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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a brief bio Owen shared with us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Transmedia News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article also noted:

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a bio on Gomez:

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

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

at cross-platform intellectual property development and transmedia

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

animation or video game titles into the global mass market.

After establishing himself in the tabletop adventure game industry, Jeff

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

characters and storylines into videogames for Acclaim Entertainment. Jeff¹s

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

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

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

videogames.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coca-Cola Company.

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

given his seminar, Creating Blockbuster Worlds: Developing Highly Successful

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

Association, International Game Developers Association and the Producers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More News for Aca-Fen

I wanted to send out two belated announcements: this past term has run away from me and I never seemed to have gotten around to posting these announcements, both of which are relevant of those of you who are fans but especially for those of you, across a range of different disciplines, who are involved in studying fan culture. The first comes from the Organization for Transformative Works and centers around the launch of a new online journal.

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an open access, international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC's aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000-8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory's broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000-7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500-2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item's content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500-2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site. Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The editorial board for the journal reads like the roster from our Gender and Fan Cultures conversation here last summer:

Nancy Baym, U of Kansas - Will Brooker, Kingston U - Wendy Chun, Brown U - Melissa Click, U of Missouri - Abigail Derecho, Columbia C Chicago - Catherine Driscoll, U of Sydney - Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Pomona C - Sam Ford, Convergence Culture Consortium - Jonathan Gray, Fordham U - Judith Halberstam, USC - C. Lee Harrington, Miami U - Heather Hendershot, City U of New York - Matt Hills, Cardiff U - Henry Jenkins, MIT - Derek Johnson, U of Wisconsin - Roz Kaveney, Independent - Derek Kompare, Southern Methodist U - Anne Kustritz, U of Michigan - Elana Levine, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee - Farah Mendlesohn, Middlesex U - Helen Merrick, Curtin U of Technology - Jason Mittell, Middlebury C - Lori Morimoto, Indiana U - Roberta Pearson, U of Nottingham - Sheenagh Pugh, U of Glamorgan - Aswin Punathambekar, U of Michigan - Bob Rehak, Swarthmore C - Robin Anne Reid, Texas A&M-Commerce - Sharon Ross, Columbia C Chicago - Cornel Sandvoss, U of Surrey - Avi Santo, Old Dominion - Louisa Stein, San Diego State U - Catherine Tosenberger, U of Florida

On other fronts, from Robin Anne Reid, a participant in this same Gender and Fan Culture conversation, comes news of the launch of a new scholarly organization focused on the study of fan cultures.

THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF AUDIENCE AND FAN STUDIES

Audience and Fan Studies are fields of scholarship that have developed in a number of traditional academic areas, including but not limited to anthropology, communication, composition/rhetoric, computer science, film studies, folklore studies, information technology studies, law, library science, literary studies, media studies, performance studies, psychology, sociology, television, studies, etc.

This new organization will promote cross-disciplinary communication, activities, and scholarship through traditional academic venues, including:

• Creation and management of a web page with forums for announcements and discussions for scholars in a range of fields;
• Creation and management of an e-mail listserv to serve the interests of scholars in the field;
• Publication of an online newsletter;
• Creation and management of interdisciplinary activities such as study days, mini-conferences, and, eventually, an online conference in Second Life;
• Creation and management of on-line academic journal;
• Other academic projects dictated by the interests of the membership.

Scholarship in any of the following areas can be considered to fall under the association's area of interest (although this list is selective not comprehensive):

• Audience Research
• Conventions
• Convergence Culture
• Cosplay/Costuming
• Fan Art, Culture, Fiction, Film, Vids
• Filking
• Folklore/myth/urban legend
• Hypertexts
• Memorabilia and Collecting
• Music
• Role-playing Communities
• Trading Cards
• Video gaming (online, console, PC)
• Virtual and face-to-face communities and cultures
• Viral Marketing

As new media technologies and the World Wide Web offer more venues for creativity, more new topics for scholarship will develop.

If interested contact: iaafsorg@gmail.com

Yahoo Announcement List

LiveJournal Community

Both of these projects suggest signs of growth in the number of people doing work on fans and participatory culture.

Dumbledore for a Day: The Things You Can Do in Second Life

A while back, I shared with my blog readers my experiences in Teen Second Life, thanks to an organization called Global Kids. I've gotten a chance to work more closely with Barry Joseph, Rafi Santos, and others from the Global Kids organization over the past year or so and each encounter has left me even more impressed with their respect for their young participants and their imaginative use of virtual worlds to focus young people on issues impacting the real world.

Some of you may have seen the virtual documentary they produced on the Ugandan child soldiers, for example, or may be aware of their excellent advice on the educational use of Second Life.

Well, they invited me back for a return engagement -- what they billed as the Hogwarts Dance Party of Good and Evil -- this time focused around Harry Potter fandom and what it may tell us about the new media literacies. There's an extensive discussion of Harry Potter in Convergence Culture and ever since, I've found myself speaking to Harry Potter fan conventions -- including the Witching Hour in Salem, Phoenix Rising in New Orleans, and the upcoming Portus in Dallas. I am also featured in the documentary, We Are Wizards, which is currently making its way on the festival circuit.

For this event, a teen designer, Sylver Bu, developed a perfect melding of my own iconic persona and that of Dumbledore, the Wizard. As wizards go, I was not particularly skilled -- in part because I use Second Life so infrequently and because I am clumsy in my off-line persona too, so I muffed my dramatic entrance, but I got much more comfortable as the event went along. Barry Joseph, who conducted the interview, dressed up in a dragon avatar for the festivities.

The interview segment was enhanced by periodic trips to the dance floor -- this time to boogey to Wizard Rock recordings, most of which had some broad social message. The selections were chosen for Global Kids by USC's own Suzanne Scott, who is completing a dissertation which deals in part with Harry Potter fan music production and distribution. Our discussion ranged from the basics of fan culture to the particular ways that groups like the HP Alliance have used J.K. Rowling's world as a starting point for social and political activism, the ways Wizard Rock exploits social network technology,the current legal battles around the Harry Potter Lexicon, and the global nature of contemporary fan culture. For Rafi's account of the event, see this blog post.

Global Kids has posted a full recording of the event for anyone who wants to relive the experience:

And this is an edited highlights video which mostly focuses on the Wizard Rock dance:

Still More Toy Stories...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes My Kids Seem Like a Bunch of Kangaroos!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remix: A Contested Practice

While we are on the subject of Remix Culture, I wanted to call attention to a contest being run this month by the website, Total Recut, designed to get remix artists of all types reflecting on what remix and fair use means to them. If you don't know Total Recut, you should check it out since it is one stop shopping for a range of diverse and interesting examples of remix video -- examples which run from fan vids to political propaganda and includes both obvious and obscure examples. Here's some of the details of the contest:

Create a short video remix that explains what Remix Culture means to you. Using video footage from any source, including Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed work, we want you to produce a creative, educational and entertaining video remix that communicates a clear message to a wide audience. The video is to be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer then 3 minutes in duration.

This contest is being run to promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity by encouraging the fair use of a wide variety of content and also to create a new pool of work that explains what remix culture is to the general public....

The contest will begin in May '08 and will be open for 1 month. Public Voting will begin in June and will remain open for 2 weeks, after which the best 10 videos will be put forward into the final and the Judging Panel will vote on each one. The winner will be announced in July '08.

Entries should follow the guidelines on Fair Use issued by The Center for Social Media, guidelines we discussed here a while back.

I was proud to be asked to be a judge for this competition, which emerged in part in response to a discussion with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher about the work our Project New Media Literacies has been doing focusing on the ethics and poetics of remix culture as we are supporting the teaching of Appropriation as a cultural competency through our curricular materials. We have, for example, been collaborating with the fine folks at Organization for Transformative Works who are producing videos for our learning library about vidding. And we are developing a whole curriculum around Moby Dick which centers on historic and contemporary examples of remix. So, I am personally very excited at the prospect of this competition leading to the production of new materials which might help students, teachers, parents, and the public learn more about remix, creative commons, fair use, appropriation, and participatory culture.

Total Recut has pulled together a truly diverse and interesting group of judges, including Pat Aufderheide (from the Center for Social Media), legal legend Lawrence Lessig, Darknet author J.D. Lasica, fan vidder Luminosity, Documentary filmmaker Kimbrew McLeod, and Negativeland's Mark Hosler. I hope that this range of judges indicates just how open the competition is to a range of different communities who are finding remix an effective mode of creative expression and social commentary. Even if you are not interested in the contest per se, you should check out this resource page which already includes a number of useful materials for explaining why remix matters in contemporary culture.

What's Behind 'The Glass'?

Over the years, I have often been asked to explain the appeal of slash to people who really don't have a clue what the genre is all about. The topic crops up in class as I am teaching my work on fandom; in conversations with journalists doing the now obligatory fan fiction story; and with strangers who learn what I research and want to know why. I know many other aca-fen face this same question and that a range of different strategies have emerged for talking about it. My approach has been to try to connect them with an iconic moment from the history of fandom, one where the original text clearly expresses issues of desire and affection between two men, and one which historically packs an emotional wallop even for non-fans. I reproduced my basic argument in the essay, "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," which was reproduced in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies.

Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches the scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

This past weekend, I was delighted to learn that the passage in question had inspired a fan vidder, thingswithwings to produce an original work based around the iconography of the glass wall.

The Glass does what the best vids do: it not only demonstrates an interpretation of the original work through the manipulation and mobilization of visual evidence; it also makes us "feel" that interpretation from the inside out by tapping the emotional power of that original imagery and upping it a few levels through its juxtaposition through editing and the soundtrack.

We've had several discussions here of vidding in the past for those of you who are not familiar with the form. But this is a particularly vivid example of how an idea might move from theory into artistic practice. In the process, the artist has expanded my original insight about Star Trek to show how persistent this image has become across a range of fannish texts. It seems that fans are not the only ones who find the forced isolation of characters as a situation which produces intense longing and which gives physical expression to the emotional bonds between characters. Just wanted to share this particularly interesting example of the flow of ideas within the aca-fan world.

Thanks to thingswithwings for giving me permission to share her work with you.

Spy Stories

This is the fifth in a series of "intimate critiques" developed by CMS Masters Students as part of my Media Theory and Methods Proseminar. Here, Xiaochang Li interweaves her reflections on the Spy genre, especially Get Smart and Alias, and her own personal and family history. This distinctly cold war genre is deployed in an effort to understand her own identity as a Chinese-American. (Of course, though this will make sense to few outside our circle, but the most fannish gesture in this essay may be, in Xiaochang's case, the opening reference to Marcel Proust!) Spy Stories

by Xiaochang Li

Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures

assembled from faulty memory, the eager sum of our desperate retellings, frantic

optimists. Autobiography is not the province of excavation but construction, and even

the most honest of us are careful architects of repetition and forgetfulness, deliberate

amnesiacs working to amass reasonable explanations for what we have become.

Recollection, I learned, is just another form of secrecy.

In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves.

****

In November of 1989, I was nearly six years old when my grandmother sewed my

identification documents to the inside of my shirt and took me to the Beijing airport. I

crossed the world with the rubbing itch of hastily tied-off threads against my skin and no

one to talk to for thousands of miles and on the other side, I managed to recognize both

my luggage and my parents. They had left China years before, while their university had

me as a sort of bureaucratic hostage, collateral for their return, though my parents had

no such intentions. Our reunion took over three years and exactly $764 (American),

including tax, a fancy camera secretly gifted to the right friend-turned-governmentfunctionary, a stamp-forger-turned-liberator. My life even now feels so clearly defined by that furtive transplantation one place to another, the bisection into before and after what was at once success and loss, discovery and displacement.

And in the weeks following, as if anticipating my arrival, footage of the Berlin Wall being

pulled apart seemed to play in a loop on every network station, the world coming

together again and again between spikes of static and weather disruption, people

spilling over, reaching out in miraculous recognition of the faces worn away to

unfamiliarity by the passage of years. Raised as I was to see all coincidence through

the lens of destiny and superstition, it seems prophetic to me now that the news footage

showed an endless cycle of reunion and celebration, but not the view after the flush of

victory had faded. What did the world look like when your physical geography no longer

bore the markers of your history?

In those first long rudderless years within an aggressively unfamiliar landscape -- the

squat sprawl of apartment complexes and strip malls and other structures of uniformity

-- I was raised by secret agents. Though finally in the same country, I still saw relatively

little of my parents -- dishwashers and pizza deliverers with graduate degrees,

consistent volunteers for double-shifts. With no one around to enforce bedtimes, the TV

had become confidant and oracle, a late-evening companion during the long, wintery

nights in rural Idaho. Knees clutched underneath my chin, I watched 60s reruns full of

covert operatives on missions to save the world from disorder, comforted by the

repeated inevitability of favorable outcomes. I cared less that these spies were saving

the world than that, however impossible the situation, they could always save

themselves.

Rewatching those episodes now, they are fraught with the almost too-obvious appeals

to racism and misogyny, a boys club of government agents fighting the good fight

against the unarticulated threats of foreign bodies. In one episode, Maxwell saves some

obscure european royalty from the aimless, but nevertheless dastardly, clutches of the

Asian arm of KAOS. America neutralizes the attacked upon the western (monarchial,

colonial) tradition, reified in the form of a swooning blonde princess, preserving the

world against uncanny reversals of power and the spiteful malevolence of the east.

But Maxwell's advantage was not in his ability, his comic incompetence, but the very

nature of his work. Episodes began with briefings, the transfer of information that left

him, however inept, knowing more about his opponents than they knew of him. Spies

appeared to me to live a thrilling carnival of carefully mistaken identity, wherein

information acquired, remembered, withheld, became the central ingredient in the

conversion of secrecy into strength. It seemed a landless utopia of well-pressed

tuxedoes and other uniforms of distinguished anonymity that existed in any place they

went, however alien. Mastery was just a matter of careful observation.

So the logic of my unlikely alliance was simple: my home was something likewise

unruly, threatening in its foreignness, and the fantasy of being a spy had everything to

do with knowing more, knowing better. Everyday I pushed further and further into

neighboring sections of the town, memorizing street patterns and license plates and

faces and behaviors: reconnaissance. Information seemed the best method by which to

wield difference as power.

*****

My great uncle was a spy. Before fleeing to Taipei with the rest of Chiang Kai Shek's

forces, he left my grandfather his military-issue binoculars, a dangerous artifact that, if

discovered, might have meant any number of unimaginable penalties. But even as he

burned all other counter-revolutionary trokens -- books, diaries, photographs -- my

grandfather kept those binoculars carefully hidden through the whole of the Cultural

Revolution and for decades after, until his death just a few years ago.

It's hard to say whether he had meant to leave them hidden for so long, whether he left

them secreted away out of habit, or of shame for compromising the safety of the family

he still had for a tangible relic of the one he lost. Or if he has simply forgotten where he

had left them, so thorough was his secrecy.

As I got older, the pressures of fitting in drew me further and further into narratives of

captivity and subterfuge, political and literal sleights of hand. I had always been resilient,

adaptable, and spies in the popular imagination and within my own history became

kindred spirits and strategic advisors, offering me a way around the oppositional

positioning of assimilated versus resistant, a framework where fitting didn't necessarily

mean selling out. Armed with an metaphor of assimilation as espionage, I found a back

door out of a system in which I was apparently so weak-willed that I wouldn't be able to

tell the difference between my clothes and my history.

In fourth grade, a classmate explained to me patiently, "You could never be president

because there's no way we can know for sure you aren't really a spy," and I thought,

fiercely, I must be doing something right.

Alias aired when I was in high school, and by then my adaptability had shifted from a desire to emulate and master my surroundings to a refusal of the assumptions that went along with being read as "Asian." Like my grandfather, I had recognized the dangers of letting others define you by what they thought your heritage meant, and understood that keeping your origins to yourself and meant keeping them for yourself, out of the hands of those who would use them against you.

On TV, Sydney Bristow embodied a vision of individual agency, and the pleasure of

watching people underestimate her was a simple, if not necessarily simplistic, feminist

revenge fantasy. She fulfilled the dream that we've all had every we've been not so

accidentally groped in a crowded room or had to walk home with our keys clenched

between our knuckles: that we can overcome the long histories of violence and trauma

and social logics that systematically privilege some people over others through personal

strength, through the fail-proof combination of karate-chop and witty retort.

She was also a double agent.

As such, she became too the fantasy of a preservable sense of self, despite the

demands of duty and survival. Her costumes were usually so flamboyantly unconvincing

that you couldn't help but recognize them for what they were, wigs and sequins and

trappings that somehow only manage to articulate the fact that she was still something

undeniably, essentially Sydney underneath. And even in her ambivalence over her

betrayal of her manipulated SD-6 colleagues, she never lost her brash devotion to a

cause.

Through her, blending in, passing, became not a denial of history but a tactical and

superficial obscuring of difference to meet your desired ends. It was an image in which

Otherness, especially hidden, was not only still meaningful, but a source of incredible

power, a knowledge of the motivating mechanisms of a world in crisis and a glock

strapped to your thigh.

The problem, of course, is this: I am no Sydney Bristow, and I've had more than one

person tell me, delighted, that I am "practically white."

The allegory of racial assimilation as espionage a nice fantasy, a neat justification, but it

falls apart at the realization that unlike Sydney, unlike Maxwell Smart, my battle is not

one for order, but representation. I have neither the conviction nor the comfortable

naïveté to stumble through the treacherous negotiations of racial identity, safe in the

knowledge that the sacrifices will always be justifiable and the outcomes always

favorable. In the struggle for visibility on my own terms, at what point is my "cunning"

disappearance of opposition and difference just another disappearance? At the end of

the day, does it matter if my camouflage is so convincing that it's always read as

assimilation, if "practically" means "strategically" to me, but "nearly" to everyone else?

Even more troubling: the last time I was in China, I spoke with an accent, unable to spit

out the slurring tightness of all my years away. How long before passing becomes

being, before your secrecy becomes so thorough that you forget where you hid your

history for safe keeping?

****

If I am honest with myself, I never quite outgrew the spy fantasies. Sometimes, I still

imagine that I'm a sleeper agent, that any day now I'll wake up knowing 13 languages

and as many ways to kill a man using a hair clip and remember, finally, who I was

supposed to be all along.

Because in the end, all of this conflicted, contested, treacherous allegory of identity

politics as espionage is fundamentally the enactment of wishful thinking: the fantasy that

beneath all of this is something more than the sum of what I've forgotten, that I might

one day be able to reassemble from the relics of memory and history, from the

trajectories of departure and return, seeking and displacement, an understanding of

what I have become. That somewhere in this mess, I have an exit strategy.

Xiaochang Li

New York University, BA 2006

Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn.

Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.

Bitch Ass Darius "Follow The Sound" Mixtape

This is the fourth in a series of "intimate critiques" produced by masters students in my Media Theory and Methods proseminar. Here, Kevin Driscoll walks us through the process by which he learned to hear and appreciate a mix tape which initially challenged him both formally and ideologically. In the process, as a young white male, he confronts some explicit lyrics which force him to re-examine some of his assumptions about race, class and sexuality. This essay may take some readers out of their comfort zone -- and that's part of its point, since he is trying to explain how we renegotiate our senses of ourselves when we encounter forms of expression which do not fit our norms or pre-established tastes. Bitch Ass Darius "Follow The Sound" Mixtape

by Kevin Driscoll

The CD itself is rather unassuming. Sleeveless, its face bears a name and phone number handwritten in Sharpie. Flip the disc over and you might suspect it is blank. The area pock-marked with data stretches from the center hole to just before the outermost edge. Drop it into a CD player and you'll discover that there are eighty tracks, few of which extend beyond sixty seconds.

I met Joe Beuckman in the summer of 2003 when we performed together in a small artspace located inside one of dozens of post-industrial hulks scattered around Allentown, PA. He gave a demonstration about reverse engineering Nintendo cartridges, showed off a vinyl record used to store executable computer instructions, and then scratched that record over Three 6 Mafia's "Sippin' On Some Syrup" while shouting, "I'm scratching data right now!" I introduced myself after the show and he gave me CD-Rs containing the latest mixtapes from two of his DJ alter-egos: Kenny Kingston and Bitch Ass Darius. Kenny Kingston is a lover of early-90s dance music: house, hip-hop, r'n'b, and new jack swing. Bitch Ass Darius plays a mixture of Miami bass, acid house, and pitched-up Detroit techno known occasionally as "ghettotech" or "booty bass". While I found familiarity, comfort, and nostalgia in Kingston's pop-heavy mix, everything about Darius' mix, from the super-fast tempo to the puerile lyrics, felt alien and alienating.

Despite (or perhaps because of) my utter inability to relate, I did not discard Follow The Sound but continued to return to it. As I grew more affectionate of the recording, I became more literate in its governing logics. This change happened with the same slow haze that enshrouds the acquisition of any new language. Meaning and distinction emerge from the undifferentiated whole as the gradual process of Platonic recollection plays out. Details pop into relief along the surface of the text that can be used to uncover further information. A snippet of one lyric is found repeated in the title of song on another mixtape. In time, I began to construct a likely tracklisting, to understand the recording and performance technique, to relate with the lyrics, and to imagine and embody the physical movement booty music is designed to accompany and control.

This passage from confusion and alienation to conversant literacy and familiarity necessarily involved a confrontation with the uncommon lyrical content of most booty music. In 2003, I (somewhat naively) considered myself anti-racist, a feminist, and self-reflective about my own privileged social status. Gripped by a fear of repeating patterns of domination, I avoided all but the most clearly "safe" heterosexual scenarios. As such, most of my intimate encounters took on a tone of conservative sexual diplomacy and made no room for the absurd, titillating application of domination at play in lyrics like "girl, let me nut on your face / and let me know how good it tastes." By struggling to understand this strange music, I was forced to put my own sexual practices in question.

Constructed in the tradition of non-stop DJ mixtapes found in hip-hop, dancehall reggae, house, and techno, Follow The Sound differs significantly from the compilations traded among fans of other musical genres. The mixtapes discussed in this essay are collections of sound recordings gathered from different sources and collaged by an individual DJ using tools for sound manipulation, playback, and recording. While a personal computer can perform all of these tasks, it is common for mixtape DJs to deploy some combination of analog and digital technologies in their production process. Turntables, CD players, analog mixers, samplers, microphones, and tape machines sit alongside personal computers in the mixtape studio.

Listeners construct an image of a traditional recording artist by reading the voices, instrumental performances, and deployment of studio technology on a track. It is not possible to locate the mixtape DJ using these signs, however, as few of the tracks feature newly recorded vocal or instrumental performances. Rather, the DJ reveals or obscures her position in the text through strategic sonic interventions, specifically, the selection, sequencing, remixing, and blending of existing tracks, the inclusion of voice-over and/or sound effects, and the improvised (often atypical) application of studio technologies. Though only a handful of the eighty tracks on Follow The Sound feature original production by Bitch Ass Darius, the DJ is nonetheless embodied in the recombinant whole. Using three turntables connected to a mixer, Darius is able to synchronize and layer multiple existing recordings to create a new continuous piece of music. In addition, rather than smoothly blend one track into the next, he calls attention to the seams between various recordings through deployment of conventional DJ transitions: scratching percussive snippets of an incoming track, suddenly turning off the motor of a spinning platter, or manually rewinding an outgoing track while slowly reducing its volume to create an ascending "zip-zip-zip" effect.

Drawn from over two decades of electronic dance music, many of the tracks on Follow The Sound share certain formal characteristics that unify the mix and enable imperceptible transitions between existing recordings from different sources. Most of the tracks are in 4/4 time and feature a handclap, snap, or snare drum on beats 2 and 4. They are also synchronized to approximately 150 beats per minute and usually aligned such that the first beat of an incoming track matches the downbeat of the track (or tracks) currently playing. To achieve this synchronization, Bitch Ass Darius uses turntables with variable speed motors to adjust tempo. The use of similar synthesizers, drum machines, and samples among dance music producers further facilitates this process of layering, stacking, and blending tracks.

Not all of the songs on Follow The Sound were unfamiliar on my first listen. Track 24 features Michael Jackson's "Rock With You" played atop a sparse acid house track built of a hi-hat, clap, and a synthesized bass line. To match the relatively slow original Jackson recording with the fast tempo established earlier in the mix, the vinyl record designed to be played at 33rpm is "pitched up" by setting the turntable to spin at 45rpm. Although this technique yields the desired tempo, it substantially distorts the pop recording, producing a "chipmunk" vocal effect. Isolated from the rest of Follow The Sound, this disruption would sound uncomfortable to listeners familiar with the original version. In the context of the mix however, this alteration is coherent and consistent with an established logic.

An important distinction between Beuckman's Kingston mix and his Darius mix is the nature of the source materials. In the case of Kenny Kingston, many of the original recordings are songs that follow a traditional pop structure. Their composers anticipate that the recordings will be heard from beginning to end as they would on typical pop radio programming. The tracks on Follow The Sound, however, are primarily composed with a DJ in mind. They often feature long repetitious passages to facilitate blending and synchronization. This shift in imagined audience on the part of the tracks' composers indicates an important distinction between the dance music following in the disco tradition and the rest of Western popular music.

To understand Follow The Sound, I needed to learn how the logics of disco-derived dance musics contrast with the rest of pop music. The clearest distinction is in the division of labor between the producers of recordings and the DJs who present those recordings to the public. In some dance musics, the marketplace mirrors this separation. Vinyl singles are printed in limited qualities and marketed to DJs who then play the tracks in clubs, on the radio, and on mixtapes for the general audience.[1] Whereas the value system at play in many traditional genres of pop music demand that the application of sound recording apparatus be limited to the creation of accurate representations of historical events [2], dance musics necessarily distinguish a musical recording from a musical performance and treat the construction and assembly of an audio recording as a creative end in itself.

Beyond the technical concerns of the recording studio, dance music producers must imagine the audiences and contexts for whom and within which their recordings will be played. While it is not uncommon to hear dance music used as retail ambiance, employed in scoring films, or playing out of car stereos, headphones, and radios, this essay concerns those recordings constructed specifically to be played on a sound system to a group of people in an environment that permits and encourages dancing. To engage with the bodies of an unseen audience is at once a mysterious and an intimate act requiring producers transcend the contrast between a typical music studio and nightclub dancefloor.

I have twice referred to disco as the antecedent for the music found on Follow The Sound. I make this connection because disco's core innovations have been carried through several generations of dance music to find themselves echoed in the essential framework of booty bass. In the 1970s, disco producers brought a straightforward drum pattern to the front of the mix by simplifying some of the swing and syncopation of funk, soul, and r'n'b. (The Black and gay roots of disco complicate the arguments of critics who suggest this "simplifying" was also a "whitening".) Typically organized in 4/4 time, disco established the dominance of "four on the floor" drum patterns in which the bass drum is struck on all four downbeats while the snare is played on the second and fourth. Disco singles were also the first records to be pressed onto 12" vinyl, a size typically reserved for full-length albums. This permitted the production of much longer versions of songs and lead the way for the lengthened intro, break, and outro passages in which a song is stripped down to its barest parts. With the availability of these records and their shared "four on the floor" drum pattern, nightclub DJs soon developed an overlapping style of mixing records that maintained a steady rhythm throughout the evening. Thus opened a transit of inspiration, need, innovation, and fulfillment among the producers of musical recordings, DJs, and dancers.

To attend to the needs of a live mixing DJ and a dancing audience, disco records vary little in their core rhythmic pattern and tempo. In the 1980s, disco was superseded by house, techno, and bass music in the U.S. and the distinctions between dance music and traditional popular music genres became more clear. Producers of dance music, aware of the DJs future interposition, tend to delay (or altogether deny) the visibility of a central melodic figure in their compositions, upsetting one of pop music's cornerstones: the hook. Pop's verse / chorus structure also gives way to highly repetitive compositions that gradually vary in timbre and instrumentation over the course of a track with no identifiable resolution.

These changing production concerns reflect changing expectations and demands on the part of dancing audiences. Whether at a nightclub, a hall, a bar, a gymnasium, or a living room, the dancefloor is a social space that encourages an emphasis on embodiment. Drowned out by loud music, verbal communication gives way on the dancefloor, and the dancer's public performance of identity is centered on the movement of his body. By joining the dancefloor, the dancer has entered into a new trusted relationship with the DJ and the music being played. If the sequence of songs progresses in a sufficiently familiar fashion, he will be able to establish a comfortable sense of himself and his place within the dancing crowd. With subtle shifts, raised tempos, or tonal transitions between each track, the DJ can thus carry this dancer from a familiar sonic space to a fairly alien one without damaging his sense of trust and comfort by causing him to falter or feel otherwise embarrassed.

Tempo and timbre can be shifted subtly on the dancefloor without disrupting the dancer's experience of self. The introduction of lyrics, however, requires its own consideration. In a loud nightclub, lyrics, whether in a familiar language or otherwise, necessarily introduce a power imbalance. Dancers have no voice and are thus spoken for by the voices in the recordings selected by the DJ.

Since disco distinguished club music from pop, dance musics have struggled with their relationships to lyrics. One role of lyrics in dance music can be to affirm, motivate, and direct dancers. The most didactic example of this type being the square dance caller. Various subgenres and producers take different approaches to the deployment of voice and verbal signs. Some focus on vaguely affirmative lyrics about dancing and partying ("Move your body!"), or positive messages ("I'm feeling so free!"), some opt for looping familiar phrases sampled from rap acapellas or film soundtracks, while others still forgo lyrics altogether to produce strictly instrumental music.[3]

Taking its cue from the sex rap found in Miami Bass, booty bass lyrics represent a sophomoric approach to sexuality. They typically feature snippets of schoolyard sex talk repeated ad naseum such as:

"Hit it from the back / Let me bang / Hit it from the back / Let me bang / Hit it from the back / ... " (etc., etc.)

During my first listen to Follow The Sound, I recall laughing out of discomfort and surprise at lyrics like, "Big booty bitches / They talk a lot of smack / Bring your ass here / And ride on this dick". I tried to mitigate this discomfort by exoticizing the lyrics and acting as though they were of an alien culture I could no more understand than judge. Yet as I was drawn deeper into the music, through repeated listens and exposure to other DJs, artists, and - most importantly - dancefloors, I had to challenge this uncritical approach.

By reading the lyrics literally, I was ignoring their role inside the logic of dance music. If the dancefloor is a place where it is safe to move one's body in unusual ways, perhaps it is also a space where the embodiment of the sex act can be exposed, toyed with, and manipulated. Like sampled drum hits and sped-up Michael Jackson songs, the coherency of booty bass lyrics is threatened by decontextualization.

The boundaries are flimsy between the technical and social structures of booty music. For example, the practice of "pitching up" records complicates typical gender performance and sexuality among vocalists. The following lyric is sung in a gender-ambiguous high-pitched voice to a feminized "girl":

"Every freaking day / Every freaking night / I wanna freak you girl / Your body is so freaking tight"

Often, the mention of particular sexual organs or gendered slang is the only way to visualize an orator. In several tracks, a call-and-response takes place between supposed male and female voices. For example, on track 19, we hear the following exchange:

F: Nigga what's your cheddar like?

M: Bitch, you know my cheddar tight.

F: Nigga, what's your ride like?

M: Bitch, you know my ride tight.

F: Nigga, what's your tongue like?

M: Bitch, you know my tongue tight.

F: Nigga, what's your dick like?

M: Bitch, you know my dick tight.

This preposterous conversation overgrounds the most subterranean inner-dialogue of the sexually-charged dancefloor. It amplifies the basest voice of the dancefloor id. The joy I find in booty bass is not simply the naughty thrill at hearing sex chat but is in the liberating potential of a construction of sonic space in which sexual desire, fetish, and perversion are no longer taboo.

The experience of dancing to these tracks in trusted spaces challenged my assumptions about sex and power. By treating sex like a courtroom proceeding and trying to remove all hierarchies from the physical interplay, I was actually maintaining my hegemonic power over the relationship. If there is no space to be be a "freak", to say and do freaky things, then the "safety" I sought has not actually been established. The absurd lyrics by DJ Nasty, DJ Funk, and DJ Assault all revel in these moments of "freakiness" where people willingly submit to themselves and their partners. By exploring these themes and ideas through movement on the dancefloor, I learned to complicate my own understanding of sex and sexual desire.[4]

Footnotes

[1] This model is quickly collapsing as the reduced costs of online distribution and digital DJ tools remove the need for pressing vinyl records.

[2] Consider on-going controversy surrounding authenticity and the use of pitch-correction software in country music. In 2003, singer Allison Moorer put stickers on her CDs that read, "Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch-correction was used in the making of this record." (www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct03/articles/vocalfixes.htm ) Notably and consistent with a history of creative appropriation, hip-hop producers have recently begun to deploy the maligned "auto-tune" software in unexpected ways.

[3] Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is interesting to consider the role of language in the global movement of dance musics. How do verbal samples function differently as they move among communities and changed territories? There is considerable opportunity for an investigation of the materiality of voice, exoticism, and globalization in the ways that various dance musics carry with them vocalizations in Brazilian Portuguese, Puerto Rican Spanish, Jamaican Patois and countless other languages, slanguages, and dialects.

[4] This discussion of Bitch Ass Darius is a first attempt at discussing the thorny topic of sexually and racially charged lyrical content. As such, it fails to address some very important issues that were no doubt raised in the minds of its readers. Chief among them are the racial dynamics at play in the popularity of booty bass and my own use of a racially unfamiliar, geographically remote culture to explore my own (heterosexual, White) discomfort. The vast majority of booty bass is produced by African-Americans living in Chicago and Detroit. The use of African-American music to explore sex and embodiment by White audiences is a well-documented and a recurring pattern of appropriation that debases and essentializes Black Americans. In addition, the "safety" of the dancefloor I describe above is highly variable. In the same group of people, conditions that feel "safe" to one participant can very reasonably be threatening to another.

Kevin Driscoll

Assumption College, BA Visual Art 2002

Kevin Driscoll earned his BA in Visual Art from Assumption College in 2002. He joins CMS after three years teaching Computer Science at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, MA. There he explored issues of identity management, media production, literacy, hacking, and hip-hop with the consistently brilliant students in grades 6-12. Inspired by a challenging first year in the classroom, Kevin co-founded a non-profit organization called TeachForward (later re-named Developing Curriculum, Inc.) to encourage the sharing and development of high-quality, free learning materials on the web. In addition to his work in education. Kevin is a frequent collaborator with internet-based artist Claire Chanel and a hip-hop dj responsible for Gold Chain and Todo Mundo events. Check out his blog at

http://kevindriscoll.info/todomundo.

My Mary Sue: What Fanfic Noobdom Reveals about Scholarly Methods

This is the third in a series of "intimate critiques" or autobiographical essays produced by graduate students in the Comparative media Studies Program. This essay, in particular, works through some of the methodological issues we've been studying this term, having to do with what one sees as an ethnographer working inside or outside the group they are studying. It also connects to an ongoing conversation we've been having in the program about whether or not the concept of "fandom" can be applied to talk about our relationships to high art or middle brow culture. Here, Lana's essay explores how seeing Les Miz on Broadway made her an active and appropriative fan of a literary character, even if she saw what she was doing as somehow distinct from fan fiction. My Mary Sue:

What Fanfic Noobdom Reveals About Scholarly Methods

by Lana Swartz

When I was in the seventh grade, we went on a class trip to New York City. I attended a public arts magnet school, so our tour filtered the city into an art shrine. We went to all the museums, the concert halls, and of course, to see a Broadway show. It was 1993 or so, so Les Misérables was well into its long run at the Imperial Theater but had lost little of its gusto. I can remember thinking, a year or so later, that my life could be divided into two halves--the time before I saw Les Misérables and the time after. Yes, I actually did think that very phrase. I probably even wrote it down. Even now, as I joke about it, I don't want to describe what it was like to see the play because the doing the work of that describing would be too emotionally intense. Seriously!

And here is list item #1-- Be Respectful. See how terrifying this is? Everyone feels this vulnerable when they talk honestly about their lives. It is absolutely essential that we as qualitative researchers not cut corners, not totalize someone else's life to fit into our academic goals. As hard as it is write about our passions, to be prepared to present them to our peers, it is a lot more difficult to read what someone else has said about them. Joan Didion, that scary lady, once wrote, "Writers are always selling someone out." That may be unavoidable, but we can try. And maybe that's the difference between writers and scholars? And maybe we--and by "we," I mean, "I"-- can remember the paralysis I felt just a few paragraphs up when I tried to write about something very pleasant that happened close to fifteen years ago.

But okay here goes. The most important thing about Les Miz is that there is a character named Enjolras. Enjolras is not a main character. He's the leader of the young would-be revolutionaries who chastises a fellow would-be revolutionary, the dreamy Marius, for falling in love, as love simply distracts from revolution. Enjolras (he was played by Ron Bohmer--an actor whose autograph I currently possess) is tall and blond and uncompromising. He dies heroically, though, sadly, more as more of a symbol than an agent of change, atop the barricade, waving his big red flag. I was would say it was hot because is it ridiculously hot, but that would be a cruel understatement.

The rest of New York was a blur. The next thing I remember (at least in this reconstructed, narrativised memory) was being at home and tearing through Victor Hugo's novel. In the book, Enjolras was even better. Check out what old VH had to say:

Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view. Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he ignored spring, he did not hear the caroling of the birds; the bare throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic. He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired, and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him! If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien, those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.

And then, comparing him to his comrade:

Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington, who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle.

Yes, I know that Hugo writes in long paragraphs, and I know that I have done little to summarize them, and I know that this is supposed to be a five page paper, but when the opportunity arises to direct a reader--even a solitary one--to the experience of the description of Enjolras, I can't resist.

But back to the story. Basically, I was in love. Certainly more in love than I'd ever been at 11 or 12, but, honestly, the feeling would certainly hold up against a few grown-up boyfriends I'd later claim to love. I felt almost immediately that Enjolras needed a woman. Someone... someone like me! Except better! Someone worthy of him. And this is where it gets embarrassing. I began to write stories that I thought belonged in the book, about a character that I thought, too, belonged in the book. Someone with, uh, long red curly hair and brilliant green eyes. Someone with a firey personality who must overcome her own pampered upbringing to come to understand the true meaning of the revolution. God! This is embarrassing. Knowing what I know now... You see, this person, this character I lovingly created and cared so much about? There's a word for it. It's not a nice word, either. Mary Sue.

Okay this is where I'm going to jump back into my list. #2 Don't be afraid to be stupid or wrong or look silly. All semester, I have been terrified to put things in writing, even on our class's weekly forum postings. When we write things down, they become relatively permanent. That which is posted to the internet should be thought of as never going away. But the fact is, we were all noobs once. Noobs to fanfiction. Noobs to scholarship. But we have to start somewhere and not be afraid to do so. Graduate studentship is nothing if not institutionalized noobdom. Also, fear leads to boring scholarship. What if Clifford Geertz or certainly Erica Rand had been afraid of looking silly? The earliest media thinkers at MIT--Bush, Wiener, and certainly the later Stallman and Negroponte--were objectively "wrong" about many things, but that doesn't mean that their work and the ideas generated around their work, even (and especially) when those ideas pointed out problems, were useless. I know this all sounds simplistic and obvious, but I think that it should be acknowledged that doing academic work is scary. One feels vulnerable even when one is not writing about their own life, their own Mary Sue.

Did I ever get past my fanfic noobdom? Not really. I never wrote a non-Mary Sue fanfic story. I never really even became part of a fan community. I searched AOL profiles, because that was how I accessed the internet, and found someone named Heather. She was about my age and into the same things I was--Les Miz, War and Peace--and we both hated the same things--The Phantom of the Opera, anything having to do with the 1960s. In War and Peace, she liked Pierre and I like Andrei, who I saw as an iteration of the Enjolras archetype (a complex a very different iteration, an Enjolras without a cause). We had long IM conversations where we pretended that Pierre and Andrei had been transported to the future, were married to us, and fought over the Sizzler buffet was a good place to eat (Pierre says yes, Andrei said no).

But back to Angelique. Yes. Angelique. That was her name. Angelique de Cadinet. Did I mention that she was beautiful? And rich? And feisty... it's so obvious now. Heather did not point out that Angelique was a Mary Sue. We didn't really have that vocabulary. Though we didn't know what to call it, and we didn't know how to contextualize it as a larger cultural practice, we brushed up against fandom, but not usually very good fan fiction. Heather and I regarded those we met online who wrote Les Miz fanfic as lame. Of course, most wrote stories centered around Eponine, a character we did not like, and paired her romantically with Marius, a relationship of which we did not approve. Because we regarded this subject matter as immature at best, we looked at our own work as somehow more legitimate. I know now, of course, it's pretty common for fandoms to split off into sub-fandoms in which certain relationships are verboten and that our persnickety preferences made us more like fan than less like them. In fact, we probably would have been able to criticize the Eponine stories as Mary Sue stories. Mine was, too, but maybe if I had been more overtly part of fan discourse, I would have been able to get past that.

Which brings me to lesson #3-- Do your research and be merciless about your limits. Certainly, it is possible to get away with dilettantish knowledge when you are working outside the expertise of your audience. When I told people about my experience, I didn't have the discourse to say fan or fanfic, so I would engage them in my experience on terms I felt were appropriate to the situation. Maybe I wanted to relate that I was a passionate but a quirky literary type person. Or maybe I'd use Enjolras or Prince Andrei to describe the kind of guy I liked, or the kind of guy I didn't ever want to date again. Or maybe I'd frame it with a little hipsterish irony--what strange creatures we all were in our adolescence. Once, I was able to charm the professor of a Russian literature class into a better grade than I probably deserved on a paper by describing my Prince Andrei thing. Anyone cares that much about Tolstoy probably deserves another 5 points added to their grade, right? I even got some scholarship money for an essay I wrote about Angelique as "an influential person" in my life. In most cases, the novelty of my experience was a foregrounded. But at some point, all dilettantes will encounter someone who can see right through their bullshit, even if isn't bullshit so much as lack of due diligence (though sometimes they amount to the same thing).

Years later, as a post-college almost grown-up person, I came in contact with academic writing about fandom and I began to realize that what I had been doing with Les Miz and War and Peace was a lot like fandom. I even began to consider myself a fan, even though my actual experience with fandom was clearly very limited. I even applied to CMS in part because I was excited about the way thinking about fandom liberated other kinds of thinking. The fan (perhaps as a metaphor?) reconciled and clarified a lot of frustrations I had-- about how to acknowledge the emotional stakes we all have in the work, about appropriation and authorship, and about cultural hierarchies. Does this make me an acafan? Right now, I would feel a lot more presumptuous about saying yes than I would have a year ago.

It began to be clarified when I came to visit CMS at MIT5. I was sitting in an Au Bon Pain with some aca-fanboys. We were talking about--of course--fandom. I cutely (I thought) told my Angelique story. Everyone laughed. I caged the whole thing with enough "Ah, youth" to get away with it. And then one of the acafan-boys asked, "So you wrote Mary Sue stories?" Everyone laughed again and I faux-solemnly admitted to it. But the thing was, I had no idea what he was talking about. Dear reader, imagine the fate that would have befallen me if I had dared--DARED--to enter into some sort of research with that kind of hubris? Imagine, even, if it had been aca-fangirls that I was casually talking to? The gender dynamic is another issue entirely, but the question still stands.

Clearly, this lesson (as I hope all in this paper do) applies to entering any kind of community. For me, a Mary Sue in fandom puts the matter under scary fluorescent lights. Perhaps this is why so many writers, before talking about fandom, include a disclaimer or caveat about the extent to which they might be considered fans. We might assume that (and this would follow the logic of Camille Bacon-Smith's work) that it's because they're nervous about associating themselves with a marginalized subculture. But it may be (and this would follow the logic of many fan reactions to Camille Bacon-Smith's work) that the writers are justly nervous about overstating their level of insider status. Fans have the ability to write back. And they're often really good at it. What if all ethnographers worked were required by their "subjects" to be so responsible?

The mention of Bacon-Smith's work brings up another point. #4 The kind of answers you get depend on the kind of questions you ask. A lot of what happened between Angelique and I (if I can put it that way) impacted my adolescent development. Angelique, as is the partial definition of Mary Sue characters, was a stand in for me. And though she was beautiful and rich and French and perfect, she was sort of like me. Or like the me I wanted to be. Particularly, Angelique was sexual. And everyone (yes, everyone) wanted to have sex with her. And she usually went for it. Through her, I was able to imaginatively play with my own emerging sexuality. "Being" her in fiction enabled me to actually get closer to being like her. I was able to play with my identity and reflect upon the way I conducted myself in my everyday life. What Would Angelique Do? This experience resonates with James Paul Gee's idea of "projective identity" in gaming. I was able to, as Gee describes, "project [my] values and desires onto the virtual character" and "see the virtual character as [my] own project in the making." Writing and thinking about Angelique, and her indeed her life after Enjolras's death, allowed me to have an immersive experience in which I questioned and projected my own sexual values and lifestyle as I hoped and expected it would be.

Between Heather and I, it was a way of interacting with texts socially. But it was definitely not for, as Bacon-Smith writes, "mutual healing, for protection from the outside, or to ponder the most pressing questions of our lives." I was learning something about how to be myself, but I wasn't converting the risks I'd have to take as an emerging adolescent into fanfiction. There was pain, yes. I walked around everyday with the pain of Enjolras's death in my heart, and to a lesser extent the pain of not being the same world as him. To be honest, I sometimes thought I was crazy! But the purpose of entering into that world was certainly not to ask, ask Bacon-Smith suggests of the fans she studies, "why does life hurt so much?"

Yes, my narrative might have fit into my understanding of Bacon-Smith's schema--a kinda' nerdy 7th grader uses fanfiction and (a two person, in this case) community to sublimate the fear of my own emerging identity as confident sexual being--but it doesn't really ring true for me. And, more importantly, it doesn't really ask the questions I'm most interested in. As someone who is most interested in the social and cultural process of fandom, my own story looks, at least until I start asking new questions, to be too psychological oriented to be of much interest.

As I interrogate even my own experience, I am compelled to look at things more culturally and less psychologically. Sometimes, as is true in this case, those questions push me beyond my personal experience. And I have to remember that all data points, even mine, are singular and thus may not individually reflect the most interesting aspect about a given phenomenon. #5 Your own experience should not limit the kind of thinking that you do.

In retrospect, it seems possible that, if Heather or I were aware of the word at all, we thought of the Eponine/Marius stories we detested as fan fiction and our own process as something else, something more "original." During that time of my life, I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be able to publish my finished work as my own sovereign creation. I know now that I was caught up in notions about authenticity and authorship that I would probably feel a lot more ambivalent, at the very least, about today. I thought that in order to make my work real, to make it count, I would have translate it into something unrecognizable as rooted in Les Miserables. I tried everything--converting it to the American Revolution but keeping the characters essentially the same, which didn't really work because that time period just didn't do it for me. Eventually, I began to get bored. I knew what I was writing would never be publishable, and my interest began to drift. If Heather or I had made the write social connection with the right fan--or perhaps if Les Miserables or War and Peace had a larger fandom--I would have found the community to help me appreciate the value of the appropriative work that I was actually doing, but I didn't. My idiosyncratic experience limited me from extracting--at least not until years later--some of the more intriguing potential meanings I could have made out of it.

Heather and I remained in touch, but we began talking about other things--starting High School, getting involved with new kinds of music and subcultures. Soon I wanted to be Courtney Love or Kim Deal, the amazing female bass players from the Pixies. And soon after that I wanted to be Joan Didion. Funny, now, at 26, I find myself again needing a fictionalized avatar self. Maybe she could give me direction toward one of these careers--and, really, lifestyles--that do not yet exist. Got any suggestions? Another methodological journey never hurt anyone

Deja Elana Swartz

University of Florida, BA English, 2002

Deja Elana Swartz grew up on a houseboat in Miami, Florida. She graduated with a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from the University of Florida in 2002. After graduation, she taught high school English in Houston, Texas as part of Teach For America. She's also worked in nonprofit development and in autism education and research.

Here at CMS, she is a researcher specializing in learning and user insights at Project New Media Literacies and serves as the liaison to the Harvard GoodPlay Project. She is fascinated by taste-making. Her own tastes currently include nail-art, knock-off fashion, fast food breakfast sandwiches, soap opera comic strips, and Tolstoy.

Who Do You Think I Am?: My Life as a Cartoon Character

Shortly after South by Southwest, I got a note from Rafi Santo from Global Kids calling my attention to the fact that my likeness had become a cartoon character, thanks to a new site called Bitstrips, which has used the festival to broaden its public visibility. Bitstrips is a site which supports the production and distribution of user-generated web comics. More recently, reader Jordon Himelfarb, a Canadian journalist wrote to tell me that the Henry Jenkins character had been deployed more than 95 times. I am one of a small selection of icons supposed to represent "famous figures", including Steve Jobs, Moby, and Doogie Howser. (The narrow range of options here suggests how deeply embedded this project has been in geek culture to date.) As someone who is interested in the ways images get appropriate and transformed over time, not to mention a notorious ego-maniac, I was very interested to see what uses were being made of this iconic representation of me. For what it's worth, I think I am funnier in real life than in the comics.

It is clear that the first few uses were from people who attended South by Southwest and were somewhat familiar with who I am and what kinds of things I am apt to say or do.

Quickly, though, the character begins to take on a life of its own. Certain aspects of the iconography (the bald head, the glasses, the beard) lend themselves to use to represent someone of a certain generation, as in this cartoon which depicts me as a father confronting his daughter's boyfriend for the first time.

bitstrips 4.htm

Something in my image conjures up a certain kind of knowledge and expertise. Thus, the character can be cast as a psychiatrist or doctor.

Or as a talk show host talking about psychology.

Or as a teacher.

Or as a mad scientist:

As a "high brow"

I'm even cast as the PC in a cartoon which plays with the Mac/PC template.

In short, the character got deployed many times not because people knew who I was in any specific sense but because my iconography constructs a particular kind of character which fits well within the classic formulas of the comic strip. This helps to explain both why my likeness becomes so spreadable and why it still carries a surprisingly narrow range of meanings, all things considered. I wonder what would have happened if the original "Henry Jenkins" character had shown me in my characteristic suspenders and not in a suit and tie.

This character, the expert, carries with it certain connotations and expectations. He is often a stuffed shirt or kill joy figure, that is, he deploys his authority to put others in their place and can thus in return become the object of ridicule. He is often portrayed as absent minded and befuddled, so that the comic situation can be used to suggest the limits of what can be comprehended. The familarity of this figure makes him a resource especially for professional humor including that involving medicine, computers, or education, themes clearly of interest to Bitstrips's first generation of users. It will be interesting to see what other ways this character gets deployed as the audience for Bitstrips diversifies. Already we can see examples of this figure getting used in other national contexts, though the stereotype seems to speak in languages that I don't personally understand. Even in the non-English language cartoons, though, I am most often depicted in an office setting suggesting that the character is seen as a professional and not as, say, working class.

I encourage my readers to see what they can do with the tool and send me a link to the results. In the meantime, see you in the funny pages!

I HEART Mutants (Except for That Shameless Mary Sue, Jean Grey)

This is the second in a series of "intimate critiques" produced by masters students in my Comparative Media Studies proseminar on media theory and methods. Each essay tries to blend personal narrative with larger theoretical issues as a way of digging deeper into the place of popular culture in our everyday lives. This year's set can be seen as a series of narratives of "coming out" as fans and how this process relates to other aspects of one's personal identity. I HEART Mutants

(Except for that Shameless Mary Sue, Jean Grey)

Lan Xuan Le

Spring 2008

I met the X-Men for the very first time on Saturday, October 31st, 1992. It was 9 AM, prime time for the grade school demographic, and the Fox Network was debuting its second attempt at an animated cartoon series based on a comic book of the same name. The first episode opened in the midst of the government's Mutant Registration Program, an initiative to find and round up all the human beings who possessed genetically-enhanced superpowers. In a recent, unexplained evolutionary burst, people across the world had begun manifesting unusual abilities at the onset of puberty. Pyrokinesis, telepathy, super-strength, invulnerability - the public had been waging a campaign of repression on these so called "mutants" out of a fear of their superior abilities. The first episode dumped the audience right into the middle of a long-standing conflict between homo sapien and "homo superior." It was in this political climate that Professor Charles Xavier and his band of select mutant followers have been fighting to preserve mutant rights against the human government and other mutants who would enslave humankind.

Running for a total of five seasons, X-Men was Fox Kid's second most successful show after Batman The Animated Series and continued airing reruns for a year after the release of its final episode. X-Men began as a popular serial comic book under the Marvel Publishing arm of Marvel Entertainment in 1963. Created by the legendary duo, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Uncanny X-Men told the story of a band of humans who struggled to protect a "world that hated and feared them." Although it was an established, long-standing franchise in American popular culture, the television show was my first point of entry into this universe.

I was not quite 12-years-old, the daughter of Vietnamese-American political immigrants, and a "gifted and talented" student in the mid-Western educational system. It seemed inevitable that the idea of mutant alienation and political struggle would ignite my young imagination. At the heart of the X-Men mythos lies a powerful metaphor of marginalization. Race, gender, sexuality - mutation stood in for and made visible the oppressions suffered by a class of people, of which I was a part. It spoke to the systematically, discursively constructed category of "othering" I suffered as a racial minority, de-naturalizing and exposing them. It spoke to my experience of systemic exclusions as a girl in America and a daughter in a family with Confucian values. X-Men represented my nascent political consciousness, the burgeoning understanding of myself as part of a larger grouping of people and an agent acting within a system of conflicting pressures. The story of X-Men became powerful to me in a way that the individual struggle of a character such as Batman could not.

The idea of mutation, a flexible metaphor, resonated with many of my experiences of exclusion. But race and gender remains, even today, the most powerful level of my experience of the mutation metaphor. Race is often discursively inscribed upon the bodies of racial minorities, like the "oversexed and savage" stereotype of black, male bodies or the sexual, pliant bodies of Asian women. So too is mutation a bodily "othering." This "otherness" of the mutant body often takes physical form, like with Doctor Hank "Beast" McCoy's hairy, animal-like appearance. Similarly, racialized or mutated bodies become the difference against which white or human bodies are visually and discursively normalized.

Some mutants in the X-Men universe, however, do not wear their differences on their bodies. Their abilities manifest in subtler ways, allowing them to "pass" as human. The conflict that arises between the obviously mutated and the "pretty" mutants erupts periodically in the story. In the X-Men universe, the physically mutated characters gathered into an underground, sewer-based community called the Morlocks after a similar, villainous society in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. They could not avoid the political experience of mutancy and became angry at those who remained sheltered and apolitical in their appearance of humanity. This, for me, mirrored the way my Asian girlfriends used the increasing invisibility of their race to avoid or even deny themselves as racialized subjects, often as gendered subjects as well. Those were precisely the moments that I understood my decisions through the mutant metaphor. By choosing to be a Morlock, I chose to openly live a fraught political reality that would act upon me whether or not I confronted it.

The metaphor of mutation, especially as applied to bodies, became a very powerful expression of the ways in which my own body had been re-written without my permission. As an Asian woman, my body is all too visible and yet my "color" has receded, being neither white nor black. I too have been inscribed upon, defined into my very DNA. But for mutants, their power lay precisely their differences. The very performance of their differences gave them the power to resist. The heroes of X-Men were those mutants who could come to accept and judiciously use their powers, not those who remained silent. That proved an important idea for me at the age of twelve, the ability to appropriate the performance of difference in some way, to reclaim the language of these performances to empower myself. It gave me a option to act, to vocally resist the silencing and naturalization of my exclusions.

While the characters in X-Men fight against the teleological framing of "mutation" in the same way I do as a woman of color, the metaphor to race and gender is imperfect. What I find most unsettling about the mutation metaphor, and the differences this represents, is the struggle between the biological reality and socially constructed nature of "mutation." Linking differences to the term "mutation" implies a kind of biological determinism. Within the story, however, these genetic changes actually produce an incontrovertible difference in the X-Men. The ability to mentally levitate objects is not comparable to the experience of race, gender, class, and sexuality, which are socially determined. Many groups have struggled to shift the debates of difference from biological determinism to social construction, and I remain ambivalent about how powerful this imperfect metaphor is for me.

I read more than just race into the bodies of these mutant characters. The bodies of women take on another significance in the X-Men television show for me. The idealization and display of female bodies is a standard part of the comic book industry's practice, which is dominated by a male culture of production. But female bodies often become sites of social anxiety. Asian female bodies, for example, were considered dangerous during earlier immigration to the US, because reproduction is the power of a marginal, feminine body to spread and contaminate the normative political body.

One of the most interesting women in the X-Men universe is Rogue, a member of the X-Men. Rogue is lushly beautiful, possessing super-strength, flight, invulnerability, and the ability to steal the life force of anyone she touches skin to skin. I envied Rogue because she represented the impenetrable female body. Rogue has the appearance of a woman who is sexually permissive, but the body which denies penetration. The markers of Rogue's class - her Southern "trash" stylings - are intimately linked to this perceived sexual permissiveness. Rogue's yearning to touch and be touched, especially when expressed in the presence of her on-again-off-again boyfriend Remy, yield to both innocent and lascivious interpretations. But because of her powers, she remains a non-reproducing body, one that is safely neutered, a contagion contained. Whether or not I understood it as a child, Rogue has always represented to me a site where masculine anxieties about women found expression.

Just as I found Rogue and the text's relationship to her body intriguing, I found the character of Jean Grey equally repugnant. In all the ways that Rogue embodies ambivalence, Jean Grey equally and oppositely represents the heteronormative forces within the text. Beautiful and in control, Jean Grey's cerebral powers mirror her middle-class origins, which stands in contrast to Rogue's physical (and blue collar) powers. Jean Grey's empathic social role in the team was to mediate the tensions of class, gender, and sexuality. She invoked her authority as the mother, the sanctioned, reproducing body, to quell insurrection and unify the group under a liberal morality invested in the feminine as a site of cultural reproduction. She became a symbol of the ways in which liberalism's promise of social justice sacrificed so many marginal voices to speak from a unified position. In a story that allowed me discursive reprieve, that provided catharsis in its simple acknowledgment of my exclusions, Jean Grey violated the agreement offered by the text.

I followed the television show until its end in 1997, at which point I sought to find the "original," the comic books, and continue my relationship with the story. I quickly discovered that the series had been running for nearly 40 years, the whole of it beyond my reach both economically and logistically. The serial nature of the comic book defeated my ability to master the canon as thoroughly as did my economic circumstances. The Internet, however, offered a different way into the X-Men history.

In 1998 I discovered fan websites, places where pieces of the X-Men story came together, character by character. But I found these dry, journalistic recitations insufficient to approximate the experience of reading the comic books, of knowing the X-Men first hand. It was during my web surfing that I found fan fiction, the resource that finally opened up X-Men to me. These stories became a snapshot of the fan's ongoing experience of reading, problematizing, and subsequent (re)writing of the X-Men comic books. It seemed a recursive, cyclical process carried through many stories, probably extending to other media properties. Whatever they represented to the fan author, for me as a reader, fan fiction became a constant renewal of the X-Men text. Through these stories, I could read X-Men anew through the lens of another fan's love. I began a two-year journey into the collective imaginary of X-Men, a historiography of myth and memory.

These fan stories explored the tensions of the comic book, perhaps further than the original format would have allowed. Dozens of stories addressed the same events in canon, correcting, changing, darning over the snags and tangles of plot holes. I had access to a collective record of the major shifts in the X-Men franchise and the fan reaction to them. Reading fan fiction was like mining the secondary sources of an historical event. Fan fiction, for me, became a record of what could never be part of the comic book canon, the discourse of an experience. The "truth" of the canon became irrelevant compared to reading the fantasy of the reading.

Fan fiction transformed my experience of the X-Men story, turning it from a monoglossic text into a multiple, unstable, heteroglossic pleasure. Every character, every relationship took on a complexity impossible in a single text, even a serial one. Although the series was multi-vocal, containing a diverse, international cast and expressive of a range of views to begin with, the very nature of fan fiction and individual interpretation allowed me a far broader experience. I adore, for example, not the canonical character of Gambit, but a layered memory of Gambit as can only be possible through people who both love and loath him. And so he is even more fascinating, engaging, and ultimately satisfying a character than any single text could offer.

By early 2000, the tide of fan fiction on the web had begun to ebb, bringing my journey with the fan community to an end. I attended college later that year and moved on to other media properties, but the X-Men would remain an essential part of my cultural imaginary. But my relationship to the franchise continued to change nonetheless. In 2000, Marvel released a full-length, live action film adapted from the comic books followed by two sequels. The same year, the X-Men: Evolution cartoon began on television, aiming to recapture the popularity of the original by re-imagining the X-Men's beginning in the present day. In 2001, the X-Men comic books spun off another alternate universe under the title of Ultimate X-Men that again re-imagined the beginning of the X-Men, but in a completely different universe from the Evolution cartoon.

The increasing number of alternate universes validated my increasing distance from the "canon" that I was originally so keen to obtain. It only added to the multiplicity and richness of the X-men text. While this move inspired fan anger for "selling out" the franchise and violating the integrity of the story, I saw this move as a way for the franchise to preserve its heteroglossic mythology. Each one of these re-imagined beginnings was designed for me, the interested audience that found itself excluded from the long-running history of the comic book. I finally felt courted by a universe that likely was not speaking to me, but from which I had appropriated strategies of resistance. While these alternate universes aimed to renew my relationship to the series, the ties had faded over time. I now possessed academic theories and frameworks through which to parse my experiences and exclusions.

In early spring of 2008, a fan group, in defiance of copyright, scanned and released all the volumes of the X-Men as PDFs online. Through the magic of peer-to-peer downloading, I finally acquired the whole of the X-Men canon. But in the end, I could not come to love them. With the exception of Joss Whedon's short stint at the helm of the Uncanny X-Men, the story was written predominantly by men for an audience that was not me, nor necessarily a group that included me. Fan fiction, on the other hand, was written primarily by women with whom I shared many salient experiences. In the end, I chose not to read the comic books lest they fundamentally change the relationship I had already nurtured with the franchise. The potential loss of that wonderfully unstable text could not ultimately compare to the gain of the comic book itself.

Lan Xuan Le

Swarthmore College, BA Biology and Asian Studies 2004

Boston University, Masters of Public Health 2007

Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the "games for health movement," conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore's McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program's top writing prize.

The Videocassette or: How I Became a Fanboy and Learned to Love Explosions

Every year, I challenge my Comparative Media Studies Masters Students to tackle a piece of autobiographical prose which describes something of their own relations with media. This may at first glance seem like a pretty cushy assignment, most of us start our writing career on personal essays, but most of the students discover it can be extremely difficult to reconcile the competing modes of autobiographical and theoretical writing. On the one hand, the language of media theory is often highly abstract and for many, alienating. On the other hand, many of us fall into the trap of "overshare" when asked to recount of our own experiences, being so interested in the process of personal revelation that we don't necessarily think through why we are sharing or how autobiography might enable us to make more meaningful generalizations about media. In preparation for this assignment, we read and discuss such essays as Erica Rand's introduction to The Ellis Island Snowglobe, Annette Kuhn's discussion of a family photograph from Family Secrets, Sharon Mazer's discussion of the power relations she encountered in doing an ethnography of professional wrestling, Robert Drew's account of karoaki which draws heavily on his own experiences as a performer, and Geraldine Bloustein's work on "girl-making." (The last three can all be found in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, which I co-edited with Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc.) Each of these writers make effective use of "intimate critique" as a way into dealing with complex aspects of personal identity and popular culture. As we suggested in the introduction to Hop on Pop, there are questions which we can only address through holding a lens up to our subjective experience of media -- the tendency of academics to hold popular culture at a distance may distort their understanding of the work it does for individuals and the society at large.

This assignment produces some of the most exciting writing I see all year and this year's crop of first year masters students produced work which I felt was especially rich and evocative. Last year, I shared some of the work my students produced for this assignment, including essays on what our lists on Netflix tell about us and about the world of Mexican comics. Over the next few posts, I plan to share some of the highlights from this year's crop. This year, there was a strong focus on cult media, fandom, and personal identity formation. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, given my own interests, so what is surprising is how very different each of these narratives about early fan experiences turned out to be.

The Videocassette or: How I Became a Fanboy and Learned to Love Explosions

by Abhimanyu Das

The cultural artifact I have chosen for this paper is the VHS tape. It is an object of resonance on two levels - it possesses enormous personal significance and, on a wider scale, it is the embodiment of a technological development that transformed the film culture of urban India. Given that videocassettes and the material they carried were a "companion for emotion and a provocation to thought" from an early point in my life, they were to me what Sherry Turkle categorizes as 'evocative objects'.

Until the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, films made outside India were very difficult to access legally. Urban centers generally contained only a few theaters (multiplexes did not arrive till the 21st century) and these were mostly dedicated to screening Bollywood fare that guaranteed more ticket sales. A tiny number of foreign films were exhibited every year, usually releases that were a year or more past their original theatrical dates. The situation for Indian cinephiles was dire. All this was transformed by the VHS boom of the mid to late 80s. The introduction of videocassette technology to Indian markets did not, however, signal the beginning of the home video release boom that was witnessed by countries like the United States. The heavily protectionist economy did not lend itself well to studios releasing foreign films on a home video market and availability of video recorders was initially too limited for any kind of real profitability from the exercise. This, however, did not preclude the burgeoning of a system of piracy and peer to peer sharing that was working well in Indian cities long before any of us had even heard of the Internet and was to survive till the cable television boom of the mid 1990s.

The first manifestation, according to my father, was the appearance in many neighborhoods of the local 'video parlor'. Some of these were larger establishments with proper storefronts while others were holes in the wall that could only be found via word of mouth. All of them, however, were stocked with pirated VHS copies smuggled in from east Asian countries. Given that the foreign studios had practically no presence or representation in India and that the police did not care the least bit about enforcing copyright laws, these parlors were free to operate. In addition to the regular Blockbuster-style services they provided, they could (at a price) copy your favourite film on to a blank videotape or even 'order' an 'official' copy of the film for you (these being a first or second generation shinier print of the film in a case adorned with color xeroxes of its American packaging as opposed to the generally fuzzy affairs in generic slipcases available for rent). The larger shops presented even more options, offering up 'camera prints' at half the usual rental for fans on a budget (the unwatchable prints of movies recorded in a theater) or 'family' versions of films with the sex scenes dubbed out (profanity and violence remained gloriously intact).

A vibrant popular film culture was to grow in the cities within years. My father tells stories of how Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone became household names within a year and I can remember passing by, on my way to school, scores of streetside hawkers selling Rambo and Terminator t-shirts when just a year previous, they had been peddling religious iconography. School-children (like myself) started up movie sticker collections that were traded aggressively. The interesting side effect of the viral nature of the VHS phenomenon was the fact that the parlors were simply one of the available options. People would copy tapes that they had rented from these parlors and circulate them amongst friends and family who would, in turn, copy them. The picture and sound would degrade with each degree of separation but this did not dissuade the enterprising cinephiles that felt like they had put one over the Man ('the Man' presumably being the video parlor guy that rented smuggled goods) by watching the movie for free. Neighborhoods would organize community screenings of films where they would set up a television set in a local clubhouse, rent a tape from the nearest video parlor and charge a nominal fee for entry. The transformation, then, was beginning. India had always had a rich history of movie-watching in the Bollywood tradition and the arrival of VHS expanded the film-goers horizons to include the Western market. Cinema clubs popped up across the cities, catering to tastes across the board, from a weekly dose of 80s action drama to one of Bergman or Antonioni (two especial Calcutta favourites). Indian youth culture was impacted as the fashions, music and slang of the Americans they saw on their television sets (which had hitherto exhibited nothing but the two mostly soul-crushing public TV channels) crossed over into the urban lexicon. This intrusion of globalization (for better or for worse) into a relatively closed cultural space was accelerated manifold by the advent of cable television but I would argue that this particular event was primed by the preceding decade of VHS supremacy.

On a personal level, the VHS tape could be said to have shaped my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are of my father bringing home our first VCR from a business trip abroad and the subsequent weekend film-watching ritual. The homework would get done, be checked over and the approving nod would be the cue for the Disney film du jour to begin. Just as Turkle's closet full of memorabilia shapes the way she thinks about her family, my memories of our weekly congregation around the joys of VHS shapes the way I think about mine. In addition, these experiences contained within and associated with the tapes were to have a profound effect on my identity and interests. Pat or even cliched as these conclusions may seem, it was the memories of those early movie sessions that formed the seed for my later affinity for everything cinematic and helped push me toward the academic, personal and professional direction I am taking now. My love of music began with VHS tapes as my parents would record music videos from the half hour Western music show that aired past my bedtime on the aforementioned public television channel. I would then proceed to play these tapes all day, forming a soundtrack to my childhood that originates as much from VHS as it does my father's LP/audiocassette collection. My affection for everything narrative probably sprang from the multiple viewings of the same films (on the same tape) that we would rent repeatedly when nothing new had come in that week, as plot threads started to get embedded into my skull, complete with dialogue and interrupted by video snow where the tape had been damaged. Even my first induction into the enticing world of 'adult language' was thanks to the verbal clashes (in stereo!) between the working class New York accent of John McClane and the cultured delivery of Hans Gruber. Thanks to Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, I knew how to swear in English before I learned the equivalents in any of the Indian languages.

The actual physical form of the videotape was also important. The tapes from the parlor that we rented from all had a particular smell (that I could never identify) - the first indication of an impending movie experience. Close at its heels was the mystique of the cassette itself, as my brother and I would open the protective tab and stare at the magnetic tape underneath, making wise pronouncements about the quality of the print based on the number of crinkles we could see in it. Despite our carefully performed expertise, however, we were completely in thrall to the inherent mystery of the incomprehensible machine, simultaneously imagining ourselves as a new generation of technopriests through our ability to perform a ritual around these objects and as slaves to our ultimate lack of knowledge about the object itself. The packaging was equally important (when there was any). Familiar faces of actors we were starting to recognize would create patterns in our choices. These packages were generally xeroxes of US or UK poster art and we learned to recognize the MPAA's Restricted logo or the BBFC's '18' and '15' symbols (ironically our parents were too frazzled and rushed to notice such things) and felt the twinge of anticipation for the forbidden darkness that we learned to anticipate within (the films rated such for sexual content were, however, generally pointed out by the 'video parlor man' for the benefit of our parents).

Finally, as the title of this piece indicates, the fanboy in me can actually be traced back to the magic of VHS as well. I still remember with relative clarity, the first defining cinematic moment of my life - my first viewing of Superman II. It was in 1988 and I was six. It was not the first film I had watched on our new VCR but it was the first one to leave an indelible stamp on my still-developing mind. The wonder of Superman's flight to the Eiffel Tower, the foreboding of the criminal Kryptonians' surprisingly brutal assault on the astronauts, the frustration of the beating suffered by humanized Clark Kent at the hands of the diner bully and - above all - the pure adrenaline rush of re-powered Superman's return and climactic clash with the villains in downtown Metropolis are all emotions that I am reasonably sure I remember accurately from that first viewing. This may well be owed to the fact that I replicated this experience countless times over the next few years, goading my hapless parents into renting the same tape to the extent that 'the video parlor man' automatically reached for it when we walked in. The reactions, however, were always echoes of my original visceral responses to what remains, to this day, one of my favourite films and the reason why I instinctively associate villainy of all sorts with General Zod. Superman II was the reason I picked up my first American comic book and marks the beginning of my lifelong fondness for fantastical narratives across media platforms, bringing us to the possibility that my presence at MIT may actually be traced back to the work of Richard Lester (or Donner, according to preference).

It is important to mention that a significant aspect of this anecdote is the fact that I managed to watch Superman II through the eyes of an impressionable young child, thanks to the convenience of VHS. Had it not been for this particular technological marvel, my exposure to pop culture (as embodied by Superman) would have really begun in the mid-90s with the appearance of cable television, by which point I would have been a teenager and - undoubtedly - indoctrinated into the way of the sciences by the ever reliable biases of the Indian educational system as it deals with male students. It was VHS that made the difference between a goggle-eyed child internalizing an epic, life-changing mythology and an engineering-track teenager laughing at a campy movie about an alien in a red cape and underwear fighting two British actors (and an ex boxer from Philadelphia) dressed like dominatrices while Gene Hackman delivered one-liners in the background. And for this, I am thankful.

Abhimanyu Das

Franklin and Marshall College, BA English, 2005

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Abhimanyu Das graduated in 2005 with a BA in English from Franklin and Marshall College. Gradually, his interests in new kinds of media texts (such as computer games, graphic novels, and serialized fiction) began to push against the outer limits of proscribed curriculum of his English department. His struggles with core questions about transmedia storytelling, the audiovisual elements of texts and social context of genre narratives led him to develop a secondary concentration in Film Studies, during which he did archival research at the British Film Institute and also read a lot of comics. His relevant professional experience includes writing about film and literature as well as a brief stint in publishing.

At MIT, he hopes to pursue a thesis project that studies "the confluence of post-colonial influences and the effect of globalization on two rapidly expanding media movements, the Indian independent film and the Indian comic book." He is currently working at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media as an RA. His long-term goal is to be able to make a living as a cultural journalist with the clout to make a few people do more than just smile indulgently while he talks about movies and comics.

A Critfan Yearns for the World As It Was

One of the more unorthodox policy decisions we've made at the Comparative Media Studies Program is to allow students to include non-academics as outside readers on their thesis committees where they can demonstrate that the person has relevent experience and expertise. This has opened to door to bringing alternative kinds of knowledge into the thesis process. When Sam Ford, who now runs the blog for the Convergence Culture Consortium, wrote a thesis about soap operas and convergence, I ended up sitting on a committee which included both a veteran soap opera writer Kay Alden (The Young and the Restless, now writing for The Bold and the Beautiful) and a long time soap fan who had written for Soap Opera Weekly, Lynn Liccardo. Needless to say, it was a fascinating discussion -- one which allowed Sam to test his ideas against real world feedback from within both the industry and the fan community. As one of the the non-soap people in the room (along with William Uricchio), I learned a great deal from listening to both of

our visiting experts. This term, Sam Ford has been teaching a course through our program on soap opera and the blog for the course has attracted a range of outside participants, including, once again, Lynn Liccardo. I asked Lynn if I could share with you some thoughts she has about what has happened to the soap opera genre in recent years and why she is becoming increasingly frustrated with a genre which has been part of her life for decades.

A CRIT-FAN WHO'S YEARNING FOR THE WORLD AS IT WAS

by Lynn Liccardo

Over the past few weeks I've been checking in on the blog Sam Ford set up for his class on The American Soap Opera: here. The student comments touch on many of the issues that underlie the current, sorry state of the American Soap Opera. Of course, being only a few weeks into the course, and from what I can tell, relatively new soap viewers, they lack the contextual understanding to connect the dots.

They're watching As the World Turns, a show I've watched since it premiered in 1956, the year I started kindergarten. But they're watching and studying ATWT as it exists today; I'm watching the same show and yearning for the show it used to be. So when a student comments on how certain characters are either actors or reactors, I hesitate to respond. I could reiterate Sam's point that characters often switch between actor and reactor depending on the circumstances. He's absolutely right. But that barely scratches the surface; what I really want to tell them is that there used to be a time on soap opera when characters might switch between actor and reactor in the course of a single conversation.

It's been a good long while since that happened on ATWT, certainly not in the time that they've been watching. So long in fact, that I'm hard-pressed to think of a specific example to give them, one downside of the sheer volume of soaps' text. Then, is there available video, or do you have to try to explain the context? And even with video, how to capture the full depth of a story that ran over months, if not years, by showing just a few isolated episodes?

All of which brings me to Ryan's Hope, a show that ran from 1975-89, and is currently shown on SOAPnet, a digital cable channel created by ABC to rebroadcast their soaps. (How the channel has evolved from its original mission is a subject for further discussion.)A few months ago, just as when the RH's 1982 episodes were to begin, the show went back to its 1975 premiere. There was a huge hew and cry from viewers; SOAPnet claimed that they couldn't clear the rights to the music used in shows after 1982. While I appreciated the outrage, I was thrilled; RH was a show I'd dipped into now and then over the years, but had never really watched. When it premiered in 1975, I had a fulltime job, no VCR and had just begun working on my undergraduate degree at night. I could barely keep tabs on ATWT, but could depend on my mother to fill me in - Guiding Light, too.

Since I'd already been watching RH for a while before the switch, there was little about the actual opening story that surprised me since I already knew how much of it had turned out. What did shock me was just how awful the first few episodes looked - flat and dull - dreadful lighting. The graphics were amateurish, and have only slightly improved. And, I have to say, Frank Ryan, the show's ersatz hero, in a coma for weeks on end was less than scintillating storytelling. But that first day, when Mary Ryan met Jack Fenelli in her family's bar, I was in for the duration.

As I write this (March 2008), what's currently on screen is just over a year into the show's run. I have to say, as much of a pleasure it's been to watch the first year of RH, it's been a bittersweet experience since in that year's worth of episodes (they run two a night Monday-Friday) I've seen more genuine soap opera drama than I have in I don't know how many years of ATWT and, occasionally, GL. In the soap opera of recent memory, I have to settle for a moment here, some subtext there. In RH, I get to see fully-developed characters and fully-integrated storytelling - albeit, 30-years old. But, has it ever held up.

However, what's truly jarring - surreal, actually - is the juxtaposition between the down-to-earth Ryans, et al - characters who actually wear coats and scarves in the winter - and the SOAPnet promos featuring the current crop of soap opera characters where women's most important piece of clothing is a pushup bra and men often go shirtless - regardless of the weather. And then there are the promo taglines: "Ruthless people who will do anything to get what they want." That one's for Y&R. The OC's described as "Pretty people, pretty messed up."

This is not to say there aren't ruthless people on Ryan's Hope: Roger Coleridge comes to mind. But the insecurity that underlies Roger's behavior is so transparent, it's hard to think of what he's doing as pure ruthlessness. Even the local gangster (and neighborhood undertaker), Nick Szabo is clearly a devoted and loving, if infuriating, father and when a major character died, he behaved decently and compassionately.

And there are certainly pretty people on Ryan's Hope, and yes, some of them are pretty messed up, but messed up in ways that real people can identify with, not just watch agog. Anyone who grew up without a family can understand the behavior of those characters on the outside looking in: Jack, who's been so traumatized by growing up in an orphanage that he never misses an chance to sabotage his relationship with Mary and her family - a tension the writers continued to play years down the road as Mary's father, Johnny, never forgot how much pain Jack's fears created for Mary, and her mother, Maeve, never forgot the cause of Jack's fears. I always wondered if those early conversations between Johnny and Maeve discussing their concerns about Jack resembled conversations my own parents has about my boyfriends

And then there's Delia, who also lost her parents young. Dee's so unhappy in her marriage to Frank Ryan (and who can blame her, he was cheating on her for years, yet being the golden boy, no one ever really blamed him), so in need of the love that Roger Coleridge wants to share with her (cruel as some of Roger's actions seem, he really does love her), and yet she's willing to give it up to remain a Ryan.

But my all-time (thus far) favorite juxtaposition between Ryan's Hope and the SOAPnet promos came during the most recent mindless bloodbath on General Hospital. Bruce Weitz, best know as Mick Belker on Hill Street Blues, played Anthony Zacchara, leader of said bloodbath. Back in 1976, Weitz also had a one-day gig on RH playing an assistant district attorney prosecuting a euthanasia case (the love story between Seneca and Nell Beaulac remains a powerful testament to forgiveness, reconciliation, and the real meaning of love between grown-ups). In a single conversation with Seneca's lawyer, Jill Coleridge a very young and smooth-faced Weitz expressed compassion for, and understanding of, a tragic situation while making it clear he intended to win the case. I had really looked forward to seeing how Weitz would play the trial and was disappointed to see another actor playing the role. Seeing Weitz as Zacchara in the GH promos stood in stark contrast to the depth and complexity he brought to his one day on RH.

The issues underlying those juxtapositions explain a lot about the current sorry state of soap opera and I'll be writing more about how down the road. But back to my initial point: how characters might switch between actor and reactor in the course of a single conversation. I've always believed that the higher one's tolerance for ambiguity, the better one can experience the full emotional impact of soap opera. What happed on RH recently provides a perfect example:

Frank has found out about Delia's affair with Roger and wants to use that information to divorce her and win custody of their son, Little John. Except that Frank cheated on Dee with Jillian first, but since Dee took him back she can't use that first adultery to block the divorce Frank wants so desperately. So she enlists Frank's brother Pat (they were an item in high school), to find evidence that Frank has resumed his affair with Jillian. The repercussions play out among all the characters, including the deeply-Catholic Johnny and Maeve, who don't believe in divorce, yet know that the marriage was never right. They want to defend Frank and blame Dee, but Pat never lets his parents forget that it was Frank who cheated first.

These scenes are long enough (another big change; the short choppy scenes currently on ATWT and GL make me dizzy) that the characters move from actor to reactor seamlessly, and the camera shows each character's ambivalence in the reaction shots. And viewers get to experience the real life emotions of characters far more real than those on any reality show.

I know these kinds of moments happened on As the World Turns in the past, most recently, during the Douglas Marland era. Marland was ATWT's headwriter from 1985 until his untimely death in 1993. One of his best stories involved legacy characters Bob and Kim Hughes, Kim's ex-husband, John Dixon, their son, Andy Dixon and Susan Stewart, a longtime rival of Kim's.

I've always believed that the most powerful and compelling drama is created when all of the characters involved in a storyline are trying to do the right thing - the right thing for the situation, not necessarily the right thing for their character - and it's their efforts that come into conflict. The situation in this case was John and Kim's son, Andy's alcoholism. So, of course Kim and John were spending time together; their son was in trouble. And, of course, Bob wanted to help, but he wasn't Andy's father; John was. Susan may have been a troublemaker in the past, but here, she was Andy's AA sponsor. And so when Bob and Susan finally hit the sheets, viewers were sighing to themselves, "oh no," not screaming, "what the fuck!," as is all too often the case with current daytime soaps.

Sad to say (sad for soap viewers, anyway), these days the only place to see this kind of character-driven drama routinely played out, with the depth and intimacy that used to be the hallmark of soaps, is on primetime: Friday Night Lights; Ugly Betty and Dirty Sexy Money are three examples of the best of what primetime has to offer. In these shows, as in the soaps of old, conflicts between and among characters begin with the emotional conflicts within the characters; as the audience watches the former unfold, they are never permitted to lose sight of the latter.

The question of whether these primetime shows are in fact soaps came up last summer in the follow-up to a discussion between Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea here, which led to further discussion on Just TV here and C3, here. And Sam has opened up a discussion with his students as to what exactly defines a soap opera here.

Given the deep-rooted stigma long attached to daytime soaps, it's not too surprising that fans of primetime serials invest time and effort parsing the textual and structural differences between daytime and nighttime soaps. What did surprise me, though, was the resistance that came from within daytime, in particular the daytime media. One daytime critic actually said, "Daytime drama and primetime drama are two very different genres with two very different audiences," an understandable, albeit specious, argument. I would argue (and will in an essay for the book Sam, Abigail and C. Lee Harrington are co-editing that grew of last summer's discussion) that daytime would do well to understand what is working on primetime soaps, and why, because it's what used to be working on daytime. And right now, daytime soaps are in so much trouble that none of us can afford to be territorial if it stands in the way of figuring out how to save this long-marginalized segment of popular culture.

Lynn Liccardo began writing about nursing after graduating from Harvard

University in 1983 with an undergraduate degree in the humanities. Her articles appeared in The Boston Globe, Revolution: The Journal for Nurse Empowerment, and Soap Opera Weekly, where she published a piece on how nurses are portrayed on soap operas. In the early 1990s, she wrote several articles for SOW, including, "Who Really Watches Soap Operas," a

demographic analysis cited in numerous scholarly articles. She currently posts on several soap boards and media blogs and still watches As the World Turns, as she has since its premiere in 1956, the year she started kindergarten. From 2005-2007, she also advised on a Master's thesis project on soaps at MIT. Lynn is also a playwright and screenwriters, with short plays performed in greater Boston, New York and Los Angeles. She's completed one screenplay, Never Can Say Goodbye, and a treatment for a second, The Good Father. In 2007, her one-act play, Settling In, was broadcast on Somerville Community Access Television (MA).

the following post is [about] anonymous

The following blog post was prepared by a CMS graduate student who, appropriately enough, wishes to remain anonymous. S/He has been watching with some interest the emergence of the Anonymous movement, a grassroots effort to protest against the Church of Scientology organization, which has adopted a range of references and models from popular culture to further its goals. It offers a rich reference point for those of us in better understanding the ways that participatory culture can offer a spring board for civic engagement. It seems like an appropriate followup to the interview I ran earlier this week with Witness's Sam Gregory in that it represents another example of how video sharing might contribute to civic discourse. The author closes the post with a call for academic discussion of the implications of this phenomenon. S/he and I offer this post as a resource for further study.

On March 15, 2008, over 9000^* people worldwide took to the streets to protest practices of the Church of Scientology organization. Without any clear leadership, masked individuals descended upon local organizations with signs and flyers. They stood outside, chanting phrases like "tax the cult" and "why is Lisa Dead?" They gave speeches, recruited new members, and granted press interviews. Then, they sang and danced to Rick Astley's epic 1987 hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Hi, We're from the Internet

The protesters call themselves "Anonymous" and their movement originated on several loosely affiliated web sites. The long-standing site Something Awful had built a community through its forums and a popular image manipulation competition called Photoshop Phriday. Other sites spun off of or grew up in parallel with Something Awful, including the always-offensive image posting site 4chan.org. The most popular "board" on 4chan was "/b/", which featured doctored photos, inside jokes, and porn. Through 2007, the community was pulling online pranks like taking down web sites and defacing Myspace pages. Their culture grew out of the pursuit of these sophomoric "lulz" and spawned several internet memes. Perhaps most well known is the LOLCats. Their language became filled with sarcastically self-referential bastardizations of English.

The community began coordinating "raids" against various sites, online games, and people that they deemed idiotic (or, in their words, had broken "teh Rules of teh Internetz"). They successfully shut down a white supremacist's page, lashed out at a site that copied one of their images, and flooded virtual games that they considered inane. They coordinated these efforts through several sites, but most prominently through a collaboratively maintained wiki. Plans would form as a result of many proposals, one of which would gain a critical mass of support. There were no leaders. At some point, the group decided to start calling itself "Anonymous," inspired by the largely anonymous web-posting tools they used. On July 26, 2007, KTTV Fox of Los Angeles did a news report on the group, calling them "hackers on steroids" and "domestic terrorists." The Fox report was quickly spread, parodied, and made fun of. It also formed the foundation for the group's ironic self-identity, and cemented the "Anonymous" moniker for months to come.

Throughout, Anonymous maintained a rough edge. Their "raids" often seemed more like cyberstalking or bullying. Their image boards continued to feature mostly porn, gore, and insults. Their conversations were peppered with what sounded like hate speech -- constant references to "fags" or "niggers". To be sure, it was a community made up largely of young white males acting somewhat immaturely. On the other hand, there have emerged more subtle undercurrents in their behavior. To some extent this language is used ironically and critically. Anons are equal opportunity offenders, and they seem to value free speech far more than they feel true hatred. They also use this harsh language when referring to each other just as much as when discussing the targets of their attacks. In a way, the phrases have been removed from their contextualized meanings in standard English discourse and reappropriated as part of the memetic language of the group.

On January 15, 2008, the online gossip site Gawker posted an internal Church of Scientology video featuring Tom Cruise riffing on the wonders of Scientology. The church had already successfully used legal tactics to remove the video from other sites, but Gawker claimed, "it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it." Lawyers for the church claimed copyright infringement, and Gawker claimed fair use. At some point, some members of Anonymous became incensed at what they saw as an attempt to silence free speech and violation of internet principles. Debate ensued, and one member stated:

"Gentlemen, this is what I have been waiting for. Habbo, Fox, The G4 Newfag Flood crisis. Those were all training scenarios. This is what we have been waiting for. This is a battle for justice. Every time /b/ has gone to war, it has been for our own causes. Now, gentlemen, we are going to fight for something that is right. I say damn those of us who advise against this fight. I say damn those of us who say this is foolish. /b/ROTHERS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO RISE AS NOT ONLY HEROES OF THE INTERNETS, BUT AS ITS GUARDIANS."

Scientology had thrown down the gauntlet, and Anonymous awoke. In a YouTube video addressed to the church, Anonymous explained that, "for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment, we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." Anonymous promptly took down Scientology's web sites, endlessly faxed them black sheets of paper, and called their public phone numbers with loops of... you guessed it... "Never Gonna Give You Up."

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the LULZ

The initial objective of the campaign was a success. By all accounts, Anonymous was frustrating the Church of Scientology and generating amusement for Anonymous. The church replied publicly, counter-attacked Anonymous sites through legal (and, allegedly, technical) means, and was forced to move its servers to a more robust and costly provider. Soon, long-time Scientology critics began to take notice. Some of these critics had worked to expose the organization's practices for decades, and the massive influx of energy was both exhilarating and frightening. One critic, Mark Bunker, replied via YouTube:

"I think it's incredibly exciting to have an army of young, passionate people wanting to do something about Scientology's fraud and abuse. However, I think you're making some major mistakes that are going to hurt in the long run. They're going to make you look bad, they're going to get you in trouble... they're going to get us in trouble, those of us who have been long-time critics of Scientology. Scientology is good at tar-and-feathering us with other people's actions. It may seems like fun and games, but Scientology is serious, you have to be prepared... I'm mainly concerned because you shouldn't be doing things that are illegal. You just shouldn't. It's not morally right, it's not right when Scientology does it, and it's not right when we do it... a better way to get at them would be to try to get rid of their tax-exempt status... now I know that doesn't sound anywhere near as interesting as attacking their websites. It sounds dull, but that's going to hurt them. Going out and protesting, that's wonderful. I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but please please please reform your movement the way we want Scientology to reform their movement."

Bunker later commented that "I thought they'd lash out at me." Instead, they celebrated him and named him "Wise Beard Man." In his video, he sounds like an earnest and concerned parent. It's hard to imagine such an uncouth and authority-hating group taking him seriously. But, they did. They began to educate themselves about Scientology's various alleged abuses, including the 1995 death of Lisa McPherson who was under the care of the church at the time she died. When someone posted a YouTube video claiming to speak for families that had been torn apart by Scientology, one Anonymous replied:

"Fucking rise up, sons and daughters of the Internet. Rise the fuck up and stay up. Let 'em know we'll take the fight to them, and that we'll help every single person that wants to leave the cult. We have lawyers and social workers and therapists in our ranks, and we can, and will, give aid to those who want out. We are Anonymous. For the lulz, but moar than that now. For teh most epic win. Revoke Scientology's tax-exempt status. Great Justice for Lisa McPherson."

Nearly overnight, Anonymous shifted focus. The Anons began planning for a worldwide protest, they compiled research, started a lobbying campaign, and cranked out flyers and informational pamphlets. On February 10, they staged their first major protest with several thousand participating. Many Anonymous donned "guy fawkes" masks, made famous in the film "V for Vendetta", as a symbol of their resistence to oppression and their commitment to anonymity. There is a long history of Scientology protesters allegedly being harrassed and otherwise attacked by the church. When anonymous translated its digital anonymity into real-world anonymity, Scientology faced something it had never before experienced.

Nevertheless, just before the second wave of protests on March 15, the CoS began agressively pursuing members of Anonymous that it had managed to identify. In some jurisdictions, local anti-mask laws had actually made it difficult for Anons to protest anonymously--a sharp contrast to their accustomed protections online. The church posted videos "outing" members and accusing them of hate crimes and terrorism (Anonymous responded by cloning the site and replacing the videos with Rick Astley). The CoS claimed to have filed criminal complaints at federal agencies, with these allegations. It tried to get an injunction against protestors in Clearwater, and failed. The worldwide protests grew, and Anonymous declared March 15 a success. The protests had been timed to coincide with the birthday of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Anonymous donned birthday hats, ate cake, and danced to a cheesy song with the lyrics, "When it's time to party we will party hard."

After the March protests, CoS sent nastygrams to some de-masked Anons via at least two law firms, which in themselves constituted no legal action. In a couple of limited cases, CoS actually took demonstrable legal action. It accused LA-based Sean Carasov of making death threats, and the LAPD dismissed the charges. It also filed a complaint of Trespass and Criminal Harrassment against Boston-based "Gregg" who knocked on the door of the local CoS and attempted to give them fliers. Gregg has yet to be heard in court, but Anonymous feels confident that the legal merit is weak and that the actions were filed solely as an attempt to intimidate.

By all measures, the intimidation isn't working. The next protests occur on April 12th, and are focused on bringing attention to the families that have been "disconnected" by the CoS. Anonymous plans monthly protests for the forseeable future.

An Academic Opportunity

Anonymous presents an array of opportunities for interesting scholorship. It is a cultural community, a political movement, a legal battleground, and more. It straddles between internet and "real world" existence. We need to study Anonymous... and to study hard.

Academics from cultural studies, media theory, and anthropology might seek to better understand what holds this unique community together. How have they appropriated anime and internet culture into the core of their identity and used it to unify their movement? How do neighbor communities like cosplay and video gaming cross pollinate with Anonymous? How does Anonymous connect with the earlier Internet vs. Scientology effort? What do we make of their obscure and offensive language?

Legal academics also have a great deal to consider when it comes to Anonymous. How do our laws regarding online vs. real-world anonymity differ? For example, should a Kentucky bill banning anonymous online posting pass or should a New York statute banning anonymous protesting in real life be overturned? Is the CoS using official-looking lawyer letters to intimidate and chill free speech? What can be done to defend Anons who claim that they are the target of fair-gaming through the legal system? What about the larger questions of Scientology's tax-exempt status and their controversial 1993 settlement with the IRS?

Political scientists studying movements and agenda-setting might want to consider how this group organizes and affects political change. What has made Anonymous able to grow and adapt so dynamically? How can such a decentralized, leaderless collective maintain potency in the long term? What are the means that the group is using to lobby and advocate anonymously? How is the movement gaining newcomers while staying on message and not becoming fragmented?

Some academics have already begun to take notice, but their work is preliminary. PBS's digital news project "Idea Lab" recently posted a thought-provoking article on the Anonymous transition from the Internet to the "real world." Anonymous demonstrates the principles of digital learning as they translate their online skills into collective action. They leverage viral-like promotion strategies through efforts like youfoundthecard.com. They use language and tactics from the video game world. They have developed a decentralized news making and gathering service in support of their cause. What can academics learn from this?

Rise up, sons and daughters of the academy.

More About Anonymous

A Sample of Anonymous Media Coverage

• Radar Magazine, April Issue: Cult Friction
• City Paper (Baltimore), 4/2/08: Serious Business: Anonymous Takes On Scientology (and Doesn't Afraid of Anything) [and yes, that's intentional]
• Christian Science Monitor, 3/17/08: Anonymous Activists Gaining Strength Online
• The Guardian (UK), 3/19/08: Taking The Rick

Anonymous-related Sites

• Why We Protest
• Reconnect.org (April 12 Protest Site)
• Enturbulation Forums
• Ex Scientology Kids
• You Found The Card
• Operation Clambake

The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part Four)

Prohibitionists and The Moral Economy

"The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important." - Tim O'Reilly (2005)

"Our entire cultural economy is in dire straights....We will live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising." -- Andrew Keen (2007)

Despite the apparent long-term necessity of the entertainment industry reshaping its relations with consumers (both in the face of new technological realities that make preserving traditional control over content difficult and in the face of new models of consumer relations which stress collaborations with users), media executives remain risk-averse. Andrew Currah (2006) argues that the reluctance of studio executives to risk short term revenue gains accounts for their reticence to experiment with alternative content distribution models despite growing data that suggests some forms of legal file-sharing would be in the industry's long-term best interests. Many executives at public companies are paid to draw incremental increases in revenue from mature markets rather than to adopt more long-ranging or entrepreneurial perspectives. New ventures might violate agreements media producers maintain with big-box retailers, decrease revenues from established markets (DVD, PPV), or spoil the balance of release windows and the geographic management of content distribution. According to Currah (2006, pp. 461-463), the executives best placed to authorize such changes are not likely to be around to see the long-range benefits and thus they opt for the stability and predictability of the status quo.

Both industry leaders and creative workers worry about a loss of control as they grant audiences a more active role in the design, circulation, and promotion of media content; they see relations between consumers and producers as a zero-sum game where one party gains at the expense of the other. For the creative, the fear is a corruption of their artistic integrity, according to what Deuze (2006) calls an editorial logic (where decisions are governed by the development and maintenance of reputations within the professional community). For the business side, the greatest fear is the idea that consumers might take something they made and not pay them for it, according to a market logic (where decisions are governed by the desire to expand markets and maximize profits). A series of law suits which have criminalized once normative consumer practices have further inflamed relations between consumers and producers.

If the hope that consumers will generate value around cultural properties has fueled the collaborationist logic, these tensions between producers and consumers motivate the prohibitionist approach towards so-called "disruptive technologies" and practices. If the collaborationist approach welcomes fans as potential allies, the prohibitionist approach sees fans as a threat to their control over the circulation of, and production of meaning around, their content. Consumers are read as "pirates" whose acts of repurposing and recirculation constitute theft. The prohibitionist approach seeks to restrict participation, pushing it from public view. The prohibitionist response needs to be understood in the context of a renegotiation of the moral economy which shapes relations between media producers and consumers.

The economic and social historian E.P. Thompson (1971) introduced the concept of "moral economy" in his work on 18th century food riots, arguing that where the public challenges landowners, their actions are typically shaped by some "legitimizing notion." He explains, "the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. In other words, the relations between landowners and peasants, or for that matter, between contemporary media producers and consumers, reflect the perceived moral and social value of those transactions. All participants need to feel that the involved parties behave in a morally appropriate fashion.

Jenkins (1992) introduced this concept of "moral economy" into fan studies, exploring the ways that fan fiction writers legitimate their appropriation of series content. Through their online communication, fan communities develop a firm consensus about the "moral economy"; this consensus provides a strong motivation for them to speak out against media producers who they feel are "exploiting" their relationship or damaging the franchise. The growing popularity of illegal downloads amongst music consumers, for example, reflects the oft-spoken belief that the record labels are "ripping off" consumers and artists alike through inflated prices and poor contractual terms. The controversy surrounding FanLib spread so rapidly because the fan community already had a well articulated understanding of what constituted appropriate use of borrowed materials. Fans objected to profiting from fan fictions both because they saw their work as gifts which circulated freely within a community of fellow fans, and because they believed rights holders were more apt to take legal action to shut down their activities if money was changing hands (Jenkins 2007a).

In a review of the concept of the "moral economy" in the context of a discussion of digital rights management, Alec Austin (et. al. 2006) writes, "Thompson's work suggested that uprisings (or audience resistance) was most likely to occur when powerful economic players try to shift from existing rights and practices and towards some new economic regime. As they do so, these players seem to take away "rights" or rework relationships which were taken for granted by others involved in those transactions." A period of abrupt technological and economic transition destabilizes relations between media producers and consumers. Consumers defend perceived rights and practices long taken for granted, such as the production and circulation of "mix tapes", while corporations try to police behaviors such as file sharing, which they see as occurring on a larger scale and having a much larger public impact. Both sides suspect the other of exploiting the instability created by shifts in the media infrastructure.

This moral economy includes not simply economic and social obligations between producers and consumers but also social obligations to other consumers. As Ian Condry (2004) explains, "Unlike underwear or swim suits, music falls into the category of things you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family, and friends. Yet to date, people who share music files are primarily represented in media and business settings as selfish, improperly socialized people who simply want to get something -- the fruits of other people's labor -- for free." Industry discourse depicting file-sharers (or downloaders, depending on your frame of reference) as selfish doesn't fully acknowledge the willingness of supporters to spend their own time and money to facilitate the circulation of valued content, whether in the form of a "mix tape" given to one person or a website with sound files that can be downloaded by any and all. Enthusiasts face these costs in hopes that their actions will generate greater interest in the music they love and that sharing music may reinforce their ties to other consumers. Condry says he finds it difficult to identify any moral argument against file sharing which young people find convincing, yet he has been able to identify a range of reasons why people might voluntarily choose to pay for certain content (to support a favorite group or increase the viability of marginalized genres of music). The solution may not be to criminalize file-sharing but rather to increase social ties between artists and fans.

Contemporary conflicts about intellectual property emerge when individual companies or industries shift abruptly between collaborationist and prohibitionist models. Hector Postigo (2008) has documented growing tensions between game companies and modders when companies have sought to shut down modding projects which tread too closely onto their own production plans or go in directions the rights holders did not approve. Because there has been so much discussion of the economic advantages of co-creation, modders often reject the moral and legal arguments for restraining their practice.

Some recent critics of Web 2.0 models deploy labor theory to talk about the activities of consumers within this new digital economy. The discourse of "Web 2.0" provides few models for how to compensate fan communities for the value they generate. Audience members, it is assumed, participate because they get emotional and social rewards from their participation and thus neither want nor deserve economic compensation. Tiziana Terranova (2000) has offered a cogent critique of this set of economic relationships in her work on "free labor": "Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited....The fruit of collective cultural labor has been not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices."

Consider, for example, Lawrence Lessig's (2007) critique of an arrangement where LucasFilm would allow fans to "remix" Star Wars content in return for granting the company control over anything participants had generated in response to those materials. Lessig, writing in the Washington Post, described such arrangements as a modern day version of "sharecropping." Fans were embracing something like this same critique in their response to FanLib, rejecting the idea that the company should be able to profit from their creative labor.

On the other end of the spectrum fall writers like Andrew Keen (2007), who suggests that the unauthorized circulation of intellectual property through peer-to-peer networks and the free labor of fans and bloggers constitute a serious threat to the long-term viability of the creative industries. Here, it is audience activity which exceeds the moral economy. In his nightmarish scenario, professional editorial standards are giving way to mob rule and the work of professional writers, performers, and media makers is being reduced to raw materials for the masses who show growing contempt for traditional expertise and disrespect for intellectual property rights. Keen concludes his book with a call to renew our commitment to older models of the moral economy, albeit ones that recognize the new digital realities: "The way to keep the recorded-music industry vibrant and support new bands and music is to be willing to support them with our dollars -- to stop stealing the sweat of other people's creative labor" (Keen 2007, p. 188).

Lessig, Terranova, and others see the creative industries as damaging the moral economy through their expectations of "free" creative labor, while Keen sees the media audiences as destroying the moral economy through their expectations of "free" content. Read side by side, the competing visions of consumers as "sharecroppers" and "pirates" reflects the breakdown of trust on all sides. The sunny Web 2.0 rhetoric about constructing "an architecture for participation" papers over these conflicts, masking the set of choices and compromises which need to be made if a new moral economy is going to emerge.

Final Thoughts

Rebuilding this trust relationship requires embracing, rather than resisting, the changes to the economic, social, and technological infrastructure we have described. The prohibitionist stance adopted by some companies and industry bodies denies the changed conditions in which the creative industries operate, trying to force participatory culture to conform to yesterday's business practices. While prohibitionist companies want to maintain broadcast era patterns of control over content development and consumer relations, they hope to reap the benefits of the digital media space. NBC enjoyed the viral buzz that came with fans sharing the Saturday Night Live clip "Lazy Sunday" but issued a take down notice to YouTube to ensure the only copies available online came from NBC's official site (within the proximity of their branding material and advertising) (Austin et al 2006). The network's prohibition of file sharing reflects NBC's discomfort with YouTube drawing advertising revenue from consumer circulation of its content. While perhaps completely defensible within broadcast era business logic, the decision ignored the ways that the spread of this content generated viewer interest in the broadcast series. For the network, the primary if not soul value of the content was as a commodity which could collect rents from consumers and advertisers alike. In attempting to re-embed "Lazy Sunday" within the distribution logics of the broadcast era, locking down both the channel and context of its distribution, NBC also attempted to re-embed the clip within an older conception of audience impressions. Many viewers responded according to this same logic - skipping both commercials and content in favor of producers who offered them more favorable terms of participation.

Navigating through participatory culture requires a negotiation of the implicit social contract between media producers and consumers, balancing the commodity and cultural status of creative goods. While this complex balance has always shaped creative industries, NBC struck down their fans in order to resolve other business matters, such as their relationships with advertisers and affiliates, sacrificing the cultural status of creative goods for their commodity value. The alternative approach is to find ways to capitalize on the creative energies of participatory audiences. Mentos' successful management of the Mentos and soda videos that emerged online in 2006 represents a more collaborative approach. Noticing a fad around dropping Mentos mints into bottles of soda and filming the resulting eruption, Mentos permitted, supported and eventually promoted the playful use of their intellectual property. Mentos could have issued cease-and-desist notices to regulate their brand's reputation, as FedEx did after a college student built a website featuring his dorm furniture made out of free FedEx boxes (Vranica and Terhune 2006). Instead, Mentos capitalized on the cultural capital its product had acquired, collaborating with audiences to construct a new brand image. Engaging and promoting fan engagement offers media companies a more positive outcome than attempting the wack-a-mole game of trying to quash grassroots appropriation wherever it arises. Doing so also brings corporations into direct contact with lead users, revealing new markets and unanticipated uses.

The renegotiation of the moral economy requires a commitment on the part of participatory audiences to respect intellectual property rights. We see the potential of rebuilding consumers' good will when anime fans cease circulating fan subbed content when it is made commercially available or when gamers support companies that offer them access to modding tools. Collaborationist approaches recognize and respect consumer engagement while demanding respect in return. Working with and listening to engaged consumers can result in audiences who help to patrol intellectual property violations; though their investment may not be measured according to the same market logics as the production and distribution companies, fans are likewise invested in the success of creative content. In doing so, media companies not only acknowledge the cultural status of the commodities they create, they're in a position to harness the passionate energies of fans.

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The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part One)

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

Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(TO BE CONTINUED)