A Whale Of A Tale!: Ricardo Pitts-Wiley Brings Mixed Magic to LA

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Last February, I announced here the release of Reading in a Participatory Culture, a print book, and Flows of Reading, a d-book extension, both focused around work my teams (first at MIT and then at USC) have done exploring how we might help educators and students learn about literary works through actively remixing them. Our central case study has been the work of playwright-actor-educator Ricardo Pitts-Wiley from the Mixed Magic Theater, who was successful at getting incarcerated youth to read and engage with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick by having them re-imagine and re-write it for the 21st century. You can read more about this project here. And you can check out the Flows of Reading d-book for free here. 
If you live in Los Angeles, you have a chance to learn more about Pitts-Wiley and his work first hand. I've been able to bring Ricardo for a residency at USC this fall, which will start with a public event at the Los Angeles Public Library on September 26. Ricardo is going to be recruiting a mixed race cast of high school and college aged actors from across the Los Angeles area and producing a staged reading of his play, Moby-Dick: Then and Now, which will be performed as part of a USC Visions and Voices event on Oct. 11th. You can get full details of both events below. I hope to see some of you there. We are already hearing from all kinds of artists here in Southern California who have sought creative inspiration from Melville's novel and used it as a springboard for their own work. But you don't have to love the great white whale to benefit from our approach to teaching traditional literary works in a digital culture, and we encourage teachers and educators of all kinds to explore how they might apply our model to thinking about many other cultural texts.
For those who live on the East Coast, our team will also be speaking and doing workshops at the National Writing Project's national conference in Boston on Nov. 21.
Thursday, September 26, 2013 7:15 PM
Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library
Thu, Sep 26, 7:15 PM [ALOUD]
Remixing Moby Dick: Media Studies Meets the Great White Whale 
Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley

Over a multi-year collaboration, playwright and director Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, and media expert Henry Jenkins have developed a new approach for teaching Moby-Dick in the age of YouTube and hip-hop. They will explore how "learning through remixing" can speak to contemporary youth, why Melville might be understood as the master mash-up artist of the 19th century, and what might have happened if Captain Ahab had been a 21st century gang leader.

* Part of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Public Library’s month-long citywide initiative "What Ever Happened to Moby Dick?"

 

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than fifteen books on media and popular culture, including Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. His most recent book, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom was written with Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Erin Reilly, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York and of Herman Melville: An Introduction. She also co-author Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom with Henry Jenkins and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. She is former Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville. A founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, she has collaborated with the New Bedford Whaling Museum on lecture series, conferences, exhibits, and a scholarly archive. She serves as Associate Director ofMEL (Melville Electronic Library), an NEH-supported interactive digital archive for reading, editing, and visualizing Melville’s texts.

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is the co-founder of the Mixed Magic Theatre, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to presenting a diversity of cultural and ethnic images and ideas on the stage. While serving as Mixed Magic Theatre’s director, Pitts-Wiley gained national and international acclaim for his page-to-stage adaptation of Moby Dick, titled Moby Dick: Then and Now. This production, which was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, is the centerpiece of a national teachers study guide and is featured in the book, Reading in A Participatory Culture. In addition to his work as an adapter of classic literature Pitts-Wiley is also the composer of over 150 songs and the author of 12 plays with music including:Waiting for Bessie Smith, Celebrations: An African Odyssey, andThe Spirit Warrior’s Dream.

What Do We Know About Participatory Cultures: An Interview with Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Part Two)

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As you note, the term, "participatory culture," can be seen as emerging from the cultural studies tradition, but there is also a strong history of writing about "participatory politics." Are these separate conversations? What might these two strands of research have to say to each other?

The participation conversation is a very broad one, and rightly noted, one that has ebbed and flowed across the centuries.  Rather than the concept of participation, it is the dominant focus of the participation that is unique to the time period - political participation, economic participation, social action.  Of course, even when one topic dominated the push for participation, thousands of smaller participatory cultures also thrived around issues such as crafting, gamesmanship, agriculture, and invention.  The communication technologies of this century have simply divided and amplified the topics allowing many more participatory cultures to flourish in unison.

Some have argued that all cultures are by definition participatory. What distinguishes contemporary forms of participatory culture from their predecessors within, say, folk culture?

Participatory cultures are not new.  They are simply the most recent manifestation of human's desire to be a part of something. One of the reasons there is so much attention placed on participatory cultures now is that they are starkly contrasted by the postmodern theories that immediately preceded them.  Postmodern theorists valued resistance, disruption and divergence, while participatory cultures value contribution and collaboration.  Today's participatory cultures are both uniquely new and comfortably traditional venues – like returning to your family home for Thanksgiving to find your bedroom is the new home office.

 

Writing about participatory culture poses a different set of questions than writing about audience resistance, a concept that dominated cultural studies a few decades ago. Resistance to what? Participation in what? What are some of the current models for describing what people "participate" in when they are part of a participatory culture? Is participatory culture necessarily a collective phenomenon or does it make sense to talk about participating as an individual?

The concept of audience resistance played an important role in cultural studies, but the notion of resistance seems almost quaint when one considers the nature of political, economic, and cultural power in the early 21st century. As individual citizens, each one of us is situated within multiple power networks.

In many instances (e.g. the physical borders of the nation-state, the globally dispersed contours of global capitalism), power relationships are imposed upon us at birth. We might be proud to be Americans (or Chinese or Canadians), but our national pride is a lucky accident. The physical coordinates of our birthplace and the citizenship status of our parents determine our initial location in the networks of state power. Financial power networks are also imposed upon us; we are born into capitalism. We might choose to remedy the shortcomings of the economic status quo by building alternative exchange networks (e.g. farmers markets, cooperatives, gift economies, remix culture), but it is almost impossible to completely subtract ourselves from the domination of global capital.

The good news is that we can also situate ourselves in political, economic, and cultural power networks of our own choosing. This is hardly a new phenomenon – Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated free associations in Democracy in America as far back as 1835 – but the emergence of the global Internet and affiliated communication technologies has accelerated our ability to create alternative networks from the ground up at the same time that we work to transform dominant institutions.

Is participation necessarily a collective phenomenon? To the extent that we participate in networks with other human beings, there is always a collective dimension. We engage, we share, we mentor, we feel connected, and we care about what other members of the community think. This is necessarily social.

However, the decision about which networks we select as meaningful outlets for participation is almost always an individual decision. If we truly value participatory culture, we must recognize the right of individuals to choose to not participate.

 

Pedagogical concerns remain central to these discussions, if we are to insure that the widest possible range of people have access to the skills and resources they need to meaningfully participate. What insights might the book offer to educators who want to bring more participatory practices to schools, libraries, and other public institutions?

 

The difficult part about participatory pedagogy is that educators must be willing to relinquish absolute control over the conversation.  For a very long time, especially in Western educational settings, teachers were situated at the top of hierarchical learning models. In educational participatory cultures, learning does not necessarily happen quickly, it is not delivered in a tidy, self-contained package, and it certainly does not conform to government standards.  Learning emerges from the conversational and collaborative journey; it is not located in "the correct answer to the teacher's question." Members of participatory cultures find their own way to solutions, often not by the most direct or conventional paths.

Your book discusses practices such as participatory budgeting which involve the interface between citizens and governments. What has been the track record so far for such initiatives? What are the biggest challenges in opening existing institutions to greater forms of democratic participation?

Neither of us are experts in participatory budgeting, but we were encouraged to see related panels at the SXSW Interactive Conference this year in Austin. For example, one panel focused on participatory budgeting and the use of crowdsourcing to determine how government funds should be spent.  To date, most of the successful initiatives have taken place in Latin America and Europe.  It was heartening to see similar discussions in the United States.

 

Aaron Alan Delwiche (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University. His research interests include participatory culture, intergenerational gaming, and wearable computing. In 2009, with support from the Lennox Foundation, he organized the lecture series Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries. In 2010, he delivered a talk titled "We are all programmers now" at TEDx San Antonio. He is also co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

 

Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.  Her research addresses the boundaries of speech in media and participatory cultures as well as the ethics of this speech.  Jennifer is the author of the 2010 book Defending the Good News: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand the First Amendment and co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

 

What Do We Now Know About Participatory Cultures: An Interview with Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Part One)

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I am happy today to be introducing Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, the editors of an important new anthology, The Participatory Cultures Handbook. Anyone who has followed this blog over the years will recognize the names of many of the contributors to this collection, which includes Christopher M Kelty, Jason Mittell, Suzanne Scott, Mia Consalvo, Benjamin Stokes, Owen Gallagher, Pierre Levy, Daren Brabham, Howard Rheingold, Barry Joseph, and Paul Taylor, among many others, each represented by an original essay which expands their earlier writings on this topic and seeks to contribute to a larger conversation about the nature of participation (cultural, political, educational) in the early 21st century. The core topics include collective intelligence, new media literacies, crowd-sourcing, participatory democracy, fandom, serious games, blogging, and the digital arts, among much much more. In short, there's something in this book which will speak to pretty much anyone who regularly checks out this blog. I have been raiding this book for my teaching and my writing ever since I first got my hands on it, and my students have found it a valuable resource for a broad range of projects. (Full disclosure: I have a short essay in this collection written in conversation with Suzanne Scott about her work on contemporary "fan boy auteurs." Both essays add some more specificity to oft-made claims about the blurring boundary between fan and author.) Over the next few posts, I am going to be grilling Delwiche and Henderson about some of the core themes that cut across the collection. I have to admit that I had a lot of fun framing these questions, since many of them are questions I am often asked in other interviews or that I am currently struggling with in my own work, and the two editors do a great job of putting forth some original reflections about these core and recurring concerns that we all confront as we seek to better understanding the participatory turn in contemporary culture. From my perspective, their responses, like the book itself, strikes an appropriate balance, embracing the collective push towards greater and more meaningful participation while also expressing skepticism about the ways that the term has been taken up and deployed rhetorically by a range of powerful and entrenched institutions. They welcome both writers who are excited about contemporary developments and those who offer strong critiques of some of the underlying assumptions driving this work. In the end, their work brings much greater rigor to our understanding of participatory culture, both by expanding the range of case studies we have to work with and pushing for more precise distinctions between different models of participatory practice.

The book includes a range of different practices, from those associated with fandom to those associated with crowd sourcing or community organizing or citizen science or digital poetry. How are you defining the core concept of participatory culture?

 

In The Participatory Cultures Handbook, we use the definition of participatory culture from the 2006 white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century that you and your co-authors wrote for the MacArthur Foundation. As a starting point, we rely on your explanation that participatory cultures are characterized by "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of information mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices" (p. 7). A participatory culture "is also one in which members believe that their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connectedness with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they have created" (p. 7).

After completing the book, we would now suggest there are three primary kinds of participatory cultures: consensus cultures, creative cultures, and discussion cultures.  While we acknowledge these are fuzzy categories, they do offer a structure for thinking about what it means to participate. We believe the nature of participatory cultures shifts just as it does in real world settings where cultures are shaped by venue, topic, participants, and interest level.

The most traditionally "productive" participatory cultures are often consensus cultures, or agreement-based.  They frequently reside in the realm of "work" where there is a goal or outcome to be met.  Something must be completed or solved or fixed.  These could easily be subdivided into expert cultures where people with specialized knowledge join together to leverage the power of collective intelligence and democratic cultures where "average citizens" do the same thing.  In the book, chapters about CERN and crisis mapping tend to the former while those about participatory budgeting tend to the latter.

Creative cultures are those in which participants are encouraged to create, share, and comment all within a safe and supportive environment.  Remix cultures live in this space, as do art and writing cultures.  The creative portion of fan cultures reside here – the fan fiction and fan-art sub-sites, for example.  In these spaces, participants are passionate about their creativity and the topics that spur those passions.  They are often lifers, who join a culture and stick with it.

Discussion cultures are ones where a topic rather than an outcome is at the heart of participation.  Sports fandoms, news sites, and food blogs all fall within the realm of discussion cultures.  Here, we often see more disagreement than support with participants engaging in sometimes heated, often real-time, exchanges on topics of personal and professional interest.  Participants in discussion cultures are not always long-time residents; they often roam from site to site as they chase the topic.

 

­­I have been seeing increased skepticism about the concept of participatory culture as a rhetoric of participation gets applied to many different sets of relationships between consumers and commercial interests. What qualities need to be in place before meaningful participation may occur?

This skepticism is well founded. One can think of many instances in which organizations use the rhetoric of participation to legitimize non-participatory relationships. This often happens when commercial interests leverage participatory culture practices to promote marketing goals (e.g., crowdsourcing slogans for a new flavor of tortilla chips), but corporations are not the only entities that attempt to pass off faux-participation as something more meaningful. The rhetoric of participation is regularly applied (and misapplied) to relationships between governments and citizens, as well as to relationships between activist groups and their members. This happens in groups of all sizes -- from smaller community groups to national political associations.

In some ways, the pretense of participation is more troubling than the absence of participation. When authentic participatory energy turns out to be little more than democratic window dressing for top-down decision-making, those who devoted time and energy to the process might walk away feeling cynical, hopeless, and discouraged. This is why it is so important for us to ask questions about participatory procedures.

To what extent can the objectives of a participatory project be defined and refined by all participants? If the power to articulate project goals is concentrated in a handful of individuals, the process does not deliver meaningful participation.

To what extent are participants' contributions filtered and edited before they are shared with the broader community? Often, organizations include "talk back" sections on institutional web sites; these components give the appearance of engaged member feedback. However, when one takes a closer look, it becomes clear that user comments are carefully filtered before they are posted. Meaningful participation is inversely proportional to the extent of censorship and editorial control.

It is true that there might be some situations in which community moderation is necessary – for example, in participatory communities that include minors. In these instances, participants have every right to scrutinize the transparency of moderation practices.

Some would argue that meaningful participation is a binary concept: it exists or it does not. However, it might be more useful -- and more realistic -- to think of participatory culture in analog terms. Some processes offer more authentic participation than others, and we should agitate for arrangements that are as close to the participatory ideal as possible.  There are times when we can only nudge. There are times when we push harder. And, every once in a while, as Mario Savio reminds us, "you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… upon all the levers, upon all the apparatus… and you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people that own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

 

Some argue that opportunities for meaningful participation still rest almost exclusively within groups which have enjoyed various forms of privilege in the past -- especially those within elite or dominant segments of the population. What do we know about inequalities in opportunities to participate? Are there compelling cases of participation "from the bottom" and what lessons might we learn from these examples that would help us broaden opportunities for participation?

Privileged elites have always had greater access to participatory technologies and political structures. In Athens, direct democracy was erected on the backs of women and slaves who were excluded from the polis. In America, representative democracy was erected on the backs of women and slaves who were excluded from the voting booth. Thankfully, the history of democratic institutions is progressive, and more people have access to participatory culture than ever before.

This progress stems directly from the fact that disenfranchised human beings have agitated for full and equal participation, often risking their lives in the process. The most crucial battles for civil rights have been waged "from the bottom" by networks of individuals who have wrestled communication tools (literacy, the printing press, radio, music, film, video, computers) from the hands of elites. In turn, activists have used these tools to penetrate and transform political and economic systems in which they are located.

How can we broaden the opportunities for meaningful participation? First, we should nurture media literacy projects at all levels of society, making sure to address what you termed "the participation gap" in the report (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture) that you co-authored for the MacArthur Foundation. In practical terms, this means fostering the competencies and social skills identified in the report: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation.

However, redefining media literacy to include an emphasis on skills required for participation is only the first step. If we want to preserve and extend opportunities for participation, we must broaden our thinking about the term "digital literacy." It is no longer sufficient for citizens to understand how to use computers; we must also learn how to program the machines that rule our lives.

If we continue to accept technological gadgets and protocols as neutral gifts from benevolent technical elites, we pave the way for our future subjugation. As Douglas Rushkoff observes in Program or Be Programmed, digital technologies are always embedded with external purposes. "They act with intention," he warns. "If we don't know how they work, we won't even know what they want. The less involved and aware we are of the way our technologies are programmed and program themselves, the more narrow our choices will become; the less we will be able to envision alternatives to the pathways described by our programs; and the more our lives and experiences will be dictated by their biases" (p. 148-149).

Scholars and activists often mystify digital technologies even as they celebrate them. We convince ourselves that computer programming is conceptually difficult or ideologically suspect. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not difficult to learn basic programming, and it is easy to master the fundamental concepts that empower us to "speak back" to technology. Yet, even as progressive iterations of computer programming languages become more and more accessible, our fellow citizens seem increasingly willing to think of themselves as users rather than programmers – as consumers rather than coders.

It is only possible to sustain and broaden participatory culture for all citizens if we take up this challenge. If we dodge this responsibility – if we fail to teach our neighbors and ourselves how to program, and thus control, the ubiquitous machines that regulate our lives – we squander the accomplishments of those who have fought to expand the boundaries of participatory culture throughout human history.

We are all programmers now. Or, at least we can be, if we are willing to try.

 

Aaron Alan Delwiche (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University. His research interests include participatory culture, intergenerational gaming, and wearable computing. In 2009, with support from the Lennox Foundation, he organized the lecture series Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries. In 2010, he delivered a talk titled "We are all programmers now" at TEDx San Antonio. He is also co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

 

Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.  Her research addresses the boundaries of speech in media and participatory cultures as well as the ethics of this speech.  Jennifer is the author of the 2010 book Defending the Good News: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand the First Amendment and co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

 

"Same Old Shit!": Fan Resistance at Wrestlemania 29 (Part Two)

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  Wrestlemania 2

The best wrestling performers know how to work with the audience, pumping them up or reacting on the fly to their moods. When we visited the Fan Axxcess event the day before, we saw some of the wrestlers from the WWE’s NXT school training. You could see that they were all working to learn how to communicate emotions through broad gestures and facial expressions that could be read by fans on the other side of the auditorium; they were working to develop a recognizable personality through which they could deliver those stock gestures and devices. And we saw people at various stages of development, including a few who had appeared prematurely on the WWE’s main stage and then been sent back down for retooling because they couldn’t deliver what was expected of them. For the most part, they were performing in character, but not really reaching across the fourth wall and engaging with the audience.

A great wrestler knows how to pull that off. I was impressed, again, with the melodramatic elements of the Jack Swagger vs. Alberto Del Rio match. Here, we saw a kind of classic “agit-prop.”

When I got pulled into WWE years ago, it was by waking up on a Saturday morning to hear the show-down between Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter. Slaughter was an American soldier who had been brainwashed by the Iraqis; Hulk was seeking to protect the American spirit and inspire the young “Hulkamaniacs,” especially those whose parents were fighting overseas. This was in the midst of the first Gulf War, and the storyline seemed well designed to play upon the emotions of the spectators.

The Swagger fight was equally of-the-moment: Swagger and his manager, Zeb Colter, represent the Tea Party. Their patter emphasizes the nativist side of the Tea Party. They wrap themselves in the American Flag and chant “We the People,” yet they are militantly anti-immigrant. So, in New Jersey, they rode out in a military vehicle and Zeb began to denounce people who speak Spanish, Italian, Greek, and finally, Yiddish, with the crowd booing louder and louder with each new prejudice. Then, Del Rio was introduced as a Mexican-American success story, reading aloud the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, and talking about how much he loves his new country. The effect on the crowd around us was visceral. For the most part, the crowd was playing their parts, booing the Tea Party and cheering the Mexicans. Add to this mix Del Rio’s announcer, Ricardo Rodriguez, who wobbled out on crutches, having been mercilessly attacked by Swagger on Raw a few weeks before, and you had a classic melodrama.

I was struck by two specific fans in the crowd. Behind us, there was a massive black guy who was standing up on his seat and chanting “white power” in response to Swagger. It was clearly a self-consciously ironic performance. But, then, across the aisle from us, there was this knot-head who keep chanting “USA, USA, USA”, and it was not clear to me where he was coming from. We were holding up a sign which jokingly read, “If Swagger wins I’ll move to Canada”. He was enraged that we were holding up a Canadian sign. I definitely thought from the way he harassed us that he might well be celebrating Swagger without any sense that he was the heel in this particular match. But here, the line between reality and performance was blurred beyond recognition.

I thought Cena’s performance on Raw after Wrestlemania was striking. It’s clear he knows that many of the hardcore fans don’t like him, and he was playing into this, giving people reasons to boo and reasons to cheer in more or less equal measures. Above all, he was seeking to bring on the heat and provoke as loud of a reaction as he could.

It’s the most dignified thing he can do. Most of those fans aren’t going to cheer for him. If he begs for their approval then he’ll look pathetic. By re-framing the boos as a sign of his success or proof of the fans’ passion for him he saves some face.

I’ve found the Del Rio-Swagger feud to be very polarizing among fans. Trust me: I wish the audience was eating it up. I like it. But here’s what I see instead: Everyone has a different opinion. Some fans like us think it’s a cool story and admire the way all of the performers are playing their parts. Other fans think the whole story is in poor taste. They say they watch escapist TV to get away from the ugliness, racism and political deadlock of the evening news. Some fans feel offended by Del Rio’s Mexican character because they view him as a stereotypical immigrant. Others – perhaps like the bald dickhead who was yelling at you for waving a Canada sign - more or less agree with Jack Swagger’s frustration with immigrants, or refuse to boo the USA and cheer Mexico. From an artistic standpoint I think it’s great that this story is challenging the audience. The WWE should be telling this story. But the result has been that crowds been restless, and their vocal reaction has been kind of muddled. You’re hearing weak boos for Swagger intermingling with weak “USA! USA!” chants. None of that reads well on TV.

As for the minor league wrestlers from NXT I agree with everything you said. It’s very cool to see these guys so early in their careers. All of today’s top superstars, including John Cena, The Rock and CM Punk, trained somewhere. There is an audience of fans out there who is even more interested in watching unknown athletes in the small independent wrestling promotions than in watching the established stars, and for much the same reasons that there’s an audience might prefer home town indy rockers to famous pop stars. They can watch the action really close up, even catch a few words with them in between performances. Pose for a picture, sign an autograph. Scout the talent. There’s a romance and simplicity to the trainees. They’re sacrificing a lot for their dream. I don’t personally focus on indy wrestling. I only have so many hours to devote to wrestling, and I prefer the grand spectacle of the WWE. But I get why so many fans prefer the indies.

Yes, like any other fandom, the WWE fans incorporate a range of interests and different forms of subcultural knowledge. In many fandoms, the result is fragmentation and individualization. Yet, this may be one of the reasons I am so interested in the collective dimensions of fan response – the shouts and chants at the match require a high degree of cooperation. There are certainly moments where two fractions play against each other in a kind of call-response fashion. So, “Let’s Go Cena” is followed by “Cena Sucks” or “Undertaker” is followed by “CM Punk”, with two sides working together to create a rhythmic dialogue. There are other times these factions are set against each other with boos and cheers trying to drown each other out.

Yet, often, everyone joins in a shared response – or at least a large segment of the crowd does. That response may represent a consensus which has been hammered out online and then expressed spontaneously at ringside. So, “boring” may be an aesthetic reaction to the performance, but it seems grounded in shared criteria, or “same old shit” seems like a spontaneous response to the scripting and the plot, but it often reflects the fans’ disappoint that the more imaginative speculations discussed online haven’t panned out. Some of the chants represent the shared lore of the wrestling fans, so they may chant the name of the referees or the announcers, rather than the wrestlers in the ring, and that seems to require a deeper, inside knowledge than most casual fans would possess.

There seem to be certain basic chants which may persist even when the wrestlers they are associated with are no longer performing. It seems the crowd will use any excuse to go into Ric Flair’s characteristic hooting sound. At the same time, we can see processes which support innovation. So, someone may try out a new chant or gesture. If it seems to express something the crowd cares about at that moment, it may start to spread really rapidly. Some of the best contributions become part of the collective repertoire and may resurface at other events around the country (especially if the chant is clearly audible on the television broadcast). As we’ve suggested, sometimes, this is about playing along with the official storyline and sometimes, it may be about resisting or playing against the dominant narrative.

All of this brings us to the now legendary crowd responses on the RAW after Wrestlemania. You and I, alas, had to fly back to LA for our respective jobs, though you caught some of that broadcast via the airplane’s media system (thank you, Virgin Atlantic) and I caught up with much of it on Tivo later. Can you share some of your impressions of what was going on there?

 

Let me answer that in a round-about way. Every year there are literally dozens of wrestling shows and conventions booked to coincide with Wrestlemania weekend. Virtually every regional/independent group in the country travels to the host city to perform at some small boxing gym or other dive. Past stars like Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart sell tickets for intimate Q&A sessions (to fund their retirement years.) WrestleCon is a whole fan convention which brings in past legends. A lot of these individual performances only draw 100 people. Then everyone comes together for Wrestlemania.

 

Met

You’d think that the crowd response for the big event would be through the roof, but that’s usually not the case. Part of it’s the acoustics of the space. When you’re in an open-air venue like MetLife Stadium the crowd noise travels upward into the sky instead of echoing around an enclosed arena. Part of it’s that the core fanbase is already worn out from the past few days, and just wants to settle in and watch the show. It’s also harder to get 80,000 fans on the same page at the same time than it is to get 16,000 fans. So even when everyone’s saying the same thing, the left 40,000 people will be shouting it two seconds after the right 40,000 people, and the result is a wordless din.

There’s also a different audience who’s joining the “core” Internet fans there – families from the local area who don’t get very rowdy, or people from the area who don’t know much about wrestling and just come to see what all the fuss is about. They dilute the concentration of the raucous crowd, and to some degree shame the loudest fans into behaving themselves. Every time I’ve ever heard fans start chanting something profane at Wrestlemania someone sitting next to them has told them to watch their mouth.

The next night when the WWE tapes their weekly television show, RAW, everything is different. The curiosity seekers stay home. So do the families. They’ve spent all they’re going to spend. What’s left are 16,000 Internet fans (and 5 horrified “other people”) wedged into an enclosed basketball arena, with acoustics designed to echo. They see that as their chance to air their agenda in front of WWE management and a worldwide television audience: to show how united they are in support of some wrestlers, and how unanimously they detest others.

One of the most dramatic moments this year was when the crowd got fed up with a match between Sheamus and Randy Orton. Instead of cheering or booing either performer in the ring, they decided to show just how little they cared by chanting the referee’s name. “Mike Chioda! Mike Chioda!” Then they chanted for each of the television broadcasters, one at a time. Then they called for RVD, a wrestler who’s in TNA!, the WWE’s rival promotion. They even threw in a Mexican soccer chant used by indy wrestler El Generico. When a villain, The Big Show, prematurely ended the match by ambushing Sheamus and Randy Orton with a steel chair the crowd chanted “Thank you, Big Show! Thank you, Big Show!”

Later, the crowd decided to show their appreciation for Fandango, a young performer they wanted to elevate, by humming his orchestral theme song. Listening to the broadcast, you can hear the humming begin as a faint murmur. Then more and more people start doing it, until almost the entire 16,000 person audience is shouting full blast and dancing in their seats. When Fandango’s match ended after just a minute or so and the WWE tried to move on the crowd kept singing. They kept it up for almost the last half hour of the show, right through John Cena’s match. Every time it would die down someone would start it back up again. Even though the event was in New Jersey, a video came out a couple of days later of the Houston Texans NFL cheerleaders doing the Fandango song-and-dance in practice. PETA employees in animal costumes did it too. Even a weather man danced on the news. Now fans around the country are apt to follow suit. Someone mixed Fandango and the Peanuts gang. That’s spreadable media.

The crowd basically held the broadcast hostage. They did not let the WWE tell the story that management directed. They started telling a new story about how bored they were with the “same old shit” the WWE was trying to sell. I’m sad that we weren’t there for it. As rude and bossy as the Internet fans can be, I’m proud of them.

But here’s the truly sad part. Just a week later the WWE has already made Fandangoing the least cool thing there is. On RAW they brought out all of the marketing statistics and glossy PR videos about how many people are Fndangoing. Then they had Fandango try for 10 minutes to get the crowd to do the Fandango dance on cue. He looked more and more desperate as he screamed hoarsely over and over for people to get out of their seats. Instead of just letting Fandangoing be a fun thing the fans came up with they turned it into a corny marketing gimmick.

Even worse, rumor has it that the WWE is considering holding next year’s RAW after Wrestlemania in the Louisiana Superdome “to make it an even bigger event.” But as I’ve already explained, the acoustics of such a giant stadium, the difficulty of getting 80,000 to harmonize at once, and the presence of so many families is all apt to discourage next year’s crowd from acting so disobedient. If the rumor is true, then the WWE is either out of touch (possible), or machiavelian (very possible).

The WWE constantly pushes fans to social media on their shows, and pops up updates on the screen every time they trend on Twitter. They write in press releases that every live audience is a focus group, and that they have their finger on the pulse of their fanbase like no other producers in Hollywood. But it often doesn’t seem like they actually give a damn what fans are saying. They just care that the fans are marketing them free of charge on social media, and giving them impressive statistics that their PR people can distribute. If the fans don’t embarrass the WWE by making a mockery of their broadcasts I don’t think management is going to take them seriously. I’ll probably remain a fan for many years to come, and I’ll be at Wrestlemania next year. But I won’t be there to dance and sing when the corporate fat cats tell me to. I’ll go to experience natural emotions and shout my genuine opinions. That’s what pro wrestling is about.

Postscript: WWE referee Jimmy Korderas said in a podcast interview:

"I appreciate the fact that the fans who paid their hard-earned money come and enjoy themselves and they cheer and boo and chant for whomever they want. They only issue I had with the post-WrestleMania Monday night crowd was it got a little bit crazy and overboard where they did it to amuse themselves as opposed to being entertained with what was going on inside the ring. So, it was almost like ‘We don’t care what’s going on in the ring, it has nothing to do with what’s going on in the ring; we’re going to start chanting and almost kind of hijacking the show to some extent... To me, it didn’t feel like it fit with the actual presentation of the show... I just thought, like you said, it was more to entertain themselves than to be entertained by the festivities."

And this week's edition of Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer reports:

"Multiple WWE employees were upset with the crowd's unwelcoming reaction to Maria Menounos, particularly since they love affiliations with celebrities and with her subsequent letter acknowledging the negative response, it got out that a strong portion of their fanbase lack proper manners, refinement and decency."

Both of these items seem to show that wrestling employees expect their audience to "be entertained", "care about what's happening in the ring", and not be "unwelcoming." But fans expect the show to be entertaining and welcoming, and for the WWE to care about what's happening in the audience. I guess it could show a lack of 'manners, refinement and decency' if Rockne S. O'Bannon showed up at Paley Fest and the audience booed and chanted "Same old shit!" But it would seem even more ridiculous for Rockne to criticize his audience for not being entertained by his show. WWE Fans boo almost every time a celebrity comes on the show, and have for years. I can see how this puts Vince McMahon in an uncomfortable position with some of his business associates. But he's got a problem, because they're booing how corporate wrestling has become, and I think they'd like to sabotage those business relationships. That's definitely unfriendly. I just think the producers and their audience have irreconcilable differences in what they want.

 

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As the World Stops Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo about Soap Operas (Part Three)

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Much of your writing has focused on parallels between daytime serialized drama and the rise of "quality" shows, primetime dramas which marry serialized storytelling with higher budgets, deeper production values, and much shorter, season-based dramas which pack intense meaning into typically between 10 and 20 episodes in a season, as opposed to 260 episodes per year. What do you feel is the nature of the connection between today's critically acclaimed dramas on FX, AMC, HBO, Showtime, and elsewhere and the daytime serial drama?  

The success of early primetime serials like Dallas (1978) and Dynasty (1981) redefined the public perception of soap opera. Larger-than-life, over-the-top characters like J.R. Ewing and Alexis Carrington, who more resembled stock characters from the commedia dell'arte, than ATWT's Hughes family, were enormously entertaining to watch, but not because viewers found "meaning and resonance through a deeper connection."  And while Larry Hagman's (J.R) called Dallas as a cartoon rather than a soap opera, to the media and public these guilty pleasures were soaps simply by virtue of their seriality. The popularity of these primetime soaps coincided with Gloria Monty's transformation of General Hospital,, and had at least as profound an impact on daytime soaps. The spirit of Dallas and Dynasty continues in current primetime soaps Revenge and Scandal, and for the teenage demo, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars.

The Best of J.R. Ewing from Dallas

The true heirs of ATWT comprise a long list of often critically-acclaimed, always ratings challenged, and ultimately short-lived serial dramas.  While thirtysomething may not have looked anything like ATWT, the the day-to-day lives of two baby boomer families, the Stedmans and Westons, mirrored those of the Hughes and Lowells 30 years earlier. Thirtysomething ran from 1987-91 and never rose above 40th in the ratings. Its very ordinariness (tensions between career and family, visiting parents, finding a babysitter) made it, and similar shows that followed (My So-Called Life, Joan of Arcadia, Jack and Bobby, Friday Night Lights, Men of a Certain Age, to name but a few), a challenge to promote effectively.

How networks schedule these quiet, slow-paced shows creates another obstacle. Broadcast network programmers, under pressure to win time slots, often shuffle their lineup, making it difficult for viewers to find these shows, which, unlike episodic television, need to be watched in order. Sometimes networks cancel them after a handful of episodes, creating a self-fulling prophecy when fans hear about a promising new serial drama, but fearing yet another heartbreak (not being hyperbolic here:), decide not to watch.

Since cable networks rarely pull a serial drama before the first order of episodes has aired, and are able to place the show in a fixed time slot followed by multiple repeats (sometimes even daylong marathons), viewers have ample opportunity to connect with these quiet, slow-paced shows. But there are still issues beyond the obvious disadvantages shorter seasons create for serial dramas: less time to fully develop characters and their relationships means less time to fully engage viewers. When networks pick up serials dramas, the creators face uncertainty about the number of episodes that can undermine the pace of the storytelling. After a 13-episode first season, Parenthood was picked up for 22 episodes, then renewed for a 18-episode third season and 15 for the fourth. Since the season often ends before the network has announced that the show has been renewed (or not), the season finale could well be the series finale.

Sometimes, scheduling uncertainty can cause a show's demise. When the first season of TNT's Men of a Certain Age ended in February 2010, the show was averaging 2.6 million viewers per episode, enough for the network to order an additional 12 episodes. After the episodes were completed, TNT decided to air them in two batches.  The first set of six episodes ended in January 2011, and the show was holding its own, averaging 2.4 million viewers. But TNT held the second set until June, when average viewership dropped to 1.5 million and the show was cancelled, a fate that might well have been avoided had all 12 episodes aired as the writers intended when they laid out the second season.

The real challenge is how to describe these quiet, slow-paced shows, which, by their very nature, defy brevity, and struggle even on premium cable, where In Treatment lasted three seasons on HBO and Enlightened is currently fighting to be heard over the noisier Girls and Showtime's Homeland. When Ray Romano pitched Men of a Certain Age to FX, he was told it "wasn't loud enough." The show wound up on TNT, where it never really fit in with the network' s other original programming, procedurals like The Closer, and the light-hearted Franklin and Bash. When Men... was cancelled, critic Alan Sepinwall admitted , "I don't always do the best job of articulating the greatness of this series, but it's there in those moments I described above, and so many more. It is a series about small details, and those details add up into big things: big laughs and big emotion; big pain and big joy."

Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) has said that she always saw The Sopranos as a family drama. She's right; but take away the mob and what are the odds that The Sopranos would have been picked up, much less become a cultural phenomenon? Peter Horton (thirtysomethings's Gary) perfectly articulated the situation, describing how networks, cable and otherwise, are driven to create shows where something stands out: "'I'm a mother who sells pot,' (Weeds); 'I'm father, but I'm a meth dealer,' (Breaking Bad); 'I'm a gangster, but I have therapy,' (The Sopranos). There's always a but, whereas thirtysomething is about people," which is exactly how Irna Phillips described As the World Turns.

"Quiet" shows with no "buts" are the 21st-century manifestation of  the "your mother's soap opera" dilemma that ultimately doomed ATWT. The challenge facing today's vertical storytellers and programmers is to develop a brand evoking the appeal of "quiet" and the missing "but," that will stand out in an ever more crowded media landscape without compromising the integrity of the vertical storytelling axis. Developing that brand demands a more precise description and definition of vertical storytelling. That means first breaking down the characteristics of these shows at the elemental, even molecular level, a task hampered by the ambiguity of language that so flummoxed Alan Sepinwall. Virginia Heffernan's insightfull 2008 observation that Friday Night Lights "ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity," which limits "platforms for supplemental advertising" also applies to these shows, and adds to the challenge, and urgency, of developing a brand for them.

 

What are the most interesting experiments with soap opera storytelling that you feel are capturing the unique nature and potential of the "U.S. soap opera format" of storytelling?

 

And therein lies the fundamental (and vexing) question: what exactly is the unique nature of the "U. S. soap opera format?"  There's a vast difference between the public perception of soap opera as a melodramatic guilty pleasure populated with campy, over-the-top, plot-driven characters motivated by agendas rather than emotions, and mine. I would argue that soaps' unique nature lies in a narrative structure that emphasizes storytelling's vertical axis, revealing characters' interiority, their emotional and psychological back stories, and providing time for viewers to fully absorb that information. All of which creates the opportunity for viewers find meaning and resonance through a deeper connection to characters.

A conversation to be continued. But first, the economic realities and the toll they've taken on soap opera's unique nature.

From the time soaps moved from radio to television, the genre expanded: first adding the visual element, then growing from 15 minutes to a half hour, and in the late 1970s, to an hour . At the time, soaps were still a profit center for networks, and their budgets, while paltry compared to primetime shows, were sufficient to hire large casts with which writers wove rich, densely interconnected stories. After O.J., ratings took a hit from which they never recovered. Networks reduced the licensing fees they paid to the production companies, who cut the shows' budgets. There are a number of ways for producers to reduce the cost of on-screen talent (shifting highly-paid veterans to recurring status and reducing the guarantees for contract players), so smaller budgets didn't necessarily translate into fewer characters. What did happen was that there with fewer actors populating each episode, characters interacted less frequently, which limited opportunities for viewers to experience the full pleasure of the vertical axis. So, what had been a rich storytelling tapestry frayed and eventually shredded into the fragmented storytelling discussed above.

In July 2011, Prospect Park announced that they had acquired the online rights to two cancelled ABC soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, and planned to launch the shows in early 2012. Grateful fans cheered and the mainstream media took note. But, PP's announcement was premature: they had not yet negotiated contracts with the unions, and their business plan, which retained the shows' hour format, failed to attract sufficient financing. When PP said they were suspending their efforts a few months later, most observers believed the deal was dead.

Fast-forward to last December: PP announced that they had negotiated collective bargain agreements with the guilds and secured sufficient financing to begin production in February. PP had lost a credibility with many fans when they suspended their initial effort, and not surprisingly, the reboot's reboot was met with skepticism (and barely a mention in the mainstream media). Initially, PP took a lot of heat on the boards, but as their plans solidified, veteran actors signed on and distribution deals were struck with Hulu and iTunes, fans began to believe (the mainstream media silence continues). Production began on February 25th.

What PP's done over the the past 18 months is what the networks and Procter & Gamble Productions ought to have been doing before soaps' economic model, so successful for so long, was no longer viable. It took PP to recognize that for soaps to survive into the 21st-century, the Web would have to be more than just an additional platform for showing and promoting shows, then come back from an initial failure to make it happen. Perhaps the most important aspect of this resurrection is that the online reboot streamlines the format: 30, rather than 60 minutes; four episodes a week, rather than five. No doubt scaling back helped to convince investors, but will PP recognize the opportunity it has to exploit the shorter format and recapture the unique nature of soaps that has been lost over the years? I'm encouraged by the relatively small, multi-generational (of the 14 contract players, eight are over 40; of the eight, two are over 50, four past 60) cast that's been assembled for One Life to Live. All of the characters are deeply-connected, with long histories between and among them, so the elements are in place for PP to turn economic necessity into the mother of reinvention. The rebooted AMC and OLTL are slated to premiere some time in April.

When Irna Phillips blazed the trail for serial drama in the 1950s, the television landscape was minuscule, three networks, and relatively expensive to enter -- the $10,000 cost of the ATWT pilot was twice the median household income at the time. Today, as the price of technology continues to drop, anyone can make and upload video to a media landscape incalculably larger than 60 years ago.  Since the mid-1990s, the Web has been flooded with mostly free content of varying quality, including an ever-increasing number of online serials designed to appeal to soap fans. Like their primetime counterparts, these Web-series are most often considered soap operas only by virtue of their seriality.  Despite barebones budgets and minimal monetization, many of these series, juggle large casts of characters squeezed into short (7-12 minute) episodes, limiting possibilities for deep viewers engagement. Only a handful have fully engaged my inner soap fan. My favorite, the critically acclaimed Anyone But Me, premiered in 2008 and ran for 26 episodes over three years before the series finale in January 2012.

Last May, while Prospect Park was off the grid getting its ducks in a row, there was a small news item on the We Love Soaps site announcing a new YouTube channel, WIGS: Where It Gets Interesting. The channel promised "high-end, original, scripted series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads." WIGS co-creator, Rodrigo Garcia, had long plumbed the vertical storytelling axis in films like Things You Tell Just By Looking At Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories and Nine Lives, along with  HBO's In Treatment. He brought the same sensibility to the work he created for WIGS.

Blue

Serena

 Celia

 

WIGS co-creator, filmmaker Jon Avnet, shares his partner's storytelling sensibility, but even more important is how the two men went about creating the channel. With first-round seed money from Google, WIGS  became an official YouTube channel, making the project attractive to media partner, News Corp, and advertisers, AMEX and Unilever. As the pieces fell into place, including collective bargaining agreements with the entertainment unions, Avnet and Garcia invited more than a dozen writers and directors to create projects built around a female lead. Established actors, aware that their industry is in flux, were eager to participate even if it meant working for scale.

Before WIGS went live on May 14, Avnet and Garcia had produced enough content to run three episodes a week for almost seven months. Enough time to build an audience: more than 25 million views and 110,000 subscribers. The first season of WIGS included a few documentaries and short films, but the channel's foundation was13 scripted serial dramas made up of 2-15 episodes running 7-10 minutes with small casts -- sometimes as few as two characters.

Last month, FOX Broadcasting signed a multi-year deal with WIGS "to expand the breadth of offerings through the WIGS channel, and test and nurture dramatic concepts and talent in the digital realm..with an eye toward building content that can be programmed on FOX and/or other channels." On March 15th, WIGS returns with a second season of Blue, followed later in the spring by the next installments of Lauren, and a new series Paloma.

Avnet and Garcia created WIGS specifically with women as the target audience. So, what to make of one commenter's question, "what does it say that I, a 35-year old man, find myself addicted to WIGS?" What to make of the substantial number of women who were (and are) deeply engaged fans of Friday Night Lights and Men of a Certain Age, both shows ostensibly for and about men? The appeal of vertical storytelling clearly transcends gender; what about other demographic markers? What are the characteristics of viewers drawn to the vertical storytelling axis?

These questions, and others yet to be articulated, need to be explored before vertical storytellers can identify and maximize their potential audience. The data generated by the 110,000+ WIGS subscribers contain essential information for brand development, which, properly analyzed, can also inform the qualitative insights necessary to fully identify viewership.

 

Where has this project led you? Now that you've put together a personal reflection on your relationship to As the World Turns, what's the next step in your ongoing research about the soap opera's place in our cultural history and in our contemporary culture?

Probably the most frustrating part of writing about soap opera has been the lack of a framework within which to consider soap opera's place in our contemporary culture. Identifying the underlying factors has been challenging because there's no hierarchical relationship among them. Over the past several years, I've posted over 100 short articles on my blog. This piece represents my first effort to begin crafting those pieces into a larger context; I've barely scratched the surface.

I first began writing about soaps as a fan. And it's as a fan, saddened and angered with the premature demise of show after show carrying on (consciously or not) the legacy that Irna Phillips began when she created As the World Turns, that I began exploring what it would take to carve out a place for this kind of storytelling in today's rapidly-shifting media landscape. Personal as my efforts have been, this work can only continue with the collaboration of media scholars and professionals along with institutional support.

On related fronts, I'm currently completing the syllabus for a class, "The Influence and Evolution of the American Soap Opera, I'll be pitching to Boston area schools, and considering the possibility of a book to follow.  Also in progress: a proposal for an Irna Phillips biography.

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning... Among her other publications are "Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps" (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); "Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera's single mother 1901-1973" (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

As the World Stopped Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo on Soap Operas (Part Two)

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You provide a very personal account of your own gradual disconnect from enjoying and having an emotional engagement with As the World Turns. How would you describe your relationship to the show, both as a fan and as a critic, and how did that relationship evolve over time?

It's ironic, and no small testament to the power of its storytelling, that I became so deeply involved with ATWT: Since it aired on the East Coast at 1:30, while I was at school, I was far more familiar with, and have far more vivid memories of, Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light, which were on when my sister and I came home for lunch in grammar school, and Another World, which I could see if I came straight home from junior high school.

 

I only got to watch ATWT on holidays, vacations and sick days, a pattern that continued after I moved to Boston in 1973, found a full time job and worked on my undergraduate degree at night. In those pre-VCR days, what I remember more than specific stories is the familiarity of the characters, who were always there when I was able to watch. That was until I took a year off (1982-3) to complete my degree.  While I had been peripherally aware of the General Hospital phenomenon, I had  no idea that GH's success was why the ATWT on my screen was so different from what I remembered.  But, I actually enjoyed what I saw and never considered abandoning the show. At the time, I was in advertisers' target demo, so from that perspective, the change in direction was a success.

 

But, while I was enjoying the ATWT's new direction, my mother was not. She missed the show she had loved for 25 years and eventually stopped watching. She wasn't the only one; the show lost more viewers than it gained and a couple of years later (1984-5) the Calhoun-Marland team righted the ship and the show rose in the ratings. But, without my mother, although she continued to watch GL.

 

After college, the combination of a flexible job and a VCR allowed me to become a serious fan. I was writing about nursing (like soaps, strongly associated with women and thereby marginalized. Also, like soaps' "not your mother's soap opera," nursing had internalized the belief that to be valued they had to become something else: "professional" nurses who didn't want to be seen as "that kind of nurse," dealing with bodily fluids at the bedside.")  While writing an article for Soap Opera Weekly on how nurses were portrayed on soaps I interviewed Doug Marland. A few months later, what was supposed to be a short news piece about CBS ending its head writer training program morphed into a longer article about the paths of three head writers (including Marland), which got me thinking seriously about soaps.

 

In 1995, I began pitching a piece to coincide with ATWT's 40th anniversary in 1996 to Smithsonian Magazine; it took over a year to convince the editor. By the time I arrived on the set in mid-March when the anniversary episode was taped, there was a new production team in place (see above) and the mantra of the executive producer, head writers and publicist was "we're not 40 years old, we're 40 years young."  I could see that things were falling apart, and while I could identify bits and pieces of what was wrong, I couldn't figure out how those pieces fit together (even if I could, I'm not sure Smithsonian would have been the right place), so I was forced to abandon the piece. I wrote one more article analyzing the demographics of soap opera audience, then turned my attention to writing a screenplay (isn't everyone:) and short plays.

 

It wasn't until Sam Ford asked me to be on his thesis committee in 2006 that I was able to begin identifying the "bits and pieces" that had undermined the Smithsonian piece. The task now is to integrate those elements into a cohesive framework within which to consider the full impact of soaps -- a task made all the more challenging since there is no obvious hierarchical relationship among the elements.

 

The book begins with a deep look at Irna Phillips and how the details of her own life so intensely shaped many aspects of As the World Turns. You also recently published a piece about Irna for Harvard Magazine. What do you believe Phillips' place is in the history of the soap opera in particular, and in the greater landscape of U.S. television?

 

Irna Phillips was a risk taker who, rather than fear failure, learned from it. In 1948, she wrote to P&G's William Ramsey that she had doubts about televising soaps, suggesting that it would be some time before a televised serial could succeed. (She doesn't explain why, but at the time there were roughly 100,00 television sets in the country, most concentrated in the New York area, up from 44,000 the previous year. As the post-war economy expanded, the number of sets increased exponentially; by 1953, over half of US household had a television.) Yet, just a few months later, in January 1949, Irna approached NBC about creating what many consider the first television soap, These are My Children. Accounts vary (some say the network pulled it after five weeks; Irna says she pulled it after 13 weeks when the network shifted its time slot), but by any measure, the television's first soap opera was a failure. Whether the show failed because it was bad (according to Television World) or because the low viewership was a function of too few households with televisions is impossible to determine.

 

The success of two early television soaps on CBS (Search for Tomorrow and  Love of Life), convinced Irna that the time was right to move Guiding Light from radio, where it began in 1937, to television. But GL's owner, P&G believed that only serials created specifically for television would succeed.  Undaunted, Irna revised two GL "highly dramatic" radio scripts (it's not clear if she secured P&G's permission), then spent more than $5000 of her own money (in 1952, the median household income was $3900) to tape the episodes and the show premiered on CBS in June, while remaining on radio until 1956 (when 71% of households had at least one television).

 

When Irna first floated the idea of a half-hour soap the suits were again skeptical. One executive told her, "we don't believe in investing in a possible failure." But, as with GL, Irna persevered, this time collaborating with longtime colleagues, Agnes Nixon and Ted Corday, to write and finance ($10,000) a pilot for ATWT. According to Irna, the nine cast members were so impressed, "they agreed to hold themselves available for six months" until the pilot was picked up.

 

In the early 1960s, Irna became a consultant for what would become the first successful primetime soap opera, ABC's Peyton Place (1964-1969). She then created a primetime ATWT spinoff, Our Private World, which ran for 19 weeks (38 episodes) from May 5 - September 10, 1965. CBS's decision to air the show over the summer, rather than launching it as part of the new fall season, likely contributed to its short run, and may also have reflected a lack of confidence in Irna. Since her unfinished memoir, All My Worlds, ends in late 1963 with her creation of Another World, if Irna had any thoughts about All My Worlds and the two shows she later created, Love is a Many Splendored Thing and A World Apart, they would be in her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.

 

Much of your book focuses on the ways in which management practices and corporate structure in the last 15 years of As the World Turns' 54-year run damaged both the quality of the story and the relationship the show maintained with its fans. In the course of your research and writing, in what ways were soap opera fans drawing these connections between industry news and what played out on their screens on an everyday basis? And what can media scholars and those who work in or study other media industries learn from studying the ongoing relationship between longterm viewers and a media property like ATWT?

 

When fan magazines covering soaps first appeared in the late-1960s, soaps had been on television for almost 20 years. Those early publications consisted mainly of interviews with actors and features that took fans behind-the-scenes of the shows. It wasn't until Soap Opera Weekly came on the scene in November 1989 that fans had timely access to industry news and serious criticism. In addition to episode recaps, Weekly published spoilers that let fans know what would happen when. According to founding editor, Mimi Torchin, fans welcomed information that allowed them to prioritize. Of course, in a extreme example of unintended consequences, spoilers have become a vexing challenge for all serialized storytelling in the digital age.

Both Weekly and its sister publication, Soap Opera Digest, included "Comings and Goings" and "The Revolving Door," features that alerted fans when actors left roles, or were cast as new characters. This information became a form of spoiler that allowed fans to speculate outside of what they saw on the screen. Producers and writers exacerbated this phenomenon by sharing information about who the new (or recast) character would be paired with, and the direction the story would take.  With the final years of ATWT  characterized by a seemingly endless array of new characters, few of whom were connected to the core Hughes family, when fans heard the news online, many were not inclined to give the show the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how stories played out before passing (usually negative) judgment.

Another factor to consider: the unintended consequences of rebranding, which requires a willingness to to alienate, and even lose, existing customers to attract desired customers. This worked brilliantly for AMC when the network shifted its focus from showing old movies to become the HBO of basic cable. But movie buffs had plenty of options; not so with soaps. Whether it was articulated or not, when ATWT shifted the show's focus in the early-1980s to capture younger viewers, the show seemed willing to lose its existing viewers, like my mother, who left and never returned, even when the show corrected course a few years later. But, with all soaps trying to recreate General Hospital's success, there was no place for disaffected fans to turn. So many stayed, and with the remote controls that came with their new VCRs in hand,  fast forwarded through many of the new characters that populated the ATWT canvas, contributing to the show's increasingly fragmented storytelling. One consequence  of fragmented storytelling is a fragmented audience, with each segment expressing its own spin on the genre's aesthetic. The result: divergent and often conflicting comments that made it difficult to interpret and apply fan feedback.

In 1996 P&G set up a toll-free number to provide viewers with inside information about the ATWT. At the end callers were asked who they wanted to see the troubled Emily Stewart paired with: "press 1 for Diego, 2 for Jeff." Since "other," "none of the above" or,"in the case of this particular character, "a good therapist," were not among the choices, the results were  meaningless. And the way in which the question was posed (the only option to bypass the question was hanging up) made clear that this was not a serious effort on the part of PGP to engage viewers, but rather a ham-handed token.

Another example of the show's tin ear was someone's (probably not the executive producer or head writer, both of whom had worked in soaps long enough to understand the subtle intricacies of how time unfolds on soaps; depending on the circumstances, sometimes compressed, sometimes extended.) literal interpretation of a frequent complaint about soaps: "the stories move too slowly." In 2008, ATWT abandoned soap opera's traditional narrative structure and began a series of short-term story arcs, some of which wrapped up in a single episode. The combination of self-contained episodes and spoilers made at least one fan happy: "Not sure how or why TPTB have come up with this new concept, but is sure is working well. I think I've watched a total of one or two episodes in the last two weeks." An unintended consequence that inflicted considerable damage in ATWT's final years.

Without an understanding of not just what's being said, but what it means, soliciting feedback is at best, futile, at worst, damaging. When it came to soap opera, however, there was no guarantee that those who were conducting the research had ever watched soaps. According to one former network executive I talked with, it was the rare researcher who even took the time to familiarized themselves with the show for which they were collecting feedback. So, while their empirical observations may have been accurate, without a shared experiential frame of reference with their subjects, researchers often lacked to tools to infer, then accurately interpret and apply how fans experience soaps.

When it comes to suspending disbelief, the very nature of daytime soaps demands more of viewers than other dramatic media. But as the genre's scope expanded over the years, traditional elements -- intimate relationships between family, friends and lovers -- began to share space with time travel, the supernatural, omnipotent villains and characters whose repeated returns from the dead often defied both logic and the laws of physics. When ATWT's James Stenbeck first reappeared in 1986 after being presume dead, he provided a simple explanation: "I had a parachute."  But as explanations for his subsequent resurrections became more and more preposterous, some fans were angry, feeling that the writers were taking advantage of their willingness to suspend disbelief -- even insulting their intelligence. Others chalked it up to a "it's a soap opera. No one gives a shit if it makes sense" mentality on the part of writers and producers. By 2009, when Stenbeck returned from the dead for the fourth and final time, the writers didn't bother to even go through the motions. And rather than get angry, those fans still watching responded with detached bemusement.

The number of serialized dramas has exploded in the past 15 years, so dominating television programming that a recent piece in TVGuide suggests that serial dramas may be reaching the saturation point. The challenges facing these shows -- maintaining the integrity of the storytelling in the face of network interference and the shuffling of show runners, spoilers, time-shifting, and more recent additions to the lexicon, binge watching and, perhaps most important, hate-watching -- all have their antecedents in soaps. Current and future storytellers facing the challenge of attracting viewers in a media landscape drowning in serial drama have much to learn by understanding how soaps and their fans have dealt with these issues.

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 Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning... Among her other publications are "Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps" (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); "Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera's single mother 1901-1973" (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

As The World Stopped Turning: Lynn Liccardo Talks About Soap Operas (Part One)

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I have often acknowledged that fans are the true experts on popular culture: their passionate relationship with a favorite series or franchise often motivates them to research it more deeply, read it more closely, and interpret it more richly than an academic would be able to do. Not all fans know how to articulate their findings in ways that move beyond the particular details and speak to the larger context and implications of their objects of study, but those who do have much to teach us about their particular corners of the popular culture universe. Lynn Liccardo is an extraordinary soap opera fan, who over the course of her life has moved from a passion for As the World Turns and its creator Irma Phillips, towards more and more active engagement with the soap opera industry (such as it has become) and who has written professionally about soaps for a number of years. I was lucky to meet Liccardo when she served on the thesis committee for one of my MIT graduate students Sam Ford, now co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture; she has been coming to our Futures of Entertainment conferences ever since; she contributed to Sam's book on the future of soap operas; and now, she has an e-book of her own, As the World Stopped Turning, which shares some of what she knows about the history, aesthetics, production, and reception of soap operas.

I am the first to admit that soaps are a blind spot for me as a fan and as an academic, though I also would acknowledge that those of us who care about transmedia storytelling and contemporary primetime drama have much to learn from the soap opera tradition about expansive storyworlds and long-form serials in particular. So, I asked Sam Ford if he would interview her for the blog. Below aresome of Liccardo's thoughts connecting As the World Turns to some of the industry trends and developments over the past six decades that have impacted serialized television storytelling.

As the World Stopped Turning is a full ebook of your essays dedicated to the soap opera As the World Turns. Why is this particular daytime serial drama so important to study, in your opinion? What is As the World Turns' particular place in our cultural history?

 

As The World Turns was the first 30-minute serial, doubling the standard 15-minute episode. But  it was more than its length that contributed to the show's impact on the genre and cultural history. When creator, Irna Phillips, conceived the show, she wanted the additional time not to tell more story, but to develop "better story and characterization." Before ATWT debuted in 1956, serials concentrated on a single family; in her new creation, Irna contrasted the stories of two families, one united and solidly middle-class, the Hughes, the other, wealthy and divided, the Lowells, "because by the 1950s divorce and separation were becoming a more pronounced element in our social structure." Irna also believed (more than 30 years before GH's Luke and Laura), that including teenagers as a major part of the story, "added the valuable asset of longevity to the serial."

But what set ATWT apart from earlier soaps was Irna's skillful juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal storytelling axes, with her emphasis on the former (character), which slowed the latter (plot), sometimes to a seeming standstill.  In fact, the first year of the show there was virtually no plot, just these rather ordinary characters going about everyday lives that resembled those of many viewers. The intimacy of the connection between viewer and character was reinforced as the camera moved slowly over actors' faces, laying the groundwork for future audiences to recognize what a character in Ron Howard's film, Frost/Nixon, called "the reductive power of the close-up."

Irna gave voice to her deeply-held belief that "nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these elements, often at the same time," through stories that gave equal weight to the conflicting emotions within each character,  forcing viewers, in the words of critic Robert LaGuardia, "to grieve over the heartbreak of the human condition rather than to hang on to a fixed value judgement."  In her outline, Irna was emphatic that ATWT "not a melodrama," but rather "a show about people." That ambiguity deeply permeated the cultural ground water and became the foundation of what's now called quality television and complex storytelling, although, as I discuss below, for viewers who only know daytime soaps after Luke and Laura, the connection is not at all clear.

The episode below aired about a year into the show's 54-year run. While it contains none of ATWT's trademark closeups, it is an elegant example (one of the few still available) of how soap opera historically used character to move plot: a narrative structure that ties current stories to back stories and uses history and memory to contextualize current plot and character development. The power of this episode lies in its four deceptively simple scenes, each a conversation between two of the episode's four characters. While almost nothing happens in the episode, when it's over viewers understand the relationships, not just among the characters in the episode, Chris, his father, Pa, and sister,, Edie, who was involved with his law partner, Jim, but between every character on the show: Chris's wife Nancy, his daughter, Penny, who became estranged from her aunt Edie when Penny's best friend, Ellen, revealed that her father, Jim, was involved with another woman, Edie. Even a character who never appeared on the show, Chris and Edie's brother, John, was fully contextualized.

As the World Turns #268 Part 1 

 As the World Turns #268 Part 2

 

What do you believe were the biggest factors in the demise of As the World Turns?

The demise of ATWT actually began in 1978, when Gloria Monty's was hired to fix a show on the verge of cancellation, ABC's General Hospital. At the time, most soap operas followed the model Irna Phillips had created on ATWT: intergenerational families made up of rather ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives that resembled those of most viewers.

 

Monty altered that model by speeding up the pace of the storytelling by shifting the focus from the day-to-day lives of the doctors and nurses of General Hospital to the young, Laura, and the hip, Luke, who, in the process of saving the world from being frozen by the Ice Princess, also saved General Hospital, thereby forever altering the public's perception of soaps. As college lounges  filled with students following the adventures of Luke and Laura, for the first time it was cool for kids to watch soaps.

 Luke & Laura - Lover's on the Run Volume 1

But GH wasn't their mother's soap opera; ATWT was. How CBS and Procter & Gamble responded to the end of ATWT's 20-year reign at the top of the ratings is a lesson in what not to do. Rather than take a deep breath and think about ways to exploit the perception of ATWT as "their mothers' soap opera" to the show's advantage, the new executive producer, Mary-Ellis Bumin, approached her task from what, in light of GH's explosive success, seemed like a logical assumption, but ultimately proved deeply flawed: the only way to attract the younger viewers advertisers coveted was by excluding older characters. So, what had been the ATWT's  greatest assets -- its 20+-year history and the multi-generational Hughes family -- was seen as its greatest weaknesses. Soon after Bunim took over familiar characters were pushed to the sidelines and viewers found themselves watching Tom and Margo (Oakdale's Luke and Laura) chase a dwarf named Mr. Big -- ATWT's version of the Ice Princess.

 As the World Turns: Vintage Tom and Margo

But what had worked so brilliantly for GH never caught on with ATWT's core audience. When Laurence Caso took over CBS's New York daytime operation in 1983, he realized that ATWT would never succeed by continuing to copy what the ABC soaps were doing. He pushed Procter & Gamble to replace Mary-Ellis Bunim with Robert Calhoun, then hired head writer Douglas Marland, who rebuilt the show around Hughes. ATWT thrived until Marland suddenly died in 1993. A year later, the show was still in the process of rebuilding as the country obsessed over the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

ATWT's missteps of the early 1980s have to be understood in the context of GH's unprecedented success, which threw all soaps into uncharted waters. But CBS and P&G had clearly failed learn from history when, in 1995, a new regime once again distanced the show from its history and the Hughes family. As the show floundered until its cancellation in 2010, no one even tried to right the ship by reestablishing the centrality of the Hughes. Even if they had, it might well have been too late. P&G's other two shows, Guiding Light and Another World, were in even worse shape than ATWT. In 2005, P&G eliminated the position of executive in charge of production and subsequently transferred the shows' day-to-day operations to a subsidiary, TeleNext Media. Then, in 2008, the TeleNext logo replaced P&G's in the show credits, sending a clear message that P&G was content to let the clock run out on their soaps.  

 

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning... Among her other publications are "Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps" (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); "Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera's single mother 1901-1973" (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About The Future of Television (Final Installment)

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Suzanne Scott: Thanks, AJ, for doing the heavy lifting by synthesizing the tensions emerging out of this conversation, and for tackling the industrial context. You’re absolutely right, fans and producers both know the score, and I think it’s vital to acknowledge fan agency in this discussion, despite my qualms about how the campaign frames fan participation and labor.  That said, I’d add a couple of corollaries to the core tensions you’ve identified above, drawing on the framing of fans across the past few exchanges.

First, I want to revisit Maurício’s point about the ultimate “winner” of the shifting power dynamics between media audiences, producers, and distributors being the story itself.  Both Maurício and Henry make a strong case for the how this emerging model might be most beneficial for liminal producers and properties, those that don’t fall neatly into the categories of “mainstream” or “independent” production.  But there’s a catch with fan-funded stories, and it’s already visible in the discourses around the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.  It’s baked into the FAQ’s nod to shipping and fan expectations (see image), and it’s directly addressed in this remark from Thomas after the success of the campaign:

“I had some desire, as a filmmaker, to take Veronica in a slightly new direction and do something adventurous with her. Or, there's the ‘give the people what they want’ version. And I think partly because it's crowd-sourced, I'm going with the ‘give the people what they want’ version. It's going to be Veronica being Veronica, and the characters you know and love. Certainly, I think I can make a fun, great movie out of that, and I'm excited about that, but it was a creative debate I had with myself, and I finally made the decision that I'm happy with it, to go with, ‘Let's not piss people off who all donated. Let's give them the stuff that I think that they want in the movie.’”

 

It’s the “give them the stuff that I think they want” that troubles the notion that story emerges the clear “winner” in this particular case.  Whether Thomas is justifiably hedging his bets in response to the intense scrutiny that has accompanied the campaign’s success (“If the movie ultimately sucks, don’t blame me, my vision was hindered by fan service…after all, they paid for it…”) is beside the point.  To return to the first tension AJ identified, fan “satisfaction” is clearly the central concern here, but it’s ultimately framed as a potential detriment to Thomas’ creative control.  There is something empowering about the fact that, in Maurício’s terms, we can now frame fans as studios.  But what I think might be getting lost here is the fact that fans are independent creators too, and it’s often their dissatisfaction with a story, or the industrial structures and strictures that limit it, that drives their textual production.  Henry’s right that fans will always be read, first and foremost, through an economic lens.  But, fans aren’t just storybuyers, they’re storytellers.  They make their own satisfaction.

 

On a second and related point, you all make a compelling case for how distribution on Netflix, or similar platforms, might help reshape industrial investments in media properties, encourage experimentation with transmedia or non-linear textualities, and cater to pre-existing fannish consumption patterns such as binge watching. Our conceptual understanding of what “television” is (who produces and distributes it, and where, when and how we consume it) continues to be radically reimagined in the post-network era.  Within the Netflix television model, the television temporalities of seriality and seasonality are effectively eradicated. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but I do wonder how these new “telelvision” models might fundamentally alter our conception of television fandom.

 

If fans produce their richest work in the gaps and margins of a television text, they’ve also historically used the temporal gaps and margins between episodes and seasons to their advantage.  I return, time and again, to Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures and his useful notion of “just-in-time” fandom to describe how fan practices have “become increasingly enmeshed within the rhythms and temporalities of broadcasting” (178).  Moreover, Hills cautioned (back in 2002, no less), that eradicating time lags function “ever more insistently to discipline and regulate the opportunities for temporally-licensed ‘feedback,’ and the very horizons of the fan experience” (179).  So, what happens when we begin to reconceptualize the afterlife for cult television series strictly as films, or in one large seasonal installment with no lag time between episodes?  The pleasures of television fandom are deeply tied to its form, and the impact of these shifts deserves further consideration.

 

My concern here isn’t just the horizons of the fan experience, but the horizons of the industrial and cultural framing of fans and fan participation. Whether we’re talking about fan-funded film extension of a cult television series, or an entire new season of a cult show dropping on Netflix, these temporal horizons are potentially less generative for fans, which in turn might make it increasingly difficult to discursively shift our understanding of them as producers of anything but capital.  If I’m being totally honest, as a Veronica Marsfan, what I really want is another season of Veronica Mars.  And as an Arrested Development fan, I will absolutely binge watch the new season (and, let’s be real, I’ll binge watch the prior three seasons as an amuse bouche the day before the launch).

 

Understandably, we all want to focus on what we’re gaining.  I’m admittedly more interested in what’s potentially being lost or overlooked, but I don’t want that emphasis to be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm about these developments.  I do think they have game-changing potential, particularly as the beginnings of a creators’ rights movement.  I just worry that fans’ legacy as creators in their own right will once again be obscured in favor of celebrating industrially sanctioned modes of fan engagement.

Mauricio Mota:

From all of our contributions so far, the ones that mostly intrigued me were the ones related to roles (fans, producers, distributors) and business models.

And both rely on a discussion that, if not well explored, can become a "chicken or the egg" equation.

Some questions to provoke that discussion:

Would Veronica Mars raise all that money on Kickstarter if it was an independent movie from a new director with an unknown actress about an unknown character?

Do we really need algorithms to figure out that BBC Format + David Fincher + Kevin Spacey + Washington politics is a success formula for House of Cards?

Is 60 thousand people as a Box Office number for a movie a sufficient number for a studio to green light to produce it?

When fans "invest" or donate for IP development and or production they are looking for some sort of creative control or ownership or just wanting the story to come to life?

We are entering - with or without the help from the Studios - an era of what we like to name as  "Grassroots Blockbusting": where IPs are nurtured to the ground up and more independent of the "normal" way of becoming a success. All Studios have what we name "Dormant IPs" - stories that have already a whole world built, good story arches and some sort of audience built through generations. But very few of these IPs (and even less Studios) are being developed in a way that allows them to become something profitable and successful.

Unfortunately it is still naive to come to a studio or any big show runner in town and tell them to "hand over IP". This is not only a conversation about studios focusing on blockbusters and mainstream stories because of shareholders. They are also investing on their libraries and keeping as much control of that IP as possible. Their framework is built around owning as much % of the IPs as possible since the same framework is built around giving more power and control for the part that invests more to make a story happen. And although roles are blurring,  very few creators can say they can make their own shows without a major investment from a studio.

In Brazil, the Government is making an immense effort to grow our TV industries by creating a new law that makes every cable channel to invest massively on original content produced by Brazilian companies (like mine). It is a huge achievement but it has also been very tricky and challenging for the producers to convince studios and networks ( still the most important distribution channels) to give up on a big percentage of an IP they would air because of that new law. Simply because it forces them to not own majority of brazilian original content. So, better said than done.

However, there are independent funds - in the US, Latin America and Asia - that are starting to invest into new green IPs or buying turnaround scripts from studios/production companies to re-start them from the ground using transmedia and the digital tools to start them small and sustainable. Like I said before, lines are blurred, roles are confused and money and knowledge about what works is more democratized.

The existing cases we have been discussing are actually good starters for a possible different model where fans and creators are closer by sharing a common dream and making it happen. And by doing so more and more the Studio system will then have new competitors among the same people they see as consumers. Which is a good thing since humans and companies tend to pay more attention to things and people that threat them than to people that they take for granted. And to AJ's points looks like creators and fans are paying more attention to what is happening around them.

 

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation on the Future of Television (Part Two)

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Suzanne Scott:

Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to this conversation.  I’ve been attempting to work through my ambivalent response to the Veronica Mars kickstarter for the past few days, particularly where it bumps up against my unadulterated fannish glee that Netflix Saved Our Bluths.  Two of my favorite cult TV series are being revived.  It should feel like a win-win, but I can’t shake this sense that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter (or fan-ancing generally) sets a problematic precedent for what constitutes fan “participation.”  Or, to AJ’s point, my concern doesn’t stem from the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, or even the value that fans are generating from this kickstarter campaign, but how producers are increasingly and strategically generating value from fans.

 

My work broadly engages with industry-fan relationships within convergence culture, and how those relationships are gendered.  In particular, I’m interested in which types of fans and modes of fannish engagement are valued, normalized, or incorporated, and which remain marginalized or are subject to containment.  I’ve written in the past about how industrial efforts to engage fan culture often function as re-gifting economies, or planned communities that strive to “repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new, something unwanted (or unwieldy) as something desirable (or controllable, or profitable).”  I’ve also blogged about the problematic legitimization discourses that surround industrial efforts to co-opt fan practices and retain ownership over fan texts.  Many, myself included, are inclined to view the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a prime example of fan empowerment (or, in Henry’s terms, as a techno-realization of a longstanding fannish frustration with audience measurement metrics, and a desire to revive media properties that were cut down in their prime).  But, I still worry about what it means to discursively celebrate fans’ power in purely economic terms.

 

I’m a frequent donor to Kickstarter campaigns, especially those like Womanthology or Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games that are attempting to make a transformative intervention into media industries and fannish subcultures that can be unwelcoming to women.  I’m also all for using Kickstarter to launch creator-owned projects.  For example, I get why Batgirl writer Gail Simone, who was recently fired and rehired by DC Comics after a massive pushback from fans, would want to kickstart a graphic novel where she’ll have full control over the creative direction and, more importantly, the intellectual property rights. I’ll probably pull the trigger and donate to the Veronica Mars movie before the days tick down to zero…or, let’s be realistic, probably before the end of this conversation.  But it’s not because I want a t-shirt, or a digital download of the finished product from Flixter, Warner Bros.’ proprietary video platform.  What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass that it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents.

As AJ rightly notes above, crowdfunding may not be the great equalizer, but it is a vital emergent tool that allows minority voices and audiences that are too often underrepresented by media industries to carve out a space to be heard.  The figures that you’re tracking on your blog are vitally important.  They aren’t just dollars, they’re pointed messages sent to media industries by media audiences.  Can we view the massive success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a call to television executives that there’s a market to be tapped for programs with compelling, complex young female protagonists?  Hopefully.  Would I feel better if Rob Thomas had Kickstarted an original web series, where the profits would be funneled into developing the next Veronica Mars, rather than into Warner Bros.’ coffers?  Absolutely. It's the slippage between crowdsourcing and outsourcing financial risk here that I find troubling.

Mauricio Mota:

Ok, here comes the black sheep-capitalist storyteller from Brazil ;-)

I was born - literally - at the intersection between Academia, Commerce, Storytelling and Marxism. While my parents were academics and Marxists during the 70-80's, my mom was a fiction writer trying to figure out how to keep working, teaching, studying, paying bills and finally get picked by a publisher to bring her words to the world. The funny thing of that intersection is that till I was 8 I thought one of my grandfathers was Karl Marx - because of a picture my parents had in the home office. But actually my grandfather was considered the Latin-American Shakespeare.

That mix of backgrounds, struggles and opportunities trained my eyes and perceptions (with some scars and learnings) to always pay deep attention to the relationship between Creators (Storytellers), Distributors (Storysellers) and Readers (Story…buyers?) and to keep on the pace around one of the most fascinating dynamics ever. In the past, the roles were so clear, the imposed status quo was so comfortable/a given and people in general were just having fun with their stories that the Veronica Mars/House of Cards models were impossible to imagine.

Kickstarter didn't invent crowdfunding for storytelling. Neither did Felicia Day or Joss Whedon. The most efficient systems of crowdfunding for storytelling that I ever seen in my life are the Catholic and the Evangelical Churches. People have been funding saints, bibles, sagas, music concerts, souvenirs or tokens for more than 2000 years. In Brazil, the evangelicals own one of the top three tv channels (where they air religious programs, produced telenovelas and bought series from the US like Veronica Mars). So the whole conversation about "exploring" fandom or using fans to fund a movie owned by a big studio is a little bit strange for me because generally people want to watch and share an experience around a story: be it that story about a guy who could regenerate fast (no, I'm not talking about Wolverine, I'm talking about Jesus), Veronica Mars or about an elite group that uses people's trust to do whatever they want (I'm talking about House of Cards).

The line between owning something and owing was completely blurred when the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign started. Many fans donated something because they feel such an emotional connection to that cannon that gave them so many good times that they feel the owe something to it and they want more of the pleasure that story gives -- with or without having something material back (a shirt or equity). It is the difference between Profit Sharing and Sharing Collective Value.

The roles are also blurred, thanks G'd -- both on Veronica Mars and House of Cards. And today I'm able to fund the stories my company creates from different sources: fans, non-profits, global advertisers, studios, networks or a toy company.

Because the Veronica Mars campaign is like advance money given by fans to the creator that implicitly says: "Hey, here is the money I would already buy for this and that, so now go make that extension so I can have the storytelling experience that no money nor a shirt can give me. Oh, I can also make it with my Mastercard and don't need to wait for someone to decide to fund it?". Instead of investing money on the IP after it airs, fans are doing it before.

Everyone, on the House of Cards case, was mesmerized by two things: launching 13 episodes at once on Netflix and the fact that some of the decisions to produce were based on algorithms. In the end of the day, the "series marathon" culture is something that is part of the fabric of pop culture consumption; Kevin Spacey is a great actor and amazing villain; politics brings eyeballs, fans add value whenever they watch something and the British version was already really good. If we build it, they will come. And with David Fincher behind, maybe (just maybe), the execution will be good. ;-)

By the way, The funders behind House of Cards are also "outside" the regular model as the Kickstarter examples: Goldman Sachs, WPP Group (one of the largest advertising groups in the world) and AT&T.

Netflix move to offer exclusive content at once was brave and risk taking strategy in a town where networks kill shows on episode 3. VOD changes the importance of focus groups and research to a level that makes me love where all this is going. Because so many amazing pilots or shows would have survived if Netflix, Amazong, Hulu and Kickstarter existed and gave that opportunity to fans, creators and last but not least, studios to make a decision.

Yes, studios.

Because everybody loves to blame the Studios for Hollywood's lack of innovation. Being a Studio is HARD. Crowdfunding is also hard. But what happens next is the point I'm trying to make.

The Veronica Mars case will show how sending the gifts and tokens for all the 50k+ backers (including movie sessions into remote cities) is really, really, really hard to accomplish but a Studio knows how to make something like this happen. And before the tomatoes come, the discussion is not if the studios do it well or not, but they make it and they have a system. If fans, indies, academics and writers believe there are improvements to be made, fight for it or kickstart a project and start your own Studio. It is about re-allocation of power and responsibilities and not resetting a whole organism that has brought to the world amazing stories - including Veronica Mars.

The Studios used to have the formula of success. Using Henry's recent book as a reference, the formula was "If doesn't get picked by studio it is dead". Now it probably would be "If doesn't get picked, lets talk to the fans and other distribution channels" (not so charming as "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" but really fascinating).

Now nobody has is total control, decision-making power is more shared. But Studios/Networks still have the most efficient marketing and logistics machine in the world and they deserve their share. Fans and storytellers that know how to build their own micro-networks also deserve a share.

Fans are now Studios. Advertisers are Studios. Amazon is a studio. Netflix too.

So, the roles are not only changing, they are blurred and the winner is the story. Because generally we don't know what we want until a story is in front of us and we say: I want more of that. And I will pay with my time, my emotions, my network of friends and my money.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

 

 

 

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About the Future of Television (Part One)

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Henry Jenkins: When I was writing Textual Poachers in the late 1980s, I stumbled across a fascinating scheme being floated by fans of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, Beauty and the Beast, a series with a very committed audience, but one that was small enough that the program was always in danger of being canceled. The fans were suggesting a plan where fans would pay into a fund that would cover the cost of the series production and then would received VHS tapes of episodes once they had been made. The fans rightly recognized that the Nielsen Ratings measured the scope of viewership but not its intensity, and that the scale of success demanded to stay on network television was considerably lower than what would be required to cover the costs of production. At the time, such plans were unlikely to succeed, given the nature of the media environment: they really did not have a robust method for collecting funds from dedicated fans, the producers would not have had a viable business model for proceeding under this unstable system, and the distribution of episodes via VHS was going to be clunky at best.

We flash forward two decades and recent events suggests we have moved dramatically closer to making such a scenario possible. First, we have seen Netflix become a producer and distributor of original television content -- programs that look and feel like network television (actually like HBO or AMC programming) but which are distributed digitally without ever being broadcast. Netflix's first venture in this direction was House of Cards, which seems to have attracted a very solid audience, and their second will be the relaunch of Arrested Development, a fan favorite series that Netflix has brought back after several years in limbo. We are seeing similar moves by Hulu and YouTube, both of which would like to get into the business of producing and distributing web-based television content.

And, then, we have seen Kickstarter emerge as a platform that, with the example of Veronica Mars, has demonstrated the possibilities of fan support pushing a once canceled program back into production -- in this case for the big screen. And for the Veronica Mars scheme to work, we have to assume there were behind the scenes discussions between Rob Thomas and Warner Brothers (which still owns the rights to Veronica Mars) that would allow them some basis of proceeding. We now are hearing that a range of other producers and show-runners are starting to explore whether they might deploy similar tactics to gain a second chance for their passion projects.

This week, I have gathered together three friends, who bring different kinds of expertise to thinking about the short term and long term implications of these developments.

Aymar  Jean “AJ” Christian:

Hello!

It’s been fascinating to see relationships between producers, fans and distributors reconfigured in digital marketplaces!

About a year before Kickstarter launched, I was drawn into the world of crowdfunding through Felicia Day. Day was a working actress with credits on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she decided she wasn’t ever going to get a leading role and showrunner status unless she did it herself. Intermittently unemployed as so many workers in Hollywood are, she wrote a pilot for The Guild, about a group of gamers, based on her experience playing World of Warcraft in between gigs. She and a skeleton crew produced most of the first season on a dime and then came to place a lot of indie producers find themselves: without funds to continue. But those few episodes had built a fan base, and, through a Paypal link on the show’s active website, she raised thousands to kick-start the rest. That early fan interest shocked the industry, distributors came calling, and The Guild found distribution through Microsoft, who was/is trying to build an entertainment platform outside of television. Day is now a huge source of inspiration within and outside the web television industry and a key brand ambassador for MSN.

In my years researching the “web series” or independent television market I’ve seen crowdfunding take a central place in show development (so much so I’ve tried to track it on my site). Series that built communities of fans early and quickly inevitably turned to crowdfunding. Soon shows targeting all sorts of groups dissatisfied with legacy television used sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to keep indie brands alive. Lesbian web series Anyone But Butraised over $30,000 for its third and final season; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl ($56,000, nearly twice the ask) for its second; The Outs (over $20,000, many times the ask), a gay-led show, did it in two rounds; last year brought Black & Sexy’s The Couple ($32,000) and Latino-focused show East WillyB ($51,000), not to mention the prodigious work of Freddie Wong, whose canny, Asian-American-led Video Game High School has crowdfunded over $1 million to date (season 1, season 2).

Raising money not only gave them funds to survive, and extra opportunities for press and marketing, they also let creators build a database of their strongest fans and supporters, who would then proselytize the show on social networks. This sometimes led to distribution and development deals with both online and on-air networks.

In short, crowdfunding causes us to rethink relationships in media industries, and think very specifically about the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, as a number of scholars are exploring, from Jason Mittell, to Michael Newman, to your work in Spreadable Media. For independent producers, crowdfunding rewards creators with a clear pitch to specific communities, who are in turn rewarded with a show conglomerates might be reluctant to green light. Of course, this kind of value is hard to sustain in our media landscape, and the fact that Veronica Marsraised several times more than most projects before it in 24 hours speaks to the kinds of value conglomerates are able to generate when they have already invested in marketing properties.

 

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

He began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 15, when he developed a story-creation platform with writer Sonia Rodrigues. Used in over 4000 schools, it was licensed 8 times and used as a tool to facilitate innovation and creativity for  many top 500 companies and the UN.

 

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part Three)

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Studying Monster fandom places a new emphasis on issues of collecting, which have remained marginal to the studies of fan culture, but which are a very large part of the phenomenon itself. What existing work do you think provides the best insights into collecting cultures and what questions do you think still need to be addressed?

Mark: I think that matters of collecting have been tangential in part because the background so many media scholars have in Marxist /Frankfurt School criticism still makes a lot of us reticent to look at conspicuous consumption as anything other than totally negative--I know I’m leery of being accused of false consciousness or bougie-ness when making a case for collecting as a form of amateur cultural preservation. That said, I’ve been relieved to encounter an increasing number of writings which take a more complicated approach to the consumption of commercial product. I would specifically mention Sara Gwenllian-Jones’s essay “Phantom Menace,” Alan McKee’s “How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption,” and Matt Hills’s concept of performative consumption, presented in Fan Cultures, and which I apply to Chaney fans in my essay. I’m also interested in the idea of creative consumption proposed by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green in their book on YouTube, although I wish they would have developed the concept for the reader a little more. I think Jose van Dijck has many interesting ideas about material culture and collecting in Mediated Memories, and I just discovered a book by Richard Cox on the practice of personal archiving that looks promising and is on my reading list. As far as questions that still need to be addressed, I’m interested in distinctions between the physical object and the digital--is downloading digital artifacts collecting in the same sense as “having” tangible objects? There’s been work done in this area in museum studies, which may provide an inroad for looking at this matter in media studies.

Bob: A great list, Mark -- I’m making notes! I’d add Baudrillard’s System of Objects and, less abstractly, Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately as ways of understanding collectors and collecting in conversation with mass media marketing. Lincoln Geraghty’s upcoming book with Routledge on “cult collecting” will also be useful, I’m sure.

Matt:  As a collector of Silver Age comic books and vinyl records, the issue of collecting is rather personal to me.  In terms of questions to pursue re: collecting, I’m particularly interested in issues of commodity value and “collectability” of an object.  I have a friend who is intensely proud of his collection of early Silver Age issues of The Justice League of America.  They are all of very high grade (virtually untouched warehouse copies in some cases) and are “slabbed.”  For him, they retain a nostalgic value (he owned copies as a kid) but he mostly values them as a financial investment.  On the other hand, my collecting has always been motivated by a desire to read or listen to something and am much less concerned about condition.  In fact,  I frequent comic book conventions looking for “reader copies” of old comic books in part because they are much more affordable but also because  I’m very interested in objects that bear traces of their use-histories.  Usually with comic books this comes in the form of a signature of ownership on the cover or the first page but sometimes there are surprising traces left behind, such as an attached personal object.  I once found a nearly incoherent response to a ‘Dear John’ letter tucked inside an LP.  It provided a strange resonance to the love songs on the record.

 

Natasha: As a former product developer who designed collectibles, I am very compelled by this question.  I’m shocked there hasn’t been more work done on collectibles in relation to fan studies.  Enormous amounts of time, capital and passion are put into collecting.  I believe that closely studying the motivations, desires, patterns, and strategies of fan based collectors can provide valuable insights and new ways to think about fan cultures.   A couple of edited volumes I’ll add to the list are: Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (ed. Leah Dilworth) and The Cultures of Collecting (ed. Roger Cardinal).

 

 

A key claim here is that Famous Monsters and its fans shaped the canon of which older films mattered and also informed the ways we made sense of those movies. What are some of the films or performers that got reappraised thanks to being featured in this publication?

Matt: More than anything, I think FM is notable for spotlighting special effects artists, especially Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, and make-up artists like Jack Pierce.  Ackerman’s narratives regarding individual artists foregrounded the tactile labor involved in filmmaking that inspired so many readers to create their own make-ups and make their own films.  The visible traces of these artists translated to the visible traces of the artist(s) of the amateur film.

Mark: Certainly FM played a major role in making Chaney appear intriguing to a generation of monster fans who may have never actually seen any of his films, and in shaping his remembrance as a star of horror films rather than as a more versatile character actor. FM was particularly instrumental in keeping one of Chaney’s lost films, London After Midnight (Browning, 1927), in memory, and of touting it as a masterpiece of horror. Ackerman may have been one of the last surviving people with a clear memory of having seen the film, and he spoke glowingly of it to the end--as he did at a Monster Bash convention Matt and his brother and I attended in 2006. In doing research for this essay, I was also fairly amazed at some of the stills and information found in the pages of FM on obscure, foreign, and/or avant-garde films like Dreyer’s Vampyr, the 1930s French version of The Golem (even now hard to find), and non-western films like Kwaidan.

 

Ackerman, as several of you note, was an important bridge figure -- between fans and the industry, but also between fandom and a range of other alternative cultural movements, and perhaps between childhood and adulthood. What kind of role model did Ackerman provide for what a mature fan identity might look like?

Matt:  Ackerman’s liberal attitudes about life are, I believe, quite relevant to his fannish affections for science fiction.  I am particularly intrigued by how certain aspects of his life are very problematic for some fans (in particular his practice of nudism in the 1950s and 1960s).  More than anything, Ackerman modelled tolerance and the necessity to think about new ways of living with one another.  Interestingly, this model is seemingly lost on some fans, who reduce Ackerman to the status of “grand collector” and nothing more.

Mark: In addition to the inclusivity and progressive perspectives Matt refers to, I think Ackerman also modelled sincerity, generosity, and kindness. One of the things I discovered while looking through old issues of FM was a series of announcements by Ackerman about an upcoming cross-country road trip he was taking, with the offer to readers that if their parents gave permission, he would visit them en route and show them some of the monster memorabilia he had with him. Imagine that! Ackerman also demonstrated a respect for children that is admirable. While I still find his sense of humor hard to take, he seems like he would have been a genuinely nice person to know.

Bob: Actually, it’s Ackerman’s sense of humor that most appealed to me as a kid; it set up a lovely counterpoint to the horrific imagery the magazine often featured, and went a long way toward “defanging” some of the primally upsetting stuff that I was drawn to, but disturbed by, in other formats (cf. the 1974 Exorcist coverage I mention above). In addition to signalling geniality and likeability, as Mark points out, Ackerman’s prose voice also delighted in its own corny panache, and encouraged me -- not always for the better -- to emulate his punning, Mad-magazine-style in my own writing.

Natasha: Ackerman’s quest to promote respect, understanding and acceptance of all people regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation or age is what I have always admired most about his cultural legacy.  Not only was Ackerman a prominent and outspoken supporter of female-produced science- fiction work, but he was also a stanch advocate for gay rights.  He was dubbed an honorary lesbian by Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S. He believed that monster films and science fiction had the capacity to take viewers out of their comfort zone and imagine alternative realities that could challenge existing sexist, racist, sexist, and ageist thinking.  Ackerman had the foresight to know that fan participation is not whimsical and irrelevant, but can be a very powerful thing that can change the way people see and interact with each other.  Best of all, he always did this with a sense of humor.

 

Matt was lucky enough to have had a chance to interview Ackerman before he died. If the rest of us had a chance to ask “Uncle Forry” a question, from beyond the grave (of course), what would you most like to know about his life, his magazine, or its cultural impact?

 

Mark: I’m curious as to how conscientiously he promoted his social politics in the pages of FM: he absolutely influenced genre fandom and formation of a canon of stars and films, but was he also trying to influence readers’ perspectives? More than asking him specific questions, though, I would’ve really liked to just talk about horror films with him, and get more of that first-hand view of London After Midnight.

The recent film, Super 8, offers some glimpses into the world of amateur filmmaking and model building which Famous Monsters inspired. To what degree do you think the film adequately captured the cultural milieu we are documenting through these essays?

Matt: Super 8 overwhelmed its superficial take on 1970s monster kid culture with sci-fi spectacle.  Joe Dante’s Matinee, while not a great film, is more successful at capturing the spirit of horror fandom because it shows us why kids loved this culture.   Super 8’s computer-generated spectacle is absent of the trace evidence of an artisan and thus distances us from the affective connections we make with classic horror and science fiction films.  In the end, the film’s nod toward kids’ amateur films of the period feels just like that, a nod.  There’s nothing substantive behind the title reference to home movies/amateur films or the storyline of the kids making a movie, no clear reason as to why they want to make a monster movie.

Bob: Funny, when I gave a talk based on my article recently, I started with a clip from Super 8: it shows the young protagonist at work painting one of Aurora’s Hunchback of Notre Dame kits. I wanted to contrast the plastic monster’s humble cameo against the movie’s CGI “star,” which was -- and here I agree with Matt -- a dispiriting genuflection to the state of the art. (If only J. J. Abrams and crew had had the guts to give us an actual creature of late 70s special effects -- a Rob Bottin or Carlo Rambaldi creation of latex and servomotors.) Its false notes aside, I respect Super 8 for what it’s trying to do (and be), and in the film’s enshrining of an earlier moment in the evolution of fantastic media -- the late 70s/early 80s golden age of Spielberg and Lucas -- heard curious nested echoes of other, prior golden ages: the late 50s-early 60s monster culture in which Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Zemeckis, Dante, and others came of age, as well as the period 20-30 years before that, when the classic Universal horror films were first released. Famous Monsters bridged at least three generations in this fashion, and overgrown “monster kid movies” like Super 8 are to me a way of carrying that tradition forward: revisiting and rearticulating shared, nostalgic pleasures while driving the continued industrial production of fantastic media.

Mark: Super 8 is nostalgic, in the way David Lowenthal uses the term to describe “memory with the pain removed.” There’s an implication that the young filmmakers/adventurers are misfits, or aren’t performing masculinity “correctly,” and that this somehow lends itself to their shared interest in monsters. But even though they’re misfits, they are in a group of friends, and all appear to be in a position of class privilege (except the Elle Fanning character, but she’s the exception in multiple ways). The film doesn’t really address the isolation, loneliness, ostracization, or queerness that has led many a young person to interest in fantasy, monsters, science fiction, role playing games, ancient mythology, the goth subculture, the occult, etc. But of course, isolation, loneliness, and queerness aren’t topics one sees addressed too often in big-budget Hollywood action films.

 

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part One)

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This December, a new academic publication, The Journal of Fandom Studies (senior editor: Katherine Larsen), debuted, which should be of interest to some of my regular readers.  The very first issue focuses on Famous Monsters of Filmland and its editor, Forest K. Ackerman. So much work in fan studies has dealt with science fiction fandoms, yet there's much we do not know about the "monster fan culture" of the 1960s and 1970s. As this issue suggests, digging into old monster magazines gives us a rich glimpse into the participatory culture of the period, including a range of material practices (such as model building, make-up and costume production, and Super 8 filmmaking) that have so far received limited attention by academics. Monster fan culture gives us a glimpse into what was at the time a predominantly male fan community, though, as we will see, there's also some important dimensions of female fan history to be reclaimed from the margins of this publication. And, we soon discover that Ackerman was not only a model for today's "fan boy auteur" but he also had a strong commitment to the politics of diversity and social acceptance, not exactly values we associate with American popular culture of the period. I was honored to be asked to be a respondent for this issue, and in doing so, I ended up writing a heavily autobiographical essay about my own memories of being a preteenage monster fan during the 1960s. I am sharing the opening of my essay below in hopes that it may entice you to track down this issue. I invited the editor of this special issue, Matt Yockey, and the other contributors to participate in an informal online conversation, exploring their own relationships with the topic, and also suggesting some of the ways their work might help us to further broaden the domain of fan research.

 

I cherish this invitation to my tenth birthday  which my mother carefully and lovingly packed away with other artifacts of my childhood.  The text, written in a quivering scrawl associated with old horror film posters, was accompanied by photographs of Boris Karloff’s Monster, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, Frederic March’s Hyde, and oddly, given my own strong preference for Lon Chaney Jr., Oliver Reed’s werewolf. The pictures had been cut from the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, almost certainly by my mother’s hands, given how precise the borders are, and then, attached with Elmer’s Glue, under my instructions, onto typing paper. The invitations were reproduced using a crude home photocopier machine my father used for his work, and then mailed to the other boys in the neighborhood.

I dug the invitation out of storage recently when I returned from seeing “The Art of Tim Burton” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Amidst concept art and film props, the exhibit devoted a room to his juvenaila,  including a childhood sketch of the Creature of the Black Lagoon (mostly likely drawn from the Aurora monster model) and  stop motion home movies (inspired by Ray Harryhausen). I was most taken with a collage (image 2), which mixes Burton’s own hand-drawn renderings of Frankenstein’s Monster, the Phantom of the Opera, and various space aliens, with pictures, including Lugosi’s Dracula, King Kong, and this time, appropriately, Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, almost certainly cut from Famous Monsters.  Burton chose Lugosi, his face partially wrapped by his cape, where-as I went with an image where the vampire’s hands are clutched, ready to strike an unsuspecting victim, but both were part of the image bank we shared with so many other boys and girls, around the country,  growing up in the mid-1960s.

 

Burton and I were born a little over two months apart, though his Burbank and my suburban Atlanta were on the opposite ends of the country.  What we shared -- with a good chunk of our generation -- was a series of powerful cultural influences, as described in the LACMA exhibit’s accompanying coffee table book:

“He revered the legendary Vincent Price and identified with such maestros of classic horror as Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., Boris Karloff, Peter Lore, and Bela Lugosi....He was swept up by the magic of the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen’s animated sequences and the unique color pallete of Basil Gogo’s illustrations on the covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines (one of the few publications he avidly read).” (Frey, Gallo, and Kempf, 2009, p. 8)

For all our self perceptions of eccentricity, Tim Burton and I had more or less the same childhood. We read the same magazines, watched the same movies, admired the same artists, and fetishized the same images. As Bob Rehak writes in this issue, “Facilitated by Famous Monsters and shared by a subculture of baby boomers in their preteen and teenaged years, the constructive activities of 60s horror fandom laid both a generational and physical groundwork for today’s transformative, franchised, materialized media culture.”...

I read these historical accounts from the perspective of someone who, unlike the other authors, was part of the 1960s monster culture they are seeking to reconstruct. This is not to say my account is somehow more “authentic” or “unmediated” than theirs. As Erica Rand (1995) has suggested, we selectively rewrite our personal narratives about our childhoods to reflect our adult conceptions of ourselves, creating an aura of personal inevitability rather than reflecting the contingency of emerging identities. What we and our parents chose to box and save are not necessarily any more a part of who we are than those many things that were tossed in the trash. The LACMA curators were no doubt drawn to those childhood artworks suggesting the gothic sensibility we associated with Burton’s films; I am drawn to childhood artifacts which reflect my subsequent academic interests in film history and fan culture.  All of these accounts involve acts of interpretation and speculation, whether recovering the perspectives of Ackerman’s young fans from the photographs and letters in Famous Monsters or reconstructing my ten year old self from fading memories and yellowing party invites. So, I am writing this first person account to add another layer to our understanding of the period’s fan sensitivities and subjectivities.

As a starting point, we might add collage art to the mix of creative and performative activities, including model-making, super 8 filmmaking, costuming and make-up, that grew up around Famous Monsters. Cutting out and gluing down pictures to create a birthday party invitation may seem pretty banal -- not as transgresive as writing a homoerotic fan story or as transformative as posting a political remix video on YouTube. But, these material practices embody a similar expectation that consumers have the opportunity and right to meaningfully reshape their culture.

The fact that my parents sanctioned this bit of appropriation and remixing tells us something about Famous Monsters’ cultural status: my parents would not have allowed me to cut pictures from books or encyclopedias, they would happily allow me to cut pictures from old catalogs or newspapers, and magazines fell into a space in between -- National Geographic or Hightlights (no), Famous Monsters (yes).  The growing accessability of photocopying (first prototyped in 1959 and introduced to home consumers in the mid-1960s) supported the easy reproduction of such images, paving the way for the DIY zine culture Stephen Duncombe (1997) documented. Such cut and paste collages would become characteristic of the 1980s punk and 1990s riot grrl zines, for example. These practices also extend a much older history of children’s scrapbooking, a practice, as historians (Tucker, Ott, and Buckler, 2006; Garvey, 2004) note, that has often mixed personal (family photographs, drawings) and mass produced images (magazines and newspaper clippings).

The overlap between Burton and my respective choices reflects the degree to which Famous Monsters helped define a canon of works its most hardcore readers were expected to know. The images we selected were shared culture (in that Burton and I draw on almost identical repertoires) and personal culture (in that Burton and I would have no doubt had different personal preferences -- my strong identification with Dracula, his fascination with Vincent Price and giant Japanese monsters). The magazine helped to set a syllabus of sorts for my adolescent efforts to educate myself about the history of American movies (and still informs my dvd collecting).  I can draw a direct link from Famous Monsters  to my decision to focus my Seventh Grade term paper, several years later, on the history of American movies. My father used to joke that I had been rewriting that term paper throughout my educational and professional life.  My graduation from an elementary school monster movie buff to an undergraduate film snob was mirrored by the fact that George Ellis, the fright host for the Atlanta market, also owned the Film Forum, one of the city’s two major retro houses.

As Kevin Heffernan (2004) documents in Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold, the Universal monster movies had been part of the large package of “Shock Theater” Screen Gems sold to television stations in the 1950s and still in active use on second tier local stations in the 1960s. After school, my friends would race home to check out which movies were playing, staying in doors if it was one featured in Famous Monsters, and otherwise going outside, often to play act those very same monster movies. At ten, we were not allowed to stay up for the “Friday Night Frights”, except in the summer time or over Christmas break, and then, often, with the carefully negotiated stipulation (shared by many of the neighborhood households) that we could stay awake only until we got to see the monster in action. This rule, designed to avoid conflicts over bedtimes, actually resulted in endless quiblings over whether a shadow or a movement in the branches really counted or in the case of The Wolfman, whether Lawrence Talbott counted as a monster before the moon turned full.  As David Bordwell (2011) has noted, the tendency of vintage film audiences to show up when they could and watch through until the point where they entered the theater surely complicates claims about narrative structure and closure. Something similar could be said of my childhood viewing practices, which put such a strong emphasis on the monster’s first appearance and meant that we almost never saw any form of containment. Much like the superheroes, who occupied our imagination around the same time, the neighborhood kids could have told you the primary “powers” and vulnerabilities of each monster (Dracula could transform into bats or fog and command wolf packs; he could be destroyed by a stake to the heart, by cutting off his head, by being exposed to sunlight), but not the plot of any particular film.

Our love for “classic” horror movies gave us a certain distinction among our classmates, many of whom raced home from school to watch Dark Shadows. We had a running battle around the school lunch table over the relative merits of Lugosi’s Dracula (never Christopher Lee’s) and Dark Shadow’s Barnabas Collins. Tom Patterson, sometimes friend, sometimes rival, held his own monster birthday party a few months later, adopting the persona of Collins, as much to cross my tastes as anything else. Ackerman’s magazine fostered a immediate and personal link between his young readers and the grand old men who had helped to create the monster movies decades earlier. When I learned that Lon Chaney Jr. was struggling with cancer, I sent him a hand drawn get well card and received a photograph of the Wolf Man, signed with his own quivering hand....

Famous Monsters contained a wealth of information about these old films and the people who made them, but it was above all a picture magazine, and our favorites often reflected what we imagined from those images.  I had seen few of the movies represented on the birthday invitation. For example,  I had not seen the original Universal Dracula by age ten; I knew the character almost entirely from the magazine, the Aurora monster models, and my Famous Monsters Speak record. Several years later, I saw the 1930 Bela Lugosi film and found it surprisingly dull. I was even more frustrated (and bored) by my aborted attempt to read Bram Stoker’s novel. The blood curdling account of Dracula in Famous Monsters, much like The Princess Bride, contained only the “good parts”. So, the Dracula I loved and admired was largely a product of my own imagination, what I extrapulated from and mapped onto the stills Ackerman published.

 

Matthew, perhaps you can get us started by sharing how this special issue focused on Famous Monsters of Filmland came about.

Matt:  This project began to percolate in the fall of 2007.  I had just moved to southern California and visited Ackerman at the “mini-Ackermansion” during one of his Saturday open houses.  I lingered after the official visiting hours were over and found that, with just me as his audience, Ackerman wanted to talk about his life - not just his work on FM or his life as a fan, but his family history, his relationship with his brother, etc.  This first conversation quickly evolved into regular visits with prepared questions.  Over the course of six months I accumulated about 20 hours of recorded conversation.  At the same time I began to purchase 1960s-era issues of FM on Ebay with the idea of writing something scholarly about FM, as this was a subject near to my heart and which had been almost completely overlooked in academia.  Around this time, I met you for the first time and seeing an Aurora model kit in your office felt like a bit of serendipity. This led to the SCMS panel with you, Mark, and Natasha, which was received so positively that finding a home to publish this work seemed the logical and inevitable next step.   In another bit of serendipity, these essays crossed paths with Katherine Larsen, who was very receptive to the idea of an FM-theme for the debut issue of The Journal of Fandom Studies.

 

 

As I note in my essay, there’s a certain generational difference in experience represented within this group. I was a first generation Famous Monsters fan reading the magazine growing up in the 1960s, where-as most of you are quite a bit younger. How did each of you first encounter the magazine?

Matt: I have a vivid memory of being 4 years old in 1970 and seeing FM #80 at the local supermarket.  The cover image was from Beneath the Planet of the Apes and I was absolutely transfixed.  My aunt, whom I was with, refused to buy it for me and I had to wait a painfully long time before I actually purchased my first issue (#95 in late 1972).   I loved FM but could only afford an issue every so often.  I would look longingly at the gallery of back issue covers in each issue and wish I could have them all.  It was a longing matched by my desire to see many of the films featured in every issue.  Reading FM directed my weekly investigation of the latest issue of TV Guide to see if any of these films were going to be broadcast on the local station that had a Friday night horror show.

Bob: Matt and I are the same age, and my first encounter with Famous Monsters and subsequent experience of Monster Culture are similar to his. I came across FM at an Ann Arbor comic book store called the Eye of Agamotto, on a rack with other Warren publications such as horror comics Creepy and Eerie, and “mature” content like National Lampoon and Heavy Metal. At 9 or 10 I was too young to be drawn to those magazines, but FM, which my parents indulged me in buying, formed the nexus of my love of monster movies new and old, which I took in both at film society screenings on the University of Michigan campus, and on TV through creature features with hosts like “The Ghoul” on WKBD-50 and WJBK’s Sir Graves Ghastly. While I don’t remember the first issue of FM I owned, I do recall the first issue whose cover I found too frightening to look at directly: #111, October 1974, which bore a Basil Gogos portrait of Linda Blair in Dick Smith’s Exorcist makeup.

Mark: I’m a couple of years younger than Matt and Bob, and I didn’t really like FM that much or read it regularly, although I do have a strong memory of reading an issue while in the hospital (the negative associations are hard to shake). At the risk of sounding like a snobby little kid, I didn’t like FM’s irreverent tone and all the pun-based captions, although I did wear a T-shirt printed with an FM cover on the first day of third grade. Right before the class recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the teacher looked over at me and said “everyone put your hands over your monsters” (not surprisingly, he was one of my favorite teachers). Around that age, I was more drawn to books like Ed Naha’s Horrors from Screen to Scream and William Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film than to FM. My parents--my dad in particular--were very indulgent of my monster-mania, and would take me to see age-inappropriate films and let me stay up late on the weekends to watch old movies. I grew up in Omaha, where the local NBC affiliate broadcast Dr. Sanguinary’s Creature Feature every Saturday. I recall being absolutely livid when it was preempted by the appearance of Saturday Night Live.

I think in terms of generational difference in reception, by the time we were old enough to be interested in monster culture and horror films, there were simply more options to explore: more publications, more books, more toys, more ways to actually see some of the films. Undoubtedly, FM paved the way for this, but it may also be the reason my own response to FM was so cool. Interestingly, my partner, who is roughly a generation older than I am, has a big stash of FMs from when he was a kid.

 

 

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

 

The Cultural Context of Chinese Fandom: An Interview with Xiqing Zheng(Part Three)

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You suggest that Chinese fans often see themselves as belonging to an elite group. In some other parts of the world, fans are considered anything but because of the low cultural status of the materials they embrace. In what ways have Chinese Otaku sought to legitimate their interests and activities through appeals to elite cultural status?

This situation is resulted from the specific history of current fan culture in China. This fan culture, however hard people try to make a connection with the older “rewriting” fiction tradition, or older tradition of appreciating a fiction on a community level, is for its majority, an import from Japan. This fact has two results: first, Chinese fan culture was at first highly restricted to a group of comparatively well-educated people, but second, the Japanese heritage of this culture is often neglected, replaced by a lineage reconstructed by Chinese fans between Chinese fandoms and canonical high art literature.

When fandoms began to emerge at the end of the 20th century in China, people having access to such cultural environment and cultural practices are highly restricted to the young, urban, highly-educated and well-informed people such as college students, or young urbanites that were at least wealthy enough to afford a computer and internet surfing fees when both of them were comparatively difficult to have in the 1990s China. Of course, universities usually have better technological condition than other places, and young students were the major target consumers of the internet cafes when they were in a fad at the turn of the century. Such condition put a restriction on the people who were able to access fandom. Comparing to the condition right now, the major difference was that the hardware difficulty stopped most young teenagers and children from entering the fandoms. And the content centered on Japanese anime further restricted the age of participants to the urbanites who were born after the late 1970s. Fan fiction created during this period is of good quality both in content and style, while many fan authors paid close attention in making their products fit the elite image. Both the age span and the social origin of the fans have enlarged in fandoms now, but the early elitism still continues.

The other aspect that I mentioned above is the self-constructed lineage of the fandoms to the elite, avant-garde literature. This is exceptionally observable in the case of slash fiction, in which fangirls try to establish a lineage between their writings with traditional Chinese literature with homoerotic contents, and also, between slash fiction and avant-garde literature with queer materials. Even though in fact Chinese slash fiction / yaoi culture has little to do with either the pre-modern homoerotic novels, nor does it bear many resemblances with avant-garde literature except both of them are standing on a marginal position in the society, and both of them present something taboo of the mainstream society. Yet still, such a self-claimed lineage constitutes a good position of self-defending, and a good way of self-disciplining.

I think the elitism of Chinese fans, and the generally mild reaction towards the fan culture from the public has another crucial reason. In both pre-modern and modern Chinese literature, there are various types and forms of fan-fiction-like literary products. For example, there were dozens of sequels dedicated to The Dream of Red Chambers 红楼梦, usually considered the greatest traditional Chinese colloquial novels, which was written in the 18th century. The novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (written around the 16th century) can be considered as an elaboration of a comparatively small segment in another great novel Water Margins 水浒传 (possibly written in the 14th century). Indeed, such rewritten stories and sequels can be seen as the remnant of the folk literature tradition in pre-modern Chinese literature, but similar things happened in the 20th century also. At the turning of the 19th and the 20th century, when the first wave of translation of Western literature into Chinese started, genre literature such as detective fiction and science fiction attracted much attention from the translators and readers. And the first wave of “new fiction” writing in the genre of science fiction, which directly imitated the Western sci-fi, often presents a science Utopia through rewriting old novels. For example, Wu Jianren 吴趼人, in his New Tale of Stones 新石头记, puts the protagonist from Dreams of Red Chambers into the contemporary Chinese society as an observer and commentator. During the 1920s to the 1940s, many authors created so-called “re-written fiction,” including the single most important writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun 鲁迅. His Old Tales Retold 故事新编 is a collection of parody of various old Chinese legends. Other similar stories involve, for example, Shi Zhecun’s 施蛰存 “Shi Xiu” 石秀, a short story in which the author retells the story of the character Shi Xiu from The Water Margins, using psychoanalysis to explain his motivation.

I am not claiming that the present Chinese fan fiction has a direct relationship with this trend, yet after some fan fiction stories started to become famous in the 21st century, many people explains the idea of “fan culture” to their curious friends by using the example of canonical literature. I have seen several cases in which people explain the definition of “fan fiction” with the example of Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold. Even though the current fan culture does not have a directly heritage from this tradition, this “rewriting of old canon” tradition is in the large social background both for the creation and for the circulation of Chinese fan fiction. I also want to add, that such “rewritten” stories are widely seen around the world; it is never a China-only phenomenon. But I haven’t seen any scholarship trying to establish this literary tradition with popular fan culture.

One last issue I have to stress here is: there hasn’t been a hierarchy that clearly distinguishes “high culture” and “popular culture” in Chinese fiction; fiction was considered low-brow in general before the end of 19th century, when a group of literati called on a literary revolution. The historical reasons for this condition are complicated, which I will not explain in detail here. Even the word “genre literature” has only existed in Chinese language for less than two decades. Consumers of media products such as Japanese anime, especially those who are no longer young enough to be considered an appropriate consumer for anime, are generally viewed in a biased perspective. And people who love Hollywood blockbusters are despised by those who love European art films. But the bias has not yet supported a deep grained stereotype for popular fans. These might be the ultimate reason for the comparatively high status for fans in China.

 

You write particularly about female fans of slash or Yaoi. How might these young women use this genre to negotiate around tensions surrounding the status of women and female sexuality in China?

Another question that I am personally very interested in. Of course the popularity for slash or yaoi is a very complicated issue. But if we consider specifically the topic of gender and female sexuality, I want to stress the issue of gender equality. (The word choice between slash and yaoi is again a difficult one. In China the term for this genre has another name: danmei 耽美, also with a complicated history. It is originally the Japanese translation of the word “aestheticism,” yet after being imported to China, its meaning shifted. Only for the convenience, I will use the term yaoi here.)

To understand the rapid fad of yaoi culture, one has to understand the population that takes part in reading and writing yaoi fan fiction and original stories. In all of the three areas that I am examining, the rise of female created and female oriented homoerotic stories is directly associated with the issue of female autonomy and independency. In the US, the slash fiction reading and writing is not only a “women’s enterprise” outside the market economy, it also signals women’s rebellion against the dominant social norms of sexuality. In Japan, the emergence of yaoi culture eventually came from the female manga artists who was blocked out of the manga industry because of their gender, started their career in amateurish market of dōjin manga publication, which, ultimately led to their professional career as revolutionary shōjo manga artists. In China, however, the case is different. As I have already mentioned, Chinese contemporary fan culture was marked by its exceptionally elitism. In the case of yaoi culture, the case is more obvious. The first generation of Chinese fangirls, in this case the ones who are active around the year 2000, usually self-considered as the social elite. There was a very famous quote by a yaoi forum titled “Lucifer”: “Fangirls have the responsibility to be more civilized than others.” The claim holds true considering the situation that many fangirls of that age are the ones who go to good universities or high schools, well-educated in Chinese and Western literature, and have excess to the internet before many others in the country. Even though with the internet technology enters more and more people’s household, the existence of the fangirls community and yaoi culture is no longer a secret among young women students in a handful of best universities in China, the tradition of elitism still lingers.

For many girls of the one child generation, their family, especially their parents have exceptional expectation on them. The traditional patriarchy thoughts still persist in some way, especially the older tradition in a family that girls have to sacrifice for boys, that only sons are considered important, but these thoughts lose their meaning and survival environment in the generation when every family has only one child. A predictable consequence is that the only daughters are treated with all attention from their families. Some girls are raised as boys to earn fame and fortune for the family, especially to earn more success than their male cousins. To my own knowledge, most urban girls of my age have the experience of being educated that women are no worse than men, and what a man can do, can certainly be done by a woman. Being inculcated with such words, most girls of this generation, especially the ones that have gained their success according to the mainstream criteria, i.e. those who achieve high academic success and the ones who find well-paid jobs, will ultimately be forced to face with the still highly unequal gender relationship in China. Within the long tradition of women-oriented romance in Sinophone area persists, in which no matter how a woman character is successful, has to finally become an obedient daughter, a loyal wife and a responsible mother, and be restricted again into the family trivial, and to rely on the marriage to determine the success of one’s life. Then any attempt of creating a strong female character risks the danger of falling into the stereotypes of de-feminized female characters of Maoist Socialist Realism. The new possibility in recent popular fiction, though, is turning the female characters into those that encourage over identification and self-projection, i.e. Mary Sue. Mary Sue characters are too easy a role for female readers to identify with; the readymade identification choice is largely degraded in the fan community as an unhealthy indulgence. Many argue that Mary Sue as a fan fiction may not even invite female audience, because the character may bear too much characteristics of the fan fiction writer and as a consequence prevents a general identification. Recently, some new types of romance written for the young women audience and teenager girls, such as Twilight series in English speaking areas, and the time-travel fiction (chuanyue xiaoshuo 穿越小说) in China are considered Mary Sue, even if they do not necessarily fall in the category of fan fiction.

Considering the easy pitfalls for the original female characters, the retreat into yaoi material for the female readers of this generation is a logical result: if you cannot find a solution to the current male-female relationship, then get rid of the female characters all together. At least in between male characters, there can be the possibility of an equal love relationship, in which there is no such thing as one has to subject to the other. This is a temporary and escapist retreat, and probably not a healthy one, because in one way or another, one has to come back to the reality to deal with the male-female relationship. Yet still, the popularity of the yaoi material, from a special perspective, shows the current crisis in gender relationship in Chinese society.

Yet the tendency of surpassing the issue of male-female gender relationship sometimes ends in misogyny in yaoi writings online. While celebrating the pure love between two male characters, the female characters who develops a romantic relationship with one of the male lovers in yaoi materials usually have very tragic ending: for the sake of the two male characters who love each other, female characters have to get away ultimately, so they either die or being tragically dumped by the male character, and also, should never has the importance of the other male character to her ex-husband or boyfriend. I will explain this situation with the reason of jealousy, but I also want to point to the complexity and ambiguity of ideology expressions in Chinese yaoi culture. Even though the explanation of gender equality issue holds true to me and many of my friends around, it might not work on every fangirl. Even if fangirls are attracted to the gender equal expression in certain slash fiction, they might not always stick to this norm when reading other pieces of slash fiction.

Most recent writings in English on Chinese fan communities have emphasized the phenomenon of fan subbing. What roles do fan subbing practices play in promoting other kinds of fan productivity?

I personally feel that fansubbing is the core and root for many fan activities in China, especially in media fandoms. And as you have mentioned in the question, it has become one of the most observable aspects of Chinese fan culture as a whole since more than six or seven years ago, both domestically and internationally, with little of other aspects of Chinese fan culture widely mentioned (I believe the earliest occasion that brought fansub to the foreground was the unintended popularity of the US series Prison Break in China, which was largely in debt to the online fansub groups. Even New York Times had this story covered.). A fansub group is not only a volunteer that translate certain foreign texts into Chinese; it plays the role of raw material selector, the role of linguistic translator, and at the same time, the role of cultural introducer. The final function usually cannot be served in the “official” translations of foreign materials. Because of the informal nature of fansubs, fansubbers are free to add notes, comments and detailed background information introduction for cultural details in order to facilitate the audience in understanding the media materials. Besides, since the fansubbers have a general idea of the identities of their audiences (usually young fans who stay online all the time), fansubbers are able to target the direct concerns and questions of their audiences more accurately.

Fansubs are sometimes the only choice for the Chinese audience to get access to foreign media products. Because Chinese government has a strong restriction on media product imports, and also because there is no rating system in China, imported media products are very limited in number, and even if they are imported, many of which have to go through a thorough censorship first. This censorship is much more on explicit reference to sex, than on politically sensitive issues. (A famous example would be the American sitcom Friends. Despite its tremendous popularity in China, it never was able to appear on TV in China. According to certain rumors—which I believe is true—it was only because there are so many sex-related jokes that after censorship, some episodes would have little left. And as we all know, Friends is so much milder than many US series). Then in order to get access to foreign media products, audiences are forced on to an illegal way. Therefore p2p download and online streaming becomes necessary. Even though students are required to learn English from a young age, the language barriers set by media products are daunting. Because “official subtitles” are usually hard to find for TV series, not to say Chinese dubbing, it is mainly the fansub groups that translate and introduce the foreign media products to the Chinese audience. Though I do not have too much information of the fansubs in English speaking countries, from what I read and heard from conferences on fan activities, fansubs in China have a surprisingly high quality. Many fansub groups require interviews and tests before accepting new members. Some fansub groups on Japanese materials even directly ask the prospective members for their levels and grades for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (is a standardized test to evaluate and certify Japanese language proficiency for non-native speakers, held internationally twice a year). Fansubs depend highly on reputation to thrive in a fandom. I have to emphasize that fansubbing is totally voluntary, not for profit, and open to the general public. But since fansubbers are doing this totally because of their love and interest for the original texts, they usually would do the translation with their best effort. Therefore once a fansub group has established its fame, people tend to believe in it even more than “official subtitles,” if there is any, because after all, fansubs are made “by people of our own community.”

Fan subbing is the starting point of every fan activities on certain media products, therefore it is very crucial. For example, it is not rare to see fan fiction written in Chinese that directly use dialogues in a media product translated by a favorite fansub group. Besides, since Chinese fan culture is especially open to foreign media materials, the role of fan subbing becomes even more significant under this condition.

Again, I am standing on the position of a “native informant” here. I have worked in various fansubbing and fan translation groups, including one on a Japanese radio program (named “Dear Girl~ Stories~,” hosted by two famous Japanese voice actors Kamiya Hiroshi and Ono Daisuke), another on the BBC TV series Sherlock, and I am still an active translator and subber of a fan group on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. The last fan translation group I am working in is based on a “little site” on a Chinese SNS website Douban (豆瓣, which is a very unique SNS site for people to exchange information on books, films, music, etc. and to post their reviews), called “Red Book of Middle Earth” 中土红皮书, a fan created and fan maintained site that introduces and updates everything about and around The Lord of the Rings trilogy and other Tolkien’s writings. If you have interest, here is the link to it: http://site.douban.com/120385/. Right now we are working on news and videos on the Hobbit films. The collection and translations of related materials do require English proficiency (and good Chinese language skills also), and much time and effort. But besides a dozen central figures that participate in the actual translation process, the fans of the fan translation group actually are able to form a small and active fan community.

 

Author's Bio: As an academic fan from China, I entered the fandom around 2003 when I was still an undergraduate student of Chinese Literature at Peking University. I am currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. My dissertation topic is Chinese online fan culture, as well as its relationship with the media and fandoms from Japan and the English speaking areas. I have done several presentations on Chinese fan fiction and fan culture in conferences, but up to now I do not have any publication in English. By the way, I am now translating Professor Jenkins's Textual Poachers into Chinese, not as a voluntary fan translator, though.

The Cultural Context of Chinese Fan Culture: An Interview with Xiqing Zheng (Part Two)

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Fandom constitutes a particular form of leisure. How does it fit within the exam culture which so shapes the lives of Chinese youth?

I do not feel in a confident position in answering this question. Basically I have personal experience to draw upon on all other questions, save this one. I myself had passed the age of being afflicted by the most tediously part of the exam culture when I entered the Lord of the Rings online fandom as a collective community for the first time; I was a sophomore in college then. Before then, yes, I was a fan, but I didn’t know there is something called fandom (and the fandom before 2003 did have much less observable a presence in Chinese society).

Fandom activity is a very good complimentary to the tedious exam culture for the youth in China, especially when exams are not consuming all time of the students. It is difficult for fandom to take much of their time, but leisure times? Very possible. I often find a fan fiction author explaining his/her slow update with the reason “I am a senior in high school, and you know, I don’t have time at all.” Or “I am a high school student living on campus and can only be back home to use the computer on weekends…” or “I live on campus and I can only use my cellphone to update my fic! Please forgive me for the problems on the format.” etc. Some young students may post on fan forums their art products or doodles made in their classrooms, at the back of an exam paper, in a lined notebook; in some online chat, some young fans express their excitement when they encounter anything relevant to their beloved products in a classroom situation. Fandom activities do find a way squeezing into their busy life. However busy the students are, there is always some time left for themselves.

Fan culture has actually existed in Chinese high schools for a long time. I have heard of people who started to write fan fiction with pen and paper in high school years to communicate with other fans, even before the internet is available to average urban families, but such sporadic phenomena cannot be compared to the current situation, when more and more young students are at least aware that there are fandoms for them to participate if they are interested in. We can see that the fan culture is really becoming a major choice for leisure time activities for the busy students in China, and probably a type of convenient refuge for them. Yet I am also reluctant to claim that it is unique comparing to other types of leisure time activities and hobbies for young people in China. After all, even if the fandoms are more and more widespread and observable in Chinese society right now, fan culture still belongs to a small audience and remains a comparatively marginal community.

What are the dominant modes of fan cultural production and participation in China?

I guess that fan fiction is still one of the dominant modes of fan cultural production and participation, and of course, fan art and fan video are also immensely important. The fan fiction I discuss here, which is characterized by female perspectives and commercial consumptions, started around the mid-1990s, and has been prosperous since then. Considering fan art, it is now not only restricted to originally created paintings, but sometimes involves technical manipulation on screen grabs to make them present certain effects. There was not a VHS age for Chinese fan videos so far as I know. The earliest ones I encounter were produced around the turn of the century and are directly circulated online. The earliest ones are usually flash video files; then the production shifted to other formats when online streaming sites become popular. Fan music exists, but the creation of which is more restricted to certain groups of people. Yet even though only a limited number of people participate in fan music writing, these people are very prolific. There are other types of fan activities, for example, fan game designing. But video game designing requires technical expertise of quite a high level, and therefore is very rarely seen. But if created successfully, fan video games are highly welcomed by fans. I have also seen friends who participated in designing fan board games. Fan translation is another type of activities that are able to connect and gather fans of a certain media product. Fan translation is not restricted to subbing a video of reports or interview or other media products related to the original material; it also involves translating certain news and interviews, and even fan fictions, fan arts and fan videos. Another fan activity online recent called “language-cosplay” cannot be categorized in any of the types I stated above. It is an activity for a group of people, with each of them role-plays a character in the original media and interacts with one another online in dialogues as if s/he is the characters.

Fan books and fanzines started later than fan fiction and fan arts in China, and in early 2000s, digital versions of fanzines were more frequently seen than printed ones. Recently the trend changes: fanzines and fan books in printed forms are becoming popular. One reason is the easy access to direct online merchandize with the emergence of platform website such as Taobao 淘宝, and the rapid development of convenient private postal delivery systems, thus direct one to one merchandizes have become possible. Nowadays most fan books and fanzines are planned and pre-ordered online. There is a website called Tianchuang lianmeng 天窗联盟 (Alliance of Roof Windows), which is the largest online search engine of any Chinese language fanbooks and fanzines. Tianchuang, meaning roof windows, is a jargon in the fan community: if a fan artist or fan author is not able to finish his/her work on time, the fanzine or fanbook will not be available for the proposed cons. Then it is called “roof windowed.” (And this jargon is originally from a slang in the publish industry.) This is the link to the website in case that you are interested: http://doujin.bgm.tv/. From this website we can see clearly that the production and circulation of materialized fan products now still has direct connection to the digital media.

For the activities in the “real world,” cosplay and cosplay photography are of the most eye-catching and prevalent phenomena in the fan communities, and have attracted attention in the mainstream media. These activities often take place in fan conventions, though cosplay photography also takes place outside the conventions. The number of conventions is rapidly growing each year and has spread from several major cities to almost all large cities in China. For example in the year 2011, there were more than 100 fan conventions across the country, though the size varies (most conventions register on Tianchuang Lianmeng, you may want to explore that website to see). Sales of fan books and fanzines are one of the major functions of fan conventions in China. Comparing to the conventions held in the US, Chinese conventions are totally supported by the fan artists and fan writers who bring their works to the conventions to sell, since it is usually impossible to invite media celebrities or producers in the media industry for panels and autography—because a large portion of the original materials that the fans consume do not even have a legal distribution channel in China (though, celebrities’ participation is not totally impossible, Chinese manga authors, writers, illustrators, and most recently, celebrities as Japanese voice actors begin to attend conventions). Since there has not been such a tradition for holding panels and discussion sessions in cons, many Chinese fan conventions usually look exactly like flea markets with sellers and customers all dressed up in costumes. Smaller fan gatherings have been a longer tradition from before the 21st century, but such gatherings usually are much smaller in scale, usually turn out to be a dinner, a Karaoke party, or an afternoon spent together in a board game café.

I personally feel that concerning the types of fan activities, fandoms around the world are very similar to each other. Even though some details may vary because of different social historical context, in the end all fan activities are about consumption, interpretation and appropriation. Indeed there are cultural differences, but fans’ communities around the world share astonishing amount of similarities. Because of the possibility of instant interaction and communication brought by the internet, the fan communities around the world is gradually breaking the language boundary, which is more observable in a third world country as in China, as people volunteer translating and reposting the fan products in other languages they like. But sadly, in most cases, it is still a unidirectional process.

Are there distinctive forms of fan production which have originated in China?

Since it is hard to determine all the fan production forms in other culture, I am not sure whether there is some form that is authentically “made in China.” But I feel that fan sub, or more broadly speaking, fan translation is specifically important in China, much more so than in many other countries. One reason is of course, the imported media products have from the beginning held special significance to the development of Chinese fan culture. The original media products are not the only things that Chinese fans translate; but also foreign fan productions, including fan fiction, fan art and other relevant periphery productions and news surrounding the original media products. I am not sure whether it is the condition of all fandoms in other third world countries, but just as I mentioned above, you do feel the powerful existence of globalization in fandoms. Even in the case of fandoms on pure Chinese materials, we find interactions and communications among different Chinese speaking regions (I have encountered fans from Malaysia in several fandoms I participate in). Again, I am not claiming that it is exclusively “made in China,” but fan translation is something that makes Chinese fandom more complicated than the fandoms I see in the US and in Japan, but beyond my scope, it is still hard to say.

Author's Bio: As an academic fan from China, I entered the fandom around 2003 when I was still an undergraduate student of Chinese Literature at Peking University. I am currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. My dissertation topic is Chinese online fan culture, as well as its relationship with the media and fandoms from Japan and the English speaking areas. I have done several presentations on Chinese fan fiction and fan culture in conferences, but up to now I do not have any publication in English. By the way, I am now translating Professor Jenkins's Textual Poachers into Chinese, not as a voluntary fan translator, though.

The Cultural Context of Chinese Fan Culture: An Interview with Xiqing Zheng (Part One)

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From time to time, I have shared with my readers glimpses into the forms fan culture has taken around the world. For example, see this discussion of Harry Potter fandom in Russia or this discussion by one of my former USC graduate students about Chinese vids made in response to Kung Fu Panda or see this interview regarding the growth of Otaku Studies in Japan. This week, I am sharing with you the insights of Xiqing Zheng, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. We have been corresponding off and on for the past year because she is working on a translation of Textual Poachers for the Chinese market. In the course of our correspondence, she shared with me some of her work which touches on the relationship between Chinese fandom and Japanese Otaku culture. She was nice enough to let me interview her about her work, which touches on some fascinating issues concerning fandom, the global circulation of media, gender and sexuality, fan subs and digital piracy, and issues of cultural, economic, and political change in contemporary China.

You have been doing research about “otaku” cultures in China. “Otaku” as a concept originates in Japan. Why is this the most appropriate word to describe what has developed in China? Are Chinese Otaku draw primarily to Japanese media content or are they adopting and localizing Otaku practices but applying them to specifically Chinese content?

Frankly, I have to admit that the wording choice for this is partly determined by the fact that the article I sent you was written for a Japanese journal: I was trying to make their translator’s work easier, as well as to save some work on my own side—you really do not need to explain what is “Otaku” to a Japanese reader, while a strict definition of “fan” may take some time and space. Out of the Japanese context, I prefer using the word “fan” as a descriptive term for the community that I am interested in. Yet I do not see a clear distinction between the so-called otaku culture, in its current meaning, and the media fan culture in the Euro-American context. So I am against the tendency of connecting either of the identities with a fixed type of media, whether it is Japanese ACG (abbreviation of “anime”, “comic” and “game,” I will use this word constantly in below), or Euro-American sci-fi TV series.

But at the same time, I feel the word “otaku” especially appropriate in describing the situation in Chinese online fan community, because: First of all, the Japanese material actually was the starting point of the current Chinese fandoms, which was imported from Japan at the end of the 20th century. Secondly, generally the condition of Chinese fandoms looks similar to the Japanese ones, more than the US media fandom, with a boundary more thoroughly torn-down between high art and popular culture, the readers and the writers. Thirdly, in daily usage, the word “otaku” is often more connected to a certain media or a group of media, while “fan” can be linked to a media, but is more frequently associated with a single text or a single individual.

Usually if we talk about “sub-community” in Chinese fan community, there are several ways to divide up the group, and one of them is a division according to the origin of the original media text. Using this criterion, the fan community in China can be divided into Euro-American media and literature fans, Japanese ACG and literature fans, Korean media fans, Chinese media and literature fans, etc. According to the statistic of a fan author, Wang Zheng, around the year 2007, 70% of the whole fan fiction writing in China is based on Japanese original texts, especially anime and manga, 20% of Chinese fan fiction is based on Chinese texts while the other is based on Euro-American texts. I do not trust her statistic completely because such statistic is hard to conduct accurately in the internet age, but from one aspect, we can see the strong presence of Japanese media in Chinese fandoms.

However, the distinction among each group is very vague, as one person can be simultaneously put in all groups mentioned above. For example, I am personally a fan of Lord of the Rings, which is a British novel and a Hollywood film trilogy; a fan of Legend of Galactic Heroes, which is a Japanese space opera and a long series of anime; a fan of Three Kingdoms, which is a traditional colloquial historical novel written in China in the 14th century and derivative media products in China and Japan.

Most of my friends in fandoms are in exactly the same situation. And in many ways, the materials from all nations are treated in a similar way from the ending point of the media distribution and acceptance. In other words, different original places for media products do not necessarily lead to different types of acceptance and re-appropriation, while the same can be said that about the cultural value of the texts, for high art and popular culture can be treated the same way at the receiving end, also.

The naming issue for the Chinese fan culture has to be taken carefully but sometimes restricted by many other unexpected troubles. The word “otaku” has been imported to Chinese; because of the same writing system of Chinese characters shared by the Chinese language and the Japanese language, the Chinese character of otaku “御宅” is the one being imported to China, while in Japan, this word is more often written in hiragana or katakana as “おたく” or “オタク”. The word was originally a respective address to another person (referring the other person in conversation not directly, but indirectly to his/her house to show respect), and has been used jokingly inside the otaku communities for each other, as acknowledging each other as fellow “geeks.” Currently it generally refers to fans of ACG media, but terms such as “sci-fi otaku,” “railway otaku,” “board game otaku,” also exist. However, the word in Chinese has shifted its meaning mainly because it has crossed the boundary of subculture and entered the public vocabulary, or at least the urban public, but with a meaning very different from the original one.

While with the word “宅” meaning “house” in Chinese, the public is using this word as the synonym of “staying-at-home-type of people,” or those who do not go out in their spare time, or do not go out at all, which is described with another Japanese word “hikikomori”引き篭もり in Japan; such behavior is not necessarily a trait for otaku. This meaning is more widely spread in Chinese society that I have already found people using this word with the new meaning in academic environment. Therefore except that I am conducting comparisons with the Japanese otaku community, I really am reluctant to use the word otaku to refer to the Chinese fan community now. Therefore I will still use the word “fan culture” to refer to the cultural phenomenon of cultural recirculation and re-appropriation in China.

 

There is a strong history of cultural conflict between Japan and China. What role (if any) does this history play in shaping potential contacts between Chinese and Japanese Otaku?

This is one of the questions that intrigue me most. I have read and heard some presentations by Japan scholars that the popularity of Japan media materials may relieve the influence of “anti-Japan” education in many Asian countries, and therefore play a beneficial role in construction of a better image for Japan in the younger generation, and make these young people grow an attitude more friendly to Japan. (I personally feel rather repelled by the ideology connotation of the wording of “anti-Japan” education.) It is true that every media product is political, and it is also true that in Japan the otaku culture is often considered right wing, though not always so. But it does not mean that as a foreign consumer, a Chinese fan will take in everything that the producers want her to take, especially in the case like here, that the social historical and ideological circumstance of the audience is distinctive from the producers’. And here is where the complicated Sino-Japan relationship comes into play.

Interestingly enough, there is a tendency in Chinese fans to divide a “cultural Japan” and a “political Japan” when consuming Japanese media material. There is a certain tendency in Chinese otaku to clearly distinguish two “Japans” in their perception of this country: one is the governmental Japan, who still refuses to formally apologize for their imperialist invasion in Asia and its military nationalism, and the other the cultural (and especially popular cultural) Japan, who represents a fashion and “Japan cool.” Chinese fans generally accept that the products are from Japan, and they are very good, intriguing, and worth becoming a fan for. But at the same time, they refuse to identify with the political national identity of Japan linked with the media product. In fact, they try to sever the role of Japanese government and politics out of the media products.

This phenomenon is very different from the situation in the US. As I have observed so far in the US, if a consumer becomes a fan of the media products from a certain country, he/she may in a large probability become a fan of the country as a whole. But in China, many friends of mine complain about their parents’ attitude towards their cultural preferences: “Who tells them that I will love Japan if I just love to watch Japanese anime?” And this is at least the fact for a large portion of ACG otaku in China. Moreover, when there is any conflict between the cultural preference and political identification, the political identification often prevails. For example, there was an anime called Night Raid 1931, broadcasted in Japan in 2010, which is set in the background of Shanghai right before Japan invaded China, and features much denigrated representation of the Chinese people. This anime was refused totally by most large fansub groups, who usually translate literarily all new Japanese anime episodes available. Several comparatively marginal groups did the fansub, eventually, but this anime is generally intentionally ignored by the Chinese otaku group for a whole season. As the media product is never imported to China, there is no other way to show our upset about it anyway.

However, the story is usually not an easy one. For more explanation, I want to raise one fandom as an example. I actually have presented on this topic at a conference, but I feel there is still more to develop. There is a Japanese web comic, titled Axis Powers: Hetalia (referred to APH below) by Himaruya Hidekazu, and has been adapted into manga and anime. APH is a set of media products of parody descriptions of the world military and political history, especially of the World War II era, with vignettes about various countries’ culture; each character is an anthropomorphizations of various countries and areas. These anthropomorphized characters, different from the traditional fixed national personifications such as John Bull for Britain, Uncle Sam for America, are created by the author Himaruya himself and does not intend to carry any political significations. APH is now immensely popular in the US also, by the way.

APH is widely circulated in Chinese otaku community basically through online video websites and through non-copyrighted fansubbed video files, downloadable through p2p venue. Similar to many other Japanese anime, APH inspires a large amount of fan creation, including fan fiction and fan video, and also cosplay shows. Usually in the APH fandom, audience attempts to create a non-political neutral perspective that is far away from the debate of the real life political discussion. In the Chinese speaking world, there is a set of “internet etiquette,” first promoted by the Taiwan fandom, then spread into mainland China. This set of etiquettes are promoted mainly to prevent any possible conflicts between the fan writers and some “outsider” readers that happens to see the fan writings that probably will enrage him/her because of the less serious political presentation in the stories.

Despite the political neutral intention from the author and most of its fandom globally, what happens in the Chinese APH fandom is that many fans eagerly celebrate and reinforce the Chinese identity, history and culture in a way close to the mainstream narrative or sometimes even clichéd official narrative in China. I argue the main reason is the clear self-alienation from totally identifying with the Japanese text, or in other words, an identity creation process with the background of understanding otaku as mainly a Japanese-exported phenomenon.

What I mean by this self-alienation and identity creation roots from, the deep rooted Sino-Japanese conflict, which is only half relieved or hidden by Japanese media products’ popularity in China, including the immergence of the otaku culture itself. With this clear split in the “Japan” idea, the accepting Japanese culture no longer becomes a critical issue even if one is unhappy with the Japanese government’s attitude. However, it also makes the acceptance for the Japanese culture much less complete. It is already difficult to separate a pure “culture” totally devoid of political narratives; the acceptance of narratives with certain reference to real world politics, such as APH becomes further difficult with the Japanese ideology involved in the story. Therefore, the interpretation and fan creation basing on such narrative takes on a mode of accepting the “Japan” on the cultural level, i.e. taking the setting and the moe characters, while refusing Japan’s self-interpretation on the political level, instead using the Chinese mainstream narrative of the history to adapt the original narrative and create new narrative. The alienation caused by the Japanese social historical narrative then pushes the Chinese fans back to their own familiar zone of Chinese self-narrative.

Take one dōjinshi (fan book or fanzine) published in 2008, Wei Long (为龙, Being a Dragon) as an example. This dōjinshi has already become a legend in Chinese fan community. It is a dōjinshi centering on the China character, Wang Yao王耀, and it is consisted of about 25 illustrations, several four-grid comics, and several short manga stories. Highly well-known in the fandom, its original price was 75 RMB, but the price of a used copy now usually exceeds 500 RMB (this speed of price increase is very rare in China). After the release of this dōjinshi, there was also a theme song of very high quality written by fans specifically for it. If you are interested, here is a link for it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gwB8vPGDIM.

The popularity of this dōjinshi comes from not only the quality of the pictures (there were more than ten professional manga authors participated in the creation of this dōjinshi), but also the content, which celebrate passionately the glorious long history of China and the strong will that China experienced in the 19th and 20th century to overcome all the difficulties to rise up again from defeat and invasion. Such usage of the original materials, especially the setting, is never intended by the original author, but has become at least one of the most important traits of Chinese APH fandom. As far as I know, such modes of consumption are rare in the APH fandom elsewhere.

There is another issue that I want to point out here, even though Himaruya as well as most APH fans repeatedly claim that the characters are merely created for entertainment purposes and not for political interpretations, still one cannot really separate one’s perception of a certain country with the cute personages in the anime. However, the historical truth in this narrative becomes then largely simplified and single-lateral. I want to note one specific example in the original narrative of APH. All country characters in the anime speak standard Japanese, with occasional utterance of several sentences in their respective native languages. The only character that does not speak standard Japanese is the China character, Wang Yao. Adding a redundant “aru” (ある) at the end of most sentences he speaks, this trait presents clearly the characteristics of a specific Creole language called “kyowago” (協和語) promoted by the Japanese colonial government in Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s.

Even though Japanese colonization is never directly mentioned in APH, the using of this specific linguistic trait implicitly alludes to this history. Yet, curiously enough, this linguistic trait has also become a forgotten history on the Chinese side, with most Chinese fans interpreting this linguistic trait as a simple personal style. As my observation goes, Japanese fans also do not explicitly take this issue very seriously. Yet it at least shows in one aspect the political and historical complications behind this seemingly simple setting. It also tells us that it is really impossible to imagine a cultural product totally independent from social political issues in the real world.

Therefore, I suggest it is erroneous to imagine that the Sino-Japanese historical political conflicts can be easily remedied by developing Chinese fans of Japanese media products (or vice versa), nor should we over-emphasize the power for the audience to totally subvert or ignore the ideology embedded in cultural materials. But at the same time, how audiences interpret or appropriate a certain fictional narrative is definitely cannot be totally controlled by the producers, therefore the fandoms based on the same media product could be very different from country to country.

 

Author's Bio: As an academic fan from China, I entered the fandom around 2003 when I was still an undergraduate student of Chinese Literature at Peking University. I am currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. My dissertation topic is Chinese online fan culture, as well as its relationship with the media and fandoms from Japan and the English speaking areas. I have done several presentations on Chinese fan fiction and fan culture in conferences, but up to now I do not have any publication in English. By the way, I am now translating Professor Jenkins's Textual Poachers into Chinese, not as a voluntary fan translator, though.

Spreading Independent and Transnational Content

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As we count down to the wide spread release of our new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, we are rolling out this week five more essays -- in this case, dealing with core issues from the book's chapters on independent media and transnational media flows. One final crop of essays from the project will go on-line next week. By now, some of you may well be receiving copies of the book advanced ordered through Amazon or New York University Press. We'd love to know what you think. I was lucky enough to be able to share some thoughts about this project this past week with faculty and students at Concordia University. This post is available in Czech language (provided by Alex and Nora Pozner from bizow reviews team).

 

The Long Tail of Digital Games

In the raging debate over the legitimacy and consequences of the “Long Tail” theory (Anderson 2006), few markets have received more attention than those dedicated to digitally distributed video games. Proponents of the Long Tail have argued that digital distribution will finally turn the historically hit-driven game industry on its head—that future revenues will be driven by consumer activity distributed across a huge catalog of video games developed, in large part, by independent game developers as opposed to titanic publishers; that it will prove consistently more profitable to focus on niche audiences in this new world of digital game distribution, rather than to focus on the development of broadly appealing hits; and (for those of us interested in the spreadability model) that a new generation of empowered consumers will actively seek and promote the highest-quality content, driving revenues to the most deserving game developers and leading to a healthier and more vibrant video game ecosystem overall.

There can be no doubt that encouraging signs of this development have begun to crop up everywhere. Many now-prominent independent game developers, such as The Behemoth and 2D Boy, have leveraged console-based digital distribution platforms such as Xbox LIVE, Wiiware, and the Playstation Network (PSN) to reach markets that were previously only accessible via the long arm of a traditional publisher. These developers have not only created award-winning games that have generated significant amounts of profit. They have, in many cases, retained the rights to their intellectual property (IP) and operated with near-total independence, an unthinkable situation for small console game developers only a few years ago. And, while digital distribution on the console typically generates the most buzz, independent developers have made equally great strides on mobile devices, the web, and the PC thanks to a wide variety of channels (stores such as iTunes, Android Market, and Steam; portals such as Kongregate.com; and more generalized distribution through social network sites such as Facebook, to name just a few). Savvy observers have noted that in mobile ecosystems in particular, independent developers have consistently had greater success than traditional publishers in cracking into the “top 10.”

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(Sp)reading Digital Comics

Comic books—especially single issues, or “floppies”—have always been spreadable. As kids in the 1980s, my friends and I would head into our local comic shop, each emerge with an armful of floppies, then spend the afternoon first reading through our own haul and then each other’s. Usually, at least one of my friends’ floppies would be from some larger multipart story arc, and, if it was any good, I’d either go digging through my friend’s collection or thumbing through the store’s back issues to find out what was going on. Sharing, recommendation, drillability, and vast narrative complexity were all part of our everyday lives long before we could even drive.

Webcomics have emerged as an alternative form of publishing that makes such practices even easier. Many webcomics use RSS feeds to deliver new installments via email or RSS reader applications, and many webcomics offer forums where fans can chat and bicker and share their favorite comics with one another, much as my friends and I did in person so many years ago. Now, I can recommend comics to friends around the world either by emailing them a link to a webcomic’s site (and thus the latest comic) or a “permalink” to the archived page or, more commonly now, by texting, IMing, or Facebook messaging them such a link. Many webcomics, such as Emily Horne and Joey Comeau’s A Softer World, include built-in widgets for fans to recommend them on online services such as Digg, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Twitter. Scott Kurtz’s PVP includes widgets to share each strip on twenty different services.

Unlike traditional print comics, for which most writers and artists labor under “work for hire” contracts for large publishers such as Marvel and DC, webcomics are typically owned and operated by their creators and rely on revenues generated by advertising, fan subscriptions/memberships, or sales of ancillary merchandise. As a result, for creators, getting individuals to purchase a single instance of their work (such as a traditional print floppy) is less important than establishing an ongoing relationship, aggregating a large recurring audience over time. The simplicity of the URL system supports this—when recommending a comic to a friend, I could copy and paste an image of the comic itself into an email, stripping out the context, ads, and links to the related merchandise, but why bother when sharing a link is so easy?

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The Use Value of Authors

A key dilemma for both media consumers and producers in today’s media environment is discoverability: with so much media spreading, and even more desperately wanting to be spread, how do we choose what to consume? Consequently, consumers need highly effective filters to direct them to the media they are most likely to enjoy and away from that which they are unlikely to enjoy; producers, meanwhile, need to develop techniques to ensure that their content enjoys safe passage through such filters and finds the audiences most likely to enjoy their work. Herein lies the importance of, and the use for, authors.

As compared to creative figures—producers, writers, artists, designers, and a wealth of other terms in common parlance to describe those who make media—an “author” is someone to whom we attribute a heightened level of authority and autonomy over the item of media in question. Most consumers operate on the assumption that a vast amount of media isn’t worth personally consuming, either because it is corporate hackery written by committee just to make a fast buck, because it is amateurish and incompetent, or simply because it doesn’t appeal to any of their interests. An author, though, is a totem of sorts that signifies a certain level of skill and singularity of vision. To talk of authors for professionally produced content is to assert creativity and self-expression in what can too often be characterized as a faceless, paint-by-numbers industry, while to talk of authors for amateur-produced content is to attribute artistry in what can too often be characterized as a world full of everyone’s uploaded cat videos. Discussing authors can be a way to validate the product of said authors, and hence to allow ourselves to discuss art, meaning, and depth in some popular media without attributing artistry or depth to all popular media.

At the same time, precisely who the author is can be hotly contested and variable, as the content industries may pose one author, while fans may look to others, sometimes working to uncover who the “real” author is. For instance, while The Simpsons is often popularly spoken of as Matt Groening’s, many fans have nominated other individuals in the show’s production as the true source(s) of the show’s perceived brilliance, and hence as its author(s). The fact that people would bother to argue over who the author is should signify how much the title of author matters, and it offers an initial sign of the importance of authors. MORE

 

The Swedish Model

Sweden is a small country, yet it has one of the world’s biggest and best-selling music scenes. You might think ABBA, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but they’re just the best-known starting point of a very long tail, with thousands of bands spanning every genre and degree of success. Sweden is also home to The Pirate Bay, the world’s top torrenting site, which ABBA songwriter Björn Ulvaeus has decried as made by and for those who are lazy and stingy and don’t understand that, if creators can’t anticipate payment, they will never release music (“ABBA Star” 2009). Since the advent of recording in the early twentieth century, recorded music has been the central economic good of the music business. Hence, it is no wonder that the mainstream industry has been so vociferous in its efforts to demonize and sue uploaders and to support national policies that limit the ability of listeners to spread music.

Further down the tail, though, Sweden is home to many artists and labels trying to forge a new way through this thicket, one that rejects the notions that certain payment is a precondition for artistic expression or that file sharing detracts from the economics of their business. The attitudes and actions of The Swedish Model, a consortium of seven independent labels committed to a more optimistic dialogue on music’s future, and other Swedish labels and musicians put spreadability at the center of their hopes for the future of the music business. The tiny label Songs I Wish I Had Written, headed by Martin Thörnkvist, who also heads The Swedish Model, shared an office with a Pirate Bay cofounder, and Thörnkvist uploads his label’s catalog in the highest quality to Pirate Bay. Labrador, another Swedish independent label, gives away annual samplers through Pirate Bay and posts all its singles for free download on its website.

These entrepreneurs have taken to heart that if their music doesn’t spread, it may as well be dead. The logic goes like this: We are small and have minimal budgets. There are few mainstream venues that will promote our music, so few people will have the opportunity to hear it through mass media. The more people who hear it, the larger the audience will become. Even if most of that audience does not pay for CDs or mp3s, the slice that does will be bigger than the entire audience would otherwise have been. And the slice that doesn’t pay to buy music may well pay for other things. As Thörnkvist put it when addressing the music industry audience at MIDEMNet, “I’d rather have one million listeners and one hundred buyers than one hundred listeners and one hundred buyers” (2009).

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Transnational Audiences and East Asian Television

Consider a clip from the Japanese variety show Arashi no Shukudai-kun that recently made its way onto YouTube in early 2009: a small group of Japanese pop singers are challenged to eat a “surprisingly large” hamburger named after a city in the Ibaraki prefecture and are joking about how “Super American” the situation is. They suggest that the burger inspires them to don overalls and grow “amazing” chest hair, while Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” blares in the background. The clip was then subtitled in English by two fans based in Australia and circulated based on its appeal to English-speaking audiences of the “J-pop” performers in the video as an embodied spectacle of Japanese popular culture. Various versions of the clip were distributed online through fan communities on LiveJournal, a Russian-owned social blogging platform with offices headquartered in San Francisco, and other forums, and fans shared the links through their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and other social media channels. In the process, the Arashi no Shukudai-kun clip was recontextualized, reformatted, resubtitled, and diverted to new (and sometimes unexpected) audiences at every step along the way. Far from exceptional, there are countless clips like this one on YouTube: in the global spreadable media environment, its crisscrossing path back and forth across multiple national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries is becoming perfectly common.

Not only is the transnational movement of media becoming increasingly pervasive; it has also become significantly more—and more visibly—multinodal. Thus, we must go beyond the use of Bruce Springsteen in the background of a Japanese variety show as part of a parody and indigenization of Western cultural materials to consider its subsequent movement as it is taken up, translated, and circulated by grassroots intermediaries, passing through divergent and overlapping circuits, often outside the purview of established media industries and markets. In short, we must look beyond sites of production and consumption to consider the practices of transmission and the routes of circulation—the means and manner by which people spread media to one another—which are increasingly shaping the flow of transnational content.

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More Spreadable Media: Rethinking Transmedia Engagement

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Let it spread, let it spread, let it spread. By now, you know: Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture is a new book, being released by New York University Press at the end of January 2013, written by myself, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Around the book will live thirty or so online essays written by colleagues, former students, and others who have been associated with the Futures of Entertainment Consortium through the years, which both engage with the content of the book, and are, in turn, taken up as part of the book's core argument.  We are hoping you will do your part to help spread these essays throughout your own social networks, and let the conversation start before the book even gets released to the world.

Today's crop, the last before the new year, offers new perspectives on transmedia entertainment and more generally, on the issue of audience engagement, both central themes in the book, as those of you who regularly read this blog might imagine. For more information, check out the book's home page.

Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text

 

While the rise of spreadable media is a major trend of the contemporary era, another development within media seems to pull in an opposite direction: narrative complexity of media storytelling, especially on television. Since the late 1990s, dozens of television series have broadened the possibilities available to small-screen storytellers to embrace increased seriality, hyperconscious narrative techniques such as voice-over narration and playful chronology, and deliberate ambiguity and confusion. These trends, which I’ve explored at length elsewhere (Mittell 2006), are tied into transformations within the television industry and technologies of distribution that have enabled programs to be viewed more consistently by smaller audiences and to still be considered successful.

Such long-form complex narratives as Lost, The Wire, 24, and The Sopranos seem to run counter to many of the practices and examples of spreadable media found elsewhere in this book. These shows are not the ephemeral “video of attractions” common to YouTube that are shared and commented on during downtime at work. They are the DVD box sets to be shelved next to literary and cinematic collections, long-term commitments to be savored and dissected in both online and offline fora. They spread less through exponential linking and emailing for quick hits than via proselytizing by die-hard fans eager to hook friends into their shared narrative obsessions. Even when they are enabled by the spreadable technologies of online distribution, both licit and illicit, the consumption patterns of complex serials are typically more focused on engaging with the core narrative text than the proliferating paratexts and fan creativity that typify spreadable media.

Perhaps we need a different metaphor to describe viewer engagement with narrative complexity. We might think of such programs as drillable rather than spreadable. They encourage a mode of forensic fandom that invites viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling (Mittell 2009a). Such programs create magnets for engagement, drawing viewers into story worlds and urging them to drill down to discover more. READ MORE

 

A History of Transmedia Entertainment

As embraced by industry professionals and media consumers alike, transmedia storytelling promises to bring greater institutional coordination, added narrative integrality, and deeper engagement to the various pieces of contemporary media franchises. Comic books, video games, and other markets once considered ancillary now play increasingly significant and recentered roles in the production and consumption of everyday film and television properties such as Heroes, Transformers, and the reenvisioned Star Trek in ways that only very few innovators (such as George Lucas and his carefully elaborated and expanded Star Wars empire) had previously conceived in the twentieth century. Yet, while contemporary convergence culture has set the stage for a greater embrace of transmedia entertainment, the processes by which stories have been spread across institutions, production cultures, and audiences from different media have a much longer history. Although we might recognize transmedia storytelling as something newly emergent, we also cannot deny its relationship to long-established models of media franchising whereby the creative and economic resources owned by monolithic corporate entities were nevertheless widely used and shared across production communities and industry sectors. The franchise models that multiplied one Law & Order into several sister series and turned X-Men comic books into action figures worked by spreading resources among a network of stakeholders brought into social relations by virtue of their parallel (though often imperfectly aligned) interests. Thus, neither transmedia entertainment nor convergence point to the end of industrial models of cultural production in favor of some new social media; instead, the transmedia storytelling of convergence offers an opportunity to see how spreadable media extend, reorient, and reimagine existing historical trajectories in the industrial production and consumption of culture.

Understanding transmedia in terms of cultural exchange across and transformation through different media experiences means recognizing traditional processes of adaptation and translation of content as a foundation for the social exchange of spreadable media today. READ MORE.

 

 

Performing with Glee

Some producers developing cross-platform media franchises are experimenting with distribution models that engage consumers on a quotidian level, capitalizing on personal audience networks and not-quite-official distribution routes to help content spread. For FOX’s television franchise Glee, the network integrates traditional, legal distribution practices with experimental tactics that engage loyal fans, in addition to harnessing unofficial distribution channels that fall into legal gray areas.

The production team has embraced the show’s fans—known as gleeks, a fusion of “Glee” and “geek”—fashioning a popular (brand) identity and catering specifically to them. In addition to conventional broadcast, Hulu and FOX.com allow viewers to catch previous episodes, and FOX offers additional content such as cast interviews and behind-the-scenes clips. Glee’s thematic fusion of high school comedy and Broadway musical provide opportunities for musical guests from both Broadway (such as Kristin Chenoweth) and the popular music circuit (such as Britney Spears and Josh Grobin), bringing new viewers into the Glee fan club while keeping current fans engaged.

To retain fan interest after season one ended, FOX partnered with CoincidentTV to create the “Glee Superfan Player.” The online platform integrates social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter with other fan-enticing elements—such as links to buy music on iTunes and to create “photobooth” pictures with the cast—in a unified space that plays episodes while viewers multitask. While the player only provides access to material on Hulu and FOX.com, rendering the experimental platform useless once episodes eventually expire, it at least represents an attempt to create a consolidated cross-platform fan experience. Other recent experiments include a MySpace karaoke contest, in which fans record themselves singing hits from Glee, and live concert tours that sold out in four American cities—so successful that the cast plans to tour the UK in mid-2011. READ MORE

Valuing Fans

Why work toward a model for valuing fans?

The U.S. media industry has run into some significant economic problems in recent years. Study after study suggests that Americans are watching more television and consuming more movies, music, and information than ever before, but, at the same time, it is neither as captive nor as concentrated as before. New ways to discover emerging artists and projects, as well as increasing choice in media platforms and content, are challenging how ad-supported media is bought and sold and rendering direct funding for some media content much harder to come by.

It was this situation that gave rise to the popularity of “engagement” a few years ago, a tactic to sell advertisers audiences whose enthusiasm is believed to translate to more awareness of and receptivity to product placement and commercials. How much more “engaged” and receptive this new audience is than the older, bigger one was considered crucial in setting a price for the advertising that supports media production. Conspicuously absent from these discussions was the role that fan communities (groups whose various interests in a media property may range widely) play in contributing economic value beyond paying attention to commercials. READ MORE

 

The Online Prime Time of Workspace Media

Ask a producer of digital content about website usage patterns, as I have, and they will tell you how important the audience accessing their content from work is to daily website traffic. According to NBC’s vice president of digital content and development, Carole Angelo, NBC.com designs its daily production schedule to service its workweek “lunch hour” audience. Fox Sports Digital (2009) also adopts this production strategy, as it summed up in its 2009 slogan “lunchtime is the new prime time.” Reporting on this trend, the New York Times observed that American cubicle dwellers were increasingly choosing to spend their break time watching online videos, playing Flash games, and engaging in social network sites instead of heading to the water cooler (Stelter 2008). The entertainment industries are creating digital content for the work space because they see this audience as a dependable online consumer demographic.

Programming for the workspace media audience is crucial to entertainment industry efforts in the online space. It allows producers to adapt familiar television programming strategies for the Internet. In television, producers have long programmed according to “day parts”—segments of the broadcast day designed for particular audiences and viewing contexts. Nick Browne has argued that the scheduling of day parts enabled television companies to reflect and reinforce a “socially mediated order of the workday and workweek” to “mediate between the worlds of work and entertainment” (1994, 71). Each day part carries with it certain assumptions about the needs and desires of audience segments, as well as expectations of modern labor. The scheduling of a workday day part demonstrates the influence that technology has had on the blending of work and entertainment. READ MORE

Spreadable Media Goes Retro: Pass It Along!

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We continue this week with the process of rolling out the essays commissioned to accompany Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture,   the book I wrote with Sam Ford and Joshua Green and which is being released to the world at the end of January, 2013. You can start to get a sense of the shape of the book's argument by reading these essays, week by week, as they get unleashed upon the world. This week, for example, we are sharing essays which are designed to accompany the book's second chapter -- Reappraising the Residual -- which explores competing regimes of value, competing processes of appraisal, and especially the ways that old media content might regain value from the ways it moves within and across social networks online.

For those who would like a bit more of a road map of Spreadable Media, below is the breakdown of the chapters:

Introduction: Why Media Spreads                                                                                                               

Chapter One: Where Web 2.0 Went Wrong

Chapter Two: Reappraising the Residual

Chapter Three: The Value of Media Engagement

Chapter Four: What Constitutes Meaningful Participation?

Chapter Five: Designing for Spreadability

Chapter Six: Courting Supporters for Independent Media

Chapter Seven: Thinking Transnationally

Conclusion

 

To learn more about the book, check out our main website. You can go there to read the whole essays (or follow the links below).

We strongly encourage you to spread these essays through your own social networks, repost them on your blogs -- all we ask is that you acknowledge the authors and the fact that they are associated with our book.   Thanks to all of you who have recirculate previous essays we've released.

RETROBRANDS AND RETROMARKETING

Today’s big brands are all rooted in the past. Tide, Coca-Cola, BMW, and even Apple are all connected to bygone decades. When these brands extend and use their existing brand name to introduce a new product or service, the past meanings and images that it invokes become an important element to be managed, understood, wielded, and shaped by managers. This short essay discusses and analyzes a form of brand extension strategy that has gained prominence, in which tired or even abandoned brands have been reanimated and successfully relaunched. Management will deliberately reach into the past and consciously seek to gain new value from old brands and the meaningful relationships they convey. Stephen Brown (2001) terms this a “retro revolution” in which the revival of old brands and their images have become an increasingly attractive option for marketing managers. Over the past decade, I have been involved either independently or with coauthors in a growing body of research that looks at how the past is consumed, valued, revalued, and managed, beginning with a study of the values and images of the Wal-Mart retail chain (Arnold, Kozinets, and Handelman 2001). Stephen Brown, John Sherry, and I define retrobranding as “the revival or relaunch of a product or service brand from a prior historical period, which is usually but not always updated to contemporary standards of performance, functioning, or taste,” seeing retro goods as “brand-new, old-fashioned offerings” (2003b, 20). Old brands retain value simply by being old: the value of nostalgia, the so-called retro appeal. There is also value in the communal or cultural relationships that the brand has built over its lifetime. Finally, there are values on an individual level that relate to the former two other values.

In a set of studies cutting across three different retro, “cult brand” products—the Volkswagen Beetle, Star Wars, and Quisp breakfast cereal—Brown, Sherry, and I have sought to explain the underlying principles of retrobranding and the way consumers responded to it (2003a, 2003b). The VW Beetle was a popular car associated with the 1960s era and hippies and also immortalized in Disney’s Herbie films, a series of four films originating with 1968’s hit The Love Bug (the series itself later updated and retrobranded into Herbie: Fully Loaded, a 2005 motion picture starring Lindsay Lohan). Star Wars is one of the most successful media franchises of all time. And Quisp cereal is an American breakfast cereal released in the 1960s using cartoon advertising created by Jay Ward, the creator of cult animation hit Rocky and Bullwinkle, and employing some of the same voice talents.

In each case, the entertainment connections of the brand have helped spur a type of residual and actual “brand fandom” that led to the possibility of a revival. In the case of the VW Beetle, this was the 1998 launch of the VW New Beetle. For Star Wars, it was the much-maligned 1999 prequel The Phantom Menace. For Quisp cereal, it was the quiet and limited redistribution of the cereal into select markets in the 1980s, after it had languished without support since the late 1970s. As well, Quisp’s fan-spurred and eBay-supported emergence in the mid-1990s marked it as the first so-called Internet cereal.

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THE VALUE OF RETROGAMES

Existing in dialectical tension with contemporary games which trumpet their photorealistic graphics, sprawling storyworlds, and intricate, extended, networked play, retrogames preserve and celebrate a prior era of gaming often referred to as a “golden age” of arcade standards (such as Asteroids, Tempest, and Donkey Kong) from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Increasingly, the category also covers the decade that followed the industry crash of 1983, when the locus of gaming shifted to home consoles such as the Nintendo and Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES and SNES), the Sega Genesis and Dreamcast, and home microcomputers such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga, as well as the first generation of PCs and Macintoshes. Compared with games for contemporary consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that occupy gigabytes of memory, resurrections of 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit video and computer games look like the mathematically downscaled primitives they are: their blocky resolutions, limited color palettes, and blip-bleep-bloop sound reproduction are matched by equally simple and repetitive gameplay. However, retrogames are not hopelessly antiquated museum pieces lacking the good sense to stay buried in gaming history. Their continued presence complicates easy (and industry-friendly) conceptions of technological and aesthetic progress, in which the newest equals the best equals the most expensive.

Older games thrive alongside their more sophisticated descendants, gaining popularity and influence with each passing year. Retrogames continue to be played in both authorized and unauthorized forms. Their minuscule memory footprint, easily grasped rules, and convenient fit within the interstices of daily routine make them ideal content for mobile devices. For instance, the App stores for iTunes and Google Android phones devote sections to retrogames. The Xbox Live Arcade markets “updated retro classics” alongside its “newest hits,” while the Wii Virtual Console sells downloads from “the greatest video game archive in history”—actually licenses owned by Nintendo. These monetized properties coexist uneasily with the thriving emulator scene, where every conceivable old game has its software simulacrum and renegade read-only memories (ROMs)—files containing data images copied from memory chips, computer firmware, or the circuit boards of arcade machines—circulate beyond the bounds of copyright. For both legal and illegal purposes, the Internet functions as both archive and distribution network, supporting the sharing, spreading, and mutation of content

READ MORE

 

A GLOBAL HISTORY OF SECONDHAND CLOTHING

Clothing, almost by definition, is a medium of transmission within a spreadable media ecology. It is both the means and the site for the storage and spread of information. Clothes are made to be carried by the human body (as in the French porter and the Haitian Creole pote). Textile skins were, from their origins, portable artifacts and temporary prostheses, shaped by the demands of a mobile body and inscribed with markers of that body’s history. The demands on clothing have always been high—armor (protection against shame, enemies, and the elements) and aesthetics, comfort and durability. Clothing is portable, proximate to the human body, and eminently changeable. Clothes remain artifacts in continual flux. They convey messages to the world, and they also provide the raw material for subversion of precisely these messages.

Before the industrial era, vestments were few and far between. Their production took a great amount of human and material resources. Into their tailored forms much was literally and culturally invested. In the Western tradition, throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, clothing—once shaped to a given body—might be worn for years, sometimes carried for a lifetime. The clothing wore its owner as much as the owner wore the clothing, bearing comparable markers of a personal narrative. Through the movements of a body in time, its clothes would acquire increasingly personal and human characteristics—worn knees and elbows, a stretched waist. Stains, patches, tears, and color changes accompanied a life journey, or at least several decades thereof.

Sometimes an article’s function was portable. This was especially true when even the simplest clothing was scarce: its production costly, time consuming, and labor intensive. A coat might be cut down into a vest, or a dress into a scarf. As a garment’s function evolved, so too might the identity of its wearer. A dress might be handed from mother to daughter through a gift economy. In such instances, it carried with it signs and markers of generational passing. A master might give his worn-out shirt to his servant, for whom it could serve as either bodily cover or portable currency. In the Renaissance, it was common for servants to sell their masters’ old clothing to peasants in neighboring villages. Itinerant rag and old clothes dealing grew into a veritable calling within a commodity-based economy. This was a profession of portability. The dealer became an intermediary between wearers, marking a transitional phase in an article’s mobile life history.

Spread That!: Further Essays from the Spreadable Media Project

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  Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, my new book with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, is launching at the end of January. Each week, we are releasing new essays written by friends and affiliates of the Futures of Entertainment Consortium which expand upon core ideas in the book. You will see that these essays are an integral part of the book, even though they are being distributed digitally. We also see these essays as a means of sparking key conversations in anticipation of the book's release. So, in the spirit of this project, "if it doesn't spread, it's dead," so we are asking readers to help circulate these essays far and wide to as many different networks and communities as they seem relevant to the ongoing conversation.

Readers are already responding, including through the creation of "memes." Over the weekend, we received this "Slap Robin" announcement via Twitter from @amclay09.

Share with us your own creations and I will showcase this here as I am posting upcoming essays.

This week, we are releasing essays which are tied to the Introduction and first Chapter of the book. Before I do so, let me share some of the early responses to the book (i.e. the solicited blurbs):

“Something new is emerging from the collision of traditionIal entertainment media, Internet-empowered fan cultures, and the norms of sharing that are encouraged and amplified by social media. Spreadable Media is a compelling guide, both entertaining and rigorous, to the new norms, cultures, enterprises, and social phenomena that networked culture is making possible. Read it to understand what your kids are doing, where Hollywood is going, and how online social networks spread cultural productions as a new form of sociality.”—Howard Rheingold, author of Net Smart

“By critically interrogating the ways in which media artifacts circulate, Spreadable Media challenges the popular notion that digital content magically goes ‘viral.’ This book brilliantly describes the dynamics that underpin people’s engagement with social media in ways that are both theoretically rich and publicly meaningful.”—danah boyd, Microsoft Research

“The best analysis to date of the radically new nature of digital social media as a communication channel. Its insights, based on a deep knowledge of the technology and culture embedded in the digital networks of communication, will reshape our understanding of cultural change for years to come.”

—Manuel Castells, Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society, University of Southern California

“Finally, a way of framing modern media creation and consumption that actually reflects reality and allows us to talk about it in a way that makes sense. It’s a spreadable world and we are ALL part of it. Useful for anyone who makes media, analyzes it, consumes it, markets it or breathes.”—Jane Espenson, writer-producer of Battlestar Galactica, Once Upon a Time, and Husbands

“It’s about time a group of thinkers put the marketing evangelists of the day out to pasture with a thorough look at what makes content move from consumer to consumer, marketer to consumer and consumer to marketer. Instead of latching on to the notion that you can create viral content, Jenkins, Ford, and Green question the assumptions, test theories and call us all to task. Spreadable Media pushes our thinking. As a result, we’ll become smarter marketers. Why wouldn’t you read this book?”—Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer and co-author of No Bullshit Social Media

This week's selections include discussions of historical predecessors,  Memes and 4Chan, the debates about free labor, co-creation in the games culture, and the power of consumer recommendations. Read the sample. Follow the links (....) back to the main site. Read.  Enjoy. Spread. Repeat next week.

The History of Spreadable Media

Media have been evolving and spreading for as long as our species has been around to develop and transport them. If we understand media broadly enough to include the platforms and protocols—to use Lisa Gitelman’s (2006) terms—that carry our stories, bear our messages, and give tangible expression to our feelings, they seem intrinsic to the human experience. Some people might even argue that the developments of vocal communication systems (language) and visualization strategies (paintings and carvings) represent defining moments in human evolution, demonstrations of man’s social nature. Human mastery of media was every bit as important as the mastery of tools. Stories of the spread and appropriation of media run across our history, each shaped by the logics of social organization and production characteristic of any given era.

Early traces of the spread and reach of media abound, even if some historical forms of media fall outside our familiar categories. For example, our contemporary understanding of the reach and influence exercised by ancient empires owes much to discoveries of coins—a medium of abstract exchange if we follow Karl Marx’s argument in Capital ([1867] 1999) and elsewhere but also a system of representation and meaning (from the value of the gold or silver to the inscribed monetary value, to the messages or portraits etched on its surface) with precise culturally defined borders. The coin, as a medium, spread with the state’s citizens, enabling their interactions with one another and at the same time attesting to the state’s reign. Ceramic dishes and tiles offer an example of a medium that was seized on for reasons of cultural exchange. The rich intermingling of styles and techniques characteristic of early-seventeenth-century Dutch, Chinese, and Ottoman ceramics speaks to the period’s trade routes and export markets and the creative appropriations of these various cultural models by its artisans. But these ceramics were also platforms, complete with highly nuanced systems of signification, hierarchies of value, and attendant associations of taste. They were carried, traded, collected, and displayed by a surprisingly large cross-section of the northern European population. As the ceramics circulated within different social groups as the vogue for ceramics rose and fell and were handed down to our present as family heirloom or antique shop curio, the journeys they undertook, and the meanings accorded them as media, attest to the energies and interests of those who helped to spread them....

 

In Defense of Memes

Although I agree that the terms “viral” and “meme” often connote passive transmission by mindless consumers, I take issue with the claim that “meme” always precludes active engagement—or that the term has a universal, static meaning. As understood by trolls, memes are not passive and do not follow the model of biological infection. Instead, trolls see (though perhaps “experience” is more accurate) memes as microcosmic nests of evolving content. Contrary to the assumption that memes hop arbitrarily from self-contained monad to self-contained monad, memes as they operate within trolldom exist in synecdochical relationship to the culture in which they inhere. In other words, memes spread—that is, they are actively engaged and/or remixed into existence—because something about a given image or phrase or video or whatever lines up with an already-established set of linguistic and cultural norms. In recognizing this connection, a troll is able to assert his or her cultural literacy and to bolster the scaffolding on which trolling as a whole is based, framing every act of reception as an act of cultural production. Consider the following example.

Founded in the early nineties by rappers Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the Insane Clown Posse (ICP) is a Detroit-based hip-hop group infamous for its violent lyrics, rabid followers, and, as it was recently revealed, secret evangelical Christianity. ICP, which performs in full-face clown makeup, has always been a target for trolling humor. The 2010 release of the group’s single “Miracles,” however, opened the floodgates—in the video, Violent J and Shaggy earnestly extol the virtues of giraffes, rainbows, cats, and dogs, not to mention music (“you can’t even hold it!”) and the miracles of childbirth and the cosmos. The song itself, which is regarded as the group’s evangelical “outing,” is peppered with expletives and features the line “Fuckin’ magnets—how do they work?” a question which inspired immediate and seemingly endless repurposing.

Within a few days of the video’s release, dozens of remixed images and .gifs were posted to 4chan’s infamous /b/ board, many of which merged with existing memetic content. A well-known image of a cross-eyed, bespectacled man captioned with the phrase “are you a wizard,” for example, inspired a series of related macros, including one featuring a close-up shot of Violent J in full makeup. “are you a magnet,” the caption reads, referring not just to the cluster of memes related to the “Miracles” video but also to all the permutations of the “are you a wizard” family of macros.

In short, trolls pounced on the phrase “fuckin’ magnets” not just because it was memorable and amusing on its own (although that played a large part in its popularity, as did the thrill of a gratuitous f-bomb) but because it was easily integrated into an existing meme set. Once the protomeme had been integrated, its resulting permutations—“are you a magnet” being a prime example—became memes unto themselves, establishing further scaffolding onto which new content could be overlaid. By choosing to repost “are you a magnet” on 4chan or off-site, the contributing troll was able to assert his own cultural fluency and, in the process, ensure the proverbial (and, in some ways, the literal) survival of his species. In this sense, the creation and transmission of memes can be likened to the process of human reproduction—specifically the decision to have a child in order to protect one’s legacy. The sexual act is decidedly active, but the resulting zygote is a passive (that is to say, unwitting) vessel for genetic information....

Interrogating “Free” Fan Labor

Over the past two decades, large swaths of the U.S. population have been engaged in copyright wars. On one side, copyright holders struggle to defend their property against what they perceive to be unlawful appropriation by millions of would-be consumers via digital technologies. On the other, millions of Internet users fear or fight expensive lawsuits, filed by entities far wealthier and more powerful than they, that seek to punish them for sharing media online. In this combative climate, fans who produce their own versions of mass-media texts—fan films and videos, fan fiction, fan art and icons, music remixes and mash-ups, and game mods, for example—take comfort and refuge in one rule of thumb: as long as they do not sell their works, they will be safe from legal persecution. Conventional wisdom holds that companies and individuals that own the copyrights to mass-media texts will not sue fan producers, as long as the fans do not make money from their works (for instance, Scalzi 2007 and Taylor 2007).

“Free” fan labor (fan works distributed for no payment) means “free” fan labor (fans may revise, rework, remake, and otherwise remix mass-culture texts without dreading legal action or other interference from copyright holders). Many, perhaps even most, fans who engage in this type of production look upon this deal very favorably. After all, movie studios, game makers, and record labels do not have to turn a blind eye to fan works; U.S. law is (as of this writing) undecided on the matter of whether appropriative art constitutes fair use or copyright infringement, so companies could sue or otherwise harass fan appropriators if they chose. But, even if both sides of the copyright wars consider the issue of fan labor settled, one aspect of the issue has not been sufficiently explored: can, or should, fan labor be paid labor?....

 

Co-creative Expertise in Gaming Cultures

Gamers increasingly participate in the process of making and circulating game content. Games such as Maxis’s The Sims franchise, for example, are routinely cited as exemplary sites of user-created content. Games scholar T. L. Taylor comments that players are co-creative “productive agents” and asserts that we need “more progressive models” for understanding and integrating players’ creative contribution to the making of these game products and cultures (2006b, 159–160; see also 2006a). Significant economic and cultural value is generated through these spreadable media activities. The usual phrases such as “user-created content” and “user-led innovation” can overlook the professional work of designers, programmers, and graphic artists as they make the tools, platforms, and interfaces that gamers use for creating and sharing content. Attention should also be paid to the work of producers, marketing managers, and community relations managers as they grapple with how best to manage and coordinate these co-creative relations.

The Maxis-developed and Electronic Arts–published Spore thrives on user-created content. Players use 3-D editors to design creatures and other in-game content, to guide their creatures through stages of evolution, and then to share their creations with other players. Since Spore’s release in September 2008, more than 155 million player-created creatures have been uploaded to the online Sporepedia repository. Players can also upload directly from within their game videos of their creatures to the Spore YouTube channel. Spreading content is a core feature of Spore; the game is perhaps best understood as a social network generated from player creativity. This spreadability is not just about content, as the players are also sharing ideas, skills, and media literacies....

The Value of Customer Recommendations

With new channels of communication and old, marketers can deliver a dizzying number of advertising messages to consumers—by many accounts, the average American sees between 3,000 and 5,000 ads a day. Yet, perhaps in response to this fusillade, consumers have learned to better armor themselves against the marketing messages they encounter. The Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) describes the extent to which consumers develop a radarlike ability to discern content whose aim is to persuade and, further, how they develop a set of skills to deal with such messages (Friestad and Wright 1994). Some of my own recent research (with colleagues Adam Craig, Yuliya Komarova, and Jennifer Vendemia) uses fMRI technology to explore brain activity as consumers are exposed to potentially deceptive product claims. Our findings show that consumers’ deception-detection processes involve surprisingly rapid attention allocation. Potential advertising lies seem to jump out of the marketing environment and rivet our attention like a snake on a woodland trail.

Advertisements are often informative as well as persuasive; consumers know this and don’t dismiss ads out of hand. But they do assess the extent to which they trust or are willing to use such information. First, and most critically, consumers seek to evaluate the credibility of a marketing message’s source. Source credibility is the bedrock of trust that precedes persuasion. People judge a source to be credible if the source shows evidence of being authentic, reliable, and believable. In the old days of marketing, firms sought to increase the source credibility of their ads by featuring the endorsements of doctors, scientists, and other authoritative experts. Once consumers became more aware that these experts were being paid handsomely for their testimony, the practice became less effective. Celebrity endorsers, who often were not product experts, provided warm affective responses but little in the way of believable, persuasive arguments.

Consumers themselves are particularly important endorsers via word-of-mouth (WOM) messages. Our past understanding of WOM (when one consumer recommends a product to another) was that consumers perceive other consumers as highly authentic but of dubious reliability. As when one’s Uncle Joe touts the superior performance of the Brand X computer, the recommender is clearly a real person but may or may not be knowledgeable enough about the product category to make credible claims. Now, with WOM increasingly occurring through spreadable media, it is more difficult for a consumer to assess both the authenticity and reliability of unknown recommenders. The practice of rating consumers’ online opinions and recommendations (e.g., Yahoo! Answers) is a direct attempt to resolve the audience’s uncertainty about who really knows something worth knowing....

 

HOT.SPOT: The Dark Side(s) of DIY

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From time to time, I have written here about the work of the Civic Paths research team in the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California. I helped to start this research group when I arrived in Los Angeles three and a half years ago; it has been the seedbed for our Media Activism and Participatory Politics project which has generated a series of case studies of innovative activist groups (and will be the basis of an upcoming book). But, the group has become something more than that -- a space where students and faculty gather to discuss the participatory turn in contemporary culture and politics. Such discussions thrive on our internal discussion list, and we've been experimenting with various ways to get these ideas out to the world both formally through op ed pieces and informally through blogging. The team recently launched a new project -- HOT.SPOT to encourage as many of the members as possible to write short blog posts around a related theme -- think of it as a mini-anthology. Lead by my journalism colleague Kjerstin Thorson and our post-doc Liana Thompson, the first of our "HOT.SPOT" blogs deals with the "Dark Side(s) of DIY."  Our work has been so focused on the values and practices of participatory politics, it seems inevitable that reservations and concerns would rise to the surface. If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps our group has an obligation to also call out the abuses, misuses, and failures of DIY culture and politics.

So, let me pass the microphone over to Kjerstin Thorson who will set up this special issue, and you can follow the links out to the individual posts.

 

Hotspot Philosophy

Welcome to the first of what we hope will be a series of Civic Paths “hotspots.” These collections of mini-blog posts are organized around themes that cut across the diverse interests of participants in our research group. They’re about the things we love to talk about. And, like our in-person conversations, they play with ideas at the intersection of participatory culture, civic engagement, and new media. Our rules for the hotspot are these: No one gets to spend a million hours wordsmithing -- these are idea starters, not finishers -- and posts shouldn’t be a whole lot longer than five hundred words.

Kicking it off: The Dark Side(s) of DIY

Don’t get me wrong: I love DIY. I muddled through the acquisition of basic sewing skills (thanks, Internet) to make a much-loved, crooked crib skirt for my daughter. My now-husband and I navigated the complexities of his immigration to the U.S. without hiring a lawyer, relying entirely on a discussion board about fiancée visas. Last year, we even put a fountain in our backyard (it was crooked, too).

In fact, I venture to say we all love DIY—and are genuinely excited about the role of new media technologies for amplifying the possibilities to make stuff, share stuff, spread stuff and generally participate in public life in a million different ways. But we also believe that DIY (or at least the mythology of DIY) has some dark sides.

Liana [1] and Sam [2] remind us that just because you do it yourself doesn’t mean that what you make will find an audience, or even that what you make will be any good. Kevin [3] considers the often-fraught relationship some DIY practitioners have to potentially dubious funding streams, and Lana [4] points out that the business of DIY can often be the selling of awful. Andrew [5] looks at what happens when crowdfunding goes awry and DIY communities try to mete out justice online. Rhea [6] also examines online communities taking matters into their own hands, highlighting the misunderstandings and mishaps that get created in the process.

Neta [7] and I [8] share an interest in the ways that beliefs about DIY political knowledge—everyone should be a fact checker! Figure out everything for yourself!—may shut down possibilities for political engagement. Mike [9] takes on the contradictions behind the idea of DIY news, and Raffi [10] wonders whether the race to make and spread the pithiest, funniest political nuggets is taking away from other forms of online political talk.

With these posts, we hope to collectively shed light on some of the difficulties that arise from an otherwise celebrated mode of creation and engagement. And while we all love DIY and its range of possibilities for civic life, we think pulling back the curtain to show when it goes wrong is an important step in figuring out how DIY can take us even further in the future.

-- Kjerstin Thorson (Assistant Professor of Journalism)

[1] On Finding an Audience, or Why I'm Not a Rock Star, by Liana Gamber Thompson

[2] Producing Poop, by Sam Close

[3] Makerspaces and the Long, Weird History of DIY Hobbyists & Military Funding, by Kevin Driscoll

[4] Blogging and Boycotting in the "Schadenfreude Economy", by Lana Swartz

[5] Gatekeepers of DIY?, by Andrew Schrock

[6] The Role of Japanese & English-language Online Communities in the Mitsuhiro Ichiki Incident, by Rhea Vichot

[7] DIY Citizenship & Kony 2012 Memes, by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik

[8] Figure It Out for Yourself, by Kjerstin Thorson

[9] Why “DIY News” Could Be a Contradiction in Terms, by Mike Ananny

[10] Memed, Tumbled, & Tweeted, by Raffi Sarkissian