Singaporean Girls Gone Wild...

Singapore is so known for its work ethic and sense of decorum that I have joked off and on about marketing a series of videos of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild which consisted of school girls in uniforms throwing peanut shells on the floor of the Raffles Hotel bar with wild abandon before returning to studying for their exams. After all, one of the first things that I ever learned about this country was that the law specified that one could be thrashed with a bamboo cane for chewing gum in public. My first impression then was something like that planet in Star Trek: The Next Generation where one could be put to death for stepping on the grass. That said, spending time here has given me a much more nuanced picture of what lies behind those stereotypes and of the ways that such a society is confronting the potential anarchy being brought about by the new kinds of participatory culture being fostered on the web. When I was speaking at the Singaporean National Library, Dr. Tony Tan, my host, the former Deputy Prime Minister and current head of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation, drew a comparison between the invention of movable type in the 15th century (and the print revolution that followed) and the invention of Movable Type (the bloging software) a few years ago and the profound impact it was having world wide. Dr. Tan argued that it would be impossible to hold onto old constraints on expression or to close off possible access to these new technologies, even if governments wanted to do so. Instead, they needed to find ways to help new bloggers develop a deeper understanding of their civic responsibilities.

Frankly, the government officials I have met in Singapore are better educated than anyone I can imagine in the Bush administration. Well, that's damning with faint praise, isn't it? Many of them have advanced degrees from elite institutions -- many of them have doctoriates -- and then approach problems with a calm and humane rationalism. They are both knowledgible and thoughtful about the issues they confront as they transition from an era where there is tight control over the press to one where there is broad democratic participation in the blogosphere.

What's Wrong with Singaporean Teen Bloggers?

What is clear from my many conversations here is that parents in Singapore as in other parts of the world worry about what young people are doing online. Their children are going places and doing things that were not part of their own childhood experiences and they are concerned about ways that these decisions may come back and hurt them later. As I have spoken to people here, three very distinct stories of youth "misbehavior" online have cropped up again and again as reference points for this conversation. I thought I would share them with you here because of the insights they offer into Singaporean culture and the ways that these technological changes are being understood in this country. Since two of them involve young female bloggers, these may be a truer picture of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild.

The first story involves Wee Shu Min, the teenaged daughter of a member of the Singaporean Parliament, who become the center of a national controversy about economic privilege and almost ended her father's political career because of something she had posted on her blog. Here's how the story began according to a news report on the CNN website:

When Wee Shu Min, the teenage daughter of a Singapore member of parliament stumbled across the blog of a Singaporean who wrote that he was worried about losing his job, she thought she'd give him a piece of her mind.

She called him "one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country" on her own blog and signed off with "please, get out of my elite uncaring face".

Wee was flamed by hundreds of fellow bloggers, but when her father Wee Siew Kim -- an MP in Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's constituency -- told a Singapore newspaper that "her basic point is reasonable", the row moved well beyond the blogosphere.

The episode highlighted a deep rift in Singapore society and was an embarrassment for the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) and prime minister Lee, who has made the reduction of the income gap one of the priorities of his new government.

The CNN story goes on to contextualize this controversy in terms of a growing public concern about income disparities in a country which generates the second largest per capita income in the world (after Japan). There is great suspicion here that moves towards a welfare state might undermine the country's work ethic so there are no government pensions or minimum wage laws though there are widespread educational benefits. The flame war that erupted around this teenage girl's blogs brought to the surface deeply buried class antagonisms with the youth, who was attending one of the country's elite schools, being compared with Marie Antoinette for what many saw as insensitive comments about the nation's underclass.

Part of what gave this story its sensationalistic qualities though was the idea that what this teenage girl wrote might be reflective of the views expressed in private by one of the nation's political leaders, an impression re-enforced by the father's attempts to defend his daughter's actions. A story on AsiaMedia quoted the father as saying: "As a parent, I may not have inculcated the appropriate level of sensitivity, but she has learnt a lesson."

The second story centers around a 19 year old female blogger who posts under the name Sarong Party Girl. Her posting of nude photographs of herself placed her at the center of a national controversy about exhibitionistic uses of digital technology and about sexual propriety among young women. Her user-name already seemed calculated to spark controversy.

According to the Wikipedia, Sarong Party Girl (or SPG) is a derogatory slang term used in Singapore and parts of Malaysia to refer to a young woman who "dresses and behaves in a provocative manner; and exclusively dates and prefers Caucasian men." The entry continues, "The stereotypical Sarong party girl has extremely tanned skin, a false foreign accent, and is provocatively dressed. Originally, the outfit of choice was thought to be a bikini/tank-top paired with a sarong, though that now exists only in the name. Many of them frequent clubs or nightspots that are popular with expatriate Caucasians in order to meet and form relationships with these men. Sarong party girls are known to prowl specific nightspots in Singapore along Boat Quay, Clarke Quay, Emerald Hill and City Hall, the classic place being the now defunct Carnegies at Far East Square."

So in choosing to call her blog, Sarong Party Girl, the youth was trying to reclaim a negative term which embodies an explosive mixture of sexual and racial transgression, while no doubt thumbing her nose at traditional sexual morality in her country. Interestingly, though, as much controversy centered around the decision of the Singapore Straits Times to report on the incident (and thus drive potentially much more traffic to her site) as on her decision to post the nude images and frank commentary. This suggests uncertainty about the public/private status of blogs and about the interface between centralized and participatory media.

The third incident involves blogger Gan Huai Shi, a 17-year old student, who was charged with seven counts of "promoting ill will" under Singapore's Sedition Act, for posting negative remarks about the country's largely Islamic Malay population. Each offense carries a potential punishment of up to three years in prison. Here's part of an editorial in the Straits Times referring to this and two other cases of young bloggers sparking race antagonism:

The Internet is not a personal space.

Yet those who air their diatribe do so in the belief that they are not only anonymous, but also that there are no rules and constraints. This perception is reinforced if site hosts and moderators fail in their duty to act, and if fellow netizens don't come down hard and fast on them.

There are thought to be more than one million active Internet users in Singapore, and the maths would suggest there are more people with the ability to do good and police the system than there are those who preach intolerance, ridicule and call others' beliefs into question.

So rather than question why it is that the authorities had to act, or the merits of which is the more appropriate law to use, or whether this is a prelude to a political clampdown, the Internet's cause will be better served if active users weigh in and do their own clamping down...

What these guys have done, as some have already suggested, is to give bloggers and chatrooms a bad name.

And if the community does not want to have Big Brother watching, then it's best that it does the watching itself.

In a society composed primarily of three major racial groups (The Chinese, the Indians, and the Malay) who have had some history of antagonisms, the Singaporean government officially promotes multiracial harmony. And thus the image of Singaporean young people freely posting anti-Islamic comments on their blogs provoked a very stern response from both the mainstream media and the national government.

As each of these examples suggest, the concern with transgression by youth bloggers (male and female) points to potential fault lines within the culture. The forms these fears take are culturally specific (as no doubt are the concerns that American parents have about what constitutes misconduct by youth on line -- whether read through the lens of the Post-Columbine controversies about violent video games or the more recent hysteria about sexual risks faced by young women on MySpace). Yet, in each case, these concerns translate into a more generalized anxiety about the risks young people face as they enter into the digital world. The young blogger becomes a figure of freedom and license, an embodiment of the breakdown of the old order as average citizens gain the ability to express their thoughts and fantasies through these powerful new communication platforms. We can't begin to address those generalized fears about youth and digital media until we understand the ways they get linked to deeper and often implicit cultural and political anxieties.

For a sense of what a good Singapore blogger looks like, one need look no further than the Jan. 8 edition of The Straits Times, which is running a series called "Piecing Together the Digital Native." (Marc Prensky, are your ears burning?) There's a full color graphic of the digital native, depicted as a tribal chieftan, complete with body and face paints and a quiver of arrows, but also depicted with a mouse hanging as a talisman on his shark tooth necklace, and with an ear and mouthpiece from a cellphone wrapped around his face. The headline on the story tells it all: "Business-Saavy Kids Turn Blogs Into E-Shopping Outlets. They Find Ready Customers Among Fellow Youngsters."

To Hell and Back...

If the notions of what constitute being "bad" are culturally specific, then so are the fantasies about what happens to people who are bad. All of this was brought home to me Sunday when I paid a visit to Haw Par Villa, a distinctly Singapore attraction owned by the Tiger Balm Company. For a small fee, you can enter the 10 Courts of Hell: a series of garishly colored plaster statues from the 1930s, represent the harsh punishments awaiting men and women alike for their transgressions (as understood within classical Chinese mythology). So, by way of illustration, here are some offenses and the punishments they bear:

Disrespect for Elders -- heart cut out.

Tomb Robbers - tied to red hot copper piller

Stealing -- frozen into blocks of ice

Misuse of books, possession of pornographic materials, wasting food -- body sawed into two

rumors -- tongue pulled out.

driving someone to their death -- thrown into wok of boiling oil

cheating during examinations -- intestines and organs pulled out

And so on. All of these punishments are depicted with blood-gushing everywhere and piles of dismembered limbs and decapitated heads. Trust me, I haven't encountered much in American popular culture which is as vivid in its depictions of mutilation and impailment.

Here are some images taken by my colleague William Uricchio when he was there last year.

This image depicts prostitutes drowning in a pool of "unclean" blood.

This man refused to pay his taxes and is being pounded by a stone mallet.

It is hard to imagine a more grisly form of public amusement, yet many Singaporeans tell me that they went to this park regularly as young people and that it played a central role in their moral instruction. American discourse about media violence assumes that young people identify with those who commit violence; this attraction, on the other hand, assumes that young people identify with those who are being punished for their transgresions and may change their ways if they see enough blood and guts, decapitated limbs, and impailed bodies. Well, it's a theory...

Elsewhere, there are a series of scenes which represent various virtues and vices: the images here are fascinating because of their surreal fusion of the human and animal, folk tradition and images of the modern world as a debauched utopia.

This debased and lustful pig represents a character from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West.

And this is one of the many images which depict the sinful nature of western dress and modern life -- jazz clubs in particular take a drubbing in these exhibits.

And consider this image of the lustful Spider demons who have taken human female form in order to deceive the unsuspecting man. What William's picture doesn't show is a cloak drapped over in the corner which is red and white checked. All I could see was Spider-Man's costume! You get some feel for at least the coloring of the cloak from the halter tops these Singaporean Girls Gone Wild are wearing.

Again, one gets a sense that one could transgress a lot of social taboos by cloaking these sensationalistic depictions of modern life with an aura of moral instruction and spiritual uplift. In the name of redemption, we can look at men and women groping each other or naked breasts. The same of course was true in the western world during the Silent era where nudity was not uncommon in the films of D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMile as long as the goal of the film was to bring the viewer closer to that old time religion.

The Price of Transgression

Of course, these same anxieties about transgression and punishment crop up elsewhere in popular culture. For example, I picked up a DVD of what has been billed as the first Singapore produced horror film, The Maid. I have not yet had a chance to watch but I found the description of the film illuminating:

Filipino Maid, Rosa, arrives to work in Singapore during the Lunar Seventh Month, or the Hungry Ghost Festival -- believed to be a time when the Hell gates open. Life turns into a nightmare where Rosa unwittingly breaks the rules of the Month, tumbling into the world of the dead and glimpsing strange apparitions at night. To keep her job, she has to stifle her screams and fears.

I can't begin to unpack the mixture of anxieties which are bound up in this story, even understood in its broad outlines on the DVD box description: concerns about immigration, the breaking of traditional taboos, the relations of servants to their employers, and so forth. I am told that there have been a series of disturbing news reports in the Singapore press about servent girls being sexually and physically abused by their masters, which could account for the themes of this work.

Let me close with another symptom of the ways Singapore is adjusting to the consequences of media change. The elevators at my hotel in the Raffles complex advertises that one can go to the in-house spa for special treatments designed to help those who have overused Blackberries, cell phones, and other mobile technologies. The image of people wracking in pain because they have spent too much time text messaging and being nursed back to health at the spa represents a particularly adult anxiety about the dangers of embracing new media technologies.

Oh, by the way, when I wandered by an ice cream parlor at the local mall, I couldn't help but notice that they were selling Seaweed Washabi flavored soft serve ice cream, a dish which to my western taste buds sounds as close to a combination of the freezing and burning hells depicted at Har Paw Villa.. :-)

An Aside:

It seems appropriate in a post about horror and the internet to end with some good news. Those of you who have been following this blog regularly know of my strong opposition to the Deleting Online Predators Act. The new year has brought good news: the Act seems to have lost steam as some of its key supporters were defeated in the midterm elections. In any case, the bill will have to be reintroduced in the House since it failed to pass the Senate. There's a better report than I can offer right now of what happened over at PBS Teacher Source. The reporter is a bit more optomistic than I am that the bill is really and truly dead. I don't think Republicans have a monopoly on moral panic and censorship. Indeed, many Democrats in the House supported this bill the first time through and might rally around it again if it looked like it would give Hillary Clinton cover with the Security Moms and Cultural Conservatives. But let's celebrate our minor victories where we can!

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

My Adventures in Poland (Part One)

Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak are the two people who translated Convergence Culture into Polish as Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. This picture was taken when they were showing me around the old section of Warsaw. The building in the background is the Namiestnikowski Palace, where the President of Poland lives.

What follows are some highlights from the introduction I wrote for the Polish edition of the book. I have focused here primarily on some thoughts I shared with my new Polish readers about the global context within which the issues discussed in the book are operating. The original plan was to have a chapter focused entirely around globalization be part of Convergence Culture. Much of that material ended up being included as the "Pop Cosmopolitanism" essay in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, or developed through the sidebars in the book at the Animatrix and about anime fansubbing. But here, I tried to bring a few strands of my thoughts about global media change together.

Next time, I will offer more observations on digital and popular culture in Poland.

Welcome to Convergence Culture.

For those of you keeping score, The dotcom era has ended. The age of Social Networks and Mobile Media has emerged from its ashes. Blogging is thriving. Podcasting is on the rise. Everywhere you look the people are taking media in their own hands, speaking back to mass media, forming their own on-line communities, learning to think, work, and process culture in new ways.

We are no longer talking about a digital revolution, which envisioned new media displacing the old. We are now talking about media convergence, where old and new media interact in ever more complex ways, where every story, brand, sound, image, and relationship will play itself out across the maximum number of media channels and platforms.

We are no longer talking about interactive media technologies; we are talking about participatory culture. Talk to advertisers, media producers, network executives, game designers, fans, gamers and bloggers and they will all tell you that the consumer is gaining new visibility and new cultural influence in this emerging culture. This is at the heart of what some American observers are calling Web 2.0. Some of them are embracing this change with enormous excitement, others with great fear, none of them claim to fully understand what is going to happen next. The terms of our participation in this new convergence culture are very much under debate, being shaped by governmental policies and court decisions but also by choices being made both in corporate boardrooms and in teenager's bedrooms.

New media are being put out by technology companies and they are being redefined on the fly by various groups of consumers. Companies are trying to get ahead of the game by empowering their lead users, by allowing key fans and consumers to test their products before they even reach the market, and building on their insights to create a better mousetrap, build a better game, or produce a better television show. Media networks are trying new strategies to grab the attention of their viewers and insure longer term loyalty to their properties. As they do

so, viewers are every level are demanding the right to help shape the production and circulation of media content.

Sites like YouTube have emerged as meeting places between all kinds of different subcultures, fan communities, and participatory cultures, places where commercial and amateur media circulates side by side. They are producing their own stars and they are also turning out to be places where consumers re-evaluate network content, calling attention to moments on television which might otherwise have passed by without much comment. Online worlds, such as Second Life, are thriving based almost entirely on what people are calling consumer-generated content (though to reduce what happens there to content or describe the participants in these worlds simply as consumers is to grossly simplify what is taking place)....

Morover, these changes are occuring on a global level, impacting each country differently according to their own national cultures and traditions, but being felt around the world. There's a reason why they call it the World Wide Web. It is not simply that American media products are flowing into international markets -- this is scarcely news. More profound is the degree to which cultural goods from other parts of the world -- at the moment, especially from Asia -- are flowing into the American market at a rate so fast that it is breaking through the protective membrane constructed by American major media companies to block access to international competitors.

More and more American young people are embracing what I call pop cosmopolitanism -- seeking an escape from the paroachialism of their own cultures by embracing cultural materials from around the world. There is an ironic juxtaposition between an American government which acts more and more in unilateral terms and a younger American population which is embracing global media. I recently spoke to an American teenager who described this particular JPop group as her "favorite band in the whole wide world." Anyone who is the parent of an adolescent knows that's the way teenage girls have always talked. But this time, as I listened to her enthusiasm for a band which had no label and no distributor in the west, I thought she might be telling the truth. She had searched the world for a group that spoke to her and found it through networking with kids in Japan who shared her interests in anime, manga, and cosplay.

It isn't just that American youth are consuming more international media:they are also taking advantage of a network culture to engage on a regular basis with youth from around the world who share their common interests. I am struck by the story of Heather Lawver in the Harry Potter chapter of my book. When Warner Brothers first sought to shut down certain fan websites around their newly acquired franchise, they sent cease and desist letters to young people in parts of the world which would have once seemed very distant from their base. Yet, as Heather tells us, the word got back to their American fans almost instantly because they already participated in a global fan network. More recently, I watched fans of the American science fiction series, Stargate, mobilize fans to news of the series cancilation worldwide in just a few days time. They now understand television operating within a global framework, rallying fans in many different countries to put pressure on their local networks where the show is still thriving and using that economic clout to push the American producers to continue to generate new content.

In some ways, new media technologies are making more visible the kinds of cultural links that immigrants have long maintained back to their mother country. I see this pattern with my own students who have come to the United States for an education but still listen to radio stations, read newspapers, share music, and talk about fan cultures from back home. The web now serves the functions that ethnic grocery stores and community centers have long played in immigrant communities with one exception. The content is flowing from one community to another as people mix and match cultural materials with others from radically different backgrounds. I live in a dormatory at MIT and I have seen first hand the ways that media sharing is opening up students to new kinds of culture from around the world.

So, I have to confess that I wrote this book very much from an American perspective. My expertise is in American media and popular culture, though it is increasingly clear that one can no longer understand American media outside of a global context. I have never been to Poland and know only very little about your country. I hope to change this but for the moment, I can claim no particular expertise about the media changes that are impacting your corner of the planet. That said, I suspect much of what I write about here will sound familiar to anyone deeply immersed in popular media in any part of the world. Many of these same franchises are known in Poland -- either through American imports or through localization of larger multinational properties.

There are differences created as a result of different economic structures -- the difference between commercial and state run media production systems, for example, result in different opportunities and restrictions on participation. Some cultures have strong traditions of open debate and democratic citizenship; others have historically placed greater restrictions on what the public could see or say, but all of them are being rocked by a media culture which is more open and more participatory than anyone would have imagined a few decades ago. As the rate of internet access increases in countries around the world, they are one by one confronting some of the cultural, legal, economic, and educational challenges Convergence Culture records.

I am certain that there are new and innovative uses of media that have emerged among youth subcultures and fan communities in your country which are not yet known in our part of the world. But the key phrase here is "not yet known." As media flows more and more rapidly and fluidly across once rigid national borders, innovation on the grassroots level may still have a global impact. Throw a pebble in one part of the ocean and the ripples will eventually wash up

on every shore.

In the book's closing passages, I return to the issue of who gets to participate in the kind of robust participatory culture I am describing and who gets left out of the kinds of knowledge communities we are discussing. My own work has turned increasingly towards interest in media literacy as I am working with American foundations and educational institutions to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need to acquire in order to fully participate in convergence culture. In doing so, I hope to shift the conversation beyond talk of the digital divide which is so often defined purely in terms of technical access and onto the participation gap which is concerned with the skills and opportunities needed for young people to actively engage with the affordances of the new media landscape....

This is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Each country is facing these difficulties on their own terms, on their own time table, in their own way, and on their own terrain, yet all of us are struggling with how to insure that the increased power and knowledge being generated by emerging technologies and cultural practice can be spread across the population as a whole. My hope is that this book will help people to better understand the implications of this participation gap both in terms of their own national cultures and in a more global context.

Games as National Culture: An Interview With Chris Kohler (Part Two)

On Friday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Chris Kohler, author of Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life and now the editor of Wired's games blog Game|Life. I hope by now I have convinced you that this book is worth a read. Kohler has been very generous with his time and his thoughts responding to my question in the midst of an explosion of new stories about the launch of the new platforms and their impact on game culture. And his answers have been consistently illuminating about the relationship between the Japanese games industry and the American marketplace. Without further fanfare, let's get into the conversation: You quote game designer Keiichi Yano as saying "video games were the big can opener" which allowed other Japanese cultural materials to enter the American market. Explain. What connection do you see between the popularity of Japanese games and the growth of anime and manga in the American market? Why do you think Americans were receptive to Japanese games at a time when they seemed closed to other Japanese media content?

People love that quote. Yano-san is almost as good as coming up with awesome soundbites as he is at designing addictive games.

Let's look at the availability of Japanese cultural materials in the US in the early eighties. It wasn't much. Frederick Schodt had just published his book Manga! Manga!, detailing the immensity of the comics culture in Japan at the time, but if you read that book it only serves to illustrate just how little impact Japanese comics were at that point making on the American comic market -- Schodt actually had to translate and print some examples of manga at the back of his book just so his readers could actually experience what he was talking about.

In 1984, Hayao Miyazaki's first original feature film Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind hit it big at the Japanese box office, and Akira Toriyama, already known for his comedy manga Dr. Slump, started the first Dragon Ball series. Both of these men would eventually become internationally celebrated, but at the time that it was actually created, their work was completely unknown outside Japan. Of course, some hardcore comics fans followed the Japanese scene, but it wasn't mainstream. Same with film; the deeply involved fans knew of Kurosawa et al, but that was where it ended.

But by 1984, there were Japanese cultural products that had made huge inroads into worldwide markets. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. Donkey Kong. Many of the most popular, biggest-grossing arcade games of the "golden age" were from Japanese designers. This is not to say that there were not plenty of great American arcade games at the time as well. Indeed, had the video game industry gone entirely smoothly for America it is probable that things would have developed quite differently.

But what actually happened was that the bottom fell out of the American game market in 1984. Atari, under new management, scrapped all of its video game products. Most smaller game developers went out of business altogether. Retailers stopped buying games because they'd been so badly burned when the bubble burst. And that was that.

Until a year later, when Nintendo decided that the game console they were currently selling by the truckload in Japan, called Famicom, could succeed in the US if they pushed hard enough. Long story short, buoyed by games like Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros., it did. Suddenly, there was a huge demand for video games again in the US -- and practically no American game development houses ready to provide content. In came Nintendo's Japanese licensees like Konami, Capcom, and Namco, all ready to start selling their games in the US.

Thanks to the better visuals of the NES, Japanese games were beginning to look and sound (and read, in the case of story-based games) more like manga and anime. Some were even based directly off of anime and manga, even if the connection couldn't have been made clear to the US audience (a Dragon Ball game was released for the NES, called Dragon Power, long before the show hit US airwaves). And sometimes the games had a very strong resemblance to anime -- look at the detailed cinematic scenes in games like Ninja Gaiden.

Even when the games themselves didn't reflect it, millions of American kids were being exposed to Japanese cartoon styles through the peripheral material such as instruction manuals, Nintendo Power magazine, and strategy guides, most of which used the original Japanese artwork and story translations throughout. Sometimes they actually printed manga in the magazine, too, which no doubt was the first exposure to the form for literally millions of American kids.

So when manga and anime did start making their way to the US in translation beginning around the early nineties, the Nintendo generation found something familiar about the style and the stories.

Cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi uses the term, "de-odorization" to describe the ways that distinctly Japanese qualities get filtered out as cultural goods enter the western market. Yet, in recent years, the Japanese quality of these games has been foregrounded by marketing and actively embraced by gamers. What factors have contributed to these changes?

When Power-Up was published I couldn't help feel like my timing was incredibly awful. When I started work on the thesis that would become the book, Japanese games were still unquestionably the best in the world. By the time it was published the situation was very different -- Western development houses had finally gotten their acts together, on the whole, and were producing games of unimpeachable quality. Games that were selling very strongly here in the US.

But two years later, in the fullness of time, it seems to me that... well, that my timing was still bad, but for a different reason. Because as you note we're now seeing "Japaneseness" being used to sell games. And not only games: publishers of manga don't really need to go through great lengths anymore to "Americanize" their products, in part because US retailers are becoming more "Japanized," willing and able to stock thousands of novel-sized paperback anthologies of manga, and pack their shelves to bursting with DVD box sets.

Manga readers have gotten used to reading from right to left, in the Japanese fashion, so there's not even a need to "flip" the artwork anymore. In fact, in most cases they don't even retouch the sound effects; they leave them in Japanese. What's going on here is that the consumers are so much more educated about the product and specific in what they want that the publishers no longer have to tweak the product and push it to the mainstream.

Similarly, it's no longer a surprise that there are innovative, quirky, funny games coming from Japan. In fact, there are so many gamers that expect this now that labeling your game as a quirky funny Japanese title can be an excellent marketing tactic. There's an audience out there looking for the next Japanese cult hit (a "cult" in name only at this point, comprised as it is of millions of vocal, active, obsessed fans with lots of disposable income).

Just recently, Nippon Ichi Software, a Japanese publisher of role-playing and strategy games that are drenched in manga-styled characters and outrageous, off-the-wall stories, opened an American branch. Their business plan hinges entirely on selling the "Japaneseness" of their products, and they're doing quite well at it.

At one time, the most distinctly Japanese games never made it into the American market. What can you tell us about the criteria which shape the import of Japanese games into the west? What game genres still remain outside our market?

As I mentioned earlier, these criteria are constantly changing. Generally, things are moving in a more expansive direction. At one time, role-playing games in general were considered to be almost completely unsuitable for the US market. Now, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of them had sold more copies in the US than in Japan.

I can certainly name plenty of genres that would not currently be considered suitable for the US market. But these days, you'd probably be able to find an exception for every single case. Probably the most notorious genre would be what are usually referred to here as "dating games". In Japan the fans would call them ren'ai or "romance" games while detractors would label them "gal-get games." They're predominantly two-dimensional games where you have your pick of a selection of women and attempt to say and do the right things to fall in love with one of them.

Mostly, these are for men, but there are also some for women -- some of which feature female protagonists, and some of which are gay male romance stories. They range from innocent high school puppy love stories to the explicitly pornographic.

But if you know where to look, you can find these games in English at places like jlist.com. So it wouldn't be entirely correct to say that these games simply aren't available. It's true that they are only available for personal computers, and not for standalone TV game consoles like PlayStation 2, but I wouldn't bet money that they won't eventually be.

In fact, it is tough to put my finger on any one genre that has made zero penetration in the US. There are plenty of games in Japan that simulate horse racing. Not the experience of being a jockey. I mean the experience of betting on horse racing. And yet, Sega has one of those machines available to US arcade owners (although I'm not sure how many are biting).

Games based on pachinko machines are big sellers in Japan. Mostly this is because pachinko is essentially the closest thing the country has to legalized gambling, but because it's a game of skill, you can in fact learn to beat the machines. So these games -- and the elaborate, lifesized controllers that go along with them -- are invaluable, because they teach you to play the game without risking any money.

So maybe that's the one genre that absolutely, one hundred percent wouldn't fly here. (And now that I've said that, expect a pachinko game to be released for Nintendo DS within a year.)

I have to ask you about Katamari Damacy, a game which came out after the completion of your book. Does it represent another landmark in the history of the western world's relationship to Japanese games? What other recent Japanese games would command attention in an updated edition of your book?

Yes, I think that Katamari Damacy was a real wake-the-hell-up point for the American game industry. Especially for Namco (now Bandai Namco), the publisher. Here's my personal Katamari story. A friend of mine, a voracious import gamer, had gotten the game after its Japanese release and was so astounded by it that I was convinced to get it myself. I was in love.

So along comes the 2004 Electronics Entertainment Expo, and Namco's booth. At that point, although they were in part playing to their strengths as a Japanese publisher with games like Taiko Drum Master and the anime-styled RPG Tales of Symphonia, they were also attempting to expand out with titles developed in the US, aimed at mainstream American audiences. Most prominently, these included the shooter Dead to Rights II (terrible) and the urban racing game Street Racing Syndicate (garbage).

Meanwhile, at the back corner of their booth, hidden, unannounced, untranslated, unpromoted except for a black-and-white sign that looked as if someone had made it using a word processor earlier that morning, was Katamari Damacy. And boy howdy if there wasn't a huge line stretching out away from the tiny cluster of demo machines.

So when I went back into the conference room to discuss what I'd just seen with Namco's media relations representatives, I said, "To be honest, the best thing you guys have right now is Katamari Damacy." And they got this look of half-disbelief on their faces, and said, "Yeah... we... we think that one's going to do really well," but in a tone of voice that suggested that they were only just coming to grips with this realization. The game shipped that fall, with a bare minimum of marketing dollars, and sold out instantly. I think as a series Katamari has sold more units internationally than domestically.

What other games would merit inclusion in a revised Power-Up? Certainly I would tell the story of Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents, for the reasons described earlier and also as a lesson in making your game hardware region-free. One of the main reasons that Ouendan took off like it did in foreign markets is because any Nintendo DS system can play any game, regardless of the country in which it was released. This has not historically been the case with game systems, which are usually locked to the region in which they are sold.

In fact, I think it was a huge mistake by Nintendo to make the new Wii system region-locked. They say that they did it because television standards differ between Europe and the US, but that doesn't explain why the US and Japan -- both on NTSC standard -- aren't considered to be one "region" under that logic.

This is a mistake on their part because Wii, much like DS, will no doubt play host to a variety of unique, original, innovative Japanese games. And the best way to tell whether these games would work in the US is to allow American import game players, who are usually very vocal and influential opinion-makers, easy access to the games.

On that note, I'd probably also use a new version of the book to complain about even more ways that video games are still treated as a second-class medium -- even by the very publishers of those games! Any fan of Kurosawa would be absolutely disgusted if Criterion's re-release of Seven Samurai were only issued with an English audio track. Luckily, Criterion would never think of doing such a thing. Why, then, does Final Fantasy XII not get the same respect?

If it's the case that there's just not enough room on the DVD to hold both language tracks, then there's not much to be done about that. But PlayStation 3's Blu-Ray discs will hold up to 50 gigabytes of data; more than enough for dual language options on anything and everything that comes from Japan. So if Final Fantasy XIII is released without the original language track, gamers can raise a very legitimate complaint.

What do you see as the most important lessons the American games industry learned from its Japanese competitors? What did Japanese game companies learn from their American counterparts?

We're back to my awful timing. When I started researching the book the thought pattern among people serious about game design was that Japanese games were simply better made, on the whole, than Western ones. Certainly, the editors of the popular and authoritative magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly were on my side. In their January 2002 issue they voted for their top 100 games of all time. 93 of the games on that list were made in Japan.

But now the tide has changed. If EGM's editors were to do another Top 100 list, it would be very different. What American developers learned, on the whole, was the value of taking their time. Well, actually it wasn't the developers who learned it so much as game publishers. Miyamoto's personal genius meant a lot, but it's just as important that he was given what would have been considered a luxurious amount of time to create his games. Meanwhile, American publishers seemed on the whole to be concerned with securing a hot product license, then getting the game out the door on as short a schedule as humanly possible.

I think at this point everyone sees the benefit of giving developers the time and money that they need to really polish up a game and make it as good as it can be. Sadly, it still doesn't happen in all cases. And American publishers still seem amazingly risk-averse; if a game proposal doesn't involve something immediately marketable they don't want to hear about it, in most cases. So although America is getting much better at making quality games that Americans love, Japan is still the innovation leader.

Which is funny, as it's the reverse of what has historically been true about America and Japan in terms of technology; typically it's generalized that American pioneering spirit fosters invention whereas Japan's diligent work ethic and obsession with miniaturization leads them to be particularly skilled at improving the designs of existing things (see: radio, television, video game hardware). Whereas with video games it is sometimes the other way around. One of this holiday season's biggest games in the US is Guitar Hero. Gameplay-wise, it's nearly identical to a Japanese game called Guitar Freaks, but with a few refinements that make it more fun.

Who deserves more praise: the innovators, or the ones who put on the polish that made it more palatable? It's a question we'll continue to wrestle with as this amazing medium continues to develop.

How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part Two): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation

Last time, I introduced readers to the Luther Blissett movement and to two of its principle architects, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2. Across the interview, they described how the group drew inspiration from Slapshot and Star Trek, not to mention Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell and Jorge Luis Borges, They discussed a range of creative and expressive activities which included the writing of novels and manifestos as well as the staging of elaborate pranks designed to quell some of the moral panics being sparked by local media. They offered a perspective on culture which is one part avant garde theory and one part fan politics, categories which only rarely mix in the American context. Today, we continue this interview with some more reflections on the ways Luther Blissett related to the emergence of digital culture, how they interacted with their readers, and how this emerged from their appreciation of popular culture.

The Luther Blissett movement has transmogified into the Wu Ming Foundation and the group has been publishing a range of genre-busting, collaboratively-authored novels, which are compared by critics who like them to the work of Umberto Eco and called by those who don't, "novels for multitaskers." To give you some taste of their work, here's part of what Publisher's Weekly has to say about 54:

The midlife crisis of Cary Grant, the founding of the KGB and the Neapolitan years of mafioso Lucky Luciano are just three of the plot lines woven into this dense, playful and always surprising literary behemoth set mostly in the year of the book's title, at the height of the Cold War. Anchoring the tale with a relatively conventional narrative is a young Bolognese man named Robespierre (Pierre), who embarks on a transcontinental odyssey to find his father, Vittorio Capponi, a former Mussolini loyalist who left the Italian army to join the Communists in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Britain's spy agency MI6 approaches Cary Grant (who's in a career slump) with a bizarre proposal: the role of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito in a propaganda biopic. It seems impossible that the multitudinous names and story threads could converge, but, deliciously, they do--in Yugoslavia, where Grant meets Tito, Pierre finds his father, and Luciano's driver Steve "Cement" Zollo tangles with the KGB, which is about to pull off a big hit. The latest joint effort (after the novel Q) from Wu Ming--a collective of five Italian intellectuals who named themselves "anonymous" in Mandarin--offers political commentary-cum-complicated escapism for the brainiac reader.

In some ways, the Luther Blissett movement and the Wu Ming Foundation novels might be seen as working in parallel with what critic Mark America has called "Avant-Pop," a new aesthetic sensability which refuses to remain firmly within any given category of cultural production, choosing to play with the contents of popular culture in ways that reflect an avant garde sensibility. America writes:

The artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them)....Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A-P artists have had to work hard at not becoming so enamored of the false consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives. The single most important creative directive of the new wave of Avant-Pop artists is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. By sucking on the contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is....Our collective mission is to radically alter the Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesturing that grows out of the work of many 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Raymond Federman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Ronald Sukenick, Kathy Acker, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), art movements like Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism and Neo-Hoodooism, and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Tackhead, The Breeders, Pussy Galore, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Ministry, Jane's Addiction, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents.

In what follows Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 offer their own perspective on the ways their project intersects both the historic avant garde and popular culture. I fully confess that I am much more a creature of popular culture than of the avant garde, yet I find myself really connecting with a lot of what they have to say about their poetics and politics here.

HJ3: You wrote, "A vast, transnational community of people surrounds us and interacts with our books in a creative way, we encourage all kinds of sharing, reappropriation, derivative works etc." What can you tell me about your relationship to your readers and the forms of appropriative works they produce?

WM2. Since the beginning of our career as professional storytellers we have exhorted our readers to get in touch with us and become a sort of collective "sixth member", in constant osmosis with the original group. To be part of the Wu Ming's "democratic republic of readers" does not mean to have a seat in the front row or a privileged access to our output. It means to take part, in a more or less direct manner, to a process of collective intelligence and creation that we usually compare with the relationship between community and storyteller in old folk culture.

It must be said that this co-operation does not take place only on the Internet, there are also many face-to-face moments, there's warm physical participation, which we deem as absolutely necessary. We're "on line" but we're also "on the road".

The Internet allowed us to skip intermediates such as the publishers' press office and PR department, our presentation tours are completely self-organized. Being a group of five people, Wu Ming is almost ubiquitous, two or three delegations can discuss our work in different places simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart from each other. We go to places that are usually snubbed by mainstream authors, such as tiny bookshops, public libraries in small villages, squats, sometimes even private apartments - we literally deliver the presentation at home, if there's a group of friends willing to get together one night and listen to what we have to say.

There's constant interaction between us and the readers, they send us comments, suggestion, and criticism. The female characters in our novels have had a positive evolution thanks to the harsh critiques expressed by some female readers. Our newsletter, titled after general Vo Nguyen Giap, has about 10,000 subscribers and regularly features the readers' feedback: reviews, comments, and pieces on various subjects. We don't rely on any open forum or blog -- we tried, but it took too much time to get rid of trolls. We prefer to receive a lot of stuff via e-mail, and make a quality selection.

Having said this, I think that the most explicit invitation to appropriate our work is the "copyleft notice" included in all our books, which can be copied, xeroxed, or downloaded straight from our website. We encourage people to use our works. Our novel Q was deconstructed and rewritten as a very original theatrical drama. 54 became the inspiration for an album by folk-rock band Yo Yo Mundi...

WM1... not to mention the use of our characters in role play games. I'll say a few things about this later.

WM2. Even more explicitly, we have launched several collective writing projects. The first one was "I Shall Call You Russell", and it bordered on the commonplace: we wrote the first chapter of a sci-fi novel, and anyone could write and send the following ones. The selection of chapters took place in public, on a temporary blog run by us. A jury selected the three best versions of any chapter, and people could vote their favorite one, which became the next chapter in the "official" (i.e. collectively approved) sequence, though all the other versions remained available as sources of inspiration, creating a web of plot "bifurcations" and "dead end streets". There was no "official" last chapter, all the versions were published ex aequo.

The most important result of this experiment was the birth of another collective of novelists, Kai Zen (Japanese for "Constant improvement"). Kai Zen themselves have launched more and more projects like that, and their debut novel will be published in a few weeks by the biggest Italian publisher.

The second project was an experiment in "open source literature", as in "open source software". The main difference between storytelling and software programming is that almost everybody can work on the sourcecode of a story. The sourcecode of a story is the story itself. We wrote a short story titled "The Ballad of Corazza" and we put it on line. We asked readers to work on it, be it to change an adjective or rewrite a whole paragraph, or insert a new character. We received alternative versions of the story, do the revision accordingly, and make the result available.

After a couple of months, we released "The Ballad of Corazza 2.0", which was a consistent synthesis of all suggested modifications. This version was also edited collectively until we had the (potentially) definitive text. The more open nature of this second project managed to stir creativity with greater effectiveness, as "The Ballad of Corazza" has become a graphic novel, a theatrical act (based upon one of the alternative versions), a two different reading performances, one of which with live musical accompaniment, and the score was the result of a similar "open source" process.

Last but absolutely not least, there's the kind of interaction generated by the novels or short stories written by our readers, with no direct connection to our work. Back when we started, we publicly stated that we were willing to read unpublished stuff. Call it "talent scouting" if you like. Well, we received so much stuff (poetry, fiction, scripts, whatever) that we had to wave the white flag. We couldn't possibly read all those novels and short stories, no way.

Our community's collective wisdom solved the problem for us: fifteen Giap subscribers responded and volunteered for reading anything submitted by other readers. These people formed a collective on their own, iQuindici [TheFifteen, even if they are about thirty people now]. They have their own website and their own e-zine (Inciquid), they organize public readings of the best stuff they receive and select, and promote the adoption of open licenses (creative commons,copyleft, you-name-it) in the Italian publishing industry. Several new authors were "discovered" by publishers thanks to iQuindici.

HJ3: More recently you drew a comparison between your projects and ARGS. What similarities do you see? What might ARG designers and players learn by studying what you did a decade ago?

WM1 What you had was a huge number of people from different backgrounds and geographical areas, all interacting with each other in order to introduce ever new elements into a legend they were constructing in real time and telling all together. It is important to point out that these people didn't know each other personally, some of them never met, never talked or wrote to each other, not even on the phone, not even via e-mail, for the whole duration of the project. I never met the majority of people who operated under the Luther Blissett pseudonym in other cities, not to mention people calling themselves Luther Blissett in other countries. Since the beginning, the Bolognese collective (which was more tight-knit than other informal groups springing out all over Italy) labeled itself "the only central committee whose aim is to lose control of the party".

Yes, there was some sort of coordination between the different local groups, and a few things were explicitly prohibited: the Luther Blissett could not be used to spread racist, sexist or fascist material, and no Luther Blissett material could have a copyright. That's all the "organization" we had.

Most of the time we ended up taking each other by surprise, we heard the news about a prank pulled by Blissett in Southern Italy and immediately claimed co-responsibility by playing a similar one or by giving a completely different motive for the prank! We enjoyed leaving clues for other Blissetts, and give wild interpretations of the clues left by them. In several cases the same hoaxes or actions were given different interpretations by different Blissett "coopeting" with each other. It was all grist to the mill, or as we say in Italy, "tutto fa brodo", everything adds to the soup.

And it was transmedia storytelling taken to its extreme, clues were left on BBSs, websites, fanzines and other DIY media, pieces of mail art sent all around, restroom walls, Hertzian waves, and even classified ads on local newspapers. Sometimes we used Luther Blissett stickers in order to leave clues and give hints on how to take part in a hoax.

I think there are many similarities between what we did, RPGs, ARGs, and other storytelling games, in spite of the fact that our experience was and is very peculiar. These similarities were acknowledged many times by the communities playing RPGs in Italy. When our novel Q was published in 1999, some of the characters were immediately introduced into ongoing RPGs. More recently, in Pescara (Central Italy) dozens of people played an RPG inspired by one of our novels called Free Karma Food. It seems that our fiction is so multi-layered and "centrifugal" that it incites continuation on other platforms.

I really don't know what the ARG community might learn by studying what we did. Certainly they might have fun reading about it.

HJ3: Typically avant garde work frames itself in opposition to popular culture. Yet it is clear that you are in some senses a fan of popular culture. How would you descrive your relationship to the entertainment texts which you draw upon in your work?

WM1. I grew up reading sci-fi pulp books, my room was choke-full of tons of Marvel and DC comics, as well as Italian comics which you probably never heard of. I spent days watching soccer matches, spaghetti westerns, Bruce Lee movies (or even worse/better, "Bruce Li" movies and other crap cashing in on Bruce Lee's death), Star Trek (every afternoon on a local tv station), British series like Space 1999, and funky detective series like Baretta and Starsky & Hutch. I was a raving fan of Japanese anime, like every other kid I knew. In the late Seventies UFO Robot Grendizer, Great Mazinger and Steel Jeeg took Italian television by storm, episodes were watched by millions of kids. I always listened to all genres of popular music from Italian singer-songwriters to Frank Zappa to LA punk acts like the Germs of Black Flag, through to Tony Bennett and Brazilian Hip Hop. I used to play soccer games on my Commodore 64. I went to the movies as often as I could. I played table games like Monopoly and Scrabble.

In short, I started to expose my brain and body to all kinds of popular culture at a time when the Internet didn't exist. I've always been in love with pop culture. All the other members of Wu Ming have similar backgrounds: sci-fi, comics, martial arts, rock'n'roll - two of them played in punk rock bands, one of which was fairly famous in the Italian underground. I think that if you don't know pop culture, you don't know your culture, thereby you don't know the world around you. If you don't know shit about pop culture, how can you be on the cutting edge of anything? If you don't soil your hands with pop culture, if you snub and sneer at today's participatory culture, you can't be "avantgarde", no matter how hard you try.

By the way, what does "avantgarde" mean? "Avantgarde" is French for "vanguard", it is a military connoted term. "Avantgarde" means being at the front point of the battle. Too often, the avantgarde turn around and find out there's no rearguard, nobody's following them. That's because they marched too fast, or in the wrong direction. This is the common problem of artistic and political vanguards. It didn't happen to Luther Blissett because Luther Blissett was about spreading a disease, plus there was an "educational" aspect. Once a prank had been played successfully, we claimed responsibility and explained it in detail. Explain: that's what the avantgarde never do, indeed, they enjoy being obscure, they mistake obscure for radical, they don't want to give the people access to their work. They are enemies of the people. We never acted like that: the more people understand what we're doing, the happier we are. From that point of view, we're not exactly "avantgarde".

God Things and Small Sizes: Convergence and Ganpati

As we have stressed here before, the changes described in Convergence Culture are occurring on a global scale, though the rate of change differs from country to country. Everywhere, we are seeing convergence as working on top of existing layers within the culture -- old practices continue, old media survives, yet both are transformed by the emergence of new media technologies and new sets of cultural practices. Convergence is marked both by continuity and transformation. I was reminded of this play between old and new recently when I received the following e-mail from Parmesh Shahani, a CMS alum who recently returned to his native India after spending three years in the United States. Shahani had been a key player in the development of our Convergence Culture Consortium and continues to be involved in our activities -- offering us a view from Asia on the trends in consumer culture we are monitoring.

This essay describes some of his impressions of the ways that new media technology is transforming Ganpati, one of the key religious and cultural festivals in Bombay. Western observers might want to compare it with the ways that new media has or has not been embraced by various religious groups in our own countries. I asked Shahani if I could share the following field notes with you.

God Things and Small Sizes

By: Parmesh Shahani

God is Everywhere

Greetings from Bombay, India. I have come back here right in the middle of the Ganpati (Lord Ganesh) festival fervor - a ten-day spectacle that begins with millions of people in the city bringing statues of the elephant god to their homes and community pandals (lavishly decorated statue stages, erected on almost every street corner in the city) - and culminates in the immersion of these statues into the ocean, accompanied by street processions, fire crackers, color, and noise, noise and more noise.

It is the final day of the event, and I am walking to Chowpatty beach near my home, the biggest immersion site in the city. It's been several years since I've been in India during Ganpati time and one of the changes I notice is that each pandal I pass is 'sponsored'. The one on the street corner near my house sports banners from Silver House (a local jewelry shop in the adjoining market) as well as ICICI bank and Britannia Tiger biscuits (huge pan-Indian brands). Just then my cell phone beeps; it's a text message from my cell phone service provider (Hutch) about Ganpati ringtones and wallpapers that I might wish to download. This is again something I hadn't experienced before.

Flashback to one week ago. I am on a 6 am flight to Calcutta, and each TV screen in the Mumbai airport departure lounge is tuned in to Star News (Murdoch's Indian news channel), beaming the early morning Ganpati aarti (ceremonial ritual based on the lighting of oil lamps) live from the city's Siddhi Vinayak temple. I visit the temple website and am quite impressed. They have a live darshan (viewing of the aarti) webcast, online booking of pujas (prayer rituals) and prasad (sweets consumed by devotees after first being offered to the deity) delivery both within India and abroad (via FedEx or other courier services). There are several ways that patrons can make donations to the temple: Union Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, BillDesk, ICICI Bank NRI Services, Remit2India, Itz Cash, Wallet 365... There is also a service to process donations and prasad requests via SMS, or text messaging. The temple has tie-ups with most of the major cellphone companies in the country for SMS alerts of prayers and aartis, downloads of Lord Ganesh wallpapers, ring tones, logos, e-cards, and so on.

Siddhivinayak is by no means the only temple to provide such extensive and intensive digital devotion possibilities - different versions of the above model are being adopted by other temples in the country (for eg: Tirumalai in south India). And it's proving to be immensely popular. Siddhivinayak's online darshan, for instance, has 4 million hits per month. In contemporary India, it seems God is not just in the details, but in the detailed choices that one has to access him with.

My mother is surprised that I want to walk all the way to the beach to see the immersion. It's so much better on TV, she urges. And she is probably right - almost every TV channel - local or national, cable or terrestrial (over 500 in the country now, and still counting) is beaming out assorted Ganpati images. Sahara News has a 4 way split screen, - showing live immersion-casts from 4 major immersion points in Maharashtra state (of which Bombay is the capital), other channels have reports from other parts of the country or abroad; there are celebrity pujas, interviews, talk shows, Ganpati teleshopping and Ganpati dance contests... I switch to MTV hoping for some variety, only to see Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan vigorously shaking his hips to the Ganpati song from his forthcoming film - Don, just as my cellphone beeps and offers me the very same music video download for 9 rupees.

I enjoy my walk, feeling the cool monsoon sea breeze on my face. In a few days, the city will become boiling hot once more as the rain season subsides. Several processions pass me by: small handcarts with baby Ganpati statues on them, being guided by 10 or 12 family members, and large trucks, with 50 and 60 foot tall statues surrounded by their giant entourages, security guards and private videographers.

Just opposite the large Times of India billboards at Chowpatty beach, (featuring humongous images of Ganpati, what else?) there is a VIP entrance where special guests can view the beach proceedings from a raised platform, and on plush sofas, while sipping on delectable non alcoholic beverages. Alas, I don't have an invitation. Instead, I am squashed and squeezed with the general population (and we're talking hundreds of thousands here) as the crowd inches its way to the beach, and chants of Ganpati Bappa Morya (Lord Ganpati, come back again) fill the air. It is claustrophobic and stinky but there is electricity in the air and beaming smiles all around and I realize that despite my discomfort, I am smiling too.

No, Bombay's devotion for Ganpati has not changed in the few years that I have been away. (It might have even become stronger... and the presence of such a huge mass of people, just two months after terrible bomb blasts have ripped through the city's trains, must surely be read as an act of defiance as well as devotion.) But what has certainly changed is the experience of Ganpati.

The array of choices made possible by media in the Bombay of today has enabled a qualitatively different experience of the spirit of Ganpati: a transmedia experience that is more complex, more extensive and more intensive than ever before. Secondly, all these different levels or touch points at which the Ganpati narrative can be experienced by individuals merge in and out of and influence and are influenced by what was essentially conceived as a communal spiritual experience by Indian freedom fighter Lokmanya Tilak about a century ago. The experience is thereby transformed into something that more personal, more portable and more pedestrian (in both senses of the term), to borrow language from Mimi Ito. This personalization of the communal is what I find especially exciting, more so in the light of our existing C3 research, where we are studying the reverse phenomenon - the communalization of the personal - through our work on college dorm culture. In both instances, I reckon, we will find that what Grant Mcracken calls multiplicity, is taking place. People are able to experience something personally as well as communally at the same time. It is never a case of either/or; always a case of bothness, or rather, severalness.

Small is Beautiful

Ganpati is the god of wisdom, of intellect and of logical solutions, and I am sure that he is very happy to note how intelligently marketers have adapted to India's fascination with smallness and customized their products and services accordingly. What works in India is the micro, the small, the miniature, the bite sized. Microfinance initiatives (small loans of less than US$ 200 to poor entrepreneurs, mostly women) from larger Indian commercial banks like ICICI are a hit. Consumer goods companies have realized that their biggest market often lies in single serve sachets, priced at between 1 cent to 5 cents, and shampoos, biscuits, tea, or mouth fresheners have all proven to be extremely successful in this format. (Companies like Lever and P& G have quickly capitalized on this).

A CK Prahlad note that today, the penetration of shampoo in India is 90% and about 70% of the shampoo sold in the country comes from single serve sachets. Similarly, the cellphone market in India largely operates on a pre-paid model - and this includes everything from monthly access and bill payment to value added services. Indians don't want the burden of regular monthly fees but are very willing to make tiny one off expenditures to try out something new. Some exciting experiments taking place in this space include:

- Ringtone scratch cards in different denominations (Users text message their pin number as well as preferred ringtone code to their cell phone company and the tone is downloaded to their phone)

- Astrology, feng shui, Bible on demand, personality tests, travel planning and other lifestyle services

- Reservation services like cinema ticket booking (where movie selection, ticket purchase as well as cinema theater entry, are all done using the cellphone screen and without any paper ticket involvement); railway ticket booking, etc.

- Creation of cellphone based communities such as book clubs

- 3D wallpapers, games of all kinds, especially based on cricket and Bollywood, videotones, text message tones, full movie trailers and videos, full songs, visual radio... the list is endless.

Fast Company

It may be productive for folks in the US to keep an eye on India's TV 18 group for a workable model of a 21st century media company that can successfully navigate the confusing waters of convergence. It's a interesting story - they began as a tiny content production house a little more than a decade ago, ramped up and launched their first cable channel via a joint venture with CNBC, and followed it up with an English news channel CNN-IBN (another JV that brought CNN to India), as well as Hindi news channels (Awaaz and Channel 7). Now they're getting into overdrive by integrating the internet into everything they do - they are the only ones to actually 'get' the spirit of citizen journalism in the country, and constantly integrate these reports within their regular programming. Their existing TV brands are supported by what I consider to be India's best news websites (live video streaming of the main channels, all kinds of interactivity and participation opportunities for viewers - check here for instance) and these sites all have robust communities present on them. More importantly, they seem to have realized that one can't think of convergence as something you add on top of your existing media efforts, it has to be at the very root of how you conduct your day to day operations. For example: a friend of mine - Rajeev Masand - is the Entertainment editor of CNN-IBN and he also anchors the weekend film review show called Now Showing. He continuously addresses his online community on the show... he checks the bulletin boards regularly and responds to the most interesting comments, both on the web as well as on TV. A lot of the innovations he's launched within the show format have come in as suggestions from the online community.

I'm pretty confident that these guys are going to give current Indian media giants - the Times of India and (Murdoch's) Star group - a pretty good run for their money. Here are some of the their latest moves:

- Launched a new technology site

- Launched a new travel site.

- Acquired edgy internet design company Urban Eye

- Acquired a cricket site

- Acquired a comparison shopping website

___

For coverage about its digital devotion activities, see this and this.

Several references in this note are from the Contentsutra blog, which provides an excellent converge of India's media convergence scene.

An interesting article on satchet marketing can be found here Also see 'The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid' by CK Prahalad.

I've borrowed the terms 'Personal, Portable, Pedestrian' from cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito's book by the same name. Check out her blog on digital media use in the US and Japan.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview with Matt Hills

Last time, I ran the first of a two part series featuring an interview with Matt Hills, a leading British thinker about fan culture and genre entertainment, discussing the revamped Doctor Who series. Hills is currently hard at work writing a book, Triumph of a Time Lord, which discusses the retooling of this classic British series for new audiences and new times. In the first installment, I focused on questions concerning the series's relations to its most hardcore fans, discussing the argument that the new Doctor Who represents what happens when fans take over control of a media franchise. But that's really too simple an explanation for all of the changes which have happened here. This time, I asked Hills to drill down on how the changes in the series format reflect trends in British and global television production as strategies to broaden the viewership of the programme. As with last time, Hills assumes readers are relatively familiar with the contents of both seasons of the new Doctor Who -- and makes frequent and telling references to individual episodes. He's pretty careful not to kill the drama for poor Americans who haven't had official access to all of the episodes this season (and haven't figured out how to order them from UK Amazon or download them from some extra-legal source.) But if you've really remained in the dark about what happens this season, you may not want to read this since there are some major plot developments that get discussed here.

Of course, there are going to be spoilers afloat in the Doctor Who community at this point: it is really absurd to have such long delays in the distribution of the series between the United Kingdom and the United States, two countries seperated by a common language, at a time when information flows so fluidly across national borders along various digital networks. Television fan culture is now global and producers run a high risk when they muck about with the temporality of information flows!

To what degree do you think the new Doctor Who has been conceived for a global rather than a national audience? I gather there were complaints early on about

the "Americanization" of Doctor Who because of shifts in the format. Have those concerns settled down?

If anything, I'd say that UK fandom has shown a certain pride in the show's volume of overseas sales - back in the day, this always used to be cited as a barometer of the old series's popularity. There are still some residual and highly proprietary attitudes among a few UK fans, though, who very much perceive the show as 'theirs', which isn't always helpful. The history of Who has frequently been one where certain groups of fans have contrasted its supposed "Britishness" to the allegedly "American" values of, say, the likes of Star Trek. And that hasn't totally gone away, even in an era where fans can internationally access the same production information, and spoilers etc, at pretty much the same time via web-based communities like Outpost Gallifrey.

I think one sign that the show has absolutely been conceived of as a global vehicle is its comparative reliance on London as a setting. Filming in Cardiff has frequently doubled for London - even causing some consternation to drunken passers-by on those late-night occasions when the Welsh capital city has been 'dressed' as London: I overheard one Welshman shout "how rude!" as he lurched past a London underground sign which the production team had erected in the city centre for the filming of 'Rose'.

Contemporary London helps to sell the show's Brit identity abroad: it makes sense as a setting for international audiences much more readily than other UK cities would. The 'showreel' used to promote series one to buyers and advertise it on-air to audiences, included that scene of Big Ben being demolished by an alien spacecraft: 'marvel as an international icon of tourism is trashed' was evidently just as strong a subtext as 'we've actually got decent special effects'.

And Cardiff's first appearance was, of course, in 'The Unquiet Dead', which compensated for this by capitalising on the BBC's reputation for costume drama (again, something likely to help sell the show overseas). This combination of 'cool London' - set up in the very opening montage of the series - and 'heritage'/period drama settings makes the show a likely candidate to travel well. And the emphasis on clear storytelling (by Who's standards) and iconic monsters are also both tokens of a global ambition, as are the occasional inserts of media coverage within invasion stories, which the show has been increasingly careful to internationalise, so that fictional US newsflashes, for instance, are seen on-screen alongside UK ones.

The 1996 US-UK co-production of Doctor Who was far more self-evidently "Americanized" than the current series. There, the TARDIS had a "cloaking device", and the Doctor kissed his 'companion' in a more straightforwardly romantic manner compared with the various contrivances Russell T. Davies has used to justify this event. And though some fans may feel the latest show has been "Americanized" in the sense that it's followed in the wake of US TV successes like Buffy, or adopted a story arc approach characteristic of shows like The X-Files, in fact elements of the new series' format can be traced back through previous Russell T Davies' screenplays and even his own Who novel - the emotionally complex, hard-hitting, and beautifully condensed Damaged Goods - as well as being indebted to developments in other Who novels: for example, the matter of groups of people (conspiracy theorists) trying to track the Doctor was raised in the Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy, and is not simply or directly a reaction to developments in genre 'realism' in US cult TV (even if some of these 1990s Who novels may, themselves, have been written in the shadow of The X-Files). And the self-reflexive depiction of fandom (done far more directly than 'Love & Monsters') is carried out in Kate Orman's Virgin novels Return of the Living Dad and Room With No Doors, in which a fan actually discusses negative fan stereotypes and asserts that he wanted to "get a life" by emulating the Doctor. Given that these adventures were written for, and sold to, a fan niche market, it's not at all surprising that they moved ahead of the new series in terms of explicitly addressing fandom as a subject. But there is a very strong argument that far from simply reacting to American cult & quality TV, the new series is partly reacting to developments there (and production values) and partly reacting to developments within an international community of professionalised fan writers.

If the series were conceived of more centrally for a national rather than global audience, then I'd argue that it would display far more of a sense of UK regionality than it does. Even Christopher Eccleston's "all planets have a North" Doctor has been rapidly replaced by David Tennant adopting an estuary English (or London-ish) accent in line with his Casanova performance, and the international sales that presumably garnered. And Peter Kay's Bolton accent surfaces in 'Love & Monsters' only when he is under heavy monster make-up, seeming to suggest that the producers wanted to reinforce the point - yes, this is still Peter Kay the famous comedian, even under all the prosthetics. Otherwise, the dominant norm in the new series of Who is that its characters and settings are London-default and largely speak in 'received pronounciation' or Queen's English: plus ca change. UK regionality is suppressed because of its irrelevance to a global audience: the fact that the series is made by BBC Wales has made relatively difference to its material form, though it has undoubtedly been a great boost to the Welsh TV industry, which - much like UK fan audiences - has again shown considerable pride in its success. And I think that takes me back to where I came in on this answer!

Doctor Who has been perceived as a children's program in the U.K. but largely watched by adults in North America. Do you think the current series retains this focus on children viewers? How have the producers sought to balance between these two likely audiences?

In the UK, the new series has been credited with 'reinventing' or 'rediscovering' the family audience for prime-time TV drama. Press reports have made much of this, and the general sense appears to be that the success of the show has challenged industry wisdom, which had previously stressed the break-up of trans-generational audiences into different age-based 'niches' who would hardly ever watch the same programme together. The show has also been successful in terms of the relative gender balance of its audience: it really does seem to represent all things to all people right now!

So, though the old series may sometimes have been deemed a kid's show - or 'children's telly that it was almost OK for adults to enjoy' - this depiction seems to have fallen by the wayside rather. To be honest, I think the old show was always something of an oddity in terms of its unusually broad appeal: when it was pretty much at its height in terms of popularity in the 1970s, it always bridged a massively wide range of ages - audience data given in The Unfolding Text (1983) proves that. And the reinvented series is no different, typically balancing its 'adult' and 'child' appeals very carefully so as to work as a cross-over show.

One of the key shifts is the massive influx of family-based storylines, many featuring child actors and characters in major roles. Not only does the show work hard to represent the Doctor and Rose as desirable travelling companions - the brief being that audiences should like them and want to befriend them - it also uses families in a variety of ways. Yes, there's the Tyler family and Mickey, but even beyond this, the family really is omnipresent. The Slitheen aren't just an alien race, they're a family group. And the human family in 'Fear Her' confront an alien which is alone, cut off from its kind and its own vastly extended family. 'The Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances' revolves around the question 'Are you my mummy?' of course, and 'Idiot's Lantern' also centrally features a family dynamic. The majority of new series' stories involve family crises - even the parallel world of 'Age of Steel' is viewed through very much through the lens of family. And in 'Fear Her', the Doctor alludes to his own family, something which the series may well build on.

There's also more than a hint of family-type relations in the warmth and affection between the Doctor and Sarah Jane in 'School Reunion', and Rose talks of getting a mortgage with the Doctor in 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit', which though it may carry some romantic implications, is also about the idea of elective rather than biological 'family'.

There are limits to the series' portrayals of family though, and the way these can work to bridge different generational audiences. While childhood is well represented - frequently giving younger audiences an identification figure in addition to the Doctor and Rose - the show has neglected older audiences and characters. The first Doctor, back in 1963, was a 'grandfather' type: the casting of Eccleston and Tennant seems to view the nominally lead character as necessarily youthful and energetic, if not unconventionally 'sexy'. Age and ageing don't seem to play well in this new series: the inclusion of some slightly older characters in the Graeme Harper-directed 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' (in the forms of Mrs Moore and Lumic's henchman) appear to be indebted to Harper's own role as the 'elder statesmen' of directors, and his use of a repertory of actors whom he's worked with across his career. 'Fear Her' and 'Idiot's Lantern' do also feature grandmother characters, though in relatively minor roles. On the whole, the cross-generational world of new Who is one where youthfulness remains at a premium.

The show has also sought to balance appeals to younger and older audiences through its patchwork of different tones. One minute slapstick or broad humour, the next political satire, and the next pop-culture referencing: Davies's show-runner role has lent the programme a deftness of touch, making it much more of a combinatorial matrix of darker and lighter moments than ever before. This may again be something learnt from the best of contemporary and recent US TV.

But again there are limits, always limits. Despite this leaping to and fro between different tones, nothing too 'adult' should intrude: sex exists only as a euphemism or an implication, and death is curiously bloodless. Much of the new series still has to happen off-screen, or through unfolding subtexts.

Writers do sometimes seem to view these limits as boundaries to be toyed with, however. Steven Moffat's award-winning series one script may use the euphemism of 'dancing' for the Doctor's apparent sex-life, but it does so with such insistency, if not nakedness, that the idea that this is a "subtext" really seems to melt away. At the very least, there is only a wafer-thin line between 'coming right out and saying it', and the strategy which Moffat pursues. And he introduces Captain Jack Harkness, a bisexual character - OK, he's science-fictionally coded as 'omnisexual' - into a prime-time "family" show... without any tabloid newspaper outcry.

Forget 'reinventing' the family audience against industry wisdom: this was the greatest achievement of series one, in my opinion. What might have looked, in some ways, like cosy viewing - oooh, the BBC does war-time period drama, and Rose is wearing a Union Jack flag - was really cutting-edge television with a sharp twinkle in its eye, and a mischievous banana in its pocket (bananas are good). I couldn't believe the production team had got away with it - but they not only did so, they did it with style to spare.

Perhaps this tightrope-walking hasn't just been about 'balancing' different audiences. It's also been about challenging where, exactly, the lines should be drawn between audience 'niches', and between 'child' and 'adult' viewers. And although some older fans have decried the Slitheen fart gags, the inclusion of farting in TV drama has, on some occasions outside the world of Doctor Who, acted as a marker of 'quality television'. For example, the Jimmy McGovern-created BBC series, The Lakes, featured at least one scene of repeated farting by way of marking out its 'realist' and inclusive intent - it was as if the star writer was saying, 'hey, you don't hear much of this in TV drama, do you, but I bet you do plenty of it in real life, right?' And arguably, Russell T Davies wasn't just playing to the child audience with a whiff of toilet humour, as older fans have complained: he was also daring to include such material, making this sort of moment and tone an example of 'sophisticated' risk-taking with dramatic seriousness, and simultaneously an instance of 'childish' glee or rebellion against good taste. The old series didn't boast alien races farting while the Doctor sought to save the world.

Another point in its favour: 'Aliens of London' also features what may well be the fastest (intentional!) tone-shift in Doctor Who history: from farcical comedy to pure, pure tragedy in the time it takes for poor, poor space piggy to be gunned down.

Honestly, give international Who fandom about ten years, and these episodes ('AoL'/WWIII') will be acclaimed as classics...

Much of the interest of the new series has centered around Rose, who has to be

one of the most popular companions of all time, as well as being key to bridging between Doctors Nine and Ten and thus knitting together the two new seasons. Rose's emotional life and secondary relations have been much more central to the series than previous companions. Is there a concern that her departure may adversely impact the series in a way that is very different from the departure of the other companions or for that matter, the shifts in casting of the various Doctors?

The production team seem to be putting a specific gloss on this departure, namely that it simply indicates one of the strengths and core values of the Doctor Who format: that the Doctor's adventures will always go on. The show is bigger than any one star. Eccleston's departure, and Tennant's successful first season, would certainly seem to lend grist to this mill, even if it suggests that in the context of the fast-moving contemporary media industry, Doctor Who may never again see an actor in the lead role for more than three or four years.

Though Rose and her family have been crucial to the new show's success, it looks as though the programme will return to its roots in 'similarity and difference'. In other words, giving the 'companion' a family has worked well: solution - bring in a new family with a tweaked and slightly different dynamic, but still recognisably following the by now established template. Rose's departure was also, of course, seemingly the narrative end-of-the-line for the rest of the Tylers, with Jackie and Pete reunited in that alt-universe at the end of 'Doomsday'.

I think the challenge presented here is the same sort of challenge which Who has always responded to across its run, whether new or old series; how much novelty do you inject with a change of cast, and how much sameness do you play safe with? It sounds as though the new companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), will again be London-based, continuing the metropolitan bias of the new series which has already worked so well to sell it globally. The latest character's family apparently includes a brother - so at the very least, there are already new narrative possibilities opened up by the likes of sibling rivalry! But these possibilities are clearly very much constrained by a need for continuity and sameness - just as the change from Eccleston to Tennant couldn't afford to make radical changes to the format. Film and TV critic Kim Newman commented on this in his recent 'BFI TV Classic' book dealing with the series, observing that given the success of the new series, it is highly unlikely that its producers will want to make radical changes, at least in the foreseeable future, to what's now a proven hit formula and a flagship BBC product.

Arguably, Doctor Who's biggest format shifts have come in the past when there have been major upheavals in the TV industry - whether this was the shift to colour TV in the UK in the seventies, or the industry perception that fragmented target audiences were more important than a 'mass' audience which took hold across the eighties, and caused Who to be self-consciously positioned in the UK as a 'cult' show with its own dedicated but dwindling fan-base who would watch it no matter when it was scheduled. By contrast, with the new series sparking an interest in the UK in the 'family audience', and doing remarkably well in multi-channel, digital TV households - its high production value special effects and multi-tonal approach seem to have made it collective required viewing on the main 'cinema'-style TV in many households - it is in the rare position of being a trend-setter at this point, rather than having to react to industry changes.

Given all this, I was still sad to see the Tylers vanish out of series two's story-arc as a job lot. I think it would've been interesting to confront the Doctor with his responsibilities to Jackie, had they both been trapped together on 'our' side of the universal fault-lines. What would she have made of him finding a new travelling companion, someone who was effectively replacing her daughter? Would she have hated the Doctor for cutting her off from Rose forever? Though the end of 'Doomsday' certainly felt like a full and satisfying resolution - a proper ending, which if I hadn't already known better, would've had me speculating it was the end of the 'Russell T Davies era' - I think there was potential for many more loose threads.

That's the price you pay for a big ending, I guess. It does mean that the show's newfound emotional realism now won't be able to develop its post-companion theme in such full-blooded ways. Instead, Rose's absence will no doubt be referred to, but in a more anodyne and less dramatically-compelling, threatening manner. And given the Doctor's repeated promises to Jackie that he would keep Rose safe, a headline failure for him would've really been something to focus on and pick away at. However, it would also have been too dark, probably, for the current format - too much family angst and not enough uplifting optimism!

Some have commented on the different emotional dynamic of the new series - more romantic, melodramatic, operatic, pick your term, compared to the emotional reserve one associates with some of the earlier Doctors. What factors led to this shift in tone?

Three words: the female audience.

There, thought I'd finish with a succinct answer!

Oh, OK, it isn't quite that simple, but almost. A key aim for the new series, from what I've heard, was to make it a TV drama 'brand' achieving very close to gender parity in its audience. What the show absolutely could not afford to be was 'science fiction for the boys'. It had to appeal to women via its re-branding. So it was that early promotional images played up action-adventure and pretty much removed science-fiction from the advertised genre mix, making the show about the Doctor and Rose and their thrilling, transcendent escape into space and time.

Part of that ambition was to integrate modes of storytelling which would appeal to male audiences with those appealing to women - it being taken as read that you can't definitively characterise sci-fi as 'boys' stuff' and melodrama as 'for girls' (though there are gendered patterns in media consumption, which is why broadcasters think in such terms). Making Rose's role basically equal to that of the Doctor was only part of this process. Techno-babble was banned, as was 'outer space' sci-fi - the fear being that audiences wouldn't 'relate' to visions of the far future. There's some anecdotal evidence to support this sort of assumption - I interviewed female fans for one research project recently, and a number of them spoke about finding Buffy 'realistic', but said that they hated certain Star Treks for their 'lack of realism'. Some generic hybrids, and themes, obviously play better than others, whereas some genre imagery, such as science-fiction construed as spacecraft, seems to turn off specific audiences - such are their prejudices and opinions.

Where new Who has done 'outer space' it has generally sought to anchor this in relation to immediately recognisable present-day concerns and themes - whether looking satirically at abuses of journalism and TV news in 'The Long Game', or Big Brother reality TV in 'Bad Wolf'. And though 'End of The World' and 'The Impossible Planet'/ 'The Satan Pit' buck this noticeable trend somewhat, they each have their present-day points of identification: in the former, Rose phones home, and the show ends with a walk through a present-day city (Cardiff, again doubling for London). And the latter two-part story was, surely by design rather than accident, originally broadcast in the UK either side of media fuss about it being the 6th of the 6th of 2006 - hence accumulating free media publicity and tying into the absolutely contemporary, even as it depicted a far-future space opera dealing with demonic forces. This sort of planned tie-in also indicates, for me, the almost unprecedented extent to which the new series is planned and rationalised as a continual media event.

As well as desperately seeking the female audience, and not wanting to alienate anti-sci-fi viewers, the new series' emotional dynamic is also evidently part of its critique of the original, and part of its attempt to fit into norms of contemporary 'quality' TV which tends to offer genre and tonal hybridity unified around core emotional content and a detailed 'series memory' rewarding audience loyalty. I've heard it said that the new romanticism of the programme is simply about fitting into a more openly emotional context in the UK - post-Princess Di - but this strikes me as incredibly lazy copy-writing, to be frank. Britain hasn't suddenly changed that much; I don't find myself knee-deep in extravagant emoting on a day-to-day basis. No, the series has changed in response to US and UK TV industry patterns in 'quality' content, as well as fans' criticisms of plot-holes and emotional absences in the old series: it certainly isn't a mirror of some supposedly vast social upheaval in the UK! What it is, is a very cleverly constructed and managed brand, which is far more intently controlled and policed for consistency than ever before.

In essence, it's the 'MacDonaldization' of what used to be a rather rickety old cult Brit show.

I mean this in a non-pejorative and analytical sense (American sociologist George Ritzer has written about MacDonaldization, at some length): the new series delivers a consistent series of pleasures, just as one would properly expect from a brand. Already in an episode like 'Fear Her', there's a sense of the writer - Matthew Graham - looking to tick the boxes of what should go into a "new series" pitch: strong family story and child-actor presence; monsters-of-the-week in the guises of an animated scribble and the possessed Chloe; emotionally uplifting, with the Doctor rescuing the Olympic flame; a little quirky moment encapsulating one of fandom's critiques of the original series (why does the TARDIS always land facing the most convenient or easily accessible way out?). It's not that any of this is ersatz, or even self-parody, just that it seems a touch too much like self-imitation pursued in the interests of serving up the same, established and regulated format. Old-school Doctor Who's defining quality was probably, above all else, its sheer patchiness; new Who would never dream of stooping to such radical inconsistency. It's a far more disciplined and rationalised beast, down to every last emotional beat. But no doubt it's just a phase the show's going through - after all, regeneration has always been its greatest strength.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Thanks again to Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins IV for their help in formulating these questions.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills

For the past decade or so, I have had people come up to me and treat me as though I were an expert on Doctor Who. This is because I co-authored a book with Doctor Who expert John Tulloch (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text) called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. I provided the sections on American Star Trek fans and Tulloch wrote the sections on British and Australian fans of Doctor Who. I hate to say it but I really didn't like the classic Doctor Who very much, though my wife and son were hardcore fans. My son dressed up as Jon Pertwee when he was a wee lad, much to the confusion of our midwestern neighbors who had never heard of the actor before. But when Doctor Who returned, I fell hard -- again, perhaps not as hard as my wife and son -- but hard enough. So, I reached out to my friend and colleague Matt Hills of the University of Cardiff to share with us a British fan's insights into what has happened to the new series. Wisely, I let my wife and son frame the questions. Hills wrote Fan Cultures which is perhaps the most important new book on fandom since... hmm, what was the name of that book again. There's a conversation between the two of us about generations of fan studies in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, and as you will learn below, he is now hard at work on a new book about the Doctor. So what follows taps Hills's special expertise as a fan and academic obsessed with this particular series.

I am going to run this interview, which is quite long (no doubt a shocking development for readers of this blog) but also quite rich, in two installments. This part focuses heavily on the relationship of the new series to its long-time fans, reading the new Doctor Who as a prime example of what happens when the fans take over the franchise. Along the way, there are lots of minor spoilers so for those of you who have not seen the second season, read this at your own risk. I don't think there are any fatal spoilers here but it's death by papercuts. And in any case, the more you know the individual episodes, the more you are going to get from his more specific comments.

Tell me a little about your relationship to the series and how you came to be

writing a book about the new production.

I've been a fan of the series since I was at least three years old - according to family stories, I used to be quietly absorbed in watching long before I learnt to talk! So, I suppose I've been a fan longer than I can actually consciously remember. My earliest proper memories of the show are of watching 'Genesis of the Daleks' on its original transmission, and 'The Deadly Assassin', both of which must have made a big impression. Davros really did terrify the younger me, even in 'Destiny of the Daleks'. And Tom Baker's eventual departure in 'Logopolis' formed a major part of my childhood emotional life...

As for how I came to be writing this book about the 'new' (2005--) series - Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century - well, it was really just something I felt I had to do, given my previous work on fandom and science fiction TV, and my love for the show.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to discuss the idea, however briefly, with Russell T Davies. He was absolutely supportive, and welcomed the notion that scholars might want to study the programme's latest version.

One interesting snag, though, is that because I'm not doing the book as an official BBC publication, BBC contracts apparently mean that production personnel are not able to grant me interviews. This is what I've been led to believe, anyway. It seems to be a very different situation, and a very different moment, to when John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado were writing Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text back in 1983 - they interviewed a wide range of then-current and former production personnel. It strikes me that right now, something like Doctor Who, especially with the success it's had, is much more intensely about information control and 'brand management' than it ever was before. It's almost as if there is a kind of info-war taking place - sometimes between the lines, and sometimes bursting into full view - between producers, fans and academics.

So, this book will probably have to be written without behind-the-scenes access, which is a shame in a way - but it's not as if working from 'the text' has ever stopped academics before: there's still masses of interesting things to be said about the new show and its audiences from different kinds of media studies perspectives.

I've ended up working with I.B. Tauris because of their excellent track record in publishing books on US and UK cult/quality TV: I've contributed to their books about Angel and a forthcoming one on CSI, and they've also done things like Reading the Vampire Slayer and Reading Desperate Housewives - spot the trend in titles! I wanted to avoid 'Reading' in my own title, though: it sounds a little limiting. And as I argued in Fan Cultures (2002), my very dense first book, being a fan is about so much more than 'reading' a beloved TV series. By now, I think 'reading' is a rather old-school academic concept or metaphor for what we all do in relation with television shows.

I.B Tauris have also recently published James Chapman's excellent study Inside The Tardis, which focuses on the 'classic' series of Doctor Who. My own book will be a little more theoretical than James's: he begins, only semi-humorously, by likening cultural theorists to Daleks and Cybermen, which I find truly astonishing. For me, 'theory' isn't ever going to be the monster of the piece. I begin my manuscript by suggesting that the ideals and politics of media theory - which often involve championing the underdog and challenging systems of power - are actually really much closer to the ideals of the Doctor himself. And in any case, Who fan writers and luminaries such as Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, and Tat Wood have been making very interesting use of so-called 'theory' in their work for years. Like the best of their writings, I'm aiming to provoke fandom, and sometimes challenge received wisdoms, but not disappear up my own fundament at the same time (hmmmm, famous last words, there!).

From the perspective of American fans of Doctor Who, the past decade has been something of a black hole with relatively limited new content. Yet, in the United Kingdom, Doctor Who was kept alive in various ways - from radio broadcasts and books directly based within the franchise to a variety of media projects which were thinly veiled references to the Doctor. Can you describe something of this process?

This seems to have been dubbed 'the wilderness years' by some fans: basically, the period between the original show's cancellation in 1989, its all-too-brief return in 1996, and then on through to 2005. From my perspective as a UK fan, the TV show may have been off-air, but the franchise (if we're going to call it that) was always active. Some of the best stories ever produced have, arguably, actually happened in original Who novels and audios - things like Paul Cornell's Human Nature or Rob Shearman's Chimes of Midnight. It's not at all surprising that the new television series, in episodes such as 'Dalek' and 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' has occasionally taken inspiration from these other imaginings of the Doctor.

I'd hazard the observation that the series of Virgin novels really helped, if not forced, Doctor Who to develop beyond its original TV series format and limitations (and yes, despite the fan belief that Who is the ultimate flexible TV format, it clearly does have, and has had, its limits...). And in a sense, that growth was one of the most important things ever to happen to the programme. The fact that it has more emotional depth and resonance in its latest production may be partly down to contemporary changes in TV drama, and partly down to Russell T Davies's less stridently gendered vision for the show, but I'd say it also has a lot to do with what happened to Doctor Who when it was off-air, and when a generation of writers who (mostly) loved the programme sought to address the limits and blind-spots of the original TV series, as well as just having fun with the characters.

Along with the Virgin novels, and the later BBC range - which, for me, really took off with the arrival of Lawrence Miles's stunningly revisionist Alien Bodies - there's also been the ongoing Big Finish series. These were all licensed Who products, created by fan-professionals for fan-consumers. And there were also the more tangential Who-based dramas that you refer to - often taking place without the character of the Doctor, and featuring various more-or-less surrogate characters such as 'The Stranger' (not much of a leap there) or Lockwood, both in assorted BBV productions. Fan producers are continuing to make some great Who-based dramas: for example, Magic Bullet have done a few audios featuring Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf). And this has produced a rather odd paradox whereby it's the less clearly Who-branded fan product which explicitly refers to old Doctor Who monsters, while the official series has used the same voice artiste (Gabriel Woolf) but has only very vaguely implied any possible continuity going back to Sutekh. It's a reversal of what you might expect - namely, that the 'official' show would exploit and explicitly name its continuity references, whilst the slightly more tangential fan products would be forced to make veiled references. Instead, the official series has started to favour these sorts of thinly veiled mentions, whether to Davros or Sutekh, really as a way of winking at long-time fans without alienating the newer audience.

It can be very instructive to watch some of the fan-produced videos from around the time of the 'wilderness' years alongside the new series. Auton and Auton 2 are currently available as reissued DVDs: while each is a highly worthwhile watch, they absolutely depend on the detailed continuity surrounding their monster. By contrast, the use of the same foe in 'Rose' is played out as pure iconography rather than continuity. The Autons are brought back for their immediate visual impact - and to hark back to older audiences' nostalgic memories of the programme's 'golden age' - not for any continuity-fest. They aren't even named in the episode. Again, though you might expect the new series to capitalise on its continuity, this has been handled very, very carefully right from the outset.

'Continuity' has almost become a dirty word, as if any strong continuity back to the original series is a step too far, or instant continuity-porn. The series isn't afraid to exploit its icons - its strong visual images such as monsters' appearances or the look of K-9 - but this imagery has consistently taken precedence over continuity. I'm almost tempted to suggest that Elisabeth Sladen's wonderful reappearance as Sarah Jane Smith would never have happened if the actress had, today, been virtually unrecognisable as her former self. Fortunately for the story 'School Reunion', Lis Sladen today looks uncannily like Lis Sladen from 1970's Doctor Who. Just like the Daleks, Cybermen and K-9, there was no call for a radical change of look: iconography, and the pull of nostalgia, again won out over excessive continuity. Of course, once the production team start bringing back the likes of Peter Davison and Tom Baker - both of whom now appear quite different to their time on the show - then my argument won't hold, but I can't imagine either happening any time soon! The moment Tom appears will be the moment the show tips over into pleasing its long-term fans rather than looking for a mainstream, mass audience...

Some have suggested that the new series represents fans taking over the franchise. Russell T. Davies comes out of fan culture. Where does his fannish side come through most loudly in the current series?

I think the argument that the show has undergone a fan take-over is an absolutely compelling one: it's a case of what you've called 'textual poachers' - fans outside the official production process doing their unlicensed and supposedly less 'legit' things with a show - becoming a whole new generation of 'textual gamekeepers'. I would guess that that process has some precedents (even in relation to the 'classic' series of Who), but I'm not sure it's ever quite happened as thoroughly as with this latest version. All sorts of people working on the programme have professed their fandom, including producer Phil Collinson, whose fan credentials have come to the fore through such things as the podcast/web-based episode commentaries he's participated in. The majority of new series writers have also been fans of various stripes, so it's not at all something restricted to Russell T. Davies - though, of course, he has always been incredible vocal about his Who fandom, even down to using clips from 'Pyramids of Mars', and the K-9 prop in Queer as Folk (not to mention the series' less-than-realist and Who-indebted ending).

You might expect fans, who are also major industry players, taking over a show to lead to obvious differences. I'm not sure that it has. Certainly, as I've already started to indicate, it hasn't lead to a massive surge in constant continuity references. I think the fannishness that now underpins the programme has emerged, if at all, in two ways: in the manner in which the old show's shortcomings have been critiqued, and in the tendency to settle, at the same time, for a new formula.

Updating a TV series - changing it, reinventing it - can involve responding to perceived failings or problems with "the original". In that sense, I'd say that new Who is very much its own 'critical reading' of the classic series. Though 'reading' may be limited as a academic metaphor, it does accurately capture some of what media producers do when they give 'notes' on a script, or when they think about how to build on a show's previous successes and failures. Russell T Davies doesn't need media studies or TV studies to tell him that there were things that didn't work in old Who: he already knows that instinctively as a dramatist, and communally as a fan.

How has the new series criticised the format of the old?

Firstly, by suggesting that the Doctor's companions don't just walk out of their existing lives to travel with him, but bring some baggage and prior human connections with them. This is a challenge to many basic assumptions made in the old show, where 'companions' were usually just that: an allocated role in the script of the day, typically devoid of any human back-story which played an active role in the Doctor's ongoing adventures (after their introductory tale or first few stories, anyway).

Secondly, by recalling that the Doctor travels in time. Watching the old series, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was merely a device for getting the character into different adventures: time-travel was featured as an integral part of the story only relatively rarely, and in the 1996 TV Movie it was reduced to little more than a narrative cop-out.

A certain Douglas Adams remembered that Doctor Who was ostensibly about a time-traveller when he contributed 'The City of Death', but in later years this was hardly the norm. And though the UK fan response to series one's 'Aliens of London' has been less than ecstatic in some quarters, the pre-credits sequence for this episode has been, for me, the sharpest and most thrilling of the new series. Like Douglas Adams at his creative best, it remembered that time-travel could be a downright tricky - if not absurdist - business. In fact, this opener, and the Eccleston Doctor's uncomfortable apology to Rose for his bungling, seem just as much of a tribute to Adams as did the entirety of 'The End of The World'. The most likely inheritor of Adams's crown as Who-genius and sci-fi humorist, Steven Moffat, also puts time-travel narratively and emotionally at the heart of his series two contribution, 'The Girl in the Fireplace', and Paul Cornell's tear-jerking 'Father's Day' does likewise in series one. Some fans may feel that Doctor Who is 'less sci-fi' than it used to be - i.e. there are fewer alien worlds and societies - but in terms of its use of time-travel as a story driver, rather than a handy device, it has possibly never been more convincingly science-fictional than it is now!

And thirdly, there's the fact the Doctor's accretion and accumulation of "victories" has also been challenged, most obviously in the episode 'Boom Town'. Surely there was a major blind-spot in a series whose hero apparently put things to rights on a planet, or at any one time, and then promptly disappeared into the ether? What of the defeated 'monsters'? What happens after the Doctor has departed for another (weekly) adventure in time and space? And doesn't anyone notice that the Doctor has been popping up throughout Earth's history and sorting out alien threats?

This lumbering plot-hole, or general story problem, has been addressed from the word go by Russell T. Davies, both through the introduction of a fan-like character Clive (Mark Benton) in 'Rose' who had been tracking the Doctor's earthly appearances, and in series two's 'Love & Monsters', as well as in a developing story arc whereby the general population of the Earth have become aware of the existence of aliens (from 'The Christmas Invasion' onwards - this being referred back to in 'School Reunion' and 'Love & Monsters').

The influence of fan culture, then, appears most readily in the form of criticisms of the original show, and production or storyline 'fixes' which aim to make the show critic-proof, or at least more internally coherent and hence not immediately dismissable on a point of logic. If iconography has been preferred over continuity, then so too has internal consistency generally been favoured over in-jokes.

Some fans have alleged that Russell T Davies's scripts have sometimes shown a tendency to collapse into deus ex machina endings - with the 'God in the machine', or rather the obvious hand of the scriptwriter, coming to the aid of the hero all-too-conveniently. This has provoked fierce online fan debate over whether the new series' stories are as riddled with plot-holes as those of the original show: demonstrating that fans, at least, are still worried about the possibility that general audiences might spot some inherent silliness in 'their' show.

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for this sort of fan criticism is 'New Earth', where intermingled brightly-coloured liquids magically avert an outbreak of zombification. However, what fans miss here is that this supposedly 'magical' resolution is really a version of a children's game like 'it' or 'tag', where the "lurgy" is transmitted or taken away by touch. It's a kind of narrative short-hand, literally: an embracing of primitive thought which probably works best for the child audience, just as the coda where Cassandra dies in her own arms (another beautiful remembrance of time-travel) probably works best for an adult audience. Attacking this sort of thing for 'plot-holes' misses the point that Davies is scripting for a range of different audiences. If anything, the peril or the pitfall of 'New Earth' is that it doesn't adequately integrate its child-like and more adult moments and motifs, unlike, say, Steven Moffat's Hugo-winning 'Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances'. It's not the plot-holes that are the problem: it's the clear segregation of 'stuff for the kids' and 'grown-up' emotional resonance - though this is not a problem that all of Davies's scripts suffer from, as his series one and two finales more-than-amply demonstrate.

I suggested a little earlier that Davies's fandom shows though both in his critique of old Who and also in his own establishment of a new format. So, what is this new set of limitations, and how does it relate to Davies's fandom?

In a word: monsters. Davies seems to be especially in love with a certain phase of the series - around the eras of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, when the show was respectively focused on clearly-drawn tales of alien invaders rampaging across the Earth, and gothic monsters emerging from various shady ids. Earlier in its run, the programme had attempted 'straight' historicals (i.e. there were no monsters, just characters drawn from history), and later on it seemed to dispense with clear narrative altogether in favour of strangely condensed multiple threats and layers of storytelling (e.g. 'Resurrection of the Daleks'; 'Ghostlight'; 'Curse of Fenric'). Here, bits of different generic plots were stapled together, either as an example of post-modern self-reference, or post-script-editing laissez faire - 'let's chuck in a bit about android doubles'; 'there aren't any traditional monsters in this'; 'what about adding a bit about the end of all life on a future earth?'

Davies's 'golden age' is apparently one of relatively uncomplicated monsters. And though he offers a 'critical reading' of much of the old series, he also proffers a very devoted re-creation of the feel of its type of cod-space-invasion and reheated-gothic. Every story has its monsters; neither series one or two have had the courage to depart from this template and risk a 'straight' historical. And, as of yet, the new series hasn't widened or deepened its palette and range of genre borrowings - there's been no time-travelling spy story; no outright psychological thriller; no crime tale or noir filtered through the series format; no intimate epic following a group of friends or budding politicians across their lives, with the Doctor intervening to save humanity from political corruption, or just from one bad decision. There's no reason why the series couldn't tell these types of stories and still be recognisably new Doctor Who. Or rather, there is a reason: the show's reinvention is seemingly in thrall to its previous fan-perceived 'golden ages', settling into a certain set of formulas, whether this is the 'celebrity historical' (a 'name' from British history, e.g. Dickens or Queen Victoria, is combined with an alien menace) or the space opera. Even at its most experimental, as in perhaps 'Love & Monsters' and 'Boom Town', the show still uses monsters as a sign of 'proper' Doctor Who-ness.

If anything, the new series has massively intensified its dependence on monsters by using them as mid-series publicity "relaunches" (Daleks in series one; Cybermen in series two) and as series finale audience-grabbers. Paradoxically, this almost domesticates the show's monsters, making them a matter of audience familiarity, safety and branding at the same moment that they are supposedly terrifyingly monstrous. A truly human monster - a psychopath, a serial killer, a despot or tyrant - seems to be simply too dark and too threatening for the new show's format to contemplate, even if it can tolerate moments of "humanity" in its Slitheen combatants, as well as pantomiming monstrosity in the guise of mad scientist John Lumic. Van Statten is probably one of the new series' darkest turns, and even he doesn't really take centre-stage, instead serving to magnify the threat of just one Dalek in comparison with his greed and ruthlessness.

Davies has also engaged in 'setpiece' or fan-pleasing showdowns such as the Doctor regenerating after a battle with the Daleks, and the Daleks and Cybermen going head-to-head. Yet again, pure continuity is a dirty word - here, it is the unusual (in fact, pretty much unprecedented) loading or addition of established, singular elements which speaks to and from fandom: regeneration and Daleks!; Daleks and Cybermen!; and, through the implied back-story of the Time War, the Daddy of all neo-continuity recombinations - Daleks versus Time Lords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highly fannish Time War (along with 'Bad Wolf') was not especially foregrounded in Russell T. Davies's original pitch document for series one (published as part of the Series One Companion), but it has certainly appealed very strongly to fans. And the Dalek-Cyber confrontation was rationalised by Davies in his Doctor Who Confidential commentary on these episodes as being what his "eight year-old self" would've loved, i.e. that this battle was designed to especially appeal to the child audience. What this missed out - I would suggest purposefully - was the extent to which Davies was also deliberately upping the ante in terms of giving fandom what it had dreamt of for years - as well as doing something which received wisdom held could only ever be 'fanwank'.

Here's a mission-statement you'll probably never hear Russell T. Davies admit to in any promotional and publicity material: what he really, really wants is to prove that 'fanwank' is the new black.

One of the second series episodes, "Love & Monsters," directly represents what many perceive as a fan community. What kinds of images of fans emerge there and what has been the response to this episode from British fans?

Oh dear; I've got my 'Best Of...' ELO CD playing as I type this! Really. 'Love & Monsters' has probably been the single most divisive episode of the new series - some fans seem to love it, and others feel that it isn't "really" Doctor Who, though quite how that argument can be sustained, I don't personally know.

What is most interesting to me about the episode is the fact that it has not only given rise to opposed fan opinions, but also to entirely opposed interpretations of how it represents fans. Those who focus on the Victor Kennedy (Peter Kay) character argue that the ep attacks fans as obsessive, possessive types who destroy what they love by seeking to regiment and control other fans' activities. In this account, Victor Kennedy stands in for a kind of hierarchy-obsessed 'superfan', and so challenges socially-organised fandom to reform its ways. And it is clearly possible to interpret the majority of LINDA - certainly, those who are absorbed - as rather lacking in social ability: these are evidently misfits and outcasts. A relatively early scene which depicts each of the group in turn also appears to poke considerable fun at their artistic, creative and scholarly achievements, almost as if Davies the professional scriptwriter is pouring cold water on many fans' creative but amateurish, unprofessional efforts.

Against all of this, there's the character of Elton Pope (Marc Warren), which the script and production are consummately careful to depict as 'normal'. It's as if his normality can only be purchased at the cost of projecting negative fan stereotypes more or less heavily across other members of the LINDA group. It needs to be remembered, as well, that this allegorical interpretation of the episode is never directly licensed - the term 'fan' is not used to described these "followers" of the Doctor, and in their world he is a real rather than a fictional construct.

But, through the figure of Elton, fandom is affectionately reclaimed as a positive thing; as a source of solidarity, as a defence against traumatic memories and feelings, and above all, as a space for cultural creativity. Elton is a textbook 'good' fan. These representations of fandom may sound rather gendered, concerning pathologically "powerful" versus "normal" male characters whom women either support (Ursula's love for Elton) or are subordinated to (we witness Victor absorb a number of female 'fans'). However, Davies's notes for the episode indicate that Elton's character was originally to have been a woman, and perhaps the loss of a more conventionally 'feminised' fan in favour of a 'normal' fanboy shouldn't be entirely lamented.

In the end, though, perceiving the episode as a fan allegory slightly closes down its richness and its possibilities - especially as one of its strengths is to challenge the usual dramatic device whereby characters in genre TV seemingly endlessly flag up and discuss their past traumas. Here, it is Elton's silences, elisions and gaps - moments where he literally does nothing other than stare listlessly off-camera into space or where he motions to switch off the camera - which carry and convey his emotional hurt. And, as a result, when his childhood trauma is revealed, it seems to come almost out of nowhere rather than having been prefigured; a whole system of silences suddenly breaks down. There's a kind of emotional truth, power and realism to Elton's silence and his busy-doing-nothing which much TV drama frequently fails to achieve, let alone 'genre' TV. And the episode is also among the most self-reflexive of the run so far, with Elton virtually speaking in scriptwriter Davies's voice, and asserting that he's put the most exciting events at the start of his story. In Triumph of a Time Lord I compare this episode to Davies's much-heralded instalment of The Grand which focused on just one character (the barman Clive) speaking to his father. Both adopt a kind of kind of intimate, oral storytelling mode, making much use of voice-over and subjective POV. It is something which also crops up in the to-camera opening in Queer as Folk, and in Bob & Rose, not to mention Rose's unusual voice-over at the beginning of 'Army of Ghosts' and 'Doomsday'.

While emphasising the emotional bond of oral storytelling, 'Love & Monsters' definitely appears to chastise those fans who oppose the show's newfound emotionality - Victor Kennedy asserts that he doesn't like to be touched "either literally or metaphorically". And this is his great failing; he can't be emotionally moved or touched - i.e. impinged on from without - he can only greedily devour and incorporate external objects (which is all people are to him). 'Love & Monsters' must surely be the favourite Doctor Who episode of psychoanalysts everywhere! Yet its representations of fandom are, I would say, relational: it depicts fandom positively, but only in relation to other negative portrayals, leaving audiences to negotiate and navigate between the good and the bad in order to reach their own (often conflicting) conclusions. Not quite a Rorschach test for fandom, it is nevertheless an apt space for audiences to project in their own prejudices or positions on what it means to be a fan.

With the relaunch of Star Trek, there was a splintering of the fan community with some remaining "loyal" to the classic series and others embracing the new entries in the franchise. To what degree has that occurred around the relaunch of Doctor Who?

It's hard to say, because the fans who are very 'anti' the new series may have drifted away from organised fandom, or may not have bothered to voice their dislike online. There has been much debate, though, about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the new series, some of which has shaded into what have been caricatured as 'pro' and 'anti' Russell T Davies camps. Such splintering is, I suspect, much more about creating an easy shorthand for different groups of fans to bash each other with, then it is about real debate. The dominant sense would seem to be that most fans love old and new Doctor Who, and value each for their very different identities. In this respect, a lot of fans are good media historians, acutely aware of the different production and industry contexts which have fed into the making of different eras.

Who may have been helped in this by the fact that its 'classic' series was always marked by the recasting of lead and supporting cast. Whereas Star Trek: TOS was really defined through its iconic lead actors (with far less variation than Who), Doctor Who has always been a little more changeable and much less identified with one central cast - Tom Baker's pre-eminence in the US notwithstanding. Fans have therefore got very used to championing certain Doctor Who stories or actors while attacking others: as a result, the fandom is much more decentred than simply revolving around 'classic' versus 'new' factions, I'd say, because of the show's long initial run and its many reinventions from the 1960s onward.

Having noted all that, I am personally aware of some fans - a very small number - who have simply stopped watching the show, saying it's just not for them any more, and that it isn't the Doctor Who they've loved all their lives. It may be that for these people, the pleasures of the show were so powerfully linked to a certain phase in their own lives, or to a sense of appreciating something outside the media 'mainstream', that the show's reinvention, rebranding, and newfound commercial omnipresence have put it beyond the pale. Sometimes being a fan is about a lot more than simply appreciating any one TV show: it can also mean making a statement about the obscurity (or not), and the individuality (or not) of what are felt to be one's defining tastes.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

City Blogging in Beirut

Part of the pleasure of starting this blog has been building closer contact with my existing students as I develop posts around some of their research and hearing back from former students who tip me about media developments in their part of the world. A little while ago, I got e-mail from a former undergraduate student Rania Khalaf. She had been a student in my Introduction to Media Studies class years ago and was reminded of the class by recent developments involving digital media in her native country of Lebanon. In this case, I wanted to share with you the story in her own words and through the images being produced by artists in the Middle East but circulated around the world.

Here's what she wrote to me:

I have been thinking a lot about that class lately and was thinking you'd find the blogging about the Lebanese-Israeli war, especially by the art community, to be an interesting phenomenon... Now, the blogs are seeping onto the walls of cities.

Here's what happening:

First, the usual first Web blogging is happening by people on both sides of the conflict. Well - since I'm Lebanese and my family's all there ... I'm a pretty stressed out - so I've mainly been following the blogs from/about lebanon. And now, as Paul Keller puts it, they're moving into the 'urban fabric' and becoming 'city blogs' .

A couple of these blogs that I like best are chronicling the war, not the politics of it but the day-to-day of it, using sketches. Maybe a few song lyrics. Maybe a few paragraphs of text. A song here and there, and one song using the falling bombs for bass.

Here are the two blogs I've been mostly checking out

There's even one that uses annotated pics of Arabic Superman comics .

Having grown up in the middle east and through one civil war, well .. let's just say political analysis of that region turns into wacky conspiracy theories and goes back thousands of years into a blame game that wastes precious time (and in turn, precious lives) .. making it so very sick that sometimes it makes me laugh a little filling the room with a nasty cynicisim .. So I tend to veer to the blogs that are about the human condition , about common sense, about staying alive and moving forward. Me, I'm still holding out for eternal peace and love and all that cheese.

Lately, some of the sketches started appearing on the streets of Amsterdam. Then, in New York, I (heart) Beirut stickers started appearing as 'love from new york to beirut' . Both have started to slowly creep their way throughout the cities of the world. I wonder whether people will notice.

And here are Mazen's pictures - on the walls of Amsterdam (city blogging).

Here are I heart Beirut stickers in NYC:

I thought you'd find this interesting from the digital community point of view, forgetting for a moment the bombs and the whats and wheres and whodroppedthefirstones.

For those who would like to know more about the role that digital media is playing in this current conflict, I would recommend checking out Morph, the blog of the Media Center, which has been having an ongoing discussion about blogging in the middle east written from people living and working across the region. Here, for example, is a discussion of blogs from an Iranian perspective:

The very first thing that I do every morning is to check my emails. It is always a great pleasure to see that people have posted comments on my blog. Even forgetting those who try to show their extreme hatred toward the Iranian regime, I am not used to reading comments like "stop offending my dear president". Many times I think everybody agrees with me; that the Iranian administration is naive and that the political atmosphere in Iran is so corrupt and inefficient. Sometimes when I find an interesting point about Iran I wonder if I should post it in my blog. I think, everybody knows this and everybody agrees with me. The problem is who this everybody is....

t seems that the world is divided into two very distinct islands. In one island intellectual people read our blogs and post nice comments. Some even blame us for being too nice to the regime. On the other island there are people whom applause when Ahmadinejad talks about "defeating the nation's enemies". Obviously, this is nothing new. People have always been separated over many issues, one of them politics. But I am afraid there is no bridge between the two islands, even if we think there is one. Internet, blog, comment, to some of us these are the great sounds of change and democracy. Freelance reporters, transparency, question. I am sorry folks we are living in our closed circle....

What I am trying to show is that basically the power of blogs is limited because of obvious barriers. I should be very optimistic to assume that an Iranian teenager in a small town will quit the national television, the only source of entertainment, and look for my interpretation of the events. I am more and more convinced that the fancy world of blogging, and arranging hunger-strikes, has no meaningful connection to the real world. People are not willing to change their perspective because Lisa tries to show them a nice picture from a "cruel Zionist Israeli". Nor they care if Mansour Osanlo is in prison because he has spoken out for a non-political demand; to have better working conditions. I am not blaming anyone. If I had to wake up seven at the morning to go to work everyday and then pass the last week of each month with virtually no money left I do not think I could afford writing in my good-looking blog. This is how I see all this. We are a community of internet freaks sharing a common positive sense for attractive words such as democracy and freedom. We talk to each other and have fun. This is fine. We are hanging out, blaming this government and that religious identity. This is all fine. But, folks, please do not make it bigger that it actually is.

And here is how Gloria Pan responded to Arash Kamanger's post:

But Arash, there are people who blog and people who read blogs. Yes, the writers are a small circle, their core audiences a larger though still select circle. But beyond that, who can say? If you look at the readership of some of the really active (not necessarily big) blogs, it's very clear that many commenters are not regulars, who just happened to come across a discussion or interesting post. My point, I guess, is that while we can't determine how widespread Internet usage and involvement is, what we can definitely see is a change in the overall public discourse. Is it freer? Are more people getting used to speaking out? Are more people getting used to hearing alternative views -- maybe not directly from the Internet, but from the cousin of the guy down the street who happens to be studying computer science? All this is definitely happening and happening faster all the time. But the question still remains: Will it be for good or evil? The new ideas out there can be from either side. I'm an optimist, and I believe that ultimately, the good ideas will prevail.

I find myself wondering whether the street media practices that Rania Khalaf described in her e-mail to me might represent a response to Kamanger's concerns -- a kind of bridge between the digital world and the people in the streets who have little access to digital media. Khalaf was not the first person living in the west to share with me the remarkable cartoons being produced in Beirut. Indeed, these artists have been able to use the web to get their impressions of the war into global circulation and their images -- whether created from scratch or appropriated -- leave vivid impressions of what it feels like to live in a wartorn country. They speak to the heart. I am thankful that digital media allows us to hear directly from people in other parts of the world and often brings us part of the story we are not receiving through the news media.

Yet, reproducing them and getting them out beyond the digital sphere seems like an important act. I am reminded, for example, of the ways that immigrant workers in turn of the century New York used to pay one member of their community to read to them while they worked -- allowing a broader number to benefit from the literacy skills of a few and maintain a connection to print culture. I am also reminded of the early days of internet fandom when people would print out all of the posts on a discussion list and share them with people who weren't online.

Here's how the man who posted the cartoons on walls and lamp posts in Amsterdam explained his thinking:

What are drawings if not posters-in-waiting that can easily been printed out and stuck against the walls of the city? clearly one only has to print them out, copy them a couple of times, get wallpaper-glue and head out into the night (ok, first wait some 10 hours for night). so i spend some of sunday night sticking a4 sized mini-posters all over the walls of my neighborhood (the pijp) in amsterdam....

yesterday evening i did a second round (around Leidseplein in the center), and i am planning to continue for the next couple of nights. hopefully these relatively small posters will catch some eyeballs and make more people think and start expressing their outrage.

Apart from the obvious advantage of making me feel like i am doing something about the situation, i also like this little action on a symbolic level. it feels like translating a blog (something normally contained to the internets) into something that is part of the urban fabric. i like the idea of images leaking from my screen into the streets of amsterdam and would probably be even more beautiful if people in other cities started doing the same...

We might think of these practices as a low tech form of grassroots convergence -- people taking up the responsibility to transmit information, stories, and images from one medium to another and in the process, broaden their circulation. If, as was suggested above, our differing access to media technologies means that we inhabit different worlds even when we share the same physical spaces -- then the answer surely must start by using appropriate media to bridge between those media sectors.

National Politics within Virtual Game Worlds: The Case of China

Last month, what some are describing as "the largest political protest gathering in a virtual world game ever" occurred within the Chinese Massively Multiplayer Game, Fantasy Westward Journey (FWJ). Comparative Media Studies alum Zhan Li has been working with me over the past several weeks to piece together some sense of what occurred and what it means. Please keep in mind as you read this that the incident concerned the still heated relationship between Japan and China. Some of the language qouted from participants may be offensive but it is qouted to help readers understand more fully the issues at stake for participants in this debate.

NetEase and FWJ

FWJ is currently the most popular MMORPG in the People's Republic of China. The game is heavily influenced by classical Chinese literature and history. The name is a direct reference to Journey to the West or Westward Journey (perhaps best known for its famous central character, The Monkey King). FWJ has over 25mm registered player accounts and a peak concurrent user count of up to 1.3mm players during first quarter 2006 with an average concurrent user count of about 458,000 players. FWJ is operated by NetEase, one of the big three Chinese companies which represent 70% of the People's Republic of China market. NetEase founder, William Ding, is a billionaire and third wealthiest person in PRC. Of the major games companies in the country, NetEase has the strongest emphasis on developing original games with Chinese culture themes (such as FWJ) in contrast to the other big 2 companies (Shanda and The9) which are more dependent on licensing foreign - especially Korean - games. NetEase operates the two leading MMORPGs in China - FWJ and a Korean license (Westward Journey Online - similar themes to FWJ). NetEase also has the most significant in-house development capability.

The Incident

The incident started on July 4 when the game's administrators placed a high level player (level 144, only 11 levels away from maximum) with an anti-Japanese name ("Kill the little Japs") in an in-game virtual jail. They ask him to change his name as it is too politically sensitive and he refused. As he explained in a public statement:

I began playing this game two years ago. When I first applied to Netease, you did not say that my alias was unacceptable! But now you come and lock up my ID. This is obviously depriving me of my private assets. Over these two years, I have spent more than 30,000 RMB on game point cards, and I have also spent more than 10,000 RMB on equipment trading.

(10,000 RenMinBi equals US$1,250)

The following day, admins announced that the guild ("The Alliance To Resist Japan") founded by the player - with 700 members, one of the top 5 in the game - would be dissolved by July 10. Netease offered the following explanation of its actions:

Although the names of individuals, guilds, stalls, shops, pets and beasts may be chosen as you wish, Netease is running a healthy and green game. In order to maintain the purity and harmony in the game world, Netease will not permit any names that include (but this list is not restricted solely to) those that attack, insult or mislead with respect to race, nationality, national politics, national leaders, obscenity, vulgarity, libel, threat, religions and religious figures.... In changing the name of an individual player or handling the case of an individual guild, we do not want to cause any unhappiness to people. We do not want such an incident to affect the patriotism of everybody. But this is a game. When we operate this game, we follow the state's regulations on Internet administration and we are monitored by the National Internet Supervisory Bureau. People come here to experience joy, and we therefore emphasize health, relaxation and happiness and we should not bring in politically sensitive topics. The experience of history tells us that patriotism should be expressed rationally under the grand theme of protecting the interests of the nation and the people. Patriotism requires passion, but it requires rationality even more so. Passion and rationality form our correct way of expressing our patriotism.

Link

The Rising Sun?

Rumors were circulating around this time (unclear whether they start before or after the jailing/guild banning announcement) that NetEase, which runs the game in question, is being taken over by a Japanese company who are making changes to the game e.g. Chinese lion statues (a historic patriotic symbol) in the game will be turned into pigs. According to the initial reports in the Beijing Evening News, many Chinese gamers were angered by a particular "Jianye city government office" represented in the game because of an icon on one of the walls which some felt bore too close a resemblance to the Japanese "rising sun" flag.

The Beijing Evening News cites some telling comments from local gamers angered by the icon:

"To raise a 'Rising Sun flag' in a Great Tang government office is obviously a challenge and an insult!" said local game player Mr. Zeng angrily. Another game player Ms. Lu could not conceal her disappointment: "Even although everything in the game is virtual, our feelings are still genuine. This incident has seriously hurt our feelings. We find this unacceptable." According to game player Mr. Gu, many game players contacted the customer service line after the incident broke upon, but the other side only repeated: "No comment." Mr. Guo said that the word among the game players is that the "Rising Sun flag" is present in a Tang dynasty government office because some of the stock shares in this online game have been purchased by a foreign company. This explanation has not been confirmed.

On this, Peking University Department of Sociology professor Xia Xueluan said that a national flag is not an ordinary commercial product because it is the symbol of a sovereign nation. Therefore, to hand the flag of one sovereign nation at the symbolic place for another sovereign nation is a form of public challenge. Professor Xia said that the game's planning and operation department should consider the social meaning of the game instead of the mere commercial value. While entertaining the public, they ought to educate and lead people to make the proper value judgments.

The game company later explained that the rising sun motif was based on a classic Chinese painting, "Sunrise in the East," and was intended to reflect aspects of traditional Chinese culture. Philips reproduces the original painting and notes that the icon on the wall in the game was significantly altered from both the Japanese and Chinese images of the rising sun, further adding confusion to the discussion.

NetEase has denied rumors that it is being bought by a Japanese company or that the game content included pro-Japanese propaganda. The company responded to suggestions that they had turned the Lions into pigs: "This is a cartoon-style game and some images may have exaggerated shapes; that don't mean their meaning has changed," the message said. They also seemed to blame The Alliance to Resist Japan for circulating these rumors and further enflaming the situation.

Link

The Protest March

July 7 was the anniversary of the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident which is regarded by the Chinese as the beginning of Second Sino-Japanese War and also of the Second World War. It is a date long associated within China with anti-Japanese sentiments that still remain intense among some segments of the Chinese population. It is on this date that the mass protests begin within the game world with almost 10,000 player/protestors on the first day. The "Summer Palace" server group, where much of the protest occurred, was almost overwhelmed when 80,000 players joined the protest -- a huge increase over the 20,000 users the server normally accommodated.

The incident has been reported both in Chinese and Japanese games related blogs.

To place this incident in its proper context, it may be useful to take a few steps back and look at the current state of online gaming in China and its historic relationship to struggles over national culture.

Games in China

Some reports identify the PRC as not only having the world's largest video gaming population, but also its fastest growing. China is the fourth largest online games market in the world (U.S. is No.1) and the third largest in Asia following South Korea and Japan. (Taiwan is fourth). The PRC began to emerge as a significant games market around 2000 and has grown steadily ever since. Online games have been seen as major driver popularizing broadband internet in PRC, and they are currently the most profitable segment of the PRC internet market About 95% of Chinese (non-mobile phone) video gaming is online PC (compared with 4% console) - the most effective business model as it is relatively piracy-free (a big problem for offline PC games). The total market size (summation of operators' revenue) for PRC online games (both MMORPG and casual) is projected to grow as high as $1bn for 2006 from around $600mm in 2005. About half of this comes from MMORPGs.

Much of this gaming -- and indeed, most of Chinese digital culture more generally -- takes place in internet cafes. Recent estimates project the number of internet users in the PRC to rise from as many as 111mm in 2005 to 130mm in 2006. (Total PRC pop. estimate as of July 2006 is approx. 1,314mm). Of these internet users, as many as 33mm in 2005 were estimated to be online gamers (35mm in 2006). About 20-25mm play MMORPGs. Some estimates suggest that there are 5mm under 18 year olds who play online games.

There is also a growing market for mobile phone games, but Chinese gamers appear to have little appetite for game consoles (a recent attempt by Shanda, one of the big 3 Chinese game companies, to a launch a domestically designed and produced home entertainment system/IPTV/online/ game console platform (the "EZ" ) has been a major flop). Fantasy MMORPGs are still the most important genre, but online casual games are expected to take over in importance soon.

The Digital Generation in China

I visited China several years ago in the wake of a tragic incident where two teenagers who were refused entry to an illegal internet cafe had returned and purposefully set fire to the door of the establishment, resulting in the death of everyone inside. The illegal cafes would sell customers all night access and then lock them inside, a practice which contributed greatly to the horrors of this incident. In a column for Technology Review, I described both the government's response (using the incident as a pretext to shut down all internet cafes in the country for a prolonged period of review) and the public's response (which tended to emphasize the breakdown of traditional community life rather than media effects to explain the youth's behavior.) At the time, I read the response in contrast to the American discourse on the Columbine school shootings which had tended to push aside any focus on social causes and adopt a policy of blaming violent entertainment. Here's some of what I wrote at the time;

Most Western discussions of the Internet and China describe the rise of digital access and consumer culture as liberating forces that cultivate democratic aspirations behind the repressive government's back. MIT professor Jing Wang notes, however, that the expansion of consumerism has been actively promoted by the government throughout the last decade. Embracing a rhetoric of "one nation, two systems," the state has encouraged a shorter work week, recreational activities, entrepreneurship, and more material goods per citizen. The goal has been to facilitate economic and technological change without promoting political destabilization.

A society once characterized by limited choice now confronts a multitude of consumer options and aggressive advertising campaigns. The first billboard I saw in Beijing contained the word "dotcom." A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, a mob of people stopped in the street and stared at a massive television screen broadcasting the World Cup punctuated by a host of consumer-electronics commercials. Red-tented Coca-Cola stands in the Forbidden City; traditional night markets flanking Starbucks-old economic and social systems are breaking down faster than new ones can emerge, resulting in a culture riddled with contradictions, a state policy characterized by mixed signals and a public charged by both anxiety and anticipation.

And China's urban youth have stood at the center of these changes. In fact, three quarters of all Internet users in China are under 30. Many urban teens don't remember a time without rampant consumerism. A few years in age between siblings translate into dramatic differences in cultural experiences. Fairly or unfairly, these urban youths embody their nation's hopes and fears about the future.

On the one hand, the government sees the high-tech sector as central to China's long term economic interests, especially since joining the World Trade Organization last year. For example, the Shanghai schools now require all nine-year-olds to learn basic Internet skills. On the other hand, anti-computer rhetoric proliferates.

In subsequent years, the Chinese government has both sought to regulate game-playing and to promote the use of computer games for cultural education -- in a sense seeing the growth of gaming in their country as both a social problem and a pedagogical opportunity.

Regulating Game Play

In mid-2005, the national government took a much more forceful stance on video game regulation, as part of a general tightening of entertainment media policy. The government's regulations included a "fatigue system" designed to limit the amount of continuous time that players could spend within game worlds. Initially, the regulations applied to all citizens but were later revised to apply only to players under the age of 16. Moreover, new Internet cafés were banned from 200m radius of schools and apartment buildings; registration of new internet cafes was suspended for time being; café curfews for under 18s introduced in July 2006

The government justified its video game regulations by citing concerns about youth addiction, corruption, and health issues related to games. Games, according to an official statement, "break the constitution, threaten national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity will be banned. Anything which threatens state security, damaging the nation's glory, disturbing social order and infringing on other's legitimate rights will also be banned." This formalized a stance that had already banned games for politically contentious content. An example of a problematic issue would be the representation of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet as independent nations

Those familiar with long-term Chinese regulation of internet access saw the policies also as a back door effort to restrict youth access and participation in cyberspace more generally. In the all night cybercafes described earlier, especially those which are not legally registered, youth would spend the night playing games, chatting with friends, reading porn, and consuming forbidden news sites. Setting limits on the amount of time that could be spent playing games would, in effect, limit these all night policies.

Players initially sought to get around such restrictions by adopting multiple accounts and using multiple aliases but the government responded in June 2006 by requiring that all online game accounts be registered with real names and ID card numbers.

Link

Transforming Game Culture in China

At the same time, the PRC has sought to promote "healthy" gaming practices and culturally-appropriate games content.

-- The All China Sports Federation has recognized video games as an official competitive sport

- PRC Ministry of Culture has released lists of officially approved "healthy" selected online commercial games that are already in the market place (15 games selected in Aug 05; another 10 in Jan 06)

- Ministry of Science of Technology has included online gaming in national plan to support hi-tech projects

- The National Copyright Administration of China has established a "China domestic online game publishing project" which aims to develop 100 home grown games (investment of $120-$240mm) from 2005 to 2010

- National initiative to address shortage of game developers - professional game development college established in Hong Kong, with branches planned for 20 cities and partnerships with 10 universities to offer video game degrees

- Shanda, one of the big 3 PRC game companies, announced in 2005 that it would be developing 100 patriotic online games about historic Chinese heroes for schoolchildren over the next decade in cooperation with Chinese government regulators

While some western observers have suggested that government sponsored patriotic games would likely be boring, patriotic games can embrace the latest in video gameplay. In August 2005 reports that a Chinese game company, PowerNet Technology, was developing a new MMOPRG called "Anti-Japan War Online" in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League (the main youth organization of the PRC Communist Party). Estimates put the development costs at over $6mm (in comparison with the U.S. Army's official online game, America's Army, cost around $7.7mm for its initial development). The game depicts key battles during the Second Sino-Japanese war, whilst avoiding graphic depictions of combat. While they cannot play on the Japanese side (keep in mind that everyone plays on the U.S. side in America's Army), players can choose from 17 professions on the Chinese side such as peasant, student, factory worker or soldier. The game project manager at PowerNet Technology was reported to remark, "Our game designers hate Japan so they want to make the game very provocative," while at the same time he was quick to reassure readers that "the team leaders have tried to tone down the violence."

Like many other countries around the world, China sees games as a key growth sector within the digital economy -- especially with online gaming being identified as a particularly East Asian phenomenon. But China also is serious about the cultural and political impact of games, seeing the medium as key for winning the hearts and minds of a growing generation of young citizens. Games thus become the focus of censorship and regulation, economic development, and struggles over national culture.

Protest in Game Worlds

One can understand NetEase's development of a multiplayer game based on a classic of Chinese Literature as part of this larger push towards the use of games to promote national culture (as well as define the company brand against competition from Korean and Japanese licensed games). At the same time, the player's response also reflects the internalization of these same policies -- an effort to police games of content that might run counter to the patriotic spirit the government seeks to promote. One can understand why patriotism was such a central issue for people on both sides of this debate, though patriotism here is defined on rather different grounds, especially as it relates to attitudes towards Japan, the country's former military foe and current economic rival.

Around the world, multiplayer games are emerging as new public spheres where issues of national pride get played out. There has been strong backlash within the United States, for example, against the rising phenomenon of "gold farming," that is, the development and sell of in game assets for money, a practice closely associated in American discourse with China, where it is estimated that as many as 500,000 people make at least some of their living through playing computer games. (Of course, this debate about "gold farming" also plays itself out in a context of a national debate about immigration policy and a renewed nationalism following September 11.) At the same time, there have been a variety of political gatherings within multiplayer game worlds, mostly protesting various corporate policies, and in the wake of what some saw as homophobic policies in the World of Warcraft, in support of gay rights. One could argue, though, that even the gay rights march centered as much around issues of consumer rights as around any larger political agenda. There has been a fair amount of discussion of game worlds as sites for economic and political experiments but in the west, there has not been this kind of spillover between ingame and real world politics. And there certainly has been nothing on the scale of what happened in FWJ.

Zhan Li, my former student who did a Masters Thesis on whether we could consider the U.S. government-sponsored military game, America's Army to be a public sphere for political debate, explains,

As far as I know, and can tell from my searching around on the web and on

news databases, there have been no mass-scale "real world" political protests of this kind on US MMORPGs. There have been small scale protests about in-game policies (this happens on Chinese MMORPGs too of course -

there was a in-game "mass suicide" protest against the government fatigue system on World of Warcraft for instance) such as the tax revolt on Second Life and in-game identities (LBGT rights etc. ) . As far as I can tell, the

largest incident about real-world politics within a MMORPG / virtual world was a 2003 dispute about Iraq involving an influx of WWII Online gamers onto Second Life (attracted by an IGN article about a small group of establish

WWII gamers on SL, not by intent to protest) , which perhaps involving "nearly 130" WWII Online gamers (a figure which Wired called "large") and perhaps a couple of hundred regular Second Lifers. And in that dispute, Iraq

seems to have been secondary - a backdrop which players referred to when working through their primary concerns about the WWII gamers wanting to see if they could conquer and own a piece of territory through violence, and that the new WWII gamers rivalled the largest established clan in size.

Arguably, the Chinese government's efforts to regulate game playing -- and to promote games as part of the national culture -- have transformed what might have been a mere passtime into a more politically charged environment. What's striking about the protest march in FWJ and the company's response to the protest is the degree to which all involved saw issues of national honor and patriotism as at stake in this dispute. This wasn't a struggle over an in-game asset: it was a struggle about how the game fit within larger debates about Chinese nationalism and about the country's relations to Japan.

Truth, Justice and the South Asian Way

This past weekend, like millions of fanboys (and fan girls) around the world, I went to see that hot new superhero movie -- not the one you are thinking about, the one with that guy from the planet Krypton. I went to see the other one -- Krrish. Krrish is what some are calling the first superhero movie to come out of India and it is playing across the United States -- not at the local multiplex or even the art house but in small ma-and-pa run theatres which cater to the local south Asian population. Most of these theaters don't advertise in your local paper so if you are wondering if it is playing in your city, check here. Krrish is a huge box office success in India -- having more than doubled its production costs in its first ten days in theatres -- and there is already speculation that it will be the first of a long running superhero franchise.

In its broad outlines, Krrish features much which will be recognizable to American comics and superhero fans: a larger than life, too honest to be true, ruggedly handsome protagonist who becomes a masked crusader while hiding behind a secret identity; a plucky female reporter with a tendency to get in over her head; an evil scientist bent on global domination; lots of high voltage action sequences; and a headline-chasing publisher/network executive who is more interested in unmasking the hero than celebrating his contributions to civic virtue. There's even a moment of painful choice when the protagonist has to choose which of two loved ones he will save from a certain death.

This being a Bollywood production, there was a lot more -- spectacular musical numbers (including one at a circus which quickly turns into an action sequence when the tents catch on fire), broad physical comedy, intense melodrama, romantic scenes, and so forth. What many western fans love about Bollywood movies is their tendency to bundle together as many different genres as possible and to play them against each other to create an extended (3 hours plus) evening of entertainment. Another pleasure is seeing familiar formulas get transformed as they are rethought for the Asian market.

An Indian Superboy?

Much like the western Superman who has been read as an embodiment of national myths and ideals, there is much which speaks to the specifically Indian origins of this particular story.

For one thing, the early signs that young Krishna may have superpowers come when he turns out to be a protégé at sketching and then confounds the teachers at his local school with a spectacular performance on his I.Q. exam. The American counterpart would have led off with his strength, his speed, or maybe even his X-ray vision but having a superior intellect has rarely been a prerequisite for becoming a superpower in the western sense of the term. Throughout the film, in fact, the other characters consistently cite his "talents" but rarely his "powers" as if he were destined to become an extremely gifted knowledge worker (and indeed, it turns out that the ethics of knowledge work for hire are at the center of this epic saga.)

His special powers are modest by western standards, though spectacular enough by local standards. Much like the original Superman, he covers vast distances through long leaps but doesn't actually have the ability to fly. He can scale a mountain peak as if it were a series of stepping stones. He can run faster than the local horses. He can reach into the river and yank out a fish with his bare hands. And he can speak with the animals and get them to do his bidding. And, in several sequences, he demonstrates his superiority, Gandhi style, by withstanding enormous physical and emotional abuse without resorting to violence.

As with the western Superman, his adventures begin when he lives the small town (village) where he was raised and move to the city but in keeping with the modern era of South Asian Diaspora, he goes not to Metropolis but to Singapore in pursuit of the woman of his dreams, who turns out to be not only a modern working girl but a Non-Resident Indian.

Krishna must adopt a secret identity in order to do good deeds when he comes to the city because he must remain true to a promise he made to his grandmother -- there's a lot in this film about the obligations the young owe to their elders. In a move almost as unconvincing as that bit when nobody recognizes Clark Kent as Superman because he took off his glasses, Krishna masks his identity by adopting the superhero name, Krrish. (Of course, there's something of a joke being made about Singapore's reputation for multiculturalism when the public is quickly convinced that the South Asian superhero might actually be ethnically Chinese and go under the name Christian.)

The villain turns out to be Dr. Arya, the heads of a global information technology empire, who has made his reputation for his contributions to wireless mobile telecommunications, but seeks to develop a supercomputer which will allow him to see his future. He has built the original machine by exploiting Krishna's father -- another supergenius, who like his son, gains his powers from contact with a visitor from another planet. The wonderful machine functions like the magic devices of so many classic folktales: it shows just enough of the future to convince people to tempt their fate but they are always blindsided in the end.

A Global Production

The film was conceived and directed by Rakesh Roshan, who had previously created Koi...Mil Goya which he claims to be the first science fiction film produced in India. We get some glimpses of that earlier film here through flashback sequences and there is much which will remind you of E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Green Lantern. As one Indian blogger notes, Krrish merchandise is holding its own across Asia with competing goods for the new Superman movie -- though she notes, both sets of products are actually made in China.

Westerners are going to be tempted to read the film as a symptom of cultural imperialism -- taking a strongly western genre and trying to sell it back to the American market. But that's too simple -- especially given all of the ways I've identified above that the superhero genre gets reworked to speak to specifically Asian values and concerns and the ways it gets mixed with other genre elements which are more closely associated with the Bollywood tradition.

Rather, we should think of this as a global cultural product, all the more so when you consider that the action sequences were directed by Tony Ching, the Chinese-born fight choreographer who worked on such PRC films as Hero and House of Flying Daggers; the special effects sequence were developed in collaboration with Marc Kolbe and Craig Mumma (whose work was featured in Godzilla, Independence Day, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) as well as a range of India-based effects houses, and the second half of the film is set amid the futuristic landscape of Singapore, including a sequence featuring the world famous Orang from the Singapore Zoo (who is identified in the film as Mao, perhaps appearing under a stage name).

As CMS alum Parmesh Shahani, a longtime observer of the Bollywood industry, explained to me:

This film has been made with loads of co-operation from the Singapore govt. Obviously some countries (Singapore, Switzerland, etc) have realized the vast reach of Bollywood - and want to tap into this. They are first movers and are thus gaining the tremendous equity that comes with this. Tourism is the most obvious thing that comes to mind that Bollywood films can promote - but bear in mind that Krrish also positions Singapore as a corporate center, a media center, and a center of cutting edge research and development - all the things that the Singapore authorities want to promote Singapore as internationally. So they're using Bollywood very savvily - as one more node to spread their very consistent brand message.

Hoping to capitalize on South Asian interest in the film, the Singapore tourism agency has organized a Krrish tour.

If you want to read more about this film, check out this New York Times story

Back Story: Indian Comics

The release of a South Asian superhero film comes as western comics fans are increasingly being drawn towards Indian comics. While comics are a worldwide phenomenon, superhero comics were until recently almost exclusively an American genre. Superman and Spider-Man's overseas appeal were totally dwarfed by the Phantom, an adventure comics figure largely forgotten in his home market but enormously successful across the southern hemisphere. The Indian comics market is dominated by Amar Chitra Katha, a comics publisher that primarily taps the country's rich historical and mythological traditions.

I have been told that there is also a lower-class local tradition of superhero comics -- many of them appropriated and reworked from western iconography -- but it is hard to get information on such comics here in the United States. (If there are any readers out there who know about such works, I'd love to hear from you.)

More recently, the American comics publisher, Marvel, collaborated with the India-based Gotham Studios to create Spider-Man: India, which depicted the adventure of the Mumbai-born Pavitra Prabhakar in his struggles against the Green Goblin who is the reincarnation of the ancient Indian demon, Rakshasa.

Even more recently, there was the announcement by Virgin of the creation of a new animation studio and comics publisher which will be introducing South Asian content into the global market. Japanese manga now far outsells U.S. produced comics even in the American market and other Asian publishers hope to follow their example. We can expect to see more Indian influences on comics in general and superheroes in particular in years to come.

And we can point to a growing number of western comics which have self-consciously displayed a South Asian influence, including Peter Milligan's Rogan Gosh, Grant Morrison's Vimanarama, Warren Ellis's Two-Step and Antony Mazzotta's Bombaby, the Screen Goddess.

Krrish is probably not the film that is going to open the western market for Asian-produced superhero movies (though there's lots to entertain western fan boys like myself.) But then, the Indian film industry outperforms Hollywood across Asia and many other parts of the world so they aren't exactly standing by and waiting for our approval. It's their party and they can fly if they want to.

Special thanks to CMS alums Parmesh Shahani and Aswin Punathamberkar for their help in preparing this post.