The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part Two)

What kinds of skills and knowledge are young people acquiring through their involvement with the production of youth radio? Response from Ayesha Walker, Online Project Associate. If you want to check out some of Walker's work for Youth Radio, try "Bathing Ape", Marketplace

and "From Blacksburg to Bay Area."

I unconfidently discovered radio my sophomore year of high school at El Cerrito's KECG station. I was determined to break through my introverted shell and find comfort behind

the microphone. Somehow in my senior year I was elected Director of Communications,

hosting my very own radio crew, playing my voice through every speaker in El Cerrito

high school. By the time my senior year came around, I fatefully stumbled across Youth

Radio. I studied all of the features and fell in love with web, photography and journalism.

As the new generation of technology users, today's young people are trained here at

Youth Radio in exactly what we need and want: proficiency through technologically

advanced equipment in media production. Therefore we advance in the skills that already

belong to us.

We learn to magnify our personality with confidence, creatively generating authentic

work through the components that YR offers:

News and commentaries: young people write stories for local and national radio,

iTunes, and our own website

Music: young people learn to produce their own music through industry standard

computer software and also program music shows featuring a range of artists and styles

for terrestrial and web radio

Web: young people learn to produce and design youthradio.org

Video: young people learn to create videos for outlets ranging from PBS to

Current TV to YouTube

After learning what we want, we learn what to do with the skills we've acquired through the program. We either move up or move out. Young people evolve into an essential part of staff, guiding other young people in the right direction. Or we find work outside Youth Radio, sometimes even outside converged media, using the professional skills gained here.

Youth Radio has helped shape the minds and personalities of many young people around the Bay Area, making the road to success much more visible.

Throughout my time here at Youth Radio, I've worked on a mob of commentaries. But there's one in particular I'm most proud of is called "Hood Sweet Hood." It hasn't aired on an outlet yet, but I'm proud of it because I feel I had the chance to clarify a few things that take place in the hood that most people outside of the ghetto wouldn't understand.

At Youth Radio, I've learned to swallow my people-fearing ways and express myself. I've learned to write creatively to a broad audience. By helping to maintain and produce youthradio.org, I've learned to take professional quality photographs, to network, and most importantly, to have fun. I've learned to think more deeply about my actions, whether it's buying from large corporations or just plain recycling. I've learned to speak properly on air. I've learned interviewing tactics--not from a book, even though I love books with all my mind, but from experience, which is the best teacher a student could ever have. Youth Radio has allowed me to sit in and help plan its future and my own.

And more on this question from Reina Gonzales, Youth Radio graduate and Associate

Producer. To sample Gonzales's work, see "Military Deserters in Canada."

I've been with Youth Radio since I was fifteen years old in a variety of roles. As a

student, I can say that the biggest impact Youth Radio had on me was that it gave me a

sense of direction. I learned what opportunities were out there for me and was then able

to decide what would bring me the most fulfillment.

As a peer teacher, I was surprised by how supportive and non- judgmental the students

were. In our weekly radio shows, I often saw the students struggle with writing or

on-air nerves, but in working together, they showed a sense of trust and mutual respect.

This was an experience completely opposite to the hostile environment I encountered in

high school.

As a youth reporter, I learned that writing ability on its own isn't enough to produce

media that matters. I had to develop a more holistic approach to the stories I worked

on--thinking about all the possible ways I could tell them and always trying to consider

different points of view.

As a radio and video producer, I've seen students learn to adapt to the always-changing

media landscape by using new technologies and producing their stories across formats.

They also think about new ways to market themselves and their work using social

networks--all of which suggests they're becoming just as good if not better than their

adult media professional counterparts.

What relationship does your group have with other youth radio producers around the world?

Response from Senior Producer Rebecca Martin and Producer Brett Myers, Youth Radio's National Network/Curating Youth Voices Initiative. To see some of the work of the Curating Youth Voices Initiative, see "Leaving the Mountains," NPR

Youth Radio has grown into a hub for local, national and international converged media

production. We carry out this work through collaborations and partnerships with youth

correspondents, youth media groups, and youth organizations across the country and

around the globe. In addition to our bureaus in DC, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, we have an

extensive network of youth media partners whom we work with to co-produce content for

national and international audiences on a regular basis.

The bureaus and youth media partners in the U.S. are part of a unified editorial

structure at Youth Radio designed to represent diverse youth experiences and respond to

national news and issues in a comprehensive way that reflects the American landscape.

This structure also insures that our content meets the highest journalistic standards.

Our extensive youth correspondent network links individual young people across the

country and around the globe with adult professional editors and producers, and youth

peer editors at our headquarters in Oakland, California, who work with them remotely to

bring their stories to national and international audiences on the radio and the web.

Over the years, we've worked with young reporters and commentators in Afghanistan,

South Africa, Palestine, Israel, Mexico, Cuba, France and India.

We actively participate in conferences that bring together youth media producers (and

founded the Youth in Radio conference with the National Federation of Community

Broadcasters); regularly host international journalists; and do our best to provide

technical assistance and advice to newcomers in the youth media field. One initiative

that formalizes the latter effort is Teach Youth Radio, a free, online curriculum

resource we offer in monthly installments designed to encourage educators inside and

outside classrooms to integrate youth media content and methods into their work.

When we met in Saint Louis, we had an interesting exchange about the value of individual

authorship as opposed to collective intelligence. I wondered if you might be willing to

share your perspective on this topic here.

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

I was actually inspired to write a bit about this topic after we met at the 2007

National Media Education Conference in St. Louis. In your media literacy white paper,

you describe collective intelligence as a property of joint projects where "everyone

knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole."

This notion of collective intelligence resonates for me in lots of ways. My own personal

youth media practice and research have always centered on learning environments that

leverage collaborative thinking and making, and I often find myself trying to expose,

understand, and promote all the joint work that takes place behind all meaningful

productions, even those designated as "single author" works. Something I especially

love about the concept of collective intelligence is the way it embraces our fundamental

incompleteness outside the social contexts we make and re-make everyday.

That said, I'm wondering if there are ways that collective intelligence just might

sometimes work against youth producers...I find that some of the most important work we

do at Youth Radio, even within our hyper-collaborative production method, is to secure

individual on air credit for the organization and our youth reporters and artists. We

take those radio "back announces" (when the host credits the contributor you just

heard) extremely seriously. Sometimes young people can't afford to be anonymous

contributors, no matter how intelligent their collectives happen to be, if they are to

convert their media productions into concrete new opportunities in higher education

and/or living wage work.

When I raised this line of questioning with you in St. Louis, you offered a provocative

response that has stuck with me. You said it reminded you of the observation that

scholars started proclaiming the "death of the author" at the very moment when women

and people of color started getting traction in academic departments and publishing.

So I guess I hesitate to declare the death of the individual youth media maker at the very moment when young people need concrete, specific, and traceable acknowledgement of their work's value, not as a loosey-goosey self-esteem builder, but because that kind of recognition is sometimes necessary for them to leverage their work to transform the conditions of their lives.

Having said all this, I do realize that to some extent I'm conflating collective

authorship with collective intelligence. Collective intelligence isn't so much about

joint production as it is about shared knowledge, not so much about who deserves credit

for the outcome, but how various minds/bodies/imaginations inform and derive

"smarts" from the process. When I reflect on my own creative methods as both a

writer and producer, I can see how "intelligence" can be displaced from the people

in the room to the project underway, from separate minds to shared spaces that take

shape throughout the time it takes to complete a given piece of work. If that's true,

it makes me wonder what happens to that collective and perhaps temporary or contingent

intelligence once the group disbands or the project ends?

Which brings me to one final point. Our conversation in St. Louis also got

me thinking about how it can sometimes feel like projects never end anymore, as a result

of digital culture and its permanent, searchable, ongoing conversation, as dana boyd and

others have described. If youth media producers drop out of that conversation after

they've finished and broadcast/posted a final version of the story, they surrender the

right to keep shaping how the piece is received, interpreted, and re-purposed by other

producers. When Youth Radio stories air nationally, we often hear directly from

listeners, usually with admiration, but not always. Some especially controversial

stories from our recent archive include: when Brandon McFarland wrote about being

whooped as a child; when Cassandra Gonzalez described the first time her baby's

incarcerated father met his newborn daughter; when Clare Robbins talked about an

anti-racist group she joined for white people only. Stories like these get other people

talking, and our challenge as a media literacy organization and production company is to

teach young people that from now on, their work doesn't stop when they produce the

story; they need also to produce the conversation that (hopefully) continues in the

story's wake.

For further information, contact elisabeth soep

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part One)

When I spoke at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis earlier this summer, I was approached by Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep and Ayesha Walker. Soep is the Research Director and Senior Producer f and Walker is an Online Project Associate for an organization called Youth Radio, which defines its mission as: "to promote young people's intellectual, creative and professional growth through training and access to media and to produce the highest quality original media for local and national outlets." As it happens, Soep is a regular reader of this blog and as it happens, because I like to listen to NPR and PRI podcasts when I walk every day, I had heard several of the segments her team had produced. We immediately fell into an intense conversation about authorship in an age of collective intelligence and participatory culture and about what these shifts in the notion of participation and collaboration mean in the context of a program which is trying to "authorize" young people (that is, empower them to become authors.) That conversation convinced me that Soep and her gang had something to teach all of us about youth media production, the nature of radio as a medium, and the shifting construction of authorship in a digital age. And so I immediately asked her if I could do an interview with her and with the people who she is working with for my blog.

This is, in that sense, an unusual interview. Most of my interviews are with specific individuals; this is one of the few times we have done a collaborative interview. The answers which follow come from both youth and adult participants in the Youth Radio program. Such a process is the most appropriate way to capture what Soep calls "collegial pedagogy" -- which depends on shifting the power relations between children and adults. (She says more about this concept below so I don't want to pre-empt her comments.)

I have written here before about my reservations about the "digital natives/digital immigrants" terminology which has gained such circulation in recent years. When I first heard the terms, I thought they were powerful and I have since seen that power many times. They immediately give people a tool to think about something they are experiencing -- some kind of generational shift in the ways that young people and adults relate to these emerging technologies. But it is a power we should use selectively since these terms also distort many aspects of the phenomenon that they seek to describe. There are at least three major distortions involved:

1. The terms are ahistorical. They give rise to the myth that this is the FIRST generation where kids have known more about technology than their parents. I hear this claim again and again from people who should know better and it is simply not true. There have been a series of generation gaps surrounding technology across the past century or more and these gaps have had real impacts on the historical development of communications media. We can learn more about the present moment by looking to the past and using language which cuts us off from that larger history is profoundly unhelpful in understanding our present moment.

2. It collapses all young people into a so-called digital generation. David Buckingham, the British researcher, was the first to really help me understand the risks involved here. We could argue, as I did in Technology Review several years ago, after attending one of Buckingham's conferences, that there are two competing myths -- the Columbine Generation (which we hear much less often now, thankfully, which sees young people as at risk because of their "unique" access to technology) and the Digital Generation (which celebrates the positive transformations being brought about by young people's access to technology). We give up the myth of a Digital Generation at our own risk since it is the most powerful way to counter the Columbine Generation myth. But we also need to recognize the ways that it erases class boundaries in young people's access to and ability to participate in the new media landscape. The Digital Natives metaphor doesn't acknowledge either the digital divide (in young people's access to the technologies) or the participation gap (in young people's access to the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully and meaningfully participate in the emerging digital culture.)

3. It ignores the degree that what's really powerful about most of the new forms of participatory culture of fans, bloggers, and gamers is that such affinity spaces allow young people and adults to interact with each other in new terms. These affinity spaces (to use James Paul Gee's term) bring together youth and adults who don't have fixed and hierarchical relationships (students/teachers, children/parents) on the basis of their shared interests. There are all kinds of anxieties about such relationships in the modern era (since any contact between youth and adults who are not members of their families bring with it a fear of child predators) but there is also something very constructive about many of these normal relations between children and adults. Even traditional forms of contact between adults and youth, such as Sunday school outings or Boy Scouts gatherings, have been tainted both by the fear and the reality of child molestation. And in any case, many of the older ways that youth and adults interacted outside of school and family -- whether through churches or youth organizations -- are facing declines in participation. Moreover, most of the traditional youth organizations were modeled on the same hierarchical relations that shape formal education. In an internet world, where people can meet first without such clear identity markers, young people and adults may at least sometimes interact without age being a major factor. In almost every case, the new participatory cultures are ones which have been built by youth and adults working together. We need to spend more time examining how and where such relationships occur and articulating their value. One of the things which interest me about Youth Radio is that they are pulling such interactions into a public service organization in very conscious ways and that's at the heart of what they are calling "collegial pedagogy." And like many related youth media projects, they involve youth speaking directly to adult and youth audiences about things that matter to them, encouraging us to take seriously young people's perspectives on the world.

The interview which follows not only explains but embodies those relationships. I would also encourage you to check out some of the links to the group's productions which are sprinkled throughout this interview: it will give you a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when we take seriously young people's perspectives on the world and help them get access to the means of cultural production and distribution.

How would you define the mission of Youth Radio? What are you trying to accomplish?

Response from Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer. You can learn more about Soep's perspective by checking out Lissa's blog.

Youth Radio is a youth development organization and independent media production company founded by Ellin O'Leary in 1992. Headquartered in Oakland, CA, we've got satellite bureaus and youth correspondents working across the U.S. and around the world producing and curating award-winning converged media content. Youth Radio stories and shows reach massive audiences through outlets including National Public Radio (with its 27 million weekly listeners), iTunes, Radio Bilingue, YouTube, and MySpace. Youth Radio promotes young people's intellectual, creative, and professional growth and citizenship and transforms the public discourse through media production.

Students come to Youth Radio primarily from the nations strapped, heavily tracked, re-segregating public schools. Most are low-income, digitally marginalized youths and young people of color. Our approach links deadline driven, production-based media education with programs that support personal and community health, engage active citizenship, and pave pathways to college and living wage jobs in the media and beyond.

Over the past several years, Youth Radio's teen reporters have examined the status of free speech in U.S. classrooms in an era of shrinking civil liberties. Our Reflections on Return series has documented the experiences of young troops coming home from the Iraq war. A Cape Town college student grappled with her father's participation as a police officer in the former apartheid state. One young man documented his experience of deportation, having been released from prison to a country he hadn't set foot in since he was two years old. A son reflected on his mother's struggle, and his own, with her AIDS diagnosis. Teens described the horror of running into their moms on MySpace.

Young people produce culture everyday. Through stories such as these, they put cultural production to work for themselves, their communities, and their audiences across our connected, divided world.

What roles do youth play in your production process? What roles do adults play?

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

The answer depends on where young people are in the program. Within the first week of starting an introductory class, students go on the air for a live public affairs radio

show, which goes out via broadcast and online. In this phase of their Youth Radio

experience, they learn mainly from peers how to produce commentaries, news,

roundtables, public service announcements, original beats, music segments, blogs, and

videos. Recent program graduates--most teenagers themselves and some younger than their

own students--serve as the lead instructors, editors, and co-producers. Peer teachers

make the transition from students to educators with scaffolding from adults through

weekly professional development workshops on topics ranging from how to operate a flash

recorder, to how to navigate the uncertain ethics of today's digital culture.

After the 10-week introductory course work, young people move through another 10 weeks

of more advanced training in specialized areas (e.g., engineering, journalism, music

production, etc.) and eventually into paid internships in every department across the

organization. Here's where they start to collaborate in a different way with adults.

Take, for example, our professional newsroom. Young people facilitate weekly editorial

meetings where they pitch stories to peers and adult producers. Youth reporters then

work closely with adult media professionals on every stage of developing the story:

finding an angle, identifying characters and scenes, developing interview questions,

gathering "tape" (a term we still use all the time inside our fully digital studios)

and then devising an outline, composing a script, mixing the story, and delivering to an

outlet.

I call our newsroom methodology "collegial pedagogy" (Vivian Chavez and I have

written about this in a Harvard Ed Review article and we've got a chapter devoted to

it in our forthcoming book, Drop That Knowledge, with UC Press).

Collegial pedagogy is a deeply interdependent dynamic that's markedly different from most classroom scenarios. In collegial pedagogy, young people and adults co-create original work

neither could pull off alone, and over which neither stands as final judge, because the

work goes out to an audience no one--young or old--can fully predict or control. The

adult producer could not create the story without young people to identify topics worth

exploring, to host and record peer-to-peer conversations, and to experiment with novel

modes of expression and ways of using words, scene, and sound. At the same time, young

people could not create the story without adults to provide access to resources,

equipment, high- profile outlets, and institutional recognition, and to share the skills

and habits developed through years of experience as media professionals. Young people

offer a key substantive contribution that the adults cannot provide -- a certain kind

of access, understanding, experience, or analysis directly relevant to the project at

hand. They contribute insights and challenging perspectives to a mainstream media that

too often ignores the experience and intelligence of youth. And yet adults do not only

oversee or facilitate the learning experience surrounding a given media production

experiment; they actually join in the production process itself.

It can be tricky to work as an adult inside collegial pedagogy, tempting as it often is

to get so swept up in a project that you start to take over. It's a problem youth

media producer Debra Koffler from the Conscious Youth Media Crew has cleverly termed "adulteration" - a risk that seems inherent in creative collaborations where young

people and adults feel mutual passion, investment, and vulnerability. That's why

there's one policy that is absolutely non-negotiable at Youth Radio: young people

always have final editorial say over everything they create. The ultimate goal of

collegial pedagogy, after all, is for young people to develop the technical, creative,

and intellectual capacities they need to step away from adults. In our newsroom, they

increasingly work independently to create high quality products, while maturing into

journalists prepared to partner, from the other side of the pedagogical dynamic, with

students following in their footsteps.

What do you see as the continued value of broadcast radio as a medium in an era of blogs

and podcasts?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

The teenagers and young adults currently enrolled and working in our organization are bridging this gap between broadcast and digital outlets. They're key consumers and producers of converged media products, finding new music through social networking sites and seeing their online radio programs downloaded as podcasts hundreds of times a week. But there are still technological barriers to online radio and podcasts becoming their own listening formats of choice.

Even though they are increasingly using their cell phones and iPods for music downloads, they often have limited access to computers on which to stream online radio. And even when they do have home computers, that access engenders a very individual - even lonely - listening experience. Broadcast radio, on the other hand, creates a listenership community. Even a high school student graduating in the class of 2008, coming of age alongside MySpace and Sirius, will have made most of the new music discoveries of his or her lifetime during drive time terrestrial radio broadcasts. I'd be surprised if the power of this nostalgia didn't echo into the next generation of listeners.

Even though radio's "golden era" (which can plausibly refer to any period before the FCC's 1996 deregulation of the industry) offered far more musical diversity, it has something in common with the post-consolidation period. A favorite radio jock is crown prince or princess of the morning, determining the proverbial water cooler conversation: Are you going to the Art and Soul Festival Chuy mentioned? They're going to have a blood donation booth. Did you hear that crank call to the bakery? That interview with Mary J. Blige - I didn't know she was in town this weekend!

I also think that despite the surge of interest and influence in user-generated content and the move-away from top-down journalism, there's still a strong desire for traditional media producers' authority of experience and delivery. "I can't live without my radio!"

I noticed that you are making your broadcast content available via iTunes. How did that

come about and how successful do you think this approach has been at broadening who

listens to youth radio?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

As digital media/online radio and podcasts began to draw increasing audiences a few years back, Youth Radio approached Apple's iTunes as a potential outlet for our radio stories. We ended up with both a weekly podcast on iTunes and a 24-hour radio stream, found under iTunes "Public," "Urban," and "Eclectic" categories.

In addition to being another opportunity for our students to refine the improvisational live hosting and interviewing skills they learn in our classes, the radio stream has been an important free space for creative stories and uncensored music that might be difficult to place on our terrestrial broadcast outlets, given time constraints and FCC regulations.

Youth Radio has produced a variety of talk-format programs for weekly and monthly broadcast on San Francisco Bay Area commercial and public radio. However, most of that programming was dominated by public affairs content - roundtable discussions and interview segments responding to news events or exploring various aspects of youth culture. The iTunes stream presented an opportunity to run 24 hours of music-driven content. This programming is akin to the live radio format that draws many young people to Youth Radio in the first place. The fact that the stream is online and carried by a significant media company vastly expands the potential audience, with listeners in various national and international locations, represented as pushpins on the world map in our iTunes studio. And like our relationship with NPR, the recognition and marketing potential of the Apple brand provides valuable leverage as we seek new digital media outlets.

The iTunes stream also has great potential as a place for experimentation as audiences' appetites shift. For example, as YouTube came to prominence, one of our students shot and posted cell phone footage of the Oakland A's mascot hyphy dancing (an energetic hip hop genre originating in the Bay Area) and the clip has been viewed more than 400,000 times to date. We were inspired to start experimenting with this less highly produced aesthetic in our audio work, launching a content stream called "Youth Radio Raw." iTunes was the natural, (and frankly, only) place to debut this material.

There's been a general trend suggesting that contemporary youth are less likely than previous generations to seek out information from traditional news channels. What insights do you have about why young people might be turned off by news?

Response from Pendarvis "Dru" Harshaw, Youth Radio Reporter and Commentator For a sample of Dru's broadcasts, see "N-Bomb", NPRand "The Turf/The Village"

Readily available news. Everyone reports. How do you decide? The information age has reached the point where news is constantly flashing in our faces, from news tickers on

the sides of skyscrapers in major cities, to news flashes on your hand held communication tool that you use as a cell phone.

News is everywhere. So how credible is every source?

Many would say that laziness is the reason that my generation doesn't re the news. But

I say searching for credibility is where my generation's laziness comes into play. Instead of researching the origin of stories and the hard facts, we would rather take what is given as fact, or not take anything.

We have an urge to know about the news that directly relates to us. When I read the newspaper, I read about the sports team I like and the city side section to see if anyone I know died. I get on the internet and check my email and MySpace, and if something on Yahoo's web page catches my attention, it's because it directly relates to me...In turn, credibility has been substituted for relativity. That's why we do not read YOUR news, we read our news.

The difference between Youth Radio and MySpace or a YouTube or any new site which allows

a person to produce themselves is ... media literacy. Youth Radio does what MySpace

would hate us to do: Teach us why sites like MySpace work--the advertisements, the

conglomerates, and how all of this relates to them getting our money. Instead of

blindly posting our videos and pictures on a website owned by a round table of old

farts, Youth Radio teaches us the process of broadcasting, the mechanics of production,

and the influence of media --not from the mouth of an old fart, but from the mouths of

young people who have also gone through this program, young people who are literate in the power of media, and the power we have in producing the media.

Answering Questions From a Snowman: The YouTube Debate and Its Aftermath

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman." -- Mitt Romney

I promised some reflections about the YouTube presidential debate almost a week ago but something has kept getting in the way. I almost decided to forget about it but in the past few days, the issue has resurfaced as the Republican candidates are doing a little dance about who will or will not participate in CNN's planned GOP YouTube debate in September. So far, only two Republican candidates have agreed to participate. I've been having fun challenging folks to guess which ones they are. The answer will be later in this post.

Some had predicted that the use of YouTube in a presidential debate was something of a gimmick or a cross-branding opportunity for CNN and Google. It was certainly both of those, but it may represent something more than that, a shift in the nature of public debates in the campaign process as profound in its way as the emergence of the Town Hall Debate format in the 1990s.

Let's consider the classic debate format where established journalists, sworn to some degree of political neutrality, ask candidates questions. This format has some strengths and some limitations. In theory, the questions asked are well informed because the people asking them are focused full time on following the campaign and the candidates and understand what topics are most likely to establish the contrast between the political figures on the stage. At the same time, the questions asked are likely to reflect an "inside the beltway" perspective -- that is, they reflect the world view of a specific political class which may or may not reflect the full range of issues that the American people want addressed.

The process maintains a certain aura around the political process: celebrity journalists ask questions of celebrity politicians in a world totally sealed off from the everyday experience of the voters. One consequence of this format is that the candidates tend to empty the questioner from the equation. One addresses the question; one ignores the person who asks the question.

This construct sounds more "rational" or "neutral" but it also makes it much easier for the candidate to reframe the question to suit their own purposes. There is no penalty for ignoring the motives behind the question because, in the end, the claim is that there are no motives behind the question. This has in the past gotten some political leaders in trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the famous moment while Michael Dukakis was asked how he would respond if his wife was raped and murdered and he offered a fairly bloodless critique of the death penalty as a matter of public policy. The questioner was trying to get at the human side of his perspective on the issue and he got criticized for being cold and calculating, yet the fact that he ignored the human dimensions of the question was in many ways a product of the presumed "neutrality" of the professional debate format.

In the 1990s, an alternative -- the town hall meeting debate -- emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question -- and why they ask it -- is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective -- the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can't get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses -- Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were "individuals" who "made a difference."

What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying "I feel your pain" a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

Clinton recognized early on the emerging paradigm of narrowcasting, using the town hall meeting in relation to specific audiences on specific cable outlets -- for example, African Americans on the Arsenio Hall show, young voters on MTV, or southern voters on the Nashville Network. In each case, he was able to signal his knowledge of specific issues and respect for specific challenges confronting this constituencies. People today remember Clinton playing the sax on late night television; they forget that it came at the end of almost an hour of thoughtful discussion of race and class in America in the wake of Rodney King and the LA Riots at a time when the mainstream media was only interested in asking him about his sex life. No candidate has ever been as effective at Clinton at responding to the particularities of the town hall meeting format but it has emerged as a standard part of the campaign process ever since and for good reason, because there is both symbolic and substantive importance to how well candidates interact with these diverse constituencies.

There are some core limits to this format. The questions come in a context which is deeply intimidating to non-professionals and thus it preserves an aura surrounding the candidates. Only certain kinds of questions get asked because only certain issues are appropriate to this format. The questions get asked with a certain degree of awe even when the voter is skeptical of the answers they are receiving.

So, this brings us to the YouTube format which seems significant in a number of levels. First, the people asking the questions are speaking from their own homes or from other spaces that they have chosen to embody the issues they want the candidates to address. The language is more informal, the questions are more personal, the tone is less reverent, and the result forces the political candidates to alter their established scripts. (And of course, let's not forget the role which CNN played in curating the set of questions presented. I was prepared to trash CNN for playing it safe but in fact, they chose some of the more provocative submissions here and these videos have emerged at the center of the controversy around the debate.)

here were moments early in the YouTube debate where the candidates were sticking to their sound bytes and talking points, despite the very different tone and context of this debate. More than anything else, this called attention to the gap between the ways everyday people speak and the lofty rhetoric of contemporary politics. What seemed relatively natural in a conversation between professionals felt truly disconnected from the YouTube participants. Then, as the evening went along, we saw the candidates one by one step out tentatively and then more assuredly onto thin ice, trying to find a new language by which to express their issues and to form a new relationship to the voters.

We certainly saw signs of the old townhall meeting format both in the style and tone of some of the more "serious minded" questions and in terms of the ways that the candidates were careful to address the person behind the question -- as in the constant salutes to the servicemen. But something else was also occurring, as when Joe Biden offered his relatively acerbic and unguarded perceptions of the gun lover who called his automatic weapon his "baby."

I was fascinated with the exchange about the minimum wage. One of the viewers asked the candidates whether they could and would live on minimum wage as president. Many of them were quick to agree to these terms -- my hopes that this might become a reality have been shattered by the fact that most of the mainstream media never even reported on this round of questions, focusing instead on the more conventional disagreement between Clinton and Obama about whether they would meet with foreign leaders. Chris Dodd won points for his honest response that he couldn't afford to support two college bound offspring on minimum wage, an answer that brought him closer to the level of the average middle class voter. And Obama carried the round by acknowledging that it would relatively easy for people who had money in the bank (not to mention free food and lodging) to live on mimimum wage and something different if you had no resources to fall back on.

By bringing the cameras into their homes, the voters were forcing the candidates to respond to the contexts in which they live. We saw this occur again and again -- not just the well publicized cases of the social workers in Darfur or the cancer patient who removed her wigs, but in the more subtle ways that we get a glimpse of the domestic spaces in the background of most of the videos. The result was a debate which felt closer to the lived experience of voters, which took on some of the informality, intimacy, and humor one associates with YouTube at its best.

To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of the broadcast came when the candidates were asked to submit their own YouTube style videos. Here, we had a chance to see how the campaigns perceived the properties of this new participatory culture. Some of the candidates did embrace the new political language (notably Chris Dodd and John Edwards, who both had fun with public comments about their hair) or tried for a more down to earth style (as in Hillary Clinton's use of hand lettered and hand flipped signs, which unintentionally mirrored the style of one of the user-generated videos on the same program.) Many of the others simply recycled videos produced for broadcast media which came across as too polished for this new context. And Dennis Kucinich, the man who once brought a visual aid to a radio debate, seemed to confuse YouTube for a late night informercial. Oh, well. He demonstrates yet again that he is a nerd, perhaps even a dork, but not a geek.

All of this brings us to the issue of the snowman which seems to have caused Mitt Romney and many of the conservative pundits so much anxiety. Keep in mind that the snowman animation was used to frame a substantive question about global warming. In this case, then, it wasn't what was being asked but how it was being asked or who was asking it that posed a challenge to establishment sensibilities. The snowman spot was a spoof of the whole process of having the questioner embody the issue and the whole ways in which children as used as foils for political rhetoric, as figures for imagined or dreaded futures for the society at large.

But it also represented a shift away from embodying issues and towards dramatizing them. I was surprised we didn't see more or this -- more use of video montages or projected images in the background, illustrating the topics in a way that went beyond what could be done by a live person standing in an auditorium during a live debate. I suspect we will see more such videos in future debates because they show the full potential of this new format. Now, keep in mind that political leaders have never had any problem dramatizing issues during their own campaign advertisements -- even the use of personification or animation would not be that unusual in the history of political advertisements. Such images have long been seen as appropriate ways for campaigns to address voters, so why should they be seen as inappropriate as a means of voters to question candidates?

From the start, it had been predicted that Democrats would fare better in this new format than Republicans, just as historically they have fared better in the town hall meeting format. This format is consistent with the populist messages that are adopted by many Democratic politicians and the format itself seems to embody a particular conception of America which emerges from Identity politics (though, as my example of the way Reagan used something similar to focus on individual rather than governmental response, suggests that this is simply one of many ways that this format might be framed). So, is it any surprise that Romney and other GOP candidates are developing cold feet about appearing in this much more unpredictable format.

Not surprisingly, while Romney and Guiliani have been pulling back, McCain is pushing ahead. This approach is closer to the old "Straight Talk Express" bus that he used 8 years ago than anything he had embraced in this campaign cycle. Right now, the guy needs a miracle just to stay in a race and perhaps being willing to engage with the public via new media may represent the best way to set himself apart from the other frontrunners. The other GOP candidate embracing the format is Ron Paul, the former Libertarian Party candidate, and the Republican who so far seems to be have a much stronger base of support online than off, in part because the web offers more traction for low budget campaigns and anti-establishment figures.

Within the GOP, the debate about YouTube debates is shaping into a referendum about the role of web 2.0 in the political process. Here's how Time sums up the issues:

Patrick Ruffini, a G.O.P. online political strategist, wrote on his blog: "It's stuff like this that will set the G.O.P. back an election cycle or more on the Internet." Democratic consultants are rubbing their hands together at being able to portray their general election rivals as being -- as one put it to me -- "afraid of snowmen" or simply ignorant of techonologies that many Americans use on a daily basis. Indeed, Governor Romney today, in the context of evincing concern over Internet predators, supported that suspicion: "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000," he said, mistaking the debate co-sponsor for the social network MySpace, which has recently done a purge of sex offenders from its rolls.

Hmmm. MySpace, YouTube, what's the difference?

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. What follows is the second installment. I am being pressed for time this morning but hope to add a few comments to this post later today about last night's debate. You only briefly touch upon the rise of news comedy shows like The Daily Showand The Colbert Report. Do you see such programs as a positive force in American democracy? How do you respond to those who feel that the blurring

between news and politics trivializes the political process? What role does

comedy play in the kinds of popular politics you are advocating?

I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As someone on the Left it is refreshing to see a progressive viewpoint expressed (even if only expressed ironically) in a way that makes me laugh and gives me pleasure. I also think that Stewart and Colbert's use of humor can be deeply subversive: they use ridicule to show how ridiculous "serious politics" is, much in the same way that Jonathan Swift's "modest" proposal in 1729 made the "rational" case for solving the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating them. The political process is already a joke, these guys are merely recognizing it for what it is.

In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth. However, it's still unclear that ironic joking leads to the sort of popular response I'm hypothesizing above. It can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for it to get a good laugh out of it all. To paraphrase the philosopher Walter Benjamin: we can learn to find pleasure in our own destruction.

However, I think we need to take Stewart at his word: he's just an entertainer. It's really up to the rest of us to answer the questions he poses. Sometimes I think we ask too much of culture: we expect it to solve our political problems for us. I don't think it can do this. It can create openings, give us insight, provide us with tools, but the rest is a political process that counts on all of us.

You contrast the ways that FDR spoke to the American public with the ways that George W. Bush addresses us during his weekly radio-casts. What do you see as

the primary differences? Most contemporary politicians who attempt to

"explain" complex policy issues in the way FDR did get accused of being

"wonks." What steps do you think could be taken to create a new political

rhetoric which embraces the ideal of an informed public but doesn?t come

across as patronizing or pedantic?

The brilliance of FDR is that he and his New Deal administration, like King and his fellow organizers, recognized the necessity of spectacle in politics. Because of this they worked hard to re-imagine spectacle in a way that could fit progressive, democratic ends. The 1920s were an era much like our own in its worship of celebrity: a mediated world of movie stars on the silver screen and sports heroes in the new photo-tabloids. But instead of merely condemning this state of affairs, New Deal artists and administrators re-imagined it, using photographs sponsored by the Farm Securities Agency and murals painted by artists of the Works Progress Administration to recognize and display a different sort of American: the dust bowl farmer, the southern share cropper, the factory worker, the rootless migrant. By creating these counter-spectacles they tried to turn the public gaze from stars to everyday (albeit romanticized) people, essentially redefining "The People" in the popular imagination. Make no mistake, this was a deeply political move, as valorizing everyday people was essential for garnering political support for New Deal political and economic programs.

Roosevelt's "fireside chats" also put the lie to the myth that spectacle has to run against reason. Over thirty times during his presidency FDR addressed the American public on the radio. He would always begin these speeches with a warm "My friends." But what followed this simple greeting was a sophisticated explanation of the crises the country faced: the banking collapse, currency concerns, the judiciary, world war. This was propaganda. The speeches were scripted by playwrights who dramatized the case for the president's politics, and FDR spoke to people's fears and desires in a folksy, personalized language, but these fireside chats also took for granted that citizens could be reasoning beings with the ability to understand complex issues. In other words FDR believed that rationality and emotion could exist side by side.

I wish contemporary politicians would learn from this. Instead, we get the "man of reason" like John Kerry, or the "man of fantasy" aka George W. Bush. Politicians need to understand - in a way that I think many producers of pop culture already do - that you can speak to reason and fantasy simultaneously. It's an Enlightenment myth that truth is self-evident: that all you need to do is lay out the facts of your argument and immediately people will acknowledge and embrace it. What FDR and King understood is that the truth needs help. It needs stories told about it, works of art made of it, it needs to use symbols and be embedded in myths that people find meaningful. It needs to be yelled from the mountaintops. The truth needs help, but helping it along doesn't mean abandoning it.

You discuss the public desire for recognition as the flip side of their

relationship to celebrity culture. What lessons might progressives draw from

reality television about this desire for recognition?

If there are two things that those on the Left love to hate (while secretly enjoying) it's celebrity culture and reality TV. These play to the our most base political desires: celebration of an ersatz aristocracy and cutthroat competition; the driving fantasies of Feudalism and Capitalism respectively. True, true. But it's a mistake to write them off as just that, for they also manifest another popular dream: the desire to be seen. What do stars have that we don't? Wealth and beauty, yes, but also something more important: they are recognized. What is reality TV about? The chance for someone like us to be recognized.

What sort of a politics can be based in a recognition that we desperately what to be recognized? First off, policies that make it easier to be seen and heard. Community TV, micro radio, free internet access, net neutrality, and so on. If the populist Huey Long once called for a "chicken in every pot," in the mass mediated age our slogan ought to be "every person an image." But it goes deeper than this, for the popular desire is not just about being seen as an image on a screen. This, in some ways, is just a metaphor for a far deeper desire: being recognized for who we are and what we are, our opinions and our talents -- and this is the core of democracy.

The democracy we have today has little place for our opinions and talents. Our opinions show up as abstract polling data, and the only talents our political process asks for is our skill at forking over money to professional activists and campaigns or our dexterity in pulling a voting lever. This professionalization of politics, whereby democracy becomes the business of lobbyists, fund raisers, and image consultants, has fundamentally alienated the citizenry from their own democracy. It's no wonder that we turn to culture to find these dreams of recognition expressed.

This issue really gets to the core of my Dream. My book is about learning from popular culture and constructing ethical spectacles, but the lessons that I hope are learned will lead far further than making better advertisements or staging better protests for progressive political causes (though that wouldn't hurt). What I'm arguing for in my book is a reconfiguration of political thought, a sort of "dreampolitik" that recognizes that dreams and desires, ones that are currently manifested in pop culture, need to be an integral part of our democratic politics.

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)

Tonight, at 7 p.m. est, CNN will host a debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, aired live from South Carolina. There have already been several previous debates during which American citizens could get an early look at Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the other contenders for the nomination. What makes this debate interesting is that average citizens were invited to submit their questions for the debate via YouTube. Last week, I appeared on Talk of the Nation with David Bohrman, the guy from CNN who has been given the task to select the questions that actually reach the air, and Joshua Levy, a political blogger (TechPresident.com). We learned that there had been, at that point, more than 1500 questions submitted and that the CNN staff was shifting through them to decide which ones should be asked the candidates. You might want to take some time today to sample the kinds of questions submitted in their raw form. They reflect two of the dominant modes of production for YouTube. On the one hand, there are straight to camera confessionals -- often deadly serious, frequently deeply personal, made by people who embody the issues they are discussing. These videos reflect the ways that Americans are taught, via television, to speak to presidential candidates and more often than not, they reflect the same agenda that has shaped previous debates. The CNN spokesperson did say that there were certain topics, Darfur for example, which cropped up much more often among viewers than among professional journalists. But, for the most part, these questions reflect the prevailing tone and style of American political discourse. The second set are parodies and satires -- often bitingly irreverent, borrowing the language of popular culture to challenge the pomposity of the debate format. Sometimes, they spoof the very idea that citizens should be made to embody their questions -- as in this video where a guy dressed like a Viking asks a question about immigration or consider this question from a LA based "celebrity". Sometimes, they make fun of what kinds of questions deserved discussion in this format -- as in this video about alien invasions. Sometimes, they make use of borrowed footage -- as in this JibJab style segment featuring a George W. impersonator.

It is going to be interesting, then, to see what kinds of selections the network makes amongst all of this material: will they naturally go towards those that adopt the discourses of respectful citizens and identity politics? Will they ask more or less the same questions that we've heard in the previous debates, only this time spoken through the mouths of YouTube fans? Or will some of the more wacky segments make their way into the air? And if they do, how will the candidates react and how will the pundits respond? As I wrote last week, we are seeing a consistent insertion of the discourse of participatory culture into the political process this campaign season in an attempt to reach voters who would normally tune out debates and that's what makes this particular set of exchanges so interesting.

To help us get into the spirit of the YouTube debate, I am featuring today an interview with Stephen Duncombe, the author of an important new book about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy which I have mentioned here several times already -- Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. I have incorporated this paragraph from Duncombe's book in a number of talks I've given over the last few months and it is suggestive of the provocative nature of his argument:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

Duncombe's previous books, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, have been important contributions to our understanding of contemporary cultural politics, albeit aimed at academic readers primarily. Duncombe himself has been active in a number of key political movements in New York City, where he teaches, and describes some of those experiences in Dream. With this book, he has produced a text which will be read well beyond the academic realm and could provide us with a handbook for understanding why this current campaign is making such vivid and interesting use of a rhetoric informed by our experiences with participatory culture. Check out his website for more information on the book.

Throughout the book, you embrace a politics based on spectacle. How do you

define spectacle? What do you see as the defining characteristics of

progressive spectacle and how would it differ from more conservative forms of

spectacle?

I guess I'd define spectacle as a dream performed, or perhaps, a fantasy on display. Spectacle animates an abstraction and realizes what reality often times cannot represent. But I also like to use the term in a broader way: to describe a way of making an argument, not through appeals to reason and fact (though these certainly can, and should, be part of spectacle) but through stories and myth, imagination and fantasy. This definition covers what I call ethical spectacles, but also describes spectacles with less scruples: those engineered by the Nazis at Nuremberg, conjured up by creative directors on Madison Avenue or staged by Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. So what separates my "ethical" spectacles from these? It's a complicated question and I spend about a third of my book exploring it, but if I had to sum up the core value of an ethical spectacle in one word it would be this: democracy.

Most spectacles are anti-democratic. They are about one-way communication flows and predictable responses. "They" engineer the look and feel and message of the spectacle and "we" - the spectators - respond in a predetermined fashion. If this type of spectacle is successful we give our consent or support: we march in lines and vote for the Party or buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it is always someone else's dream. Ethical spectacle follows a different formula. It's a spectacle where the lines between those who create and those who spectate are blurred, one which is dreamt up, executed, and acted upon by its participants. This makes for a sloppy sort of spectacle, one where spectators are also actors, where the mechanics of the staging is obvious to all involved, and where meanings and outcomes are not predetermined, but isn't this also the definition of democracy?

There's also another key difference between the spectacle I'm advocating for and that which we are used to experiencing: reality. Most spectacle is using fantasy as a replacement for reality. Think of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln. This was an attempt (imagineered by an ex-TV producer named Scott Sforza) to replace reality with fantasy: our president is a warrior prince, not a combat dodger; the war in Iraq is won, not just beginning. The approach I'm advocating for deals with reality differently, using spectacle to dramatize the real, not cover it over.

A great example of this is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. He went into Birmingham knowing the violent, racist reputation of the chief of police. In fact, he counted on it. And "Bull" Connor acted out his part: jailing school kids, turning fire hoses on picketers, letting dogs loose on peaceful protesters, and so on, creating those iconic images of the civil rights movement, and publicizing to a world media the reality of racism in the United States. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil Rights Act passed the next year. It's also no coincidence that the footage of Top Gun W couldn't be used by the Republicans a year after the staged landing; the deadly reality of the continuing war had leaked through the staged fantasy. As the presidential namesake of the aircraft carrier that Bush landed on once said: "You can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Ethical spectacle fools no one. It is at its best when it is obvious what it is: just a spectacle. Like the architecture of Las Vegas or the campy performance of pro wrestling, one can also stage spectacles that don't pretend to be reality but wear their constructed nature on their sleeve. They are spectacles which present themselves as spectacles. As such, these dreams performed become, in their own way, real. Illusion may be a necessary part of politics but delusion need not be.

Your book poses some sharp criticisms of the kinds of political rhetoric which

has emerged from "mainstream" perspectives within the Democratic Party. For

example, you characterize progressive critics, such as Hillary Clinton or Joseph

Leiberman, who embrace a "culture war" rhetoric as playing into conservative

stereotypes of "well-mannered, well-dressed, liberal elites,"

"busybodies" and "condescending experts" who want to use the power of

government to enforce their tastes upon society. Why do you think Democratic

leaders have been so quick to embrace a form of politics which is so strongly

opposed to popular culture and what do you see of the benefits of shifting the

terms of the debate?

One of my friends, the activist David Solnit, once said: "all politics is theatre, just some of it is bad theatre." When it comes to popular culture, the Democrats seem clueless about their public image. Take Senator Hillary Clinton's press conference condemning Grand Theft Auto for example. Here she was, before an international media, playing out the Right's stereotype of the Left: a bunch of superior sounding, out-of-touch, elites telling the rest of us what's good for us, and then using government regulation to make sure we can't decide for ourselves. Karl Rove couldn't have asked for anything better (Nor could Rockstar Games since that press conference likely sold boku copies of GTA/SA as people hurried out for a taste of forbidden fruit).

Why the Dems are so clueless is a bit of a mystery. Part of it has to do with the history of Liberalism in this country which comes out of elite reform movements like Prohibition (a once progressive idea, along with eugenics!) as much as it arises out of labor and social movements (both of which are more interested in equality and justice than morality and culture). But this shying away from pop culture, I think, also has a lot to do with an abiding Enlightenment faith in the superiority of rationality and reason, and a deep suspicion of desire and fantasy - the very things, of course, which drive pop culture. This is a political problem since so much of politics is based in fantasy and desire and Liberals these days are simply not very skilled in operating on this terrain. This split between rationality and fantasy is also a false one, these forces don't inhabit separate spheres, they coexist and intermingle in all of us. It's the old, and tired, mind/body split. It's time to move on.

You describe popular culture as a "ready-made laboratory" for studying the

"dreams" of the American public. Why do you think progressive politics have

been so disdainful of popular culture? How do you respond to critics who might

argue that your arguments place too great a trust in market forces? You write,

for example, "If culture stays, and sells, it means that it somehow resonates

with the popular will. And anyone interested in democratic politics ignores such

enthusiasm at his or her peril."

The biggest problem with ignoring popular culture, politically speaking, is not that you turn off this or that group of fans (the Dems could alienate every single NASCAR fan in the entire country and still sweep the elections), but that you ignore this powerful indicator of people's dreams and desires. As the great political commentator Walter Lippmann once argued, politicians don't need to think much of popular culture, but they do need to think a lot about it.

I have a lot of problems living in a consumer capitalist culture, and my own cultural upbringing was in the decidedly anti-market world of punk rock, but even I recognize the value of appreciating popular culture in a society like ours. Unlike culture patronized by the aristocracy or funded by the state, commercial culture has to appeal to a wide enough audience to make it a profitable business. Yes, this appeal is not pure: marketing and star power can make any movie a hit the first weekend, but for that movie to still be selling the second and third it had better resonate with the popular will. So if you want to figure out what ideas and aspirations are resonating with the public a good place to start is with popular culture.

But, and this is a big but, the hit movie is not what we should be paying attention to -- we need to dig deeper. What we really need to explore are the dreams at the root of the hit movie. That movie is only one manifestation of our desires, and a commercially acceptable one at that, we need to think of others. Take a hit movie like the original Matrix. As a fan I can appreciate it as exciting entertainment, but as a politico I'm interested in what it says about us as a people: our striving for personal power and to be part of a rebellious community, our desire to stick it to the man and reveal the truth, (not to mention our love of cool toys and stylish outfits). Once you understand these forces you can do other things with them. Pop culture is just one expression of our dreams, a progressive political system that empowers people, builds community, fights power and reveals the truth -- might be another.<.blockquote>

So far, we are seeing some signs of a more playful style of activism is having

an impact on the upcoming presidential election. Witness the spoof of the Apple

1984 campaign, "Obama Girl", or for that matter, the video in which Hillary

and Bill spoof the Sopranos. What do you think this YouTube based politics

might suggest about the potentials or limits of a politics which draws its

images and language from popular culture?

I think you explore this far deeper, and far better, than I do Henry, but it seems to me that accessible media production technology, the semiotic tool box we've all built from our life-long immersion in pop culture, and the new distribution apparatus like YouTube, have immense political potential. MoveOn.org demonstrated this in their "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign. They asked their audience to make an anti-Bush advertisement -- and received more than 1,500 of them, many of them better than anything a professional production house could create. This demonstrates the awesome power - and talent - of the "audience." This is, um, "poaching" at its best: political "fans" tapping into popular desire and, using pop culture language, delivering, a different message. At its worst this pop culture poaching leads to the Hillary Clinton Soprano's ad: using all the style of popular culture but ignoring the deep seated reasons that such a series was popular. Clinton's approach is just using pop culture a gimmick.

One of the things that interests me most about the explosion of media production is the multiplicity of messages and meanings that political campaigns have to contend with. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy (George Washington was accused of being the corrupter of a washerwoman's daughter), and the swiftboating of John Kerry was just a high-tech version. What is new this election cycle is the direct impact, not of opposing professional campaigns, but of political fans. We've already seen how fans of Barack Obama have used pop culture tropes to make him into a sex symbol and render Hillary Clinton as Big Sister. Political campaigns are just going to have to make peace with the fact that they can not control their message, and that the message is going to be determined, in part, by their fans. This means that "unacceptable" material is going to be part of the political discussion and decision making.

We can either bemoan this fact: the debasement of the political process and so on, or we can look for what might be more positive aspects. It could be argued that one of the things that's wrong with electoral politics today is that what is considered "expectable" is determined by professional pundits, big media and those who make large campaign contributions. Consequently, what is of interest to the majority of us is left out of the discussion. Certainly, Obama Girl isn't opening up a substantive political discussion of anything, but it's very existence, and its popularity, suggests that we, the people, want something else, something more, than the sanitized, pre-packaged, content-free politician packages we've gotten in the past.

There's no doubt that reducing serious politicians like Obama to a stud and Clinton to Big Sister debases politics, playing into old stereotypes about the sexuality of Black men and the controlling nature of professional women. But as the means of mediated spectacle production and distribution continue to be democratized, I have faith that what will develop is a sort of bell curve of meaning. There will be offensive and malicious media spectacles as outliers on either side, but the critical mass of the center will open up substantive issues of political interest to the majority of citizens. Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? This is merely democracy in the age of the mediated image.

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series elaborating on comments I made to Mother Jones as part of their special Democracy 2.0 issue. Today, I take up a few more of the many implications of this interplay between participatory culture and participatory democracy. Democracy and the Participation Gap

While I remain firm in my belief that, as I explained here some months ago, the rise of participatory culture has the potential to renew participatory democracy, I remain concerned about the participation gap, those who lack the technical access, the cultural competencies, and the sense of empowerment needed to fully participate in this new political culture.

MJ: Are there elements about the use of technology that could make the political process less democratic?

HJ: If the central conversation about the election is only online, rather than through broadcast television, large numbers of people will simply not have access to what the candidates are saying. So, for some people, this campaign is going to be more accessible than ever before. They have access to more information; they can drill deeper; they can maintain regular contact with the campaign; they can interact with other supporters and so forth. For others, who have no access or limited access to the Internet, moving all this activity online suggests that they don't count, their voices don't matter. They have no access to the information to make reliable decisions. And it's not the campaigns who are doing that, so much as broadcast television, which is decreasing the coverage that it provides of the party conventions. It's local newspapers that are cutting back the number of pages devoted to candidates for office. Those are the things that make the use of new media less democratic, because they are falling back on the presence of the new media to justify cutting back on basic information sources that citizens who don't have online access would rely on to follow the political process....

Whenever we look towards new and emerging platforms as a resource for democracy, we must at the same time consider who is being left behind. And I do see dangers at a moment when mainstream media is cutting down on its news coverage of the presidential nominating process and much of the information is moving to cable or digital media. The people who are going to have to work hardest to get access to information and participate within the process are going to be those who have historically felt the most disenfranchised in the first place. The move towards digital campaigning may capture the imagination of many young voters but it may also exclude many low income participants.

Social Networks as Political Interfaces

My conversation with Mother Jones turned towards the use of social networking sites, another major innovation in this year's campaign:

HJ: I think some of it has to do with the use of MySpace by the Obama campaign, which is something that I don't think is necessarily being [deployed] by the other campaigns as effectively yet--[Obama's supporters show] an understanding of how you use social networking to reach young voters. It's not about bringing people to your site and keeping them there; it's about giving people the resources to take your message with them wherever they want to go. It's allowing people to befriend the Obama campaign via MySpace and the other social networking pages. It's really clever because it makes the social affiliation of the campaign much more visible, and it allows all those people to connect to each other and feel a sense of affiliation, as opposed to simply receiving a message from on high. That's why the anti-Hillary 1984 campaign commercial that circulated was so much more credible than the one that reacted to it, because there is a sense of the Clinton campaign speaking to us from a contained space as opposed to breaking free of that and creating a new relationship with the voters.

In many ways, the interfaces campaigns adopt model their idea about the relationship between political leaders and citizens. I have long felt that the most authoritarian candidates tend to have top-down structures built into their web presences, where-as those candidates who want to establish a more dialogic relationship are drawn towards community-building and networking capacities on their sites. Most of the media attention on the campaign's use of MySpace has focused exclusively on the direct links the campaign is creating with individual voters, but it is part of the nature of social networks that it is also enabling supporters to connect to each other without going through a central hub and it remains to be seen how this impacts the campaign. It's interesting to think about Hillary's use of campaign videos in this way. Supporters see these videos as the later day equivalent of the Fire Side Chat. I get the analogy. FDR used radio, then a relatively new political platform, to speak directly to Americans in their living rooms and adopted a frank, informal, and conversational tone appropriate to the nature of such an exchange. In many ways, Hillary Clinton is adopting that same tone in her confessional-style videos -- which would seem totally appropriate for an era of broadcasting but which now seem much too one-directional to work in a networked culture.

Credability, Partisanship, and Wiki-Politics

As the interview continued, Mother Jones asked me about issues of credibility given the ways that videos and other content now circulates well beyond its original context and given what I have said here about the likelihoods that many of the videos will attempt to mask their origins.

MJ: What effects is this going to ultimately have on how people filter the information that they're getting through this media? Eventually, will they simply disbelieve anything they see?

HJ: I think there's going to be skepticism and not cynicism. We should be skeptical of the sources of information that come to us via these grassroots channels. At the same time, we've seen these emerging knowledge cultures, these sort of large-scale grassroots communities that pull in information and debunk these things in very quick order. The turnaround is really fast, and for those people who are wired, that flow of information is surprisingly effective, what people are calling "collective intelligence," the ability of people to collectively pool their knowledge and share what they found. And I think that, actually, collective intelligence is a profoundly democratic process. It's social at its root, and it allows people to form communities around debating political issues and how the candidates are representing themselves to the public. It makes us less susceptible to negative campaign advertising than we've been before.

MJ: How sophisticated do you think online media consumers are at this stage? And to what degree are these collective intelligence systems currently up to the task of catching misleading information?

HJ: The answer to the first question is relatively sophisticated. If we make our political process more like Wikipedia, then I think we create the space that's needed for people to pull knowledge and form a consensus and weed through conflicting evidence. I think we're not quite there yet. I think the interesting thing is how much this next campaign cycle accelerates the process of people moving from playing with collective intelligence to deploying collective intelligence as a source of political power. I think that's what we're going to see unfolding in the next couple of years. And I don't know if we're ready for the task yet, but I think we're going to grow up pretty fast.

The reference to Wikipedia, here, picks up on something I said earlier in the conversation which is missing from the web transcript but was quoted in the print magazine:

The blogosphere has done a really bad job in general of finding a common space between disagreeing parties. It probably does contribute to the further partisanization of American politics. Wikipedia represents the alternative model, one where people from different political backgrounds could work together. But it depends on the willingness of the candidates and the campaigns to try to come up with a purple strategy as opposed to a red-vs-blue strategy.

Without idealizing Wikipedia, the group has developed a series of ethical norms about how to deal with conflicting views or competing claims which could be a good model for how people of good will but opposing perspective might work together to reshape the political process. We have created a climate in this country which makes it difficult if not impossible for either political party to govern because both are preoccupied with winning.

My reference here to a Purple strategy is a gesture towards a well publicized map produced in the aftermath of the last election which tried to represent the balance of votes in each state based on a blending of red and blue. No state is pure blue or red, despite our most common ways of depicting election results. In fact, many of the individual states are closely balanced. Showing them as purple states helps reveal some of the commonalities between different regions of the country rather than focusing purely on divisions. And so some political commentators have started to talk about "purple strategy" and you can see signs of this "purple strategy" emerging from candidates such as Obama in the Democratic Party or Hucklebee in the GOP. My fantasy was that campaigns might use wikis to try to identify points of consensus which could be used to broaden their political base, rather than deploying bloggers to try to draw blood from the opposing camp.

Interestingly, Mother Jones also spoke with Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales to get his perspective:

JW: One of the concerns people have had about blogs is that they are going to have a very divisive influence because people only read blogs that they agree with, and they won't get their news from the mainstream media, which are supposed to be neutral. But you see a couple of things happening. First, blogs are hardly the only form of new media. People come to Wikipedia all the time, which is quite clearly as neutral as anything can be, I think. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. At Wikipedia itself, we are now seeing a large volume of information being created that has been put through an extensive process of compromise, with people from very diverse viewpoints really hammering away at it to find some compromised view that everybody is satisfied with.

Also, you see people who are really active in reading blogs do end up reading opinions that they disagree with because bloggers get into arguments and link up back and forth and have those debates. So people do get exposed to alternative viewpoints, far more than they would if they had one source of information. I think it's pretty clear that people are getting better information than they used to.

I hope to write more about the use of new media in the campaign in the coming months.

A Valuable Resource

In parting, let me do a shout out to a very interesting project focused on the role of media in presidential campaigns, produced by Project Look Sharp. If you are an educator, you can download here a range of images, sound files, and videos going back across the entire history of the nation, which you can use in talking with your students about the political process. I was lucky enough to see a presentation by Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp at the Alliance for a Media Literate America last month and being the political campaign buff that I was, had a grand time seeing the materials they had collected -- from images of 19th century street parades to the fireside chats, from Nixon's Checkers speech to Saturday Night Live spoofs of the presidential debates.

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part One)

I am proud to be featured as one of the experts on new media and American politics featured in the August 2007 issue of Mother Jones, alongside such notaries as Howard Dean and his former campaign director Joe Trippi, A-list blogger Jerome Armstrong, digerati Esther Dyson, legal theorist Lawrence Lessig, conservative icon Grover Norquist, Moveon.org's Eli Pariser, Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales, and author David Weinberger (Everything is Miscelaneous). The magazine is taking inventory of the ways that new media tools and techniques are reshaping the campaign process, looking back at the 2004 campaign and forward to the current political season. Even if you read the printed edition of the magazine, you should check out their web edition which includes more extensive versions of the interviews quoted in their articles. I was bemused that the quotations from me they selected for use in the magazine emphasized some of the concerns I have about the current shape of online democracy, leaving me looking like one of the crankiest people they interviewed. I have to say that playing the part of a pessimist in a publication like Mother Jones is a most familiar position for me, given my reputation as a critical utopianist. But, I tend to spell out the positives and negatives in interviews -- most of the time, they go with my most wide-eyed comments and this time, they emphasize some of my worries. I thought I would share some of what I said here and offer a few more thoughts about the role which new media is playing in the presidential campaign so far. Some of it builds on ideas I first introduced in my Technology Review column, "Photoshop for Democracy," and developed more fully in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

One thing to keep in mind: campaigns are often early adopters and adapters of new media technologies as they seek new interfaces with potential voters. The most innovative use of new and emerging technologies comes from insurgent or dark horse candidates who are trying to get their message out with limited funds and have less to lose from taking risks. If what they do seems to work, you will see it taken up in the next campaign cycle by more established and thus more tactically conservative candidates. So, for example, last go around, Howard Dean's campaign staff went for broke in their use of platforms like Meetup to organize face to face meetings with voters, of blogs to give voters a greater sense of access to the candidates and the campaigns, and the use of the web to raise money from smaller donors. By this election cycle, all of these tactics are taken for granted and they are being used by pretty much every candidate in the race. This go around, the newer tactics have to do with social network sites, such as Myspace, to create a stronger sense of affiliation with the campaign and the use of YouTube and other video sites to distribute content. Further out on the horizon might be the use of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, to allow candidates to "meet personally" with key leaders scattered around the country or the use of Wiki software to allow citizens to play a stronger role in shaping the candidate's platform and position papers. (So far, we are not seeing major candidates adopt these later approaches, but the campaign is young and anything can happen.)

Politics YouTube Style

All of this, however, frames this from the wrong angle though, since it keeps us focused on what the candidates and their campaign staff is doing, while as my response to this first question suggests a lot of what is most interesting in the campaigns is emerging bottom up -- from citizens taking media in their own hands.

MJ: What areas do you think are going to be the most ripe for experimentation and innovation?

HJ: I think a lot of it is not going to be through campaigns but through loosely affiliated organizations. We saw this last time with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Texans for Truth. Those are examples where the candidates lost control of their own campaigns to some degree, or at least maintained a level of plausible deniability. I think the most interesting work I saw during the last election cycle came out of True Majority, an organization that was using appropriation and transformation of popular culture to reach younger voters in a hipper way. I wrote about the role of what I call "Photoshop for Democracy," which is the use of Photoshop collages as a kind of grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. What happens when you tap popular culture, you pull politics much closer to people's everyday lives. So, I'm very interested in the ways those kinds of new uses of media touch both campaigns and citizen groups and the uneasy relationship between the two. The positive side is that it gets more citizens involved; it develops a more playful language; it produces a more engaged electorate; it transforms the language of politics. The downside is that checks on negative campaigning break down completely, and that's what we saw the last time with the Swift Boat Veterans: They went lower faster than any campaign would have been able to do on their own.

A key phrase in this passage was "plausible deniability." I think the rise of citizen media makes it possible for campaigns to keep certain supporters at arms length, allowing them to do some of the dirty business of the campaign while allowing the candidate to deny any and all association. Candidates are required to verbally endorse all paid advertisements sponsored by their campaigns, where-as these are the kinds of spots they can deny. We don't know for sure what, if any, involvement the Obama campaign had, for example, in the distribution of the anti-Hillary mashup of the Apple 1984 campaign, though Mother Jones includes an interview with Phil de Vellis, its creator, who had this to say about the video:

MJ: I'm sure you are aware of the skepticism surrounding the situation-that people just don't believe that there was no campaign involvement. You lived with an Obama PR flack.

PD: I'm friends with people on every campaign. Politics is a really small world-it's really like junior high. The [Obama] campaign was not involved in it at all. As soon as they found out, I left the company. I think Obama's a great guy, and I think he's running a great campaign, but that doesn't make me officially part of the campaign. But am I connected on one of these trees that connects all the great rock bands-like the drummer of Pink Floyd is also in Supertramp. Yeah, there's some of that. But I have the capability to do that on my own and the ability to get it out there. I'm kind of a utility player. I can do it all. I can also just shut up and watch the fireworks go off and that's what I did.

MJ: In your response on Huffington Post, you said you wanted to express your feelings about the Democratic primary and also to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. And in light of what's happened recently with Obama's MySpace page, how does a campaign harness the power of that citizen without it getting completely out of control?

PD: They can't-the game really has changed. They can't exercise the same amount of control over the campaign. During the Dean campaign, nobody ever said, "Oh, look at what your crazy supporter did." Reporters were interested in the technology and never really read anything people were writing-and they were writing really crazy things. So I would say it's probably best to encourage supporters to go out there and be advocates and at some point, [candidates] are going to have to distance themselves if it's not what they intended.

I suspect we are going to be tracing story after story like this throughout the forthcoming campaign -- videos produced by supporters who may or may not have direct links to the campaign. Such videos will have the look and feel of those produced on the most grassroots level, even if some of them -- like the notorious Al Gore's Penguin Army -- turn out to be produced by top-flight agencies. In the past few months, we've seen some fascinating examples of how videos can function in the campaign -- from the sexy Obama Girl video to the videos being produced by Firefighters to challenge Rudy Guiliani's attempts to capitalize on his role in 9/11. (Could firefighters be the new Swift Boat Captains?) Interestingly enough, we are even seeing the idea of "fan parody" move from the fringes of the last campaign to the absolute center -- witness Bill and Hillary's participation in a video spoofing The Sopranos (which was itself a promotion for their do it yourself campaign theme song competition.) These videos are both interesting because of their style (the use of parody as a vehicle for mainstream political discourse) and because of the mode of their circulation (becoming something that supporters can actively spread across cyberspace). As I told Mother Jones, "The video's becoming the modern equivalent of the campaign button -- something you wear, you display on your blog to spread the message to your friends and neighbors."

Lawrence Lessig also discusses the role of parody, appropriation, and grassroots video production within the political process:

Lawrence Lessig: The campaigns are realizing that if last election was defined by Swift Boat, this election there will be a million Swift Boats. There will be content showing up that will be much more interesting and watched by many more people than what the campaigns are creating. That changes the way that presidential campaigns are defined, where they buy up as much of the speaking space as possible. No one yet knows how this is going to play out.

In the analog world, it wasn't really that anyone was stopping ordinary people from becoming political actors, it was that the costs of doing so were so much larger. The technology is unleashing a capacity for speaking that before was suppressed by economic constraint. Now people can speak in lots of ways they never before could have, because the economic opportunity was denied to them.

MJ: So what does that mean for the quality of the conversation? Not that it's a really high bar.

LL: If you look at the top 100 things on YouTube or Google it's not like it's compelling art. There's going to be a lot of questions about whether it's compelling politics either. We can still play ugly in lots of ways, but the traditional ways of playing ugly are sort of over. This medium is only a medium if people are interested, and we'll get as good as we deserve.

CMS and Media Lab Get Knight Grant to Start a Center for Future Civic Media

The John and James L. Knight Foundation announced today that the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Media Lab would receive a grant of $5 Million over the next four years to create and operate a Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM). The money comes as part of a new initiative the foundation has launched to deploy new media technologies to foster greater civic engagement. Here are some excerpts from the press release announcing the award:

MIT, MTV, top young computer programmers and bloggers are among the 25 first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, announced today at the Editor & Publisher/ Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded the contest with $25 million over five years to help lead journalism into its digital future.

The first-year winners all proposed innovative ideas for using digital news and information to build and bind community in specific geographic areas.

* The Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology receive $5 million to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test and study new forms of high-tech community news.

* Journalist/web developer Adrian Holovaty, creator of chicagocrime.org, receives $1.1 million to create a series of city-specific web sites devoted to public records and hyperlocal information.

* VillageSoup in Maine receives $885,000 to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation site VillageSoup.

* MTV receives $700,000 to establish a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist (Knight "MyJos") in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to report weekly - on cell phones, and other media - on key issues including the environment, 2008 presidential election and sexual health.

* Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism receives $639,000 for nine full journalism scholarships for students with undergraduate degrees in computer science.

* The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University receives $552,000 to create an incubator where students will learn how to create and launch digital media products.

18 more winners receive prizes between $25,000 and $340,000. Nine bloggers will receive grants of $15,000 each to blog about topics ranging from GPS tracking devices to out-of-the-box community publishing solutions. All winners will maintain blogs about their projects.

Says Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation's President and CEO: "We want to spur discovery of how digital platforms can be used to disseminate news and information on a timely basis within a defined geographic space, and thereby build and bind community. That's what newspapers and local television stations used to do in the 20th century, and it's something that our communities still need today. The contest was open--and will stay open next year--to anyone anywhere in the world because 'community' is something we all can define."

Background on the winning entries:

MIT

With its $5 million Knight News Challenge award to the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Knight Foundation teams up with one of world's premier technological innovators. MIT will create a Center for Future Civic Media to test and investigate civic media in local communities. The center pairs the technological innovation of the Media Lab with the social and cultural expertise of the Comparative Media Studies Program.

"We are moving to a Fifth Estate where everyone is able to pool their knowledge, share experience and expertise, and speak truth to power," says Chris Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Cheek-sent-me-hi), MIT's director of the Computing Culture Research Group, who will lead the center as co-director, together with Henry Jenkins, co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Says Jenkins: "We now have more than a decade's worth of research into the kinds of online communities which emerge within networked cultures. With this project, we seek to draw on that research to strengthen people's ties to their own local communities." The Center will develop new theories, techniques, technologies and practices that support and foster community news and civic engagement. "All good journalists worry about what the digital revolution is doing to the news citizens need to run their communities and their lives. Now, the awesome array of science and technology at MIT will focus on this question. From their experiments we expect to see a new generation of useful community news technology and technique," says Eric Newton, Knight Foundation's vice president/journalism program.

...The Knight News Challenge is open to anyone. Applications for the 2007 Knight News Challenge round can be submitted at www.newschallenge.org starting July 1. Application deadline will be Oct. 15.

I am personally looking forward to the partnership with the MIT Media Lab. I have joked through the years that I should have "outside reader, Media Lab" printed on my business cards because of all of the times I have served on thesis and dissertation committees within the Lab, starting within days of my arrival at MIT 16 years ago. I co-edited From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games with Justine Cassell when she was part of the Lab's faculty. But this will be the first formal research collaboration between the two groups.

It gives me a chance to work closely with Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitchell Resnick, two faculty members in the Lab, who I have known and respected for many years. Together, we are going to create a new research center which will host events designed to showcase the best practices among community leaders and educators working in the emerging field of civic media and transmit their perspectives via blogs and podcasts; we will be drawing on those insights to inform the design and deployment of a range of new technologies and practices which are designed to help people in communities learn more about their local governments, get to know their neighbors, and form new social relations; we will be taking those technologies and practices into the field to test them in communities across the country; and we will be running training programs to help spread these ideas even further.

By civic media, we don't simply mean citizen journalism, though clearly that is part of what Knight sees as our mandate. We mean all kinds of practices which bring community members together and give them a reason to interact with each other. We have ideas for projects that effect groups as diverse as high school journalists, senior citizens, and new immigrant populations.

We are very grateful for the support of the Knight Foundation which will give us a chance to put some of our ideas about civic media into action. We hope we can make a difference on the ground -- where people live -- and through these efforts, further realize the vision of "applied humanities" that has been a core ideal of the Comparative Media Studies Program since its inception.

There's a great deal more to tell about this new initiative and I will be sharing information here in the weeks and months ahead.

What MIT Students are Learning about Communicating Science to the Public

One of the truly remarkable things about teaching at MIT are how many of our best students are crossing over from the sciences or engineering programs to take classes in media studies. They hope to use what they learn in our courses to improve their capacity to communicate scientific ideas with the general public. Here are two examples:

For the past few years, the Comparative Media Studies Program has been partnering with Terrascope, a freshman year program run by faculty from Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Terrascope students spend the year focusing on one of the world's leading environmental problems, pooling together research, talking to experts, and taking a trip to the site to see for themselves the nature of the problem. Historically, they have learned to translate their findings not only into research papers but also into museum exhibits designed to communicate with the general public. A few years ago, Ari Epstein, a faculty member in the program, approached me to see if our students might be able to help them teach the Terrascope participants how to use radio as a medium to convey their ideas to an even larger public. This year, CMS Masters student Steve Schultze served as a teaching assistant in the class. This year's focus was on how New Orleans should deal with the consequences of Katrina. The result: "Nerds in New Orleans."

The other was a paper I received from one of the undergraduate students in my Media Systems and Texts class which manages to combine his passion for climate issues with some of the things we've been learning this term about YouTube and participatory culture. The issues are ones which I have addressed here before -- the controversy which emerged as Al Gore's Penguin Army was revealed to be astroturf, but the student connects this debate to the larger context of media coverage of global warming issues in a way only a MIT science geek could.

Analyzing the Role of Media in the Climate Change Debate Through the YouTube Video, "Al Gore's Penguin Army"

by Garrett Marino

Climate change, or long-term changes in average weather conditions, signifies an important issue impacting the contemporary media landscape. The two-minute YouTube video criticizing Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army, now viewed over 500,000 times, offers a compelling example to analyze the role of media in the climate change debate. A framework of questions can be asked around this video, with the intent of progressively working outward to link media with broader cultural trends on climate change: What can be learned from this video? How does it critique An Inconvenient Truth? What were the motives and goals of the video's producer(s)? Why use YouTube to respond to the movie? How do the contents of the YouTube video fall within broader efforts to discredit climate change science? The information presented in An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore's Penguin Army that individuals digest and the opinions developed through related media will arguably impact policy during the coming decades.

Released on May 24, 2006, the same release date for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army serves largely to discredit Al Gore and his movie. In the video, Al Gore is dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Batman's enemy Penguin, who could be described as a gentleman of crime. The crime being committed by Al Gore, according to the video, is his promotion of climate change science and dictating what people should do to combat this problem. The video opens with penguins assembling into an ice cave to listen to Gore's global warming slide show. On the wall of the ice cave, a sign depicts a part human, bear, and pig figure with a slash through it titled "Manbearpig." The poster references a South Park episode where Gore speaks at South Park Elementary about the Manbearpig, a monster who roams the Earth. Gore begins his talk and quickly the penguins lose interest at the illegible charts and fall asleep. Gore continues his discussion, apparently oblivious to his audience's indifference, and shows outrageous material, such as blaming the skinniness of Lindsey Lohan on global warming. At the end of the video, Gore says that "you must take action to stop global warming!," and immediately a list of "things you can do to stop global warming" appears, including "stop exhaling," "become vegetarian," "walk everywhere (no matter the distance)," and "take cold showers."

In addition to barraging the viewer with material despicable for a critique of a serious climate change movie, Al Gore's Penguin Army has no roots in reality throughout. The opening quote in the video supposedly quoting Newsweek editor Eleanor Clift as saying, "If you liked March of the Penguins, you'll love An Inconvenient Truth," was fabricated, although she did interview Gore a month before the film's release on April 28, 2006, the same date given in the video's quote (Clift).

Another misrepresentation in the video was the penguins themselves. They were all created to resemble Tux, a Linux mascot that does not accurately portray any known species of penguin. Even seemingly credible weather facts in Al Gore's slide show were also grossly exaggerated or untrue, such as "Coldest Day in NYC (January 2005)" and "Record rain in New England (May 2006)." In no day during January 2005 did the temperature at New York City's Central Park (the official site for National Weather Service observations since the 1800's) fall below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while the all-time record low for NYC was minus 20 degrees set in February 1934. In May 2006, some areas such as Newburyport, Massachusetts did receive all-time May monthly rainfall records, but this record is far-surpassed by rains that occurred in 1936, 1938, and 1955.

Now that the video has been discredited, there needs to be an analysis of the motives and goals of the producer(s) of Al Gore's Penguin Army. The video's YouTube page shows the poster as a member by the name of "Toutsmith," who identifies himself as a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. An email exchange between Toutsmith and the Wall Street Journal enabled the paper to originate the email to a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm whose clientele include Exxon Mobile Corp. When contacted by the Journal, DCI Group refused to say whether or not they had a role in the release of the anti-Gore video: "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," said Matt Triaca, DCI head of media relations. Despite their denial, DCI has a history of raising doubts about the science of global warming, placing skeptical scientists on talk-radio shows and paying them to write editorials. DCI client Exxon Mobile announced that they did not participate in the creation of the video and did not help release it, according to the Journal article.

Despite the denial of both DCI and Exxon Mobile, the motives behind the producer(s) of the video are clear: cast suspicion on climate change science and confuse the public, prevent people from seeing the movie, and make those who dislike Gore hate him even more. Digging back to the original response to the video, most people who replied believed climate change is real and people are largely responsible for it. There were a few, however, that took the opposite stance, as YouTube member Bear182 writes: "People get real...global warming has been around for millions of years...do your own research . . . Real scientific research is out there for anyone to find. This is all part of a natural cycle. Al Bore is a dummy duh." To quote Bear182 exactly, all typos remain, notably Gore's last name spelled as Bore. Bear182's remark represents the fundamental leap not yet taken by most climate change skeptics: they believe that global warming is occurring, and has occurred in the past, but are not yet willing to accept that humans cause it.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gores presents a trend known as the Keeling curve, a fact that should dispel the lingering myth that the climate change occurring now is part of some natural cycle. The Keeling curve, named after Dr. Charles David Keeling, depicts the nearly constant rise in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past fifty years. Incorporating these direct atmospheric measurements with various proxy records available from ice cores, scientists can recreate carbon dioxide concentrations over the previous tens of millions of years. The record indicates that in no point during the foreseeable past have carbon dioxide concentrations risen at such a fast rate, and if current trends were to continue, by the year 2100 carbon dioxide will exist in the atmosphere at levels unseen over the past 30 million years.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes this point vividly, by projecting the Keeling curve along with about the past million years of carbon dioxide concentration data on a large screen. He proceeds to raise himself on an automated escalator to near the top of the screen. He then projects the future century of predicted rises in carbon dioxide, and the million-year trend is startling: it appears as a nearly constant flat line with an upward spike at the end twenty feet tall.

Despite this overwhelming trend with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, videos like "Al Gore's Penguin Army" still surface and represent a critic that will not go away easily. An interesting difference between Al Gore's Penguin Army and previous anti-climate change propaganda was its release through YouTube. According to the YouTube web site, its founding mission was to become the place to watch and share videos on the web, enabling its users to become the broadcasters of the future. YouTube is less than two years old, but the site has already become a place to promote songs and upcoming movies to its nearly twenty million unique daily visitors. The Gore penguin movie also shows that YouTube and online video in general have become a large political experiment designed to change and confuse public opinion and alter the public's perception of the world.

Politics has migrated onto YouTube for several reasons. YouTube does not fully contextualize the circulated material on its site; the creator indicates the content of his or her video(s) through keywords and generic categories such as 'entertainment' and 'sports'. Also, the open-ended aspect of YouTube enables anyone to post content and remain anonymous. With amateur-looking animation able to capture people's interest without producers resorting to professional methods, astroturfing becomes even more widespread, as apparently the case with Al Gore's Penguin Army. Astroturfing is a term used to describe a disguise of a client's agenda as independent public reaction by one or a group of individuals. In this case, a large company can mask its power and use a technology associated with less powerful groups.

With the wide selection of material now uploaded and available through YouTube, it would be hard to come across a video like Al Gore's Penguin Army.

To further support the notion that the anti-Gore video was a product of astroturfing, from May to early August of 2006, when Google searchers typed "Al Gore" or "Global Warming," the first sponsored link on the side directed users to the video. The ads were removed only a few days after the Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group in August 2006. Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, said to the Journal that they do not allow advertising text that "advocates against any individual, group or organization", and will not release the identity of any advertisers (Regalado). However, the Google policy does not apply to sites associated with ad links, the loophole that enabled the link to exist.

On the other side of the climate change debate, Al Gore's team has also employed the Internet. Paramount Classics, the distributor of An Inconvenient Truth, along with Gore's consent, created its own YouTube video titled, Al Gore's Terrifying Message, which depicts Al Gore talking to the robot from the cartoon show Futurama about global warming. This video has been even more popular than Al Gore's Penguin Army, registering 1.6 million views as of April 24, 2007 compared with Penguin's half million, an indicator that the pro-climate change camp is winning the media "war" surrounding this issue.

How do the contents of Al Gore's Penguin Army fall within the broader efforts throughout media to discredit global warming? Climate change skeptics typically cite and exaggerate unanswered questions in the science, and produce long lists of scientists who dispute global warming, without stating that the list only contains a few percent of the scientific community. Given, scientific consensus has not always proved to be accurate, e.g. with the Biblical version of Earth's history taken as fact before Darwin, or continental drift theory laughed at before the 1960's. However, climate change science is based on harder evidence than the supposed evidence in the past for a six thousand-year-old Earth or stationary plates on Earth. Science has progressed immensely since those periods, although given it is not perfect. Agreed, there are open issues in climate science, but with the climate changing, ignoring the threat until every question is settled is like refusing to run from an incoming tsunami along the east coast of the United States simply because no tsunami has hit that region in the past.

Television is another medium that at times also appears to be siding with the anti-climate change camp, discrediting global warming. For example, in December 2004, delegates gathered in Argentina to discuss ongoing problems with the Kyoto Treaty. The media, and particularly television, during this period only briefly mentioned this meeting, but jumped on covering Michael Crichton's then-new novel that dismissed global warming as a scheme cooked up by scientists looking for funding. A Crichton interview by John Stossel on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 began with, "He's concluded [that global warming] is just another media-hyped foolish scare. And many scientists agree with him" (Linden 228).

Stossel's irresponsible reporting was exacerbated by an article that appeared the same week in Science, which reported that not one scientific paper published on climate change since 1993 challenged the issue that people are changing the climate. So where are these scientists that agree with Crichton? They exist in small numbers, but keep their ideas out of publication.

Entire corporations can also employ various media outlets to discredit global warming science. They thrive on public fear of the government playing a larger role in their lives during a future era of climate consciousness. Al Gore makes a compelling statement in his interview with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek:

The behavior of Exxon Mobil is disgraceful. They finance in whole or in part forty organizations that put out disinformation on global warming designed to confuse the American people. There has emerged in the last couple of decades a lobbying strategy that is based on trying to control perceptions. In some sense it's not new, but it's new in the sophistication and the amount of resources they devote to it. It's not new in the sense it's the same thing the tobacco industry did after the surgeon general's report of 1964, and that is a major part of the reason why the Bush administration doesn't do anything. The president put their chief guy in charge of environmental policy in the White House.

During the first years of the Bush administration, innumerable investigations mostly analyzed if people were to blame for climate change. Now that scientific consensus has converged, even the President has admitted that we are changing the climate. The next phase of the debate needs to focus exclusively on policy and its social, economic, and political impacts. The mainstream media needs to take a reality pill and direct their efforts to covering and promoting policy changes and not an unfounded debate.

The YouTube video Al Gore's Penguin Army served as a case study that provided the focus of this paper: the role of media in the climate change debate. Despite the negative role that media has contributed to confuse the public on the climate change issue, the messages of Al Gore and climate change scientists appear to be gradually gaining public awareness and acceptance. The country is on a tipping point beyond which, with the help of modern media, the problem will be faced seriously and politicians from both parties will begin offering solutions to combat climate change.

Bibliography

Burt, Christopher C. Extreme Weather: A Guide & Record Book. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Fleming, James R. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

Linden, Eugene. The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Meyer, William B. Americans and Their Weather. New York: Oxford, 2000.

Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991..

From an early age, Garrett had a fascination with the weather and in understanding the

science behind weather and climate issues. While in high school, Garrett performed

research in fluid dynamics that earned him recognition, including a semifinalist in the

prestigious Intel Science Talent Search. After graduating from High Technology High

School in New Jersey in 2004, he entered MIT and immediately joined the Weather

Forecasting Team. Garrett recently created the Weather and Climate Club at MIT which

provides an opportunity for MIT students with interests in day-to-day weather and in

long-term climate issues to deepen their interest and to enrich their MIT educational

experience. Garrett is expected to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Earth,

Atmospheric, and Planetary Science in June 2008. He then hopes to stay at MIT for

graduate work.

Why Media Studies Should Pay More Attention to Christian Media...

I have been pleasantly surprised by how much interest has been generated by last week's announcement in the blog that Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum was hosting a special event focused on Evangelicals and the media. So, I wanted to be sure to let you know that the webcast version of the event is now available. Some people have asked why our program would help to host such an event. There are a number of reasons why media scholars should care more about the use of media by this particular population:

1. This event brought together representatives of two of the largest and most influential media ministries operating today -- James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. While they often operate in a world apart from mainstream commercial media, their work has enormous reach. For example, Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 20 million copies, making it the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, though many of those copies sold through Wall-Mart or Christian bookstores

which do not necessarily register in the tabulations of the New York Times best-seller list. Similarly the Dobson organization has run a major media empire since the late 1970s.

2. As Diane Winston explained during her opening remarks at the Forum, Evangelical Christians have been key innovators in their use of emerging media technologies, tapping every available channel in their effort to spread the Gospel around the world. I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups -- evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public.

3. Anyone who wants to understand how niche media works in this country needs to understand what's going on in Christian media. It's hard to call Christians a subculture when most studies suggest that the vast majority of Americans claim some religious faith and most claim to belong to some mainstream Christian denomination. Yet, because the most hardcore members of these groups feel alienated from much of commercial popular culture, they have created their own alternative cultural sphere -- producing their own television programs, films,

music, games, magazines, comics, you name it. We can learn a lot by studying the strategies by which this alternative popular culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, often depending heavily on viral marketing to get the word out without having to rely on mainstream media channels.

4. While we often talk about "conservative Christians" as if the evangelical movement spoke with one voice, the term evangelical actually describes a range of different religious, cultural, and political perspectives, as was clear as we begin to see the contrast of perspectives between the two media ministers who spoke on this panel. One important educational function an event like this can play is helping people to recognize and understand the diversity of the

evangelical movement and thus push past some of our stereotypes. Getting ready for this event, I shared with my students a broad range of Christian-produced media from the rather hardcore music videos of Carman to news reports on Rick Warren's conversations with Barack Obama. Some of what we watched -- including some materials from Dobson promoting abstinence education -- upset some of my students, while other materials fit more comfortably within the consensus of the class. (We often justify showing other controversial content on the grounds that we want to "challenge" our student's preconceptions. Well, maybe it is time we challenged our student's preconceptions about "crazy Christians.") My students learned something by simply observing the personal style, the language, the tone, even the delivery of the speakers, as well as listening to the ways they answered questions from the audience.

5. Academic institutions may have an important role to play in supporting and sustaining conversations between conservatives and liberals in the face of the growing divisiveness of American politics. I am eager to use some of the programming we do through CMS to bring together people who may come from fundamentally different ideological perspectives in a context where we can have a civil conversation designed to help us understand what others believe and why they believe it. I was personally very pleased with the tone of the conversation -- the questions from the floor were smart and respectful and the speakers saw this as an occasion to encourage reflection and dialog rather than as a chance to prostheltize to our community. Indeed, I think in this context, the speakers were more frank in addressing core concerns than they would have in a more confrontational context, allowing us to get a better glimpse into how they think about and deploy media.

I should acknowledge that Timothy Stoneman, currently a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society program was the person who first proposed this session and assisted in recruiting the speakers. He is doing interesting work about the use of radio by evangelical missionaries, a project which sheds light on a somewhat earlier chapter in the history of Christian media.

By the way, we've gotten questions about whether our sessions with Jim Ross and Mick Foley, recent guests to the CMS program from World Wrestling Entertainment, will be available via podcast. We have fallen a little behind putting up the podcasts on the web due to a range of other activities but these events were recorded and I will let readers know when they go up on our site.

Meanwhile, if Christian media is not interesting to you, might I suggest checking out the podcast of advertising guru Alan Moore's recent talk at the CMS program. Moore's work will be familiar to readers of this blog through an interview I did with him earlier this year.

[Note: This post originally misidentified Dr. Dobson as Charles rather than James. I don't know where my brain was at since I have been following James Dobson since the 1970s. I might have crossed him with Charles Stanley, who was the minister of a mega-church in Atlanta when I was growing up. Sorry for the confusion.]

Dissecting a Media Scare

Shortly before I went on break, someone e-mailed me a segment from WDAZ News (Grand Forks, North Dakota) focused on the "newest youth trend" -- "Emo" (or as the reporter helpfully explains, "emotional people.") It struck me as a textbook example of the ways that youth subcultures get misrepresented on television news and the ways that adult anxieties about kids who don't look, dress, and act "normal" get turned into hysteria by misreporting. I have long argued that we need media literacy for adults far more urgently than we need it for kids, so I figured we might use this space to collectively dissect this video and the various ways that it constructs Emos* as a threat to public safety. So, dear viewers, let me invite you to join me in a game of what's wrong with this picture?

1. Look closely -- there were no actual Emos consulted in the production of this segment. The reporter spoke with a local police officer who emerges here as the expert on this youth trend (despite the fact that he knew nothing of the subculture before his daughter told him about Emos) and then went to the local high school, talked to a few "average" students about what they think about those "other" kids who are all "emotional" and stuff. This means one of several possibilities: the reporter couldn't find any actual Emo in Grand Fork; the reporter has no idea what an Emo looks like; and the reporter couldn't care less if there are any actual Emos who might have a point of view in this story. (Of course, given how subculture members most often get treated on news segments like this one, this may be a blessing in disguise!)

2. Literal mindedness is the hallmark of most coverage of youth subcultures. Subcultures adopt often hyperbolic style to express their resistance to dominant culture but it is not a simple matter to understand what that style means and one should be highly reluctant to ascribe any single meaning to the style. In this case, though, the reporter isn't even responding to any actual subcultural practices: they are responding -- let's assume unknowingly-- to parodies of the subculture created by outsiders who themselves know little about what's going on. I took a look at some of the sites which flash quickly across the screen during the segment -- Insta Emo Kit -- for example and it is clear that they are as close to a checklist of what you have to do to become a good little Emo as George W. and his classmates red the Preppy Handbook to figure out how to get through Yale. We fill out check lists for a great many reasons. As a native Southerner, I am sucker for checklists that start with "15 reasons you may be a redneck" for example. But most of them are not exactly a guiding set of principles by which we organize our existence or rank ourselves. Subcultures don't typically come with membership cards and instructional manuals and if you think you found one, I'd be looking for the little emoticons that demonstrate that more than likely the author is smiling at you.

Consider, for example, this passage from the site:

The height of achievement for an emo boy is to live to forty while mooching off his parents and clutching their inheritance. This will allow the emo boy to go to emo concerts in the future and listen to the same old derivative music that got its start in the punk movement back in the 70's. Ah, we mean the 90's. If any emo music you listen to has its roots in anything before 1998, then you're old school and therefore not emo.

Does this sound like something that was written by a leader of the Emo movement? Or for that matter, by anyone even remotely sympathetic to the Emo subculture? Is it possible that the reporter didn't bother to read the website that the story suggests is the key to understanding Emos?

3. The next step is to remove the subculture from any larger historical or cultural context. Maybe there were no Emos in North Dakota until a few months ago. Maybe the reporter is looking for that extra-timely factor that gives a story like this one a sense of urgency and might even push us towards a crisis mentality. Nothing like this has ever happened in North Dakota before and by jiminy, we've got to put a stop to it right away.

4. The next step is to link the subculture to some risky behavior -- in this case, the reporter makes literal the old journalist story, "If it bleeds, it leads" by equating being an Emo with cutting. There is no actual evidence beyond a few sketchy websites to demonstrate any direct links between the two. There's no attempt to figure out how common such practices might be within this community. There's no recognition that cutting is a symptom of clinical depression which occurs across many different segments of the population. It is simply taken as given that if your son or daughter goes all Emo on you, there's a high likelihood they are going to be looking for a way to cut themselves up.

5. Recanting is always helpful. Pay attention to the rather gothy girl in this segment who starts out trying to offer some sympathetic account of why these kids act the way they do and then uses every trick in the book to disassociate herself from being seen as an emo. If even your friends won't stand by you, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you, or at least that's the logic the newscasters are using. Note also the opportunistic use of quotations: does this girl really think that cutting yourself is just another form of creative expression or was that a slip of the tongue that the journalists are using here to create a through-line for their piece?

*I should warn you that I have had very little exposure to Emo culture myself but you don't have to know much to see how badly they are being misrepresented here. A reader notes that they are usually called Emo or Emo Kids, not Emos. I have left the text as is so it doesn't render the comment senseless but know that you probably shouldn't trust me on the plural form. I haven't gone back to check the video but I am pretty sure they do use Emos throughout.

So Why Should We Care?

A little while back, reader David A. wrote a response to my blog post about the Politics of Fear, saying what a number of others have suggested -- that I take all of this too seriously.

Here's what he had to say:

I am always amused by our politician's efforts in regulating the internet, for our own good of course. I think you take them way too seriously, Henry. Efforts to rein in violent video games will have no more effect on their sales than the CAN-SPAM Act had on the amount of spam I get in my inbox. It's all a dog and pony show. The reason they can make propose such irresponsible, and quite possibly unconstitutional legislation, is that is that they know it will have no effect on anything -- for a wide variety of legal, technological and commercial reasons. Furthermore, they get the no-risk benefit of appearing to be "doing something" about the problem.

What the politicians fail to realize is just how foolish and ineffectual it makes them look from the prospective of up-and-coming generations of voters. How is anyone going to take them seriously in the future?

All of this sounds reasonable. We can fall prey to a moral panic about moral panics. But here's why I remain concerned:

1. Governments have no legitimate business holding hearings on matters to which they have neither the authority nor the resolve to pass actual legislation. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, I reprinted my account of testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee investigation into youth and violence after Columbine. The hearings were described by one of the Senators who participated as a "ritual humiliation" of the American entertainment industry and were intended to create a chilling effect around popular culture, intimidating the media industry into making decisions which they could not be legally compelled to make otherwise. Such hearings, in and of themselves, do damage to the range of ideas in circulation in our society, precisely because the hearings themselves can not face legal challenges, and because they invite us to take likely the protections of free speech in the Federal Constitution, undermining respect for what should remain solid walls against government constraints on expression.

2. Political leaders and newscasters, alike, can lead moral authority to thugs who operate outside of government constraints and at a much more local and immediate level. Even if no laws get passed, or the laws that get passed are overturned through the courts, they have given moral authority to parents who are over-reacting to their son or daughter's thrashing about trying to define their identities, to principles and teachers who pass policies at the most local level that can make it a utter hell to receive a public education in this country, and to bullies who want an excuse to beat up any kid who looks, acts, or thinks differently than the fine folks in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In the case of Columbine, there were any number of horrors committed at local levels by people who wanted to protect their teens from the horrors that the folks in Washington DC were warning them about and they went further than Sam Brownback or Joseph Lieberman would have ever imagined but I didn't exactly see either Republicans or Democrats standing up and suggesting that these people were abusing their authority in this matter.

Having staked out a position in opposition to DOPA, I now receive a steady stream of angry letters from yahoos of this ilk. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter we received from a concerned parent:

Teens need to live genuine lives, not virtual lives. And your position that by monitoring teen use of the Internet we risk the trust of our teenagers is completely indefensible. The overwhelming majority of teenagers are untrustworthy almost by definition. Anyone who accepts at face value what a teenager says is either an idiot or a teenager or both.

The unfortunate reality for those who, like you, abandon reality in preference to its digital approximation is that as parents of teenagers we are legally bound to the activities of our juvenile dependents. If one of our teenagers violates the law, we, the parents, will be served a summons along with our child. And make no mistake, a 16 year old is still a child. Hence, it is only prudent that as responsible parents we keep a close eye and a tight reign on our children as they enter the wonders and horrors of the Internet...

With all due respect, we really don't need another apologist for irresponsible

Teenaged behavior.

Hey, it's an improvement over what I usually get called! Sure, this guy was probably cranky about his teenage daughter before MySpace came along, but the last time we need is to give this guy more firepower.

3. Such laws do pass and do have some real impact on those youth who have the most to lose. While DOPA failed to pass the Senate, there are still very real risks that similar legislation (The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act) will sail through Congress this go around and even if it doesn't, at last count there were anti-social networking laws under consideration in more than 20 States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Many of these laws will pass. Some will be overturned in court. Many of them will make it harder for schools and libraries to provide instruction to students about rationale use of social networks. Some will block teens whose only access is through schools and public libraries from access to the online experiences which are formative for their classmates. There's something at stake here, folks, and most likely, it is at stake in your own state or local community.

Do such laws block the long-term development towards a more participatory culture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But they can certainly inflect misery on the lives of an awful lot of young people along the way. We don't want to over-react but we can't afford to be complacent. Let's not panic but let's take action

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco (Palestine) as conducted by CMS Masters student Huma Yosef (herself a former professional journalist from Pakistan). Today, I continue this interview. It occurred to me as I was putting this together that it represents a fascinating contrast to the interview I ran a week or so back with comics Creator Rob Walton (Ragmop). Both artists are very interested in using comics to explore political issues but they approach these issues from very different vantage points: Sacco creates realist comics that document the everyday lives of people from war-torn countries while Walton uses fantasy and comedy to encourage us to reflect on the American political process. Between them, they suggest some of the ways that comics may function as civic media. I now turn you over to Huma for the rest of her interview.

In what ways is your method of working akin to that of a journalist?

I conduct lots of rigorous, sit-down interviews, one after the other. Lots of things happen that aren't part of the interview process, and I'm often in situations where I can't take notes. In those instances, I duck behind a wall and frantically take as many notes as I can. In the evenings, I translate all my notes into a journal.

I also take photographs whenever I can. I'm currently doing a book about the Gaza Strip for which, after interviewing someone, I'd take his or her photograph. If someone refused to have a picture taken, then I'd try to quickly draw an image of the person in the margin of my notebook. Sometimes, there are things I realize I need to draw only after I start working. In that case, I visually research places later on. When I was working on Palestine, I wasn't aware of a lot of things and had to draw a lot from memory. With Safe Area Gorazde, my process has evolved. Now, if anything, I take too many pictures.

On the job in Palestine, I also started following stories as they unfolded. Like any reporter who has a little freedom, you follow your nose and try to cover the stories that you don't think anyone else will tell. For example, Gorazde opened up while I was there - I didn't know I would write about it until I arrived in Bosnia. Once I identified my subject, I conducted preliminary interviews about what happened, then broke it down into component parts. No doubt, the second time around was a more methodical process as I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing.

What extra measures do you have to take given the visual nature of your work?

I have to ask a lot of visual questions about what a street or a camp looked like. Still, you're not always aware in the field of what visual stuff you'll need when you start drawing. Over time, my method has been honed, and I'm more aware of what I'll need later on.

I also need to do extra research sometimes. For example, the work I'm doing right now is sent in Gaza in 1956. I've made trips to United Nations archives to gather photographic evidence of Gaza city at that time. When I was interviewing people about what happened, I spent a significant amount of time talking about the visual details. I had people taking me around and showing me old houses, some of which had been built over, but still gave me a sense of how things looked.

Do you struggle with issues of journalistic integrity when drawing something that you haven't seen or been able to find photographs of?

I've never had a situation where I couldn't visualize something to some level of accuracy. I may not know exactly if there were trees or a hill there, but I'm not going to drop material because of details like that. I like to compare myself to a film director who's making a movie about the 1700s: you just have to recreate something to the best of your ability sometimes. Granted, not every twig is going to be in the right place, it won't literally be the same thing. But I'm clear about the fact that my work is an artistic rendition of something, a mixture of art and journalism. If I start obsessing about the details, I may as well be a photographer.

How do you respond to critics who argue that your work cannot be considered journalism because of its artistic dimension?

It's perfectly valid to argue against what I do and wonder whether it can be considered journalistic. I describe my work as comic journalism, other people call it documentary journalism, but these are all just labels to me. The fact is that no one can tell an entire story, everyone concentrates on what they want to, details are cropped out of photographs, stories go through an editing process. Every portrayal is to some extent a filter, and on that level something that someone might find problematic. Ultimately, I try to be as accurate when putting down quotations and describing things. I'm not making things up even though there is an interpretive element to my work.

You told The Guardian that you do "comics, not graphic novels". Could you elaborate on that distinction?

A novel to me is fiction. I think of myself as working in the non-fiction world and don't like my work being considered fiction. I think of the term 'graphic novel' as a marketing moniker geared towards adults who are scared of comics. But it doesn't bother me to talk about my work as comics. I consider myself a comic book artist. The notion of comics still has an underground feel to it, which is fun.

Have you had trouble explaining the medium that you work in to interviewees who may not be familiar with comics?

The main problem I've had is with myself. When I was working on Palestine, I would tell people I was working on a 'project' because I felt sheepish and unsure about what I was doing. By the time I was in Bosnia, things were different. Younger people were more open to me as they have a history of comics there. Moreover, by some weird coincidence, someone in Sarajevo reviewed my work just before I got there, so people were greased for it.

During my last few trips to Gaza, I would bring my book along and show it to people. Especially with older people, having my work with me worked to my advantage since they don't speak English but can recognize the streets or camps that I've drawn. Different cultures might be different, but in the Middle East they can get their head around the idea of drawing and depicting historical events. In Iraq, when I was with marines, there was no getting around what I was doing because they could easily google me and find out exactly what I was up to. So I did meet some lieutenant colonels who were skeptical about my method but were willing to give it a shot because I had press credentials.

Do you manipulate comic conventions such as framing to express meaning?

Yes. My drawing is a very conscious process. The choice of frames, the decision to put captions in little bursts, each angle is very thought out. In Palestine, I feel I overdid some things and have since learned how to discipline my drawing. While working on Palestine, I'd get tired of drawing the same angle so I'd change angles. But now I know to stick with something if I need to maintain a tone.

Does your process involve much revision?

I try not to revise much. I write the script of the comic first and spend a while on this stage. Most of the editing occurs when I realize that I don't need to write out something because I can draw it instead. Other than that, I try to keep the script as it is. In the drawing, on the other hand, I let myself be loose and problem solve as I'm working. I don't story board the whole comic, which makes the process a little more lively and spontaneous. If it were a matter of connecting the dots, I don't think I could carry on working without losing interest.

Where and how were you introduced to comic books?

I grew up in Australia where I read British war comics and some American western comics. I didn't read many super hero comics, other than perhaps strips about The Phantom. It became a hobby because I'd draw my own little figures, mimicking the ones I saw in the comics I was reading.

Do you think working in the medium of comics liberates your journalism from the constraints of the 24-hour news cycle?

I don't think the freedom from the conventional news cycle is peculiar to comics. Herr's Dispatches, for example, is liberated from the constraints of time. I think it's about the approach rather than the medium. With my work, it has to be about the approach. I look for stuff that people will respond to even if the material is dated. That said, I try to make my shorter pieces for magazine publication timelier.

What can traditional print journalism learn from your work?

I

've been trained in classic American objective journalism, but I feel like a reporter should not treat a reader like a repository for facts, rather as someone you're talking to across a table. When I'm reading about a place, I want to know what it's like, what it feels like to be there. I think American journalism lacks the human element that is a bit more prevalent in the British press.

When I'd be sitting with US correspondents in Jerusalem, they'd tell me a story about something that happened to them, but would never write about it. They're so focused on getting all the right quotes, telling this side of the story, that side of the story, interviewing the right spokesperson, and working by the numbers, that they end up doing a disservice to their readers by being objective. They're so focused on being balanced, they don't tell you what they know themselves. It's difficult to maintain objectivity when you start writing that way, but I think reporters should be human beings with an opinion. Why can't a reporter tell me exactly what he or she thinks? Why is all the talking left up to pundits who never leave their desks in DC?

How do you decide which events to cover?

The hardest thing about this kind of work is how much time you spend on the desk. There's that impulse to always see more, but I have to choose the things that matter to me personally for whatever reason. To some extent, it used to be a financial thing. But it's ultimately about what hits you in the gut. The Palestine issue really hit me in the gut. When you start thinking about it, you realize what a disservice has been done to the issue by its media coverage in the US, you realize how many tax dollars go into perpetuating the situation. Similarly, I felt compelled to go to Bosnia. And when I had the gut instinct to go to Iraq, I started calling up agents to see if anyone would be interested in my work about the war.

Of course, there are other things that I'm compelled to do, but if you spend three, four, or even five years on a book, the years start to go by and you can't get to everything, even if it is compelling and interesting.

You also need to prepare yourself before you go, and it can take years of reading to learn the ten per cent you need to know so that you can be open to what's happening there and not waste time asking the simple questions. That basic historical context is important, even though you learn the rest when you get there. That said, I now want to do some shorter pieces for magazines and get out more.

Do you consider returning to the territories you've covered in order to keep your work up to date?

I feel I've already gone pretty deep into the places I've covered. Ultimately, I don't think I can really go much further than I've gone without becoming an Arabist. I think I'd need an academic base to go much further. But then question arises: am I a cartoonist or an Arabist? Also, I feel the urge to cover new ground and be creative for my own sake.

Do you think you've created a market for comic journalism that didn't exist when you started working?

I just tried to do what I wanted to do and didn't think about whether it would work out commercially for me. I thought I was committing commercial suicide with Palestine. Then, half way through Safe Area Gorazde, I had no success at all and was about to give up. But it's always been about doing what I want to do and so I stuck with it. Other people have come to see value in it. It's been a long road and it has taken many years for it to happen, but now I can pick and choose a lot more than I ever imagined possible. It helps that there's been increased interest in comics too.

Does your methodological approach change as you cover topics as varied as rock bands and the Balkan war?

With most of my work, I try to draw relatively realistically, and that's been a struggle since I've largely self-taught myself. When doing the rock band book, then, I've got a looser style and I enjoy doing it more. When doing funny work, I'm less worried about accuracy, the stakes are lower, and I can have more fun with the material.

Has there been a political backlash to your work?

Not really. Once in a while a store won't put my work on the shelves, but I've never had to deal with anything I've been bothered about. When Palestine came out, it was under the radar. My next book may not be under the radar, but we'll just have to wait and see what happens with that.

Given that your work reflects a political stance that is uncommon in the mainstream media, are you concerned about broadening your audience?

I probably get a bigger audience now, in this medium, than I would otherwise. No other medium is going to publish or broadcast this stuff. I also feel that if you popularize the material, you have to dumb it down. Overall, I think if I was to try any other tactic, I wouldn't have gotten done what I have managed to do.

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part One)

Every year, I ask students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to apply what we are learning in the class and do an interview with a media maker. The goal is to pull to the surface their "theory" of the medium in which they operate -- the often unarticulated, sometimes well considered, assumptions they make about their audience, their creative context, their techniques, their technology, their cultural status, and so forth. I will be getting a chance this week to see what my students have produced. I knew going into the process this year that I would be interested to see what Huma Yusuf produced. Huma Yusuf graduated from Harvard in 2002 with a degree in English and American Literature, and returned to Pakistan to work as a journalist. She specializes in writing about social trends as represented in media and media and society issues, in addition to addressing subjects such as low-income housing, 'honor' killings, gang wars and the state's ineffective prosecution of rape cases. Her writing garnered the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation 'Gender in Journalism 2005' Award and the European Commission's 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. Yusuf is interested in investigating the interface among media, local politics and global trends - an intersection that she will explore through sites such as community radio, trends in media consumption, and online environments. With the support of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, she is currently launching a first-of-its-kind webzine, the goal of which is to provide an alternate forum where journalists, academics, and media students can examine and critique the Pakistani media industry at large.

I knew because Huma is an interesting person with a journalist's impulses but also because she was connecting with Joe Sacco, the journalist who has used comics as a vehicle to capture the perspectives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Occupied Territories and to tell the story of the Bosnian War. We had been lucky enough to have Sacco as a speaker at a CMS colloquium event several years ago (alas, before we started our podcasts!) and I thought interesting things might happen if the two of them got on the phone together. When I heard she was doing the interview, I asked if we could run it on the blog.

Everything from here comes from Huma's account of the interview:

Working as a reporter in Karachi, Pakistan, I was often frustrated by the limitations imposed on my work by the parameters of traditional journalism. When I filed an interview with the Police Surgeon of Karachi, the man who oversees all forensic evidence gathering and related medico-legal issues in the city, I hated that I couldn't describe the homophobic graffiti that had been scratched onto the surface of his desk and filing cabinet, the best indication of the kind of pressure under which his team operated. While reporting on a horrific rape case, I would have given anything to describe the self-satisfied way in which the police official I interviewed scratched his crotch using a fly swatter throughout our conversation. That one crude yet probably unconscious gesture said more about the sense of physical entitlement that Pakistani men enjoy than anything I ever wrote. Similarly, if I could have admitted in print that I found myself throwing up in a back alley after visiting the sewage-ridden tin shacks of hundreds of homeless Karachiites, perhaps more people would have been outraged by a government scam that denied access to low-income housing.

I wasted many evenings arguing with my editor about the value of first-person narrative journalism and the shortcomings of objectivity. Unfortunately, neither of us could conjure a reporting template that would be considered appropriate within the standards set by the mainstream media, yet simultaneously capture everything that was raw and repulsive about the reality I was documenting.

Enter Joe Sacco. At the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston last fall, soon after my arrival in the US, I happened upon Palestine, Sacco's comic journalism tour de force. Although conference participants had spent the weekend brainstorming ways in which to make journalism more textured, insightful, and human, no one had come close to suggesting a technique that could rival the satirical, brutally honest, and profoundly immersive experience that is Sacco's work.

Often compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's award-winning Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996) has been hailed for setting new standards in the genre of non-fiction graphic novels, or, as Sacco terms it, comic journalism. With his follow-up effort Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, Sacco established himself as a journalist to be reckoned with. He has since covered all manner of "compelling" events from Ingushetia to Iraq, from rock bands on the road to raids in Ramallah. Each comic is reportage at its best, daring to go behind-the-scenes of journalistic objectivity, using alternating visual chaos and clarity to render a reporter's all-encompassing experience of a situation. Even better, Sacco's frames are replete with the adrenaline and anxiety, humor and humanity that are never granted any column inches.

While it would be inappropriate for me to compare Pakistan to Palestine, I do believe that there are some realities so absurd that they demand new ways of telling. Sacco's work serves as a reminder to all journalists that they should strive to recount the reality that drives their investigations by whatever means necessary. Sacco is currently working on another comic on the Gaza Strip. Until that hits bookstores, we can content ourselves with some thoughts from the cartoonist:

You've been described as a pioneer in the field of comic journalism, yet one could argue that your work is part of a long tradition, an evolution of the political cartoon. How do you contextualize your work?

I primarily think of myself as a cartoonist, but also as someone who is interested in political matters and what's going on in the world. I know there's a long tradition of illustrators dating back to the London Illustrated and Harper's coverage of the Civil War as well as another tradition of artists who deal with political matters, political cartoons, and editorializing news through pictures. In the end, though, my interests have just come together. I wanted to be a journalist and then fell back on an intense hobby to make a living. I don't think too much about where I place myself and I never really had a theory about what I was doing. People keep asking me about my work, so I'm coming up with something to say post-fact. But the truth is, it's quite accidental. If you've done something for 15 years, you need to build some theory around it, but I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I started doing it

.

Who or what has influenced your work?

George Orwell, Robert Crumb, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr's Dispatches. I really care about journalism and it's very important to me to get the facts. But I also like getting the taste of something in my mouth, being a part of the same swirl that the writer is in. Herr's work, for example, is more atmospheric and so tells more about war from a universal standpoint that can be accessed in different ways.

Given your influences, do you consider your work to be in line with that of the New Journalists?

I hesitate to make the direct connection. I studied standard American journalism and wanted to write hard news. I only wrote feature material later on. I discovered Herr half way through college and Thompson long after graduating. Other people have assigned me a place among the New Journalists, whatever that means. In my work, I'm just trying to create the flavor of a place I've been.

Did the New Journalists influence your decision to insert yourself into the narrative?

My work process has always been organic so I never made the conscious decision to appear in the narrative. When I started doing comics, I was doing autobiographical material. When I went to the Middle East, however, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. But it wasn't such a stretch to think that I would reflect my own experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along the lines of a travelogue.

Looking back, I think having myself in it is a strong part of the work, not because I want to be a character, but because I want to point out that this material isn't objective, this is my point of view, these are the impressions I got. I'm interested in the facts, but that's not the same as being objective. My figure represents the personal pronoun 'I' and emphasizes that this isn't 'fly on the wall' journalism.

By inserting yourself in the narrative, you can also write the stuff that journalists don't, for example, about how people interact with you. I want to get away from the pretense of the reporter as artificial construct. Reporters have feelings about a situation and that impacts the way they write. My work is a way to demystify a process that may otherwise seem strange to people.

How Second Life Impacts Our First Life...

After having written so much about Second Life during my recent exchanges with Beth Coleman and Clay Shirky, I swore to myself that I would not write about this virtual world for a bit and let reality catch up with some of my theories. No such luck. I recently heard from digital theorist Trebor Scholtz suggesting that there had been some interesting responses to the Shirkey-Coleman-Jenkins exchanges over at the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) mailing list. Scholtz asked politely if I might weigh in on some of their arguments (always a dangerous thing since I am not on the list and not fully following their conversations) and clarify my position. I asked if I could cross-post my response here on the blog.

The question which Scholtz posed to me was deceptively simple:

My main question to Jenkins and all of you concerns the relationship between this virtual world and "first life." Do these virtual worlds merely provide an inconvenient youth with a

valve to live their fantasies of social change (elsewhere), or do they, in some measurable way, fertilize politics in the world beyond the screen?

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line.

Here, for example, is a link to the webcast of a session of the 2005 Games, Learning, and Society conference at Madison, Wisconsin. (Check out the session called Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything). It was one of the first places that I heard extensively about the kinds of educational uses of Second Life. One of the stories there which caught my imagination dealt with the ways people were using this environment to help sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to rehearse social skills and overcome anxieties that can be crippling in real world social interactions. (They call their island, Brigadoon). Those who are undergoing therapy in Brigadoon are able to interact through Second Life for several reasons, as I understand it: first, because it creates a buffer between the people lowering the stress of social interaction; second, because it reduces the range of social signals through the cartoonishness of the avatar, helping them to learn to watch for certain signs and filter out others. Ideally, participants then return with these new social skills and apply them to their interactions in their First Lives. But even if that is not possible for all of those involved, they have had a chance to interact meaningfully with other human beings -- even if through a mediating representation.

For me, Brigadoon offers both a demonstration of the value of having a Second Life that operates in parallel to your First Life and as a metaphor to think about the ways we can try things out, learn to think and act in new ways in virtual worlds of all kinds, and then carry those skills back with us to our everyday reality.

In some cases, the Second Life opens up experiences that would not be possible within the constraints of the real world. My former student and friend, John Campbell, wrote a book, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Identity, and Embodied Identity . His research primarily centered on much earlier forms of chatroom technologies rather than Second Life per se, but much of what he found there is still very relevant to our present conversation. One of the things I took away from Campbell's book was the idea that these chartrooms played important functions for queers who lived in small towns or in conservative regions of the country where there were little or no chances to socialize with others who shared their sexual preferences. Entering into a virtual world (even one as simple as the early chat rooms) allowed them to begin to explore aspects of their sexual identity that they could not yet act upon in their First Lives. Through this process, they developed the self confidence necessary to come out to their friends and family, they felt some connection to the realm of queer activism, and they made a range of other life-changing choices. I wanted to bring this into the conversation because I see from time to time academic theorists who want to dismiss the kinds of sexual experimentation that occurs in Second Life as interactive porn. Such language shows a limited understanding of what such spaces can and often do mean to the people who participate in these sexual subcultures in virtual worlds.

Those who have read my blog know how much I respect the work that Barry Joseph is doing through his Global Kids organization in Teen Second Life. Joseph has a strong commitment to using the virtual world to educate and empower young people and redirect them towards dealing with problems in the real world. Consider, for example, their recent collaboration with the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum to make images of the genocide occurring in Darfur visible to young visitors to Teen Second Life. The Museum was already projecting these photographs onto its own facade in the real world. The Global Kids group worked to showcase these same images within the virtual world, in the process learning more about real world suffering, and using Second Life as a platform to educate their contemporaries about a world problem that might otherwise have escaped their attention. By all reports, this was a transformative experience for the teens involved, resulting in them putting greater energy into trying to change the real world. Perhaps, Barry, who is a regular reader of this blog, will share more about his experiences.

How far might we push this? Consider the case of Kristofer Jovkovski, one of the readers of this blog, who wrote me recently to describe his proposal to construct a Virtual Macedonia through Second Life. Jovkovski's argument appeared in a Macedonia Arts and Culture magazine, Art Republica:

Macedonia is country of spiritual and profound people, having its culture originating from a deep tradition and culture. However, by implanting extremely materialistic culture and values that even the most developed capitalistic countries are revising and varying, the country is gradually losing its spirit.

Radical virtualization of reality would turn us back to our own natural needs. That would be the final, strongest slap in our own face, as radical immersion into the cyberspace would produce the opposite effect, at the same time, along the immersion path, would make us integrate, instead of enforce, the democratic and open values of the medium, process which would finally lead to reconciliation between the spiritual (i.e. cyberspace) and material world

It is essential to make space for the young people to create their individual and collective reality....

Macedonian government would accredit Virtual Macedonia as a legal state extension in the cyberspace and would give rise to virtual institutions and legal rights to the citizens, thus recognizing the first virtual sovereign state act that would make precedence in the international politics and instant popularity. Promotion of the first virtual state would incite knowledge and information revolution, changing the face of Macedonia. Everybody willing to embody themselves with a virtual identity, or Avatar, would have rights and possibility to create, own and trade virtual objects, thus empowering himself. Virtual Macedonia would be introduced to the older Macedonians in a nostalgic manner that would evoke ideological enthusiasm from their youth. Young people would, of course, be riding enthusiastic energy wave of even greater intensity.

Virtualization of reality would help us relive traumatic politization and transformation of everyday life. Experiences from the virtual reality would affect our real reality. We could help ourselves, and maybe most important, by taking more proactive part in creation of their own reality, young people could break the karma of cynicism and pessimism of elders.

Virtual Macedonia could be practical model of virtual state with its own territorial sovereignty, functional economy and community rights and regulations, opened to the world....

He has not yet tried to build a Virtual Macedonia. I don't want to get into this specific politics of the Macedonia situation but I was moved by this vision of how a virtual nation might revitalize a real one (which is in any case in the process of trying to reinvent itself after a complex history of struggles over national identity).

Might we imagine, for example, the construction of virtual homelands within Second Life that brought together disaporic communities and helped to cement their cultural and political ties to their mother countries? Might this result in new kinds of political alliances and affiliations that straddle between the real and virtual world? Could we use a similar structure to create a common space for interaction between groups which have very little face to face contact in the real world, even groups who have a history of conflicts over geographic space?

All of these examples work because Second Life does not perfectly mirror the reality of our First Lives, yet we could point to countless other more mundane and everyday ways that Second Life and other multiverses can and are being used to facilitate meetings in real world organizations, including those which result in all kinds of real world political effects.

That said, as Steven Shaviro notes on the iDC discussion list, there are some limits to the kinds of politics that can be conducted through Second Life at the present time:

Overall, Second Life is connected enough to "first life," and mirrors it closely enough in all sorts of ways, that we can pretty much do "there" the same sorts of things -- especially collaborative, social things -- that we do "here."...

A protest against the Iraq war in Second Life is little more than an empty symbolic gesture; but one might cynically argue, especially given the tendency of the media to ignore them, that

real-world protests against the war , however many people they draw, are at this point little more than empty symbolic gestures either.

On the other hand, I don't think that one could find any equivalent in Second Life of political organizing that takes place in "first life": if only because the people in Second Life are a fairly narrow, self-selected and affluent, group.

This goes back to the debate we've been having here about whether Second Life participants constitute a niche or an elite. Either way, the inhabitants of Second Life certainly are not a representative cross section of the society as a whole and there are many people who are excluded through technological or economic barriers to being able to participate in this world. These factors limit the political uses that can be made of SL: they make it hard for us to insure that a diversity of opinions are represented through the kinds of political deliberations that occur here; they makes it easy for participants to ignore some real world constraints on political participation, starting with the challenges of overcoming the digital divide and the participation gap; they make it hard to insure the visibility of online political actions within mainstream media.

That said, I don't think we can discount the political and personal impact that these online experiences may have on the residents of SL. We simply need a broader range of models for what a virtual politics might look like and need to understand what claims are being made when we debate the political impact of these virtual worlds.

Another list participant, Charlie Geer, goes a lot further in dismissing the value of Second Life. He takes issue with my claim that the participatory culture represented on SL is worth defending. Here's part of what he wrote:

It would seem to me obvious that trying to make some sense of and find ways of mitigating the violence and injustice in the complex world and culture we already necessarily inhabit, not least bodily, is far more pressing and considerably more worth defending than any supposed capacity to 'design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture'. This seems to me to be at best a license for mass solipsism and at worse something like the kind of thinking that undergirds much totalitarianism, as well as an evasion of our responsibilities to the world as we find it. Such a fantasy seems to be at play in both the relentless construction and assertion of identity', a drive that militates against proper social solidarity, and thus plays into the hands of those sustaining the status quo, as well as the fantasy entertained by the Bush

government that the Middle East can just be redesigned as if in some video game

Apart from anything culture is not something that can simply be constructed. It is something we are thrown into and which we can only at best try to negotiate our relationship

with. Culture necessarily involves other people and prior existing structures. Has Jenkins considered what it would mean if everyone felt free to 'construct their own culture'. Even if

such a thing were possible, it is certainly not desirable, especially if we have any hope to produce a properly participatory culture.

Frankly as far as I am concerned SL is really just a kind of cultural pornography, and is to the real business of culture what masturbating is to sex with another person. I like

masturbation as much as the next man, or indeed woman, but I don't make the error of mistaking for something it isn't. Apart from anything else it lacks precisely the element

that sex has, that of involving a proper, embodied, responsibility to someone else and to the potential consequences of the act itself.

There are lots of misperceptions embedded in these comments. To start with, I was not suggesting that we should be concerned with SL to the exclusion of concern with the real world. But I do see the struggle to preserve participatory culture as a fundamental political struggle in the same way that the right to privacy or the efforts to defend free speech are foundational to any other kind of political change. We are at an important crossroads as a society: on the one hand, we have new tools and social structures emerging that allow a broader segment of the population than ever before to participate in the core debates of our time. These tools have enormous potential to be used for creative and civic purposes. On the other hand, we are seeing all kinds of struggles to suppress our rights to deploy these new tools and social structures. Even as we are seeing a real promise of expanding free speech, we are seeing real threats to free speech from both corporate and governmental sources. We should be working to broaden access to the technologies and to the skills and education needed to become a full participant rather than having to defend the new communication infrastructure against various threats from government and business.

Gere understands what's going on in Second Life primarily in individualistic rather than collaborative terms. It would indeed be meaningless to describe a world where everyone constructs their own culture. Culture by definition is shared. But it is not absurd to imagine a world where everyone contributes to the construction of their culture. It is not absurd to imagine different projects in SL as representing alternative models for how our culture might work. Indeed, the virtual world allows us not only to propose models but to test them by inviting others inside and letting them consider what it might feel like to live in this other kind of social institutions. I think of what goes on there as a kind of embodied theory. And I think what is interesting is that these are intersubjective models that are indeed being taking up and tested by communities large and small.

In each of the examples I cited above, participants are learning how to work together with others through the creation of a shared virtual reality. We certainly need to spend more time exploring how we can connect what happens in these worlds back to our everyday lives but that doesn't mean that what occurs in a symbolic space is devoid of a real world social and political context.

Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation.

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part One)

The following is my attempt to provide a written record of the remarks that I presented at the Beyond Broadcast conference that we hosted at MIT the other week. I would strongly recommend watching the webcast version of the talk to achieve the full effect since the talk depended very heavily on the visuals and I am not going to be able to reproduce very many of them here. You might also want to check out the interview I did for Thoughtcast in advance of the event. This post is intended, however, to provide links to all of the examples I presented during the talk. Getting Too Close to Reality

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, my recent book, opens with the curious story of Bert and Bin Laden:

Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-American high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street's Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of "Bert is Evil" images he posted on his homepage. Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolph Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.

In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie, but were very aware of a blue chicken who serves as one of the series mascots in Arabic-speaking nations. The printer thus didn't recognize Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al-Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.

CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and Bin Laden. Representatives from Children's Television Workshop spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We're exploring every legal option to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on - the young man who had initially appropriated their images or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a number of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

From his bedroom, Dino sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: "I feel this has gotten too close to reality.... "Bert Is Evil" and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open."

In the context of the book, I am interested in the ways that this story illustrates the ways that contemporary media culture is being reshaped by the intersection of top-down corporate media and bottom-up grassroots media. Here, though, I want to invite us to reconsider what it might mean for citizens in a participatory culture to get "too close to reality" and whether this is a new kind of political power that we could deploy to transform society.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

One place to starting addressing this question would be to consider the case of This is What Democracy Looks Like, a feature length documentary that emerged from the Indie Media Movement in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. 100 media activists were issued camcorders and dispersed across the protest, each recording their own perspective on the action. The finished documentary shows us the experience in the street by pooling together the best of their footage into a 72 minute film, which was in turn intended to be a rallying point for further community building and activism. We might see the project as an example of the kinds of politically committed grassroots media production that was showcased throughout the Beyond Broadcast event.

Yet, I also want us to pause for a minute and consider the question posed by its title. What does Democracy look like? As Americans, we have a rich image bank to draw upon -- dating back to the founding days of our nation, so often, when we depicted Democracy, we fall back upon images of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, various protest activities such as the Boston Tea Party, or various national icons such as the American Eagle or The Spirit of 76. More recently, the Popular Front movement of the 1930s revitalized many of these images, offering us new icons of American democracy from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Yet, today, when we represent democracy, the images we construct have a vaguely and often an explicitly retro feel to them. It is as if democracy in this country has a past but not a future.

But, we might well ask what Democracy could look like for the 21st Century? It might, for example, look like the kinds of protest activities which are occurring within game spaces, such as Velvet Strike, a conceptual art project which involved "spray painting" any war graffiti inside Counter Strike, the recent gay pride march inside the World of Warcraft, or the massive protest rallies that took place in the Chinese multiplayer game world, Fantasy Westward Journey, or a broad array of activist uses of Second Life As someone who lives in Boston, it is worth recalling that the Boston Tea Party involved people adopting alternative identities (might we see the Native American garb as an early form of avatar?) and engaging in symbolic acts of political violence.

Democracy in the 21st century might look something like "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People." A Houston-area hip hop group, The Legendary K.O., used their music to express something they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened. The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum,

achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by

bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos.

Democracy in the 21st century might look like some of the ways that citizen journalists have deployed photosharing sites like Flickr to circulate ground-level images of public events such as the London subway bombings.

Democracy in the 21st Century might even look like some of the activities surrounding the selection of the American Idol. As I noted here last summer, critics who claim more people voted for the last American Idol than voted in the last presidential election are confused. More votes were cast for American Idol to be sure but then, the system allows and even encourages people to vote as many times as they want. The Vote for the Worst movement around American Idol, on the other hand, does represent an interesting model for how people might pool knowledge and deploy shared tactics to shape the outcome of the selection process, trying to negate the expectations of mass media companies and use their power to select to keep bad contestants on the air.

Escaping the Culture War Rhetoric

These new forms of activism may not look very much like the classic images of democracy. Indeed, there has been a tendency for activists to look down upon these kinds of activities, seeing them often as distractions from rather than incitements towards civic engagement. The result has been a kind of culture war between old style activism and the emerging participatory culture. We know more or less the kinds of images which cultural conservatives -- and indeed, the mainstream mass media deploys to dismiss and often demonize the new participatory culture. On the one hand, there are images of tarnished innocence -- wide-eyed children staring slack jawed at the television or computer screen, being imprinted by its toxic content and on the other hand, there are images of savages, youth run wild, and the feral children of the boob tube. Indeed, as Justine Casell pointed out to me recently, these fears are heavily gendered with a tendency for us to fear for our daughter's innocence and to fear our son's savagery. What strikes me, though, is that the images promoted by the Media Reform movement and by the Culture Jamming/Ad Busting world of progressive activism falls back on almost entirely the same kinds of images to condemn young people for their interests in popular culture. Once again, there are images of young people being brainwashed by television or driven wild by the seductions of popular culture; the content they consume gets described as "bread and circuses" or "weapons of mass distraction"; brand messages are written more or less directly onto their hearts, minds, and bodies; the public is depicted with faceless conformity; consumers are described as "idiots" who lack any critical judgment and told to "get a life." Such images grossly overstate the power of mass media and underestimate the agency of media consumers. The result is a politics focused on victimization rather than empowerment.

I have never quite understood how we are supposed to found a democratic movement on the premise that the public as a whole is stupid and has poor taste. And I am reasonably convinced that such images and rhetoric has the effect of turning off many people who might otherwise support many of the policies being advocated by the Media Reform movement. What I want to do in this talk is suggest ways that we might reimagine the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy, embracing new political language and images that mobilizes us as fans as well as citizens.

To understand what such a politics might look like, I would suggest picking up a new book by NYU professor Stephen Duncombe -- Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. Duncombe's previous work has included Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, work that has offered a range of models for how popular culture can be deployed for democratic activities. In his new book, he argues that the left has seemingly lost the ability to construct a utopian vision for the future or convey such a vision through popular fantasy. The left, he suggests, has developed a powerful critique of what Noam Chomsky calls "the manufacture of consent" but it has not developed any fresh models for the "manufacture of dissent." He urges us to reconsider our relations to popular culture before it is too late:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

I found Duncombe's description of what a progressive popular culture might look like to be inspirational, though I might be inclined to describe this as a democratic popular culture since many of these traits he is discussing might also be embraced by at least some conservative groups as well and we would have a better society if these virtues were shared by both the right and by the left. We might sum up his key claims through the following terms:

Participatory: Dumcombe's example of this new kind of playful activism is Billionaires for Bush, a group which showed up in costumes and staged street theatre during Bush's appearances in the last presidential campaign, trying to remind reporters and citizens of what they saw as links between the Republican Party and corporate greed. Another example might be the Sorry Everybody website where many individuals posted snap shots and messages to the planet after the results of the election as a way of acknowledging what they saw as the damage Bush was doing to America's image around the world.

Active -- We might consider the ways that Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta emerged as a response to Thatcherism, was produced as a film in time to be read as expressing dissent against the Bush administration, and has been literalized within participatory culture through a series of YouTube videos that link the film's dystopian future with the rhetoric and tactics of the current War on Terror. V offers progressives both a dystopian fantasy of where today's policies might logically lead (thus providing the basis for a critique of the manufacture of consent) and a fantasy of resistance (thus offering some idea of how we might manufacture dissent.)

Open-Ended -- Consider the kinds of political dialogue being sparked by comedy news shows such as the Daily Show, Politically Incorrect, or Colbert Report, which often call attention to topics that have been under-covered by the national news and encourages viewers to reflect on the mechanisms by which the news constructs our understanding of the world. I wouldn't turn to such programs for answers but I would see them as posing questions that might lead to further reflection and inquiry. The politics of this style of news comedy is clear at that moment when Colbert spoke truth to power at the Washington Press Club Dinner, directly confronting the president of the United States with what many see as fundamental contradictions in his world view. This style of news comedy has proven so effective at manufacturing dissent that Fox News has decided to create its own right wing alternative, The Half Hour News Hour.

Transparent -- Here, we might cite, for example, the kinds of progressive fantasies of an alternative America constructed on The West Wing. I wrote for Flow a few years ago about the ways that the program's construction of an alternative presidential campaign between essentially a maverick Republican in the John McCain mold and a progressive minority candidate of the Barack Obama school gave the program a chance to model what an alternative framing of the two parties might look like.

Transformative -- My example here was the work of JibJab, a group of animators who use borrowed and manipulated images to spoof the political process.

If we put all of these pieces together, the resulting organization might look something like True Majority, the pro-Democratic Party group created by Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's fame), which is perhaps best known for circulating a video during the last election during which The Donald fires George W. Bush as if this were an extra-special episode of The Apprentice. As I discuss in Convergence Culture, this group embraced the concept of "serious fun" as a form of progressive activism, designing videos that people wanted to pass along not simply because of what they said but how they said it.

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

Attend the tale of plucky young independent filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who have tapped every device available to them in the era of participatory culture to get their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters in front of an audience. Rather than waiting for the film to come out on DVD to offer director's extras, Buice and Crumley shot a compelling series of videos about the film's production and released them via iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, where as of August 2006 they had been downloaded more than 600,000 times. As audience interest in the property grew, the team used their own blog/website to solicit support from their fans, promising that they would insure that the film got shown in any city where there were more than 150 requests. Indeed, they were able to use the online interest expressed in the film to court local exhibitors and convince them that there was an audience for Four Eyed Monsters in their community.

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

Most theaters would normally avoid a project like ours because we don't have a distributor who would be marketing the film and getting people to show up. But because the audience of our video podcast is so enthusiastic about the project and because we have numbers and emails and zip codes for all of these people, we've been able to instill enough confidence in theaters to get the film booked.

As of today, the site has received more than 8000 requests from screenings. Fans can use their website to monitor requests and to help them to identify other potential viewers in their neighborhood. As Crumley explained,

We've learned that it's almost impossible to distribute your film to theaters the way the current system works, but their are loop holes, and they are building your own audience and then proving to theater owners you have that audience and that they are willing to show up to pay money to see your film that's something distributors don't have to do, but theaters would really benefit if they did.

The film and the web campaign behind it has drawn interest from the Sundance Channel which plans to broadcast it down the line but who used it to launch a series of screenings of independent films in Second Life, where once again it played to packed houses.

Based on their experiences, the filmmakers have started talking about what they call "collective curation" of content: a scenario where independent producers court audiences via the web, creating interest through clips and previews, and identifying where they have a strong enough following to justify the expense of renting theater space and shipping prints. They believe that such an approach will help other directors get their work before enthusiastic paying customers.

Seeking to support other filmmakers who want to follow in their footsteps, the Four Eyed Monsters team has posted a list of more than 600 movie theaters around the country which they think might be receptive to independent films and encouraging others to fill in relevant details.

The filmmakers will be sharing some of their experiences and perspectives to those attending the Beyond Broadcast conference this Saturday. As reported here earlier, this conference is being co-hosted by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law, and Yale's Information Society Project.

The Four Eyed Monsters team also play a prominent role in the newly released documentary on videoblogging which CMS graduate student (and Beyond Broadcasting organizer) Steve Schultz has helped to produce for the Project nml Exemplar Library. As I have mentioned here before, we are producing a series of web-based documentaries for use by schools and after school programs interested in getting young people involved in media production projects. I will be featuring more information about this documentary down the line but I wanted to call it to your attention in advance of the Beyond Broadcast conference since it provides such a useful overview of the implications of citizen-based media. This is the first of the documentaries produced under the supervision of our newly hired production coordinator, the talented Anna Van Someren.

The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)

I first became aware of Peter Ludlow and his work for the Alphaville Herald when NPR called me up and asked me to be a pundit commenting on a nationally broadcast debate between the candidates for the leadership of the largest town in The Sims Online -- a debate between a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach and a 20-something airline employee from Virginia. I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the mechanisms surrounding the election broke down, some voters were denied the right to cast their ballots, the election technology was manipulated, and charges of corruption and poor sportsmanship flew right and left. The Alphaville elections, in other words, were the game world counterpart to what happened in Florida in the 2000 elections. Ludlow, who was far more deeply emershed in this world than I was, became my expert guide through this whole process. I wrote about these events for Technology Review and later revisited them for a section of my book, Convergence Culture. I lost contact with Ludlow for a while but recently he wrote me to see if I might give him some advice about his own new book project -- his account of his time as the editor first of the Alphaville Herald and then of The Second Life Herald, co-authored with Mark Wallace. Their book recounts a fascinating saga of mobsters and griefers, of civic boosters and would be socialites, and of the challenge of governing virtual worlds. The book will be coming out some months from now from the MIT Press but in the meantime, what Ludlow had to say was so timely, especially given my recent exchanges with Clay Shirkey and Beth Coleman about the value of Second Life and given our forthcoming Beyond Broadcasting conference that I wanted to share some of his reflections with you much sooner than that. When he is not playing the part of a muckraking journalist in Second Life, Ludlow is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Linquistics at the University of Michigan.

In the conversation that follows, he explores more systematically what it means to construct civic media in Second Life and discusses his contributions to the life of this emerging online community. Tomorrow, he will share his reflections on the Second Life Debate as well as his thoughts about the challenges of governing online worlds. Together, these two installments represent a fascinating inside perspective on the nature of civic engagement in Second Life.

Axel Springer announced the other day that they would establish a full time newspaper in Second Life. What do you see as the significance of this announcement? What does it mean to the existing local newspapers which are indigenous to SL?

The Axel Springer virtual newspaper, called The Avastar, launched a few weeks ago, and they have had, suffice it to say, a rough start trying to find their way around Second Life. One problem is that Second Life is a very complex and hard to understand cluster of social spaces, and the Avastar managers don''t seem to understand the world very well. I also don''t think they have had great success in lining up knowledgeable and articulate writers, and if they think people are going to *pay* to read their paper (or, for that matter, advertise in it) they are badly mistaken.

The fundamental problem with their project, however, is their idea that there is some sort of value added by virtue having their newspaper in a PDF format, rather than a blog-like format. PDF doesn't integrate into the Second Life infosphere in the appropriate way (they can't link to other stories, we can't link to them, people can't comment, the stories are stale by the time they appear, etc).

If you think about it, their project is somewhat reactionary. They had an opportunity to come to this strange and fantastic new place where all the rules can be rewritten, and the only thing they could think of doing was coming up with a product that mimics meat space newspapers as much as possible. Far from offering us a new way to think about news and entertainment and how it should be presented, they are effectively trying to make a last stand for static push media by using PDF instead of a blog or some sort of social software.

From the outside, I''m sure they look all bleeding edgy ("oh look, a newspaper in a virtual world!") but from inside they look reactionary in concept, and clumsy in execution.

You've been involved with local newspapers in two virtual worlds now -- SL and Sims Online. What do you see as the importance of civic journalism in imaginary space? How important is it that the perspective be "local" -- coming from the player community itself?

Civic journalism in virtual worlds is very important, and it has grown up a lot over the three+ years I have been involved with The Alphaville Herald, and now the Second Life Herald. When we started in October of 2003 there were lots of fan sites for online games, but the concept of blogs/journals that covered in game events and player/owner conflicts with a critical eye was foreign. People reacted to the Herald like it had come from outer space. I can''t speak for other virtual worlds, but today in Second Life there is a very rich community of dozens of bloggers - many of which are self-labeled as newspapers. It makes for a very interesting media ecology for Second Life.

Some of the sites are merely fan sites, and some are personal journals of some form or other, but there are some that take a serious and critical look at the world and Linden Lab policies from time to time. All of them play an important role in recording and commenting on various aspects of this very rich and complex space.

This sort of journalism is important, and the way I think of it, there are three audiences: the internal audience, the external audience, and the audience that isn''t born yet.

The internal audience involves other players, and the flow of information can be crucial to maintaining a fair playing field. Just as an example, we ran a story about a memo the Lindens had sent to some key land owners, informing them that prices for private islands would be going up shortly and that if they acted now they could grab islands at the current price. That story embarrassed the Lindens into opening the offer to everyone and extending the buy-in period for land at then-current prices. There are lots of instances of this sort - policies and actions have serious economic consequences and virtual journalism can be a watchdog.

For the external audience, we provide a window onto the world that hopefully accurately reflects what is going on there, so that people will come join for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Also, if you have thousands of people in a given space interacting, it is important that people on the outside know what is going on. If this isn''t clear, consider the case of The Sims Online, which is a space that is supposedly suitable for children as young as 13. Well, I think it is important that parents and policy makers be informed about what is going on in that space. I''m not going to tell them what to do about it, but I do think there is a kind of civic responsibility to point out some of the adult activities that are taking place.

The future audience: a hundred years from now people will want to know what was happening in the rapidly evolving social web of our era, and these journals provide important records. Sometimes when I write for the Herald I even imagine that I am writing for an audience that won''t come along for a hundred years. (Usually though, I''m just banging something out as fast as possible.)

Some of your critics have argued that your coverage of the issues facing the communities in game world could be used to spur on reform and regulation efforts by outside government authorities. How do you balance your responsibility to the community within the game world (to expose problems so they can be addressed) with what they perceive as your responsibility beyond the community (to not stir up public controversy which could bring outside attention)?

It certainly can''t be my responsibility to cover up in-world problems. I understand that people view critical commentary and exposure of outrageous in-world behavior to be an attack on the community, but of course it is nothing of the kind. The problem is that sites which constantly spin the world in a positive light have no credibility when an outside critic comes along. For example, when Clay Shirky launched his recent attack on Second Life, it was easy for him to dismiss the defenders of SL as a bunch of breathless logrolling fanboiz. He can''t do that with the Herald however, and we are, I think, positioned to slap him down good and hard when we have the time to get around to it.

I should also add that over time people do come to understand that we are not attacking the community, and some of the Herald''s harshest critics have gone on to be good friends and contributors to the Herald. If you stick around, that shows people that you are committed to the community, and that is what really counts the most.

Some people have made fun of your efforts suggesting that these virtual worlds are "only games" and that you are taking them "too seriously." How do you respond to this criticism?

The ""only a game"" meme is of course not merely leveled at the Herald, but at anyone who participates in online worlds (and participatory culture more broadly - it is a species of the "get a life" meme that you have discussed in Textual Poachers and elsewhere). The first thing that has to be said is that as applied to Second Life it is badly mistaken, since Second Life is barely a game at all --- it is a completely open platform the content of which is provided by participants (that is they build, texture, and script whatever they want). The platform can be used for many purposes, but developing and playing what might be called games has never really been a big part of Second Life.

Beyond that, I tend to think that not much in life is *only* a game. Even spaces like World of Warcraft that are pretty clearly designed to be games are also spaces where people socialize, exchange real world information, work on projects together etc.

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating ""only a game"" so much. If you google ""only a game"" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it''s only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn''t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it''s only a game" is like saying "this isn''t how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain''t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

At various times, you have seemed to struggle with whether you are playing a reporter in a game and taking seriously your responsibilities as a journalist covering real people in a real community. To what degree does the "magic circle" give players --- including yourself -- license to shed real world responsibilities in virtual world? Where should we draw the limits?

I don''t think we struggle with whether we are in or out of the magic circle so much as we intentionally play at the circumference. Sometimes, when I think we are getting too serious, I will post a silly story, and when we are starting to get too silly I will put together a serious interview or offer a polished essay or piece of serious journalism. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable; they want to know if we are serious journalists or just playing at being journalists. But the answer is we don''t respect the distinction and we are constantly trying to flout it.

Playing (sometimes even being) seedy tabloid journalists has helped us to learn the role that tabloid journalism plays in the media ecology of Second Life and the internet more broadly. I''m fascinated by this topic. If you think of media as a kind of eco-system them you see that tabloid journalism plays an important role - churning up stuff that publications with bigger budgets and more time can sift through and investigate.

What is frightening, however, is seeing the number of so-called serious media outlets that pick up our stories (and other blog flotsam) and just reprint them as though it was the word of Gopod. More frightening than that, however, has been the many instances we have seen where major news organizations research their own stories and end up with great big piles of steaming crap. So I am in this strange position of thinking both that (i) people should not be reprinting our stuff without doing their Serious Journalism thing with it and (ii) the content we generate is on the whole more reliable and informative than what they come up with when they do that Serious Journalism thing.

The net effect of this has been that it has made me very pessimistic about the state of journalism in the business and technology sector; it seems to be mostly about recycling press releases without reflection. And it's even worse than that. The *real* problem is that too many people now equate Serious Journalism with the recycling of press releases. Critical journalism is so foreign to people (except maybe on the sports page) that they recoil against it. Well, let me modify that statement. People in the US have this problem. Readers from other countries (Germany, Italy, etc.) find the critical stance of the Herald altogether natural and they are baffled by the Americans who complain about it. So maybe this is just a problem with the American media consumers - they have forgotten what a genuinely critical media looks like.

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled "Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy." It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, public media professionals, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups. Beyond Broadcast 2007 builds on the overwhelming success of last year's sold-out event, "Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture" held at Harvard Law School. Over 350 people took part in-person and online through the virtual world Second Life. Attendees used several unique online tools, including a web-based "question tool" to probe panelists, a collaborative wiki, live blogging, flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us tagging, and YouTube video production. These tools enabled the conference to practice what it preached, turning the event into a two-way participatory interaction in contrast with many conferences. The tools have been expanded upon this year, already spurring an active conversation on

the conference web site, weeks before the event.

I will give the Keynote Address, followed by panel discussions from media makers and policy commentators. Details of these panels are being updated on the conference web site

In the second-half of the day, the conference turns its focus to working groups that attendees will help organize. Building on themes coming from the plenary sessions, participants will target specific issues or questions and join efforts with the diverse crowd of others. In the past, these groups have been facilitated by thought leaders in technology, policy, and academia. Many attendees last year expressed their appreciation for this hybrid conference approach in

which they had a chance to "do something before heading home."

There will also be an evening reception, called "Demos and Drinks," showcasing groups that are doing exciting work related to conference themes.

Registration is only $50 (before February 9), and includes lunch and the evening reception. There is also a special 50% discount for students. The conference follows the 2007 Public Media Conference taking place in Boston February 20-23.

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today's post, I offer an interview with another of the conference's speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a "culture of citizenship." After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director. According to Wikipedia, "The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation's work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen's and their government."

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let's start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the "bread and circus" aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference's theme, "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy" invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me -- the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I've met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I've met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch -- for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump -- a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I'm thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

There are millions who have participated in political life because of the internet, first by ventriloquism (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this political article was interesting") then by speaking (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this article is interesting because x, but they got it wrong because...") who then become more comfortable in their other communications, on and offline, in speaking about political issues.

And then there are those extraordinary people, like those we've seen at the Sunlight Foundation, who take citizenship to a whole new level. Simply by being asked, "help us investigate this question about earmarks," a handful of people not only responded to that question but have becomes intrepid, creative citizen watchdogs, digging up information about our politics and sharing it broadly, all on their own time.

There are still more who have participated in a one-dimensional way, the way one "participates" in the coca cola industry by drinking coke (and an increasing greed on the part of candidates to increase this kind of participation -- big lists, assigned tasks), where neither personal responsibility nor creativity are engaged. But even this flat kind of participation leads a handful to taking the role of citizen seriously.

The internet breaks down some barriers to creativity, to public expression, to information, to public conversation, and to collective action.

That said, our human hunger for humor, connection, games, entertainment, gossip, is nearly limitless, and when the supply is nearly limitless it is hard to avoid. When I go to the airport, I can't tear my eyes away from celebrity gossip magazines, even though there is no barrier to my reading the Economist -- when I'm online, the celebrity gossip, the games, and the political gossip constantly beckon. There is now no barrier to instant dopamine hits from playing games, from reading gossip, from emailing and instant messaging friends. I can't generalize from my experience, but I know I'm not completely alone when I say that the internet has diminished many of my other experiences -- I cook less, read fewer books, plan fewer parties, and wander the streets aimlessly less frequently because I can always trust in some small comfort online when I would have to risk much more by taking on the streets. As applied to politics, its an open question -- will we, as a culture, choose the limitless entertainment because its there, and will our civic culture continue to decline (with a small percentage the exception?). Or will the new possibilities lead to a new culture of citizenship?

I happen to think the culture of citizenship is possible, but it will take real vigilance, care, cultivation, and a collective choice to make it a priority. It may also take some serious thinking about whether we want something like the fairness doctrine for the internet -- whether, looking at ourselves in the mirror, we decide we want some structural supports for our civic selves -- it will take a choice. The internet -- no matter all the joyful possibilities of political engagement it enables -- will not make us citizens, we will have to do that ourselves.

You were The Director of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Given those experiences, what advice would you offer the current crop of Democratic candidates about the potential use of new media in the forthcoming campaign? Do you have any predictions about which campaigns seem to best understand this current era of web 2.0?

I am far more interested in who will make the best President than in who uses the best tools, and a clumsy use of email, youtube, and blogs wouldn't dissuade me from supporting a candidate who I largely support. The only way they really relate is that part of any support for me is necessarily a commitment to citizenship and to transparent government.

If you were advising a candidate in this election cycle, would you recommend that they adopt an avatar and go into Second Life?

Yes, I would have a full time staffer, with three interns at least, who were

responsible for gaming outreach.

For the past 40 years or so, there have been basically three ways a citizen can reliably interact with a Presidential candidate:

1) She can join a group (like a labor union) and engage in that group's decision-making, which is then communicated to the candidate through an intermediary.

2) She can watch the candidate on TV in a debate, on a news story, or in an ad

3) She can live in New Hampshire or be lucky.

Other forms of interaction were possible, but there were not that many, and they were not scalable. Suddenly there is Second Life, listservs, email, games that a candidate can play with and against others, a dizzy mess of kinds of interactions that are possible. The only real limitations on these new kinds of interactions are scale, creativity, and political will.

I once saw an interesting talk by a Microsoft sociologist, in which he talked about the kinds of characters that show up in list-servs. Its easy to be inauthentic in one forum, one time or a few times, he said, but over time, its pretty clear who isn't acting like a human - there are certain personality types we all recognize (including the trolls) and those that don't quite seem right we shy away from, picking up subtle signals that suggest that "this person is sort of lying." This is finally a positive conclusion for internet communities - it sugests that guerrilla marketers may be able to strike once, but astroturf will reveal itself in the end. Language, used unrelentingly over weeks and months, will out the shill.

This thesis is also interesting when reflecting on the efforts candidates make to engage people in completely new forms of interaction - a chat room, say, or in Second Life. While candidates won't necessarily lie, inasmuch as they do not sound like humans sound and bring prefabricated phrases, or phrases of others, it can undermine their credibility - and certainly undermine their interest. (The cookie cutter emails that so many campaigns now send have growing lists but idle members, who do not believe that the emails carry any authentic connection to them.) Likewise, even if thousands of people show up to watch candidate y "chat" or "blog", the interest will only remain so long as there is some reason to think they are getting something more than a press release or scripted notes. And the fashionable time-delayed "chat" in which questions are submitted before hand is not a new form - is similar to having a guest on talk radio, except leaves the candidate more control.

But back to your question -- a real time chat, or a conversation in Second Life, is a new form. That, as it develops, will be fascinating for politicians, who have so much more on the line in every word than the reporters who regularly do this. Would I recommend it? Yes. Presidential

candidates should be outreaching in gaming forums, including game-of-life forums, actively. But it will take some innovation and looseness to work well.

We had some very fruitful real time chats during the Dean campaign, when they were used for policy experts from the staff to answer basic policy questions by chatters. It was a narrow enough context that policy experts were quite forthcoming, and the discussions were fruitful from both sides - the chats we had with Dean involved were more chaotic and less likely to be fruitful. In both cases, much of the interesting conversations that I had were the side-chats, carried on in groups of two and three who pinged me, seeing the name of a staffer. In Second Life, with new dimensions added (and the possibility for visual demonstrations), I can imagine these lecture-like moments being even more valuable - a candidate could have a forum on net neutrality, for example, in which he presents not only himself but his policy experts, creating a new kind of conversation, but one more likely to inform a citizen both about the issues and about the way in which a candidate makes decisions.

Second Life, chat rooms, and social networking tools makes it easier to both create groups and be creative -- so instead of having to speak to a candidate through a large community years in the making, 30,000 people with shared interests can get together and ask for a town-hall meeting from each of the candidates, and invite tough questioners to attend.

The forms and format of the meetings can go beyond the classic candidate forum, because of the low cost of bringing people together - and it may be that in these liminal forms we learn more than we thought possible, even if the candidate does not step on his tongue.

What lessons do you think political leaders should take from the Wikipedia movement?

I think there are two key lessons:

1) Small groups of people who feel responsible are highly competent to manage difficult and boring and very important tasks. I think this is one of the most under-told stories, especially in politics -- politicians are eager for mass numbers, big email lists, big readerships, big donations, and thousands of people door-knocking for them. This is all fine -- but to truly be a democrat (small d) they must also believe that citizens are competent at decision-making and governing, and express that belief through their campaign structures and their governing structures. Any politician you ask will gush about the possibility of the internet to enable citizens to give her good ideas, but most are wary of actually distributing roles, not tasks, to groups of people that are not on the payroll. Wikipedia should help change that story -- self-governance is possible.

2) Millions of people want to engage as creative, intelligent adults in political life. Wikipedia, for all its neutral point of view, is a profoundly political project, and evidences, along with hundreds of other examples, the hunger of people to be meaningful contributors to political society.

What connection do you see between the ideals of citizen journalism and the kinds of voter participation and government reform efforts being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation?

Sunlight Foundation is committed to using technology to strengthen the relationship between citizens and Congress. Our grants support people who are making amazing transparency tools, and other parts of our work is more explicitly political, lobbying (with facebook groups and an open, distributed attititude) for Congress to open up its processes and join the 21st century. We beleive that a transparent budgetary process, once impossible, is now possible because of the internet, and the more citizens engage in that process, the closer we are to achieving ideals of self-governance.

I don't personally have an ideal of citizen journalism, but an ideal of citizenship -- which is to say that people actually take responsibility for their government. They can discharge that responsibility in infinite ways -- much as one can discharge the responsibility of motherhood or owning a pet in infinite ways. But we all know the difference between someone who owns a pet and takes responsibility for it, and one who does not -- what I seek is a culture in which most of us take responsibility. One of those ways is to research and write and mashup and make videos and generally engage others in Congress, and we are working to enable those (a quickly growing community) that are interested in this. There are some amazing people who work with Congresspedia and our Senior Researcher, Bill Allison, doing the hard investigative work it takes to actually understand how Congress works, and they are doing all of us an extraordinary service.

Can you give us a preview of your remarks at the Beyond Broadcasting conference?

Nope! Because I don't know what they are yet...

Jenkins-Isms?

As I mention the other day, I am currently posting this blog from Singapore. I was invited here as a guest of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation which hosted a public lecture at the National Library's Drama Center on Friday night which was attended by some of the country's political, economic, and intellectual leaders and was designed to focus public debate around the issue of Media in Transition. The talk has received enormous interest here -- I think I have been interviewed at this point by pretty much all of the English language media in Singapore. (I am starting to feel like Noam Chomsky!) The first interview came on my first morning of the country and went up on line almost immediately. It was with AsiaOne and resulted in this story. They asked for my photograph, having no time to get a photographer over to my hotel, and wondered if they could take some images from my blog. I was amused to see that they went with a picture of my Mii, created by Alice Robison, and the photograph of me reading a Polish comic book outside the Warsaw train station. In this context, the Mii looks a little bit like the kind of artist renderings a police might circulate about a crime suspect but I suppose it does drill home my attitude towards game and digital technology.

The article ran with the provocative headline, "The Youtube of Tomorrow Will Come from Asia," and discusses in some depth my interest in the flow of Asian produced goods into the west and my belief that Singapore as a nation may be posed to become a key broker in that relationship.

On Saturday, I opened up the Straits Times over breakfast and found a full page article about my talk, including a side bar on "Jenkins-isms" which included the following tidbit about my recent visit to Teen Second Life:

"Prof Jenkins himself went into Second Life and met a young girl from Mexico City. Despite their age gap, they could talk freely about many things."

So, Mariel, it looks like our encounter the other day is making international news!

It's pretty scary when people start naming "isms" after you!

I have also found this rather interesting blog post from a Singaporean who attended the public lecture and who describes some of the kinds of questions and concerns that got raised from the audience:

I was amused to hear about the story of how one lady was not too happy with her daughter studying before the exams with her iPod plugged in. Her daughter was actually listening to her own lecture notes, but hey, when I was studying, the radio or Walkman was always on full blast. This is what we define as The Generation Gap.

But I was not amused was when this PR practitioner stood up and said most of the online stuff that people are crazy over is "rubbish" to her.

Actually her point was that it was difficult for her to find useful stuff on the Internet apart from traditional media content (like a PDF of a print magazine interview), and she couldn't get the hang of being a constant web community. It's this sort of dismissal that will cause the older folks to be blindsided when the carpet is suddenly pulled from under their feet and they realize the old media ground no longer exists.

On Sunday, there was a second, longer profile of Prof Jenkins in the Straits Times. written by Cheong Suk-Wai, a high profile Singaporean journalist. I was really impressed with the quality of the reporting here: she manages to convey some of the core concerns animating my work and also to capture something of my personality as well. There are a few glitches -- most notably, she took my estimate that this blog gets 4000 visitors per week (more or less) and wrote that it had gotten 4000 hits since June.

I am also struggling with her side comment that I speak in a "chirpy rapid-fire throttle." I will certainly buy rapid fire throttle -- I do talk way too fast, just trying to fit in everything I want to say, but I never thought of myself as "chirpy" before.

The portrait captures both my optimism and the concern that we need to work together to confront some of the challenges and risks represented by this moment of media transition. A heavy focus here was on the work we are doing with MacArthur on new media literacies and with my own experiences raising a son during the digital age. My southern background -- described her as "homespun" -- seems to strike a note in this piece which is at once exotic (a world not often encountered here) and familiar (with its stress on family and religion.) This is perhaps the first article about me that talks about being raised a Southern Baptist by a mother who ran our church's vacation Bible school.

In addition to the public lecture, "From YouTube to YouNiversity: Learning and Playing in An Age of Social Networks," I did a workshop with employees of the various newspapers represented by my host, the Singapore Press Holdings, which centered around the relationship of old and new media as it impacts news and journalism. Since this talk was off the record, I can't really share with you what they asked or what I said. But much of what I conveyed drew upon some speculations I put together along time ago for Technology Review and for the MIT Communications Forum. Anyone who wants to read my thoughts on the future of news would do well to start with these two articles, now somewhat out of date, though many of the same issues remain.

One journalist said that Singapore was a great country which suffered because it was in a "shabby neighborhood." A central theme of my remarks had to do with the ways that geographic location might be playing a less central role in the production and circulation of news in the future. So, in 2001, I wrote that the American tradition of local newspapers might give way -- was indeed already starting to give way -- to a culture centered around national papers. More and more Americans get their news from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor or USA Today, all of which are essentially national rather than local or regional newspapers. Many techies still read the San Jose Mercury online, both because it was one of the first online newspapers and because it has unique access to developments in Silicon Valley and on Sandhill Road. I personally get my national news from the Washington Post and my international news from the New York Times. I know many Americans who prefer to read about Iraq and the War on Terror through the British media because they don't trust how the American trust has handled this story.

Can we imagine, then, other newspapers developing specializations which play on their core competencies and which thus attract readers nationwide? Could the Boston Globe, say, build on its access to leading colleges and universities by becoming in effect a center of excellence (or something like the journalistic equivalent of a magnet school) focused on covering Education? Could the LA Times beef up its coverage of entertainment news and start to attract nationwide readers online? What happens next -- I am seeing students in my dorm who continue to read the online editions or listen to the digital radio broadcasts from journalists in their home country. And the same thing is happening to readers of small town newspapers in this country when they go away to college.

In such a world, is it far fetched to imagine that a publication like the Straits Times, which does a first class job covering developments in Asia (both political and cultural), might become the newspaper of choice within the Chinese Diaspora or might even attract the interest of pop cosmopolitans in the west who want to read more about anime, manga, Jpop, Bollywood, and other forms of Asian popular culture or the Asian business scene?

In such a scenario, newspapers as a medium will survive but there's no guarantee that any particular paper will survive. Some newspapers will wither and die in such a world, just as we've seen over the past several decades, the consolidation of rival newspapers in major cities. How many American cities still have competing dailies? Surprisingly few. So, the next step may be the consolidation of publications within the Northeastern Megalopolis, say, so that papers in Boston and Providence start to fold into each other. Those newspapers which survive will be those which know how to identify and serve specific interests not just for their local readership but for interested consumers nationally or even globally.

All of this is of course totally speculative. I am channeling my inner McLuhan here! You can just chalk it up as another example of Jenkins-ism run amok!

An aside: While I am in Singapore, my name seems to be cropping up in relation to a controversy in the American gaming community. Penny Arcade's Tycho ran a piece last week discussing a new documentary, Moral Kombat, which centers around video game violence. I gather that the film's trailer is pretty sensationalistic (though I have had trouble accessing it here in Singapore). As Tycho notes, "I sincerely doubt the tone of the piece matches this trailer, given some of the participants - for example, I don't think that Henry Jenkins would be party to a hysterical dialogue, even in an attempt to tame it."

Thanks, Tycho for the vote of confidence. I haven't seen the film yet myself so I can't guarantee what its contents actually look like. I have been snookered before by producers who seemed earnest and then ambushed me. See the article in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers about my experience on Donahue. And there was the guy who signed me up for an interview and then ended up confessing mid-interview that he had lost his son to the evils of gaming: actually, his son was a national CounterStrike champion but the father couldn't accept the place of computer games in his son's life. Needless to say, that was not a fun interview from that point forward and the final film -- which will remain nameless here (primarily because I've blocked it out) -- ended up having a major ax to grind.

But my sense is that Spencer Halprin, the producer of this film, really wanted to get out both sides of the argument. He spent time following around Jack Thompson and hopefully gave the old buzzard enough rope to hang himself with. And he asked me some pointed but thoughtful questions, giving me a chance to spell out my arguments for why the links between video games and real world violence have been over-stated. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the finished product has the same reasonable tone and rational perspective as the interview I did with the producer several years ago. If I get an advanced peek at the work, I will certainly share my impressions here.

The Student Press Law Center and the Future of the First Amendment

Some of my most formative experiences involved working as a student journalist -- first in high school and then in college. As someone who took seriously my responsibilities to my community, I found myself on multiple occasions in battles over the censorship of the student press. Most memorably, when I was an undergraduate at Georgia State University, we tried to do a special issue of the paper focused on the adult entertainment sector in Atlanta. There were a large number of strip clubs, porn theaters, and other such operations not far from campus which students drove past on their way to school and we decided to provide some insight into what went on there. Inquiring minds wanted to know and all of that. When the issue hit the stands, the administration was all over our backs and the editor of the paper quickly capitulated, pulling the paper from distribution. A bunch of my friends went around collecting the papers before they could be destroyed and then we organized a group of students to distribute them in brown paper bags as a protest of the pressures put on the paper by the administration. We later ended up defending our choices as journalist before a hearing conducted by the Student Government, which had been stung by criticisms of its policies and campaign tactics and saw this issue as a chance for pay back.

Several years later, I got involved in advising a high school newspaper editor who decided to stand up to the principal and the school board who wanted to stop him from reporting news about controversies going on in his school: he took the school board into court and won what was then a fairly groundbreaking case in student press law.

All of these experiences have left me with enormous respect for the work of the Student Press Law Center, a watchdog group that monitors struggles over censorship of student produced media and provides resources for editors who want to assert their First Amendment rights. A recent visit to their site showed a range of information which seems relevant to readers of this blog.

The website reports on a recently released study on the Future of the First Amendment, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which looked into young people's attitudes towards free expression. Among the studies findings was evidence that there has been a significant increase in the percentage of students who have studied the First Amendment in their classes (up 14 percent since 2004), that 64 percent of students favored the right of student journalists to publish what they want without prior restraint (up from 58 percent two years earlier), and that 45 percent of students (compared to 35 percent just two years ago) believe that the First Amendment "goes too far" in protecting the rights of the media. We can see this last statistic perhaps as evidence of the climate that has shaped this culture since 9/11 -- where criticism of the government's position gets read by a significant percentage of Americans as unpatriotic or "going too far."

The site provides interesting coverage of the ways that the Deleting Online Predators Act might impact student expression, focusing on the uses of MySpace and other social networking sites for political activism:

David Smith, executive director and founder of Mobilizing America's Youth, the Washington, D.C., based group that operates Mobilize.org, said that many students ...are finding that social networking sites can be "a great tool for social activism."

He said this was demonstrated particularly with the rallies that took place in the spring against congressional anti-illegal immigration legislation. In March, thousands of high school students across the country, including an estimated 40,000 in Southern California, walked out of school in protests, many of which were organized in part on MySpace.

"There was so much conversation, at least within the Beltway, saying 'Where did this come from? This issue, we didn't realize it was so hot out there, so how could you mobilize tens of thousands of young people?'" Smith said. "It seemed like it came out of nowhere, when if these people were actually on these various sites and had been able to be privy to these different conversations, they would have realized that these conversations had been happening for a long time, and because of the way social networking sites are designed, it's easy to activate people and get them to do stuff offline as well."

And although Mobilizing America's Youth was not directly involved with the immigration protests, Smith said the organization uses MySpace and several other social networking sites to inform students about political issues and motivate them to get involved in the group's campaigns. One of these causes is the Save Our Social Networks campaign against DOPA.

"There are very few members of Congress that have a MySpace account, I don't think any of them have Facebook accounts," Smith said. "So they have no personal connection to these networks that millions upon millions use. They have no concept of how these sites are used positively."

Going back through their archives, one can find a really disturbing 2004 report on the growing efforts of schools to extend their authority over student expression to include things they have posted on the web which may have been produced off school grounds, outside of school hours, and not on school equipment, even if they did not explicitly target the school community. Principals have tried to argue that such posts can be subject to punishment because other students may access them on school computers, especially if they include commentary on school related issues. The report summarizes the current status of such cases:

While most courts recognize the constitutional limitations placed on public school authorities to punish students for their private, off-campus activities, a few have been very reluctant to tie the hands of school officials completely. Some courts have gone out of their way to justify schools' responses to off-campus speech, suggesting that students may not have the same rights as the general public when their off-campus school speech has a "disruptive" effect on campus. In other cases, school officials attempt to link off-campus speech to some on-campus event, such as the distribution at school of an underground newspaper written away from school.

Taken together, these three stories give some interesting data points about some of the struggles which are shaping participatory culture. Young people have new opportunites to become involved in the political process and to express their perspectives in ways which are relatively unfettered by prior restraint, but those opportunities are threatened both by laws which would block inschool access to social networking software and by school policies which might punish youth for what they do on their own equiptment on their own time. And young people are themselves, no less than others in our culture, struggling with anxieties about what constitutes an abuse of their rights to free expression and when media may go "too far."

I had a disturbing conversation the other day with one of my colleagues who seemed to believe that the First Amendment provided protections to professional journalists that extended beyond those protections allowed to citizen journalists. Many of the others around us seemed equally confused about this core principle. Nothing could be further from the case. At the time the First Amendment was drafted and amended to the United States Constitution, there was little that resembled modern professional journalism. Many of the founding fathers had written pamphlets debating the merits of Revolution against England which had been self-published. They wanted to insure the ability of all citizens to write and publish what they want. Of course, in a world where only a few had the means to print and distribute their ideas, this freedom of the press had limited application in the lives of most people. Freedom of the press did not mean that printing presses were free. We have become accustomed to hearing the professional press assert their First Amendment protections but we have had fewer occasions to think about what it means to us as individual citizens.

The emergence of new media has lowered barriers to participation in the marketplace of ideas. Now, more of us are expressing our ideas through blogs or posts on discussion forums and thus more of us are starting to feel a stake in what happens to the First Amendment.

Those of us who care about this push for a more participatory culture should pay close attention to the legal struggles surrounding student journalists and bloggers. Students are using these new media as they make their first steps towards civic engagement and political participation. How they get treated can have a lasting impact on their future understanding of their roles as citizens. In my case, struggling to defend my rights as a student journalist left me with a deep commitment to free expression. For many others, those hopes can be crushed, leaving them apathetic, cynical, and uninterested.