction films to be released in recent years. It raises a high bar for Avatar, The Surrogates, and some of the other SF films which we are anticipating for Fall release.

Yet the film did not come out of "nowhere" either in the sense that those of us who follow the genre closely didn't know it was coming or in the sense that it is a totally "original" work which shatters all of our expectations about what science fiction is. Some of the mainstream critics sound almost shocked that science fiction can be deployed as a genre for exploring serious and timely social issues, for example, overlooking more than a hundred years of such exploration in literary SF. As someone who has taught science fiction courses off and on for the past 20 years, I wanted to situate District 9 over the next two installments in two important conversations -- one about transmedia branding and the other about race and science fiction.

The reason why the film wouldn't have caught many who followed science fiction by surprise is that it has been the focus of a transmedia marketing campaign for well over a year in advance of the film's release. Signs prohibiting nonhuman use of restrooms surfaced at Comic-Con a year ago. By the start of the summer, such signs were appearing on park benches, the sides of buses, and in a variety of other contexts around major cities. Here, the producers and promoters no doubt took some inspiration from the campaign which Campfire Media developed for the launch of True Blood last summer.

If you want to learn more about that campaign, check out Greg Hale's presentation at Futures of Entertainment 3 at MIT last year. Hale shared a stunning video which traced the evolution of that promotion. You can see it here starting at 8:40. Hale, who worked on the campaign, was a veteran of the Blair Witch Project, the release that really has set the model for most subsequent efforts to use transmedia to expand cult audience awareness of forthcoming small budget films. (See Convergence Culture) Another example of this process would be the work that Lance Weiller did around his film, Head Trauma. Lance was also featured on this same session at Futures of Entertainment. (By the way, there will be a Futures of Entertainment conference this November and I will be sharing some details pretty soon. It is always the weekend before thanksgiving.)

Meanwhile, pseudo-documentary segments were surfacing on YouTube and across the web. Here are a few examples.

These films, and others like it, serve important expositional functionss. They situate the context of the film and establish some of its core premises. But they also suggest the debates sparked by the events of the film, showing us different sides of the story than are depicted on the screen. District 9, for example, constructed a site for supporters of the Prawn, MNU Spreads Lies. We see alien rights activists in the background in the feature film but here we get a better sense of what motivates them and how they are critiquing the MNU. We learn things about alien biology -- including about the "Prawn"'s sexual reproduction -- which put the film's depiction of parenthood in a different context. (I particularly love the way that the MNU Spreads Lies site repurposes a documentary from MNU on its blog, constructing its own alternative counter-reading, and thus creating space for ambiguity about how reliable the information it contains may be about the "Prawns.")

This amateur video sought to stitch together some of the scattered pieces, drawing explicit analogy to Cloverfield, another film which "snuck" into the theaters, thanks to saavy deployment of transmedia branding and promotion strategies.

Of course, it makes sense that this film and filmmaker would embrace digital platforms as a means of expanding the fictional world given that District 9 was based on Neill Blomkamp's short, Alive in Joberg, which has been widely available on YouTube for some time. It's worth watching to see how the ideas and images in the current film took shape and how much he was able to achieve with a microscopic budget some of the same emotional impact that people have commented upon in District 9.

District 9 adopts a hyper-mediated style, framing the opening segments as a series of news reports, though it becomes harder as the film progresses to have a rational explanation for who is holding the shakey camera which follows the protagonist around the rubble of an increasingly militarized refuge compound. And the use of these various videos, depicted as coming from different sources, contributes to that aesthetic.

Given the filmmaker's goal to blur the boundaries between our real world and the fictional world it depicts, creating a science fiction film that requires surprisingly little suspension of disbelief, it seems right that the film's world would extend physically into our reality even before we step into the cinema.

The information value of the park bench is limited: it evokes a powerful history of racial segregation in this country and extends it into our understanding of the relations between humans and alien visitors. Yet, the shock value of seeing what amount to "Jim Crow" signs in contemporary Los Angeles reminds us that the story could indeed take place in our world and that we may be poorly prepared to deal with interplanetary diversity given how badly we have dealt with the very human diversity in our own midst.

So, can a park bench be a transmedia extension? I would vote yes -- at least in this case. It may be a small piece of a larger system of information about the film but it moves beyond simple branding and already situates us emotionally and intellectually inside the fiction.

The Message of Twitter: "Here It Is" and "Here I Am"

Last week, the following conversation unfolded via my Twitter account about, well, my use of Twitter as a technology:

>aramique@henryjenkins mr professor... you theorize on participatory models over spectatorial but i've noticed your whole twitter feed is monologue12:32 PM Aug 19th from web in reply to henryjenkins

aramique@henryjenkins p.s i am a fan...just wondering why you are using twitter to simply broadcast instead of sparking dialogue12:34 PM Aug 19th from web in reply to henryjenkins

henry jenkins @aramique it is the curse of having 4.5k followers! Feels odd to do 1 to 1 conversations @that scale!2:39 PM Aug 19th from TwitterFon in reply to aramique

aramique@henryjenkins so then what would you say to a brand or entertainment property with millions of fans?2:54 PM Aug 19th from web in reply to henryjenkins

mikemonello@henryjenkins Twitter conversations aren't 1 to 1, they are open to all. (re: @aramique)

henry jenkins @armique, @mikemonello, yr questions get Twt's strengths, limits. but answer won't fit in character limits. Watch for blog post soon.

I will admit that there is a certain irony about having to refer people to my blog for an exchange that started on Twitter but couldn't really be played out within the character limits of that platform. But then, note that armique's very first post had to be broken into two tweets just to convey the emotional nuances he needed. And that's part of my point.

From the start, I've questioned whether Twitter was the right medium for me to do my work. I've always said that as a writer, I am a marathon runner and not a sprinter. I am scarcely blogging here by traditional standards given the average length of my posts. Yet I believe this blog has experimented with how academics might better interface with a broader public and how we can expand who has access to ideas that surface through our teaching and research.

For a long time, I held off joining Twitter because I was not sure how it might expand meaningfully on the work I am already doing here. My friend, danah boyd, the queen of social networks, more or less threatened to do me bodily harm if I did not join Twitter and she personally set up an account for me to use. Now, I am really glad that she did because there is so much I've learned by experimenting with this platform which has been expanding in visibility and influence over the past handful of months.

My first impressions were correct that Twitter is no substitute for Blogs or Live Journal. And in so far as people are using it to take on functions once played on blogs, there is a serious loss to digital culture.

Someone recently asked me, "If McCluhan is right and the medium is the message, what is the message of Twitter?" My response: "Here It Is and Here I Am."

Here It Is

Let's break that down:"Here it is" represents Twitter as a means of sharing links and pointers to other places on the web.

I've been reasonably selective about which Twitter streams I follow -- and that selectivity has to do with both my respect for the person writing the account and my desire to get access to a broad range of communities. Different people give me a point of entry into conversations taking place around advertising, transmedia entertainment, journalism, civic media, intellectual property, fandom, and a range of other topics which run through my work.

I see each of those Twitterers as the only truly intelligent agents -- human beings -- and Twitter as a whole as a kind of knowledge community. None of us can spot everything in our field and collectively pooling our knowledge is of enormous value. For me, that's been my primary use of Twitter both as a consumer and as a contributor. I also love to monitor how my contributions circulate -- being able to read who has retweet me and watching the stats on Bit.ly as to how many people have followed my links gives me greater insights than ever before about my readership and the impact of different posts.

Unfortunately, there has also been some losses. Three years ago, when I started this blog, if people wanted to direct attention to one of my blog posts, they would write about it in their blog and often feel compelled to spell out more fully why they found it a valuable resource. I got a deeper insight into their thinking and often the posts would spark larger debate. As the function of link sharing has moved into Twitter, much of this additional commentary has dropped off. Most often, the retweets simply condense and pass along my original Tweet. At best, I get a few additional words on the level of "Awesome" or "Inspiring" or "Interesting." So, in so far as Twitter replaces blogs, we are impoverishing the discourse which occurs on line.

I have been especially amused and dismayed by the way Twitter removes or distorts context as it moves across cyberspace. People take notes at lectures, pulling out a sentence here or there. It is fascinating data to me to see which of my points stuck. But then often the sentence doesn't capture the specificity of the idea and it rapidly takes different meanings as it travels. I am particularly dismayed by shifts in attribution. So, I quoted Ethan Zuckerman as having said that any technology sufficiently powerful to support the distribution of cute cat pictures can bring down a government and in my talk there is attribution. But the shortening needed for Twitter removes the attribution and before long, I am seeing this quote ascribed to me far and wide. Yes, I said it as in that the words came out of my mouth, but I did not write it, in the sense that the words are mine. I was equally dismayed when I qouted Shakespeare's Hamlet for "Brevity is the Soul of Wit" and connected it to Twitter only to have readers assume I originated the phrase.

Early on, I proposed a Twitter game -- Twik or Tweet. You throw out a quotation without attribution. And the Twitter community has to guess if it is an authentic tweet or a literary allusion.

If we see Twitter as part of a larger informational economy, it does very important work. It spreads my messages out to larger networks which might not even know my blog exists but who may be drawn to a post that s of particular interest to their memberships. Like many people out there, I was fascinated by some of the Twitter posts coming out of Iran in the wake of their contested election and Twitter expanded the information I had available to me. I sat in on a discussion at Annenberg last week with the program's incoming journalism students and a key theme was how reporters could deploy the platform to tap into larger currents in the society or identify unknown sources for their stories. This is spreadable media at work.

Here I Am

Even among the intellectuals and thought leaders whose Twitter flows I chose to follow, there is an awful lot of relatively trivial and personal chatter intended to strengthen our social and emotional ties to other members of our community. The information value of someone telling me what s/he had for breakfast is relatively low and I tend to scan pretty quickly past these tweets in search of the links that are my primary interests. And if the signal to noise ration is too low, I start to ponder how much of a social gaff I would commit if i unsubscribed from someone's account.

But even in my grumpier moments I find that I gain some loose emotional or social value out of feeling more connected to others in my circle. I feel closer to people I didn't know very well before through following their tweets. The fact that I hear from them every day means they remain more active in my thoughts. And when we connect again, we can dig deeper in our exchanges, at least in so far as the feelings are mutual, moving past the small talk into other topics.

Here we come closest to McLuhan's core idea -- "Here it is" is a function of Twitter; "Here I Am" may be its core "message" in so far as McLuhan saw the message as something that might not be articulated on any kind of conscious level but emerges from the ways that the medium impacts our experience of time and space.

This effect even extends to tweets which have greater informational value. The power of the tweets from Iran was not simply that they got out messages which the mainstream media could not have delivered to us because of the limits on how they operate under that repressive regime, but it was also that we felt a sense of immediacy because we were receiving those messages from average citizens, like ourselves, who were seeing things happen directly, on the ground. (and no doubt a fair number of fake messages fabricated for propaganda purposes, but that's another matter). As many of us turned our icons green as a show of solidarity, we saw the emergence of a larger community that felt linked to these developments.

"Here it is" became "Here I am" and more importantly "Here we are."

Broadcast? Not Really

Twitter works on a number of different scales. For some users, most I'd assume, Twitter represents a relatively narrow cast medium, a kind of social network which allows them to communicate with people they already know. For others, the scale of contact expands and the people who link to them might more appropriately be called "Followers." In my case, I currently have something approaching 4.5 thousand followers on Twitter, of whom I probably recognize by name only a few hundred. These are people who heard me speak, who saw my blog, and increasingly have picked me up because some one else retweeted one of my messages Thanks for Follow Friday shoutouts. This situation creates an asymetrical scale -- many of these people feel much closer to me because I am one of a small number of Twitter Streams they follow while I feel no closer to them because they are not sending me their "Here I am" messages back.

armique's initial question to me then asks why I am deploying Twitter as a broadcast medium.

The short answer is because the scale of communications, for me, is too great to allow for meaningful dialogue. A better answer would be because as an academic, I need a broadcast channel if I am going to get my ideas into broader circulation. I don't have access to the airwaves or to a printed publication which might bring what I write to a much broader readership. I don't have an advertising budget with which to put my ideas onto billboards. Twitter, as a platform, alters the scale of my communication by allowing me to expand my readership.

For others, companies for example, it may do the opposite, helping them to move from communications at an impossibly large scale, to something much closer to the ground. They can start to see their consumers as individuals or at least as a community of people who have a broad range of responses to what they are producing. They can sample public response to their products. They can discover groups of users they didn't know existed.

Once again, they are combining the "Here It Is" and "Here I am" functions of Twitter to both collect data and feel greater closeness to their consumers.

In return, almost without regard to the content of their message, the consumer feels greater connection to the companies -- the company ceases to be an anonymous entity and develops a face or at least a voice of its own. To me, this relationship -- even at a large scale -- is very different from broadcasting because of the ways that it creates a greater sense of intimacy and connectivity between both parties involved. When I watch a corporate message on television, I have no sense that the company can or would want to see my response.

But a smart company goes further. We are hearing stories of companies that scanTwitter looking for references to their products and reaching out to consumers to respond to their concerns. In some cases, consumers get quicker and fuller responses to their problems because they posted these problems on Twitter than they get calling the customer service department. And this is where the "Here I Am" message is especially strong -- this company cares enough about me to actively seek out people with problems and make sure they get fixed, rather than hoping nobody complains. A really smart company hires people full time just to respond to Twitter: they can respond to many more people and they can get their responses out in real time, neither of which is really possible to me given that my day job involves many more activities than just dealing with Twitter.

Now, here we get to the interesting part: does the company do this through direct messaging or through a general post to the community? There are trade-offs in both case. Twitter certainly can through its Direct Messaging function allow for private one to one conversation.

But in many cases, there is a performative dimension for both parties. The customer did not simply want to get the attention of the company; they exploit the potential of Twitter to spread the word about their complaint, to identify others who share their concerns, and to exert collective rather than personal pressure on the company, thus potentially increasing their influence. The companies are responding more quickly to Twitter based complaints because they feel exposed or at risk as what was once a personal matter transmitted through the telephone as a one-to-one channel now because a public issue and if they don't respond quickly, they may lose control.

On the other hand, because of this public complaint, the company wants to perform its concern not just to the individual customer but to the larger brand community. They don't want to simply fix the problem; they want to show they care. And if there is an answer or response, they want to send it out to everyone who might have the same concern, thus expanding the impact that any given customer service call might have on their buying public.

Now, that's the delimma I face as an academic confronting this much larger scale community. The 4 thousand plus followers I have amassed is larger than the audiences I draw at any speaking gig -- even large hall events at South by Southwest.

We can imagine the exchanges there on two levels: in some cases, the queries I get feel very much like the questions I would get during a Q & A period after a talk and it feels totally natural to respond to them through the main Twitter feed in front of the large audience. Yet, it is challenging for people to link my response to the original question. If I was speaking some place and most people couldn't hear the question, then I would feel compelled to repeat the question into the microphone. Yet in Twitter, by the time I did that, there wouldn't be any characters left to answer it with. And in any case, the question is apt to be much more concise than any meaningful answer I could provide. So you can ask questions on Twitter that are impossible to answer on Twitter -- present case a great illustration -- and so you then have to use the "Here It Is" function to direct people to another space for the response.

Other questions feel much more intimate and personal, more like the kinds that I get when people crowd around the table after the talk, and it feels weird to share such intimate exchanges in front of the larger population that reads my blog. And in some cases, I get very personal messages which don't belong in a public arena at all, that function more like texting, and it is clear that the direct message function is much more useful. I am still trying to sort out the different levels of address here and how they might shape my relationship to my readers.

I have seen a few Twitterers who are aware of this one-to-many aspect of Twitter and use it to create a kind of call and response or crowd sourcing relationship with their readers. Neil Gaiman seems to be a real master at this use of Twitter. I've seen him ask his readers for advice about specific language in a script he is crafting, almost like polling the audience on Who Wants to Be the Millionaire, and then make decisions based on the response. This is much like the company which performs its concern for the consumer and is designed to strengthen the sense of ownership and attachment his fans have to his work. If I was less over-extended, I would be playing with this community aspect of Twitter, and I suspect this may be what shaped aramique's question in the first place.

All I can say is that I am still experimenting with the medium and have not yet achieved its full potential for my work. I hope to respond to this larger challenge in the weeks ahead.

So there you have it.

How Susan Spread and What It Means

I've done four interviews over the past few days -- with the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Mainichi Shimbun (Japan) -- which in one way or another have touched on the dramatic story of Susan Boyle, the dowdy and musically gifted contestant on Britain's Got Talent who has become the new queen of both broadcast and participatory media.

What I've been telling all of them is that Boyle's success is perhaps the most spectacular example to date of spreadability in action, and indeed, since we've discovered a fair number of busy corporate types out there who don't feel like reading the eight installments of "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," I figured I'd use this space to spell out again some core principles of spreadable media and show how the Boyle phenomenon illustrates how they work.

The statistics are moving so fast that it is impossible to keep track of them but here's the basic data points as reported on Monday by the Washington Post:

According to Visible Measures, which tracks videos from YouTube, MySpace and other video-sharing sites, all Boyle-oriented videos -- including clips of her television interviews and her recently released rendition of "Cry Me a River," recorded 10 years ago for a charity CD -- have generated a total of 85.2 million views. Nearly 20 million of those views came overnight.

The seven-minute video that was first posted on YouTube and then widely circulated online easily eclipsed more high-profile videos that have been around for months. Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin has clocked in 34.2 million views, said the folks at Visible Measures, while President Obama's victory speech on election night has generated 18.5 million views.

But it's not just in online video where Boyle, the unassuming woman from a tiny Scottish town, has dominated. Her Wikipedia entry has attracted nearly 500,000 page views since it was created last Sunday. Over the weekend, her Facebook fan page was flooded with comments, at some points adding hundreds of new members every few minutes. The page listed 150,000 members at 1 p.m. Friday. By last night there were more than a million.

By comparison, the 2008 Season finale for American Idol, one of the highest rated programs on American broadcast television, attracted almost 32 million viewers, or between a third and a half the number of people who had watched Susan's video as of Monday of this week. So, what's happening here?

Contrary to what you may have read, Susan Boyle didn't go "viral." She hasn't gained circulation through infection and contagion. The difference between "viral" and "spreadable" media has to do with the conscious agency of the consumers. In the viral model, nobody is in control. Things just go "viral." In the Spreadability model, things spread because people choose to spread them and we need to understand what motivates their decision and what facilitates the circulation.

While she originated on British broadcast television, her entry into the American market was shaped more by the conscious decisions of 87 plus million people who choose to pass her video along to friends, families, work mates, and fellow fans than by any decision by network executives to put her on the airwaves in the first place.

This is not to say that the original video was not professionally produced and edited in such a way as to maximize the emotional impact of what happened to her at that particular talent composition. This is not to say that our interest in the content wasn't shaped by our general familarity with the genre conventions of reality television (leading us to expect another William Hung kind of moment) or by our particular perceptions and investments in one Simon Cowell, whose boyish grin and sheepish expression represents the ultimate payoff for her spectacular performance (which we can appreciate because we've seen American Idol and know what a tough-minded SOB Simon can be). And that's not to say that the visibility of Susan Boyle hasn't been amplified as she's gotten interviewed on Good Morning America and spoofed on the Tonight Show, to cite two examples. We have to understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon as occurring at the intersection between broadcast media (or to use Amanda Lotz's term, television in the post-network era.) In other words, this is convergence culture at work.

The Susan Boyle phenomenon would not have played out the same way if there wasn't YouTube, if there weren't social networks, if there weren't Twitter. Indeed, the very similar video of Paul Potts making a similarly surprising success on the same program generated nowhere near the same level of circulation a year ago (though it may have also prepared the way for the public's interest in this story). What allowed the Susan Boyle video to travel so far so fast was that it could travel so far so fast.

For most of the people who saw it and decided to pass it along, they had a sense of discovery. They could anticipate that they were sharing the video with people who probably hadn't seen it already, precisely because the content was not yet being broadcast on commercial television. The fans found Susan Boyle before the networks did -- much like that old saw that by the time a trend makes it to the cover of Time Magazine, it's already over. There was an infrastructure in place -- across multiple communication systems -- which would allow anyone to share this content with anyone else who they thought would like to see it with minimal effort. We can send links. We can embed the content in our blogs.

The role of Twitter in all of this is most interesting. Twitter Twits did what Twitter Twits do best -- they tweeted alerts about an interesting bit of content and were able to embed micro-links so their followers could quickly access the content. I think of Twitter as like a swarm of bees that spread out in all directions, searching for interesting materials to share. When someone finds it, they come back to the hive, do a little honey dance, and send the swarm scampering behind them. This is how collective intelligence outsmarts the broadcast decision-makers: The Twitter Tribes can figure out what content the audience wants to see because the Twitter Tribes are the audience, making decisions in real time.

Equally important is that we had the agency to decide which content we wanted to pass along -- out of all of the possible video clips posted on YouTube last week or indeed, out of all of the many segments of media content which are circulating around us.

We believe that we can only understand what happened here by identify the choices which consumers made as they decided to pass along this content and not that content. The USA Today on Monday sought to identify a range of different motives which shaped the decisions to pass along this particular content: "Vindication . . . Surprise . . . Guilt . . . Shame . . . Psychology . . . Hope . . . Distraction . . . Empowerment . . . Authenticity . . . Spiritual Solace."

There's no need to identify a single cause for why people spread this content. Different people spread this content for different reasons. Hell, often, the same person spreads this content for different reasons. I sent the link via e-mail to my wife with a note saying "want to feel warm and fuzzy," to a close friend with a note suggesting "this will crack you up," and to my Twitter and Facebook mobs with the suggestion it illustrates something important about reality television because you wouldn't believe this if you saw it in a movie. My sharing of the video meant something different in each of these relationships. We can certainly identify a range of common reasons for why the emotional structure of this video might motivate people to circulate it.

Does the wide-spread circulation of reality television suggest the triviality of what constitutes public interests? I don't think we can answer that question without knowing what we are using Susan Boyle to talk about. Her meaning doesn't reside in the video itself -- we won't exhaust it no matter how many times with watch it. The meaning rests in the conversations that Susan Boyle enables us to have with each other. As it starts to circulate, the Susan Boyle video gets inserted into all kinds of ongoing conversations across a range of different communities, so that I've stumbled into prayer circles for Susan Boyle; I've found scientists talking about how someone with that body could produce such a sound; I've seen discussions amongst Karaoki singers about her techniques, and I've seen reality television fans trying to explain why her success would never be possible given the rules of American Idol which exclude someone her age from competing in the first place. Susan Boyle circulates because she's meaningful on many different levels and after a while, all of this has started to go meta so that we are spreading Susan's videos to talk about how fast they are being spread.

For many of the people who are spreading her videos, the transaction is understood through the lens of a gift economy. We share her because she allows us to make someone we care about have a somewhat better day. We share her because of what she allows us to say about ourselves, our world, and our relationships. I sent Susan to my wife as something like a Facebook Gift -- a short, quick, friendly gesture on a day when we weren't going to see each other until much later.

Yes, there were other groups who had other motives for getting me to pass along the content -- the producers of the programme and the network on which it aired, perhaps YouTube itself -- but their motives had very little to do with why I chose to share that video with people I cared about. So my circulation of the video needed to be negotiated between their interests and mine.

The fact that YouTube makes it easy to embed the content makes it easier for me to share it. The fact that Bit.ly allows me to reduce the length of the url allows me to tweet about it. And all of these technical innovations makes it that much easier for the video to spread, but at the end of the day, it also spreads because I and all the rest of us have become more literate about social networking, because we are linked to more people and have more regular contact with them, because we now often interact with each other through sharing meaningful bits of media content.

Keep in mind a fundamental fact: many of the 97 plus million people who downloaded the video are part of a surplus audience from the perspective of the people who produced and marketed Britain's Got Talent. Indeed, beyond a certain point, Susan Boyle's rapid visibility becomes a liability rather than an asset. Keep in mind that Boyle stars in a British program which does not get commercial distribution in the United States. I can't turn on a television network -- cable or broadcast -- and watch the next installment of Britain's Got Talent. I can't go on Hulu and download that content. And I can't at present go on iTunes and buy this content. Market demand is dramatically outpacing supply.

What I can do, though, is consume illegal downloads of the series via various torrents or fan distribution sites, which have the flexibility to get the content into circulation without having to negotiate international deals or work through protectionist policies which make it hard to bring international content into the American market. Even with Cowell's production company already having working relations with multiple American networks, my bet is that he can't get that show on the air quickly enough for Americans to be able to catch up with the Brits.

Sure, Simon Cowell has already signed her to a contract and talks about how ""there's every chance Susan Boyle will have the number one album in America" if she appears on Oprah . But the record can't go on sale fast enough to capitalize on this burst of public interest and by the time it reaches the market, there's a good chance that her 15 minutes of fame will have expired.

Wired tells us that even where the media producers might have made money from the spread of Sarah's video, they are so far choosing not to do so: "a Google spokeswoman responded to our e-mail and phone queries with some surprising news: "That video is not being monetized." We've contacted Sony (Simon Cowell's label) and FremantleMedia (the show's producer, owned by RTL Group not Sony as appeared in this update earlier) to try to determine why the $500,000 or more Boyle's video should have generated so far is apparently being left on the table -- despite the fact that both companies are confirmed revenue-sharing partners of YouTube." So, whatever calculations have gone into getting us to help spread this video, they don't make sense in terms of a simple and direct economic equation. This isn't about counting impressions and raking in the cash.

Keep in mind that what we've seen so far is her first appearance in a season long competition and the implication of this blockage becomes clear. I've argued here that piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers. It isn't that people will turn to illegal downloads because they want the content for free. My bet is that many of them would pay for this content but it is not legally being offered to them. We can compare this to the global interest generated by Ken Jenning's phenomenal run on Jeopardy: Jeopardy was already syndicated in markets around the world so when he generated buzz, he drew people back to the local broadcaster who was selling the content in their markets. They could tune in and see day by day whether he stayed in the game. Right now, everyone's still acting as if Susan Boyle was only one video but they will wake up tomorrow or the next day and discover that lots of those people want to see what happens to her next.

When many of us write about the global circulation of media, the American circulation of British reality television isn't necessarily what comes first to mind. Indeed, there's some kind of mental block in terms of understanding this content as international in the first place. Yet, there is already a strong fan base in the United States for British media content which had already been downloading and circulating Britain's Got Talent, even though no commercial producer had guessed that this series might generate this kind of American interest. And that fan base is now in a position where they may need to service Susan's growing audience.

Part of the reasons Americans like Susan Boyle is that she's so damned British. USA Today says her story is like "a Disney movie," but it isn't: it's like a British movie, like Calendar Girls or Billy Elliot or The Full Monty, one of those down to earth dramas where average Brits cut across class and taste boundaries and do something extraordinary. The mixture of gritty realism, portly stars, eccentricity, class consciousness and wild-eyed optimism is what draws many of us to British media in the first place.

We are used to talking about things that could only happen in America. Well, Susan Boyle is something that could only happen in Great Britain -- get used to it because the next one will be something that can only happen in India or Japan. When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand.

And as we discover we like someone like Susan Boyle, we seek out more information. Suddenly charity records she made years ago spring up videos on YouTube. Suddenly there's a flood of interest on Wikipedia about this previously unknown figure. And people are seeking out videos of Elaine Paige, the queen of British stage musicals, who Susan identified as her role model. Many Americans had never heard of Paige before so we can chart dramatic increases in downloads on her videos though they are dwarfed by the Susan Boyle original. Most of the thousands of comments posted on the Paige videos make unfortunate comparisons with Susan Boyle, suggesting that even though she has been a much bigger star historically, has a string of commercial successes, that for this week at least, Susan Boyle's got a more dedicated fan base. Just to give us a baseline, some of the Elaine Paige YouTube videos reach more than a million viewers, where-as the rest don't get over 100,000. My theory is that Susan Boyle's fan base have discovered some of them and not others, accounting for the huge gap in traffic.

Or consider the fact that Susan Boyle gained more than a million Facebook subscribers in less than a week at a time when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have been battling it out to see who could be the first to get a million subscribers on Twitter. (Yes, Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter but it's still an impressive accomplishment!) This is not to say that long-term Oprah could help Susan Boyle open up her record to a much larger audience, just that in this frenzy of interest, she doesn't need Oprah or any other old style broadcast celebrity to turn YouTube on its ear.

So, that's what Susan Boyle can teach us about Spreadability. So what happens next? Talk among yourselves. And while you are at it, spread the word.

Ghouls Just Want To Have Fun: Doug Gordon on The Zombeatles (Part One)

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you will have noticed that zombies are taking over the entertainment industry. Case in point, the Zombeatles. You can get a taste of their music in this highly popular YouTube video, "A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead." Some readers may find the band hard on their eyes and ears, but others will quickly fall under their spell.

The Zombeatles first caused a stir in Madison, Wisconsin, where I did my graduate work, so I've been hearing alerts about their appearances for some time, and figured it was time to do a shout out to them here. At first, I was horrified by the prospect of Zombies performing on State Street, but then I realized that this perspective was small-minded of me. Cultural Studies scholars have long been committed to lending their voices to those who are voiceless in our society and to helping our readers to understand phenomenon which may disturb or disrupt the operations of the dominant system. Clearly, learning to appreciate Zombie music (and tracing its roots back to the cultural experiences of Zombie-Americans) requires us to think outside the box. It has required much less flexibility on the part of the media industries who have proven all too eager to cater to the tastes of any significant consumer niche and who are constantly trying to dig up new talent to circulate through the global media marketplace.

A new documentary, All We Need is Brains, recounts the story of the rise of the Zombeatles in all of its gory details, sharing not only some hit songs, such as "I Want to Eat Your Hand," "Hey, Food," and "P.S. I Love Eating You." I had a chance to watch the film over the weekend and while it churned my stomack and made my blood curdle, it also opened my head to some new experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise. This may make me sound like a spinless intellectual but this film helped me to wrap my brain around the Zombeatles. Here's a preview of the documentary which is circulating on the web.

You can order your very own copy here. And if this music makes your heart skip a beat or two, you can also order their new album, Meat the Zombeatles. Neither is going to cost you an arm and a leg and it's safe to say that you won't ever hear anything like their music again.

Doug Gordon, a Wisconsin Public Radio producer, has emerged as the mouth of the Zombeatles and he agreed to share with us what's on his mind. He certainly provided me with a lot of information to sink my teeth into. So let's give him a hand for helping out here.

Can you give us a little background on the Zombeatles and how they impacted contemporary popular music?

Jaw Nlennon and Pall IcKartney met as art students in Pool of Liver, England back in 1957. They were bitten by some skiffle zombies. The skiffle zombies transmitted the "solanum" virus that creates zombies (as discussed in Max Brooks' book, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead") to Nlennon and IcKartney. These skiffle zombies were also suffering from "rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu" (or, as it's more colloquially known, "a bad case of loving you"); this infectious disease was also passed on to Nlennon and IcKartney when the skiffle zombies bit them.

The combination of these two diseases transformed Nlennon and IcKartney into music-loving zombies. They soon developed a voracious appetite for human brains and for writing and performing original songs about their voracious appetite for human brains. The old adage, "Write what you know," was clearly not lost on these unlively lads. They formed a zombie skiffle group called The Gory Men. Guitarist Gorge Harryson joined the combo a short time later. The band realized that they would probably be able to rock out a bit more if they had a drummer so they tried to recruit Eat Breast to pound the skins for them. Breast was reluctant to join The Gory Men because of their name, as he felt it was a little too "on the nose." So the band changed their name to The Zombeatles and Breast took his place behind the drum kit.

However, The Fab Gore's producer, Gorge Mortem, had reservations about Breast. Mortem thought that Breast couldn't keep up with the other Zombeatles; he couldn't eat enough brains. So Breast was dismissed and replaced by Dingo Scarr, the recently-deceased drummer for the popular zombie rock combo, Rory Sturm und Drang and the Curried Brains.

Angus MacAbre ("Scotland's Funniest Zombie Comedian") and legendary undead rock critic Fester Fangs (of Rolling Tombstone Magazine) first encountered the Zombeatles at The Cadavern Club in Pool of Liver. Fangs was instrumental in bringing The Fab Gore to public attention and MacAbre was instrumental in bringing the public's brains to The Fab Gore.

The Zombeatles' impact on popular music was immense and immeasurable. As Fester Fangs wrote: "The Fab Gore brought a certain frenetic frisson to rock and roll. Their songs about eating brains really dug deep into the heart of the public's collective brain (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors). With such classic songs as "I Wanna Eat Your Hand" and "Ate Brains A Week," The Zombeatles performed a kind of figurative electroconvulsive therapy on both popular music and popular culture, which left the rest of the music industry looking brain-dead (pun pretty much unavoidable)." (from "Eat 'Em Raw: The Cannibalization of The Zombeatles," as reprinted in Psychopathic Reactions and Cerebral Cortex Guano: The Work of A Legendary Undead Rock Critic, edited by Greil Carcass).

Zombie music has long been an underground phenomenon. Why do you think it is surfacing now?

I think it's surfacing now because the "underground" can only stay under ground so long before the mass media and popular culture "dig it up" (so to speak) and it becomes part of the mainstream. I'm not saying that zombie music is part of the mainstream yet but I think it's well on its way. Take, for example, Angus MacAbre's blatant attempt to cash in on the success of the popular American indie rock band Vampire Weekend by forming his own band called Zombie Workweek. This is the kind of derivative cannibalization that the music industry is famous for.

Zombie music is just riding the zombie zeitgeist. As June Pulliam so eloquently put it in her essay, "The Zombie," which appears in Greenwood Press' Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares: "The zombie itself is a malleable symbol - representing everything from the horrors of slavery, white xenophobia, Cold War angst, the fear of death, and even apprehensions about consumer culture - and has become an icon of horror perhaps because it is quite literally a memento mori, reminding us that our belief that we can completely control our destiny, and perhaps through the right medical technology, even cheat death, is mere hubris."

Are the Zombeatles simply a revival band or do they bring their own fresh material?

The Zombeatles are a revival band only in the most literal sense of the word "revival" - that is to say that The Fab Gore breathed new life into popular music as only the living dead are capable of doing. The Zombeatles gave pop music a metaphorical Heimlich Maneuver; they transmogrified rock and roll from the bloated, maggot-ridden corpse it had become, replacing the figurative rigor mortis that had set in with a revolutionary, new, riboflavin-enhanced approach to rockin' and rollin'.

The Zombeatles influenced countless acts. Can you imagine The Zommonkees' recording their 1966 debut single, "Last Brain in Clarksville," without The Fab Gore paving the way with such classics as "Ate Brains A Week"? Not bloody likely. And who can deny the Fab Gore's influence on The Zomzombies' big hits "Thyme Is The Seasoning," "Smell Her Slow" and "She's Not Rare"? The Zombeatles even inspired a fictional parody band called The Zomrutles.

Your press materials suggest that the Zombeatles "went viral" after they were showcased by Rob Zombie as part of a Halloween promotion on YouTube. What happened next? How many people were infected? Could this viral spread have been prevented through sanitary measures?

It's like that old TV commercial for shampoo... "And they'll tell two friends. And they'll tell two friends. And so on. And so on." Friends kept telling friends about the Rob Zombie-endorsed Zombeatles' music video, "A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead." These friends told other friends. As of right now, 1,121,999 people (give or take a few) have been infected. This number is based on the fact that there have been 1,121, 999 viewings of the video on YouTube. Of course, some of these viewings could have actually been re-viewings by the same person(s). And there's no telling how many people that would apply to. I'm confident, though, that YouTube founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim are working on the cutting-edge technology that will allow us to determine this in the very near future. When I hear back from them, I'll definitely get back to you, Henry.

As for the question of whether or not this viral spread could have been prevented through sanitary measures, I really can't say for sure. All I know is that it's important to wash your hands immediately before and immediately after using YouTube.

Doug Gordon is a producer for Wisconsin Public Radio's/Public Radio International's Peabody Award-winning program, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." Originally from Canada, Gordon has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Major: Creative Writing) and a Creative Communications diploma (Major: Journalism). When not trying to make public radio more entertaining, he can be found working on various creative, artsy multimedia projects.

Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part One)

I can think of very few examples of textbooks that have made original contributions to scholarship in media studies: Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art and Film History books may be the notable exception. I generally prefer not to use textbooks in my classes, exposing my students to cutting edge articles from books and journals, and increasingly to blog posts from key public intellectuals. Most textbooks homogenize and generalize, lacking the particularity and pointedness of other kinds of academic writing. They try to appeal to everyone, try to include everything that matters, and in the process, they mask the criteria which shape their construction of the field. For these reasons, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Jason Mittell, who I consider to be one of the top thinkers in television studies, was tackling the task of writing a textbook for this field. Mittell has been working on late on the issue of complexity in television narrative, having already contributed to our understanding of genre and television. We share a common intellectual background -- both being alums of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications Arts Program. Mittell is involved in our Convergence Culture Consortium and recently posted some interesting thoughts on his Just TV blog which compliments my focus on "spreadability" with what he calls "drillability." You can learn more about Television and American Culture here.

I had a chance to read some of this textbook project in draft form and was excited by what I saw, so as soon as I heard Television and American Culture was being released, I contact Mittell to do an interview for this blog.

Let me be clear: Mittell has done what I would not have thought possible, creating a compelling, up-to-date wide-reaching, nuanced, readable, and engaging introduction to television studies, a textbook which does what we want a good textbook to do but doesn't read at all like a textbook. As you will see, I wanted to get the genre theorist Mittell to reflect on textbooks as a genre and on the ways he chose to reinvent that genre through this project. In talking about Television Studies textbooks, Mittell also offers some reflections on why we should study TV and what the current state of the field looks like.

You open the book with a consideration of the Janet Jackson flap at the Super Bowl. What does this incident teach us about the range of different ways television functions in relation to American culture?

This was the first section I wrote during the book proposal process. I knew that the book's core model would be to show how television, like all media, can be understood as spanning a number of facets that are often treated separately - this was based on the "circuit of culture" model emerging out of British cultural studies in the 1990s. For television, the six facets that I identified are commercial industry, democratic institution, textual form, site of cultural representation, part of everyday life, and technological medium - the first draft of the book actually had only six (very long!) chapters, each covering one of these facets.

In drafting the book's introduction, I needed to come up with an example that would literally sell the book - to publishers looking at the proposal, to faculty reviewing the book for adoption, and to students on the core concepts and engaging tone to keep them reading. This was in late 2004, so the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" was still a current event, with ongoing legislative and judicial processes. It struck me as a perfect example to demonstrate this circuit of television in action, comprising the full scope of issues within an example that was very easy to write about - you don't need to see the clip to understand the case study, while many other examples that I could have used required more familiarity with a program, channel, genre, etc. The only problem is that the writing process took long enough that what started as a hot-button contemporary example reads a bit dated for today's students - and in a few years, it will be old news. So I'm keeping an eye out for a newer example to plug-in for the book's revised edition.

Many textbooks strive for a "neutral" voice which balances out competing perspectives in the field. You do lay out competing arguments here, but as you note in your introduction, you also take sides, constructing your own arguments about key contemporary trends and programs. How do you see your book relating to the genre expectations surrounding the "textbook"?

When I decided to tackle a textbook, I spent some time reading through a number of textbooks on the market, both within media studies and other fields. What struck me most was how disengaging and dull the majority of them were. Even when they were written by authors who can be lively and compelling writers in their other scholarship, the genre of the textbook seemed to follow the edict of a lot of network television: provide least objectionable content. They present material in a seemingly objective, overly-simplified manner, and write without passion or personality.

I had no interest in writing such a book. And my experiences as a teacher suggests that forcing neutrality, oversimplification, and disengagement results in bad pedagogy and bored students. While I want students to grasp material such as the differences between broadcast networks and cable channels, that's not the core of education to me - instead, they should be thinking about the significance of these systems more than simply recalling them. So I made it clear to interested publishers that I wanted to write a textbook with a more engaging voice and distinct argumentation - to quote my proposal, "By explicitly offering arguments and challenging assumptions, the book will be designed to engage students and force them to question their own positions, rather than the more typical textbook goal of recalling factual information." Oxford University Press fully embraced this approach, encouraging me to write the book for a sophisticated and engaged reader, not the typical textbook model.

This approach is certainly forged by my experiences teaching at a top-flight liberal arts college like Middlebury. I work with students who are taking my course as part of a broader liberal arts curriculum, not a pre-professional track that typifies a lot of Communications departments. To fit into an institution like Middlebury College, I need to make the study of television an intellectually-engaging and interdisciplinary endeavor - I wrote this book in many ways to spread that approach of "television studies as a liberal art" more broadly to other types of institutions. I'm optimistic that a lot of faculty will find my book more engaging to teach because it "talks up" to students, rather than assumes that they need to be distracted by glossy photos and random sidebars. We'll have to see how it's received by both faculty and students, but I wrote the book that I want to teach from (or would have wanted to read as an undergraduate 20 years ago).

The cover of your book shows contemporary television projected across a range of different screens, some of which look like the boxes we've used for years, and

some represent mobile phones, computers, and other emerging platforms. Does the cover of the book signal the obsolescence of its content? At what point as we

explode the range of distribution options, does television cease to be television as a specific medium and begin to blur over into all of the other media around it?

When I started working on this book in 2004, YouTube didn't exist, iPods had no video capabilities, and networks had only just begun to experiment with putting their programs online. By the time the book came out in 2009, the idea of television as defined by the box in your living room had lost its centrality. And there's no doubt that the last five years are not the end of this core technological shift - honestly, I don't know what "television" will mean in another five years. But I'm certain that the history of the medium and its industrial and regulatory systems will still matter - whatever technological ecosystem we'll be living in during the 2010s and beyond, some remnant of television will matter, just as the lingering presence and influence of print, theater, cinema, and radio still matter today.

The cover was designed to signal the book's engagement with technologies and programming of the past, present, and future. I suggested the idea of "lots of different shows on a variety of devices" to Oxford, and they came up with a design that I really love. But I'm sure in another decade, it will look like a dinosaur! Of course, the very idea of publishing a "textbook" might be arcane by then as well, so clearly I've embarked on a project with a potentially short half-life for both content and form.

You could argue that many of the topics you deal with here - convergence, digitalization, globalization, branding, shifts in audience measurement - are impacting all media. What do you see as the relationship between television studies and a more generalized media studies? Can we read the title of your blog, "JustTV," as a statement of sorts about how you position yourself in the space between television and media studies?

I see television studies as both on the forefront of media studies, and in danger of being forgotten. In many ways, television studies has led the charge for a humanistic model of media studies, and it has really set the model for a mode of scholarship that is both theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written, socially engaged yet historically grounded. This is probably in large part due to the luck of the draw in its intellectual history, as the field came of age after the peak of high theory in film & literary studies, and was in the right place at the right time to introduce the British cultural studies model to America, in large part through the work of our mutual mentor John Fiske. When I look at the best of media scholarship today, whether it's about videogames, popular music, or transmedia narrative, I see the influence of television studies of the past two decades and the model it helped establish.

But the danger of convergence is an assumption that all media are the same. This is certainly a lesson that the industry has faced repeatedly, as with ill-fated devices like WebTV, and I've seen similar scholarly missteps when academics trained in literature or film try to study a different medium as if it were simply another textual form (I won't name names here...). Specific aspects of television, from regulation to ratings, help shape the medium to an extent that you can't simply disregard the industrial systems and viewer practices that are unique to television. So my fear is that as television becomes more diffused - either through technological transformation or dilution across media - media scholars will neglect the specific practices and systems that shape our understanding of the medium. The specific lessons and facets of television studies shouldn't be lost as the boundaries of the medium blurs.

As for the name of my blog, Just TV refers both to the dismissive reflex common to academics viewing television, and an attempt to delineate the blog's scope. I do embrace broader issues in media studies, such as gaming, fair use, fandom, etc., but try to tie it to the specificities of television whenever possible. I hope that work like mine and many of my TV-centric peers helps legitimize the medium in the eyes of academia, just as the programming itself is becoming more accepted and embraced by scholars across disciplines. But I'm reminded of a wonderful talk that Charlotte Brunsdon gave at Society for Cinema and Media Studies a few years ago - she warned that "poor old television" might get lost in the transition from cinema studies to a digital-centric media studies, and called for scholarly spaces that still privilege television. Hopefully Just TV fits that bill.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media

Culture, and Chair of Film & Media Culture, at Middlebury College. He is the

author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American

Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP,

2009), numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and the blog Just TV. He

is currently writing a digital book on narrative complexity in contemporary

American television.