CMS and Home Inc. Host Media Literacy Event

2007 Media Literacy Conference October 27th, 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture

HOME, Inc., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies, partner on a one-day conference on Media Literacy. The event is scheduled for October 27th and will take place at the MIT Campus: Building E51. It has been two years since we had our wonderful conference, Media Literacy, Building Critical Thinking Skills In Our Media Age at MIT.

Since fall of 2005 so many things have changed. The cell phone has cameras and people are sharing videos over the Internet on YouTube and MySpace. Music and video games are omnipresent, and virtual worlds on the Internet, such as Second Life are being co-opted by large business and educators, who are discovering whole new avenues for teaching, learning and commerce.

The conference theme "Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture" will showcase the innovative work of classroom teachers, highlighting new pedagogical practices that support school reform and after school enrichment. We will explore after school learning through new platforms and technologies such as Second Life, and examine the research that is shaping the field.

Educational decision makers, curriculum developers, after-school program coordinators, superintendents, instructors and community leaders are all welcome to attend and participate in relevant panel discussions and breakout sessions. The conference will include two plenary sessions and eight breakout sessions covering topics relating to "in-school" and "after school" media literacy program development. Teachers from the Boston Public School's U.S. Department of Education funded media literacy and health projects will be highlighted with video presentations, sample curricula, professional development strategies and more. Discussion on best practices in Media Literacy curriculum, integration of replicable programs into K-12 or after school settings, along with a workshop on developing technology grant proposals, will provide helpful insight that will enable attendees to take the next steps toward school reform.

A keynote address will be given by Henry Jenkins, who is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006).

Other scheduled speakers include:

Rafi Santo and Global Kids, "Virtual Worlds, Real Skills"

Renee Hobbs, Temple University, "Meeting The Challenge of Teaching and Learning With Media in Schools"

Anna Van Somerin and Deb Lui, "Moby Dick Remixed: Appropriation As a New Media Literacy"

If you require any additional information on this event please contact us at, 978-395-5068 or by email at medialitconf@homeinc.org

Was Herman Melville a Proto-Fan?

Earlier this year, I proclaimed my ambitions to re-read (perhaps more accurately, read) Moby Dick this summer, having done a rather poor job of tackling this novel as a high school student. I am now a hundred pages from the end. What had inspired my own personal pursuit of the Great White Whale was my involvement through Project nml with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Ricardo has been working to get young people more engaged in Melville's classic story by encouraging them to rewrite it in a more contemporary setting. The result was Moby Dick: Then and Now, a remarkable stage performance which our team (especially Deb Liu) has been documenting. This fall, we will be working to create a teacher's guide for Moby Dick based on the idea of learning through remixing.

In anticipation of work this fall with Wyn Kelly, my colleague from the MIT Literature Section and a leading Melville expert, I returned to the scene of the crime -- reading the novel in the battered Bantam classics edition that I had failed to complete in high school. I must say that reading Moby Dick through the lens of remix culture has taught me a new way to experience this remarkable and idiosyncratic work: rather than cursing the various digressions from the core adventure saga, I have found myself reading them with renewed attention.

Moby Dick, I am discovering, absorbs all of the genres of writing and speaking of its own times, sucking up stories and cultures, juxtaposing them with each other in fresh and unanticipated ways. The abrupt shifts in language, the desire to record every detail of life on board the ship, to catalog every piece of equipment, to dissect the whale from skin to bones, to trace stories across every possible mode of representation and to question all existing accounts of the Whale, these all become part of the work's encyclopedic drive.

Somewhere around page 400, I came to another realization. We might see Melville as adopting a range of interpretive strategies and modes of reading which would be recognizable to contemporary fan culture. What if we looked at Melville as a fan of whales and whaling lore. After all, only a true fan would be so obsessed with every detail and would chase the damned "fish" all around the planet the way Melville does.

Speculating

Here is one of the many passages in the book where Melville examines the story of Jonah:

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:- He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head- a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless

.-- Moby Dick, Chapter 83

In this case, he is describing a process of speculation through which his fellow whaling fans -- the old sag-Harbor whalesman and Bishop Jebb -- try to make sense of contradictions in the source text, extending beyond the information given in order to try to reconcile what they know of whales in the real world with what the story tells them about Jonah's encounter with the Leviathan. Any one who has been in fandom for very long recognizes this conversation -- you take an element which doesn't quite work and rather than discarding it, you keep speculating around it trying to figure out under what circumstances it might make sense. Fans often describe such creative work as "repairing the damage" created by a distracted artist who didn't think through all of the implications of their own story and such speculation clearly leads step by step towards a whole scale rewriting of the narrative to better satisfy the fan's own fantasies and interests. What emerges is a kind of proto-fan fiction.

What if we imagined Jonah inside the Whale's mouth rather than fully swallowed -- maybe even inside his tooth? Ah, but we've already figured out that the Leviathan must have been a Right Whale, and not wanting to discard all of that earlier fannish labor, we want to preserve that theory and so we have to discard this new layer of speculation.

Nitpicking

In this case, the speculations also constitute a form of nitpicking. As I've discussed nitpicking here in the past, it involves a fan reading the text in relation to another body of knowledge. The example I used a while back was a site where doctors and medical students "nitpicked" House. Such nitpicking comes through most vividly when Melville takes on previous representations of the whale. Here, we see Melville boldly assert his superior knowledge and his desire to "set the record straight," both motives I recognize from myself and other contemporary fans:

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

But, before he can do so, he must clear away previous representations, in this case, focus on the anatomical inaccuracies created by artists who have had no direct experience of the living beast:

These manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young suckling whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

I am reminded of a recurring feature on Sequential Tart, a long-standing webzine by and for female comics fans, which regularly posts and critiques unlikely depictions of the female body in various superhero comics. Here, for example, is an excerpt from one tutorial on "Bizarre Breasts":

Bizarre proportions are nothing new to comics; be it the desire to cater to the cheesecake crowd or simply the preference of the artist, distorted anatomy has become commonplace. The fact that "professional" artists may utilize distortions in published works is a bit disappointing, but frankly, if they've gotten the job the odds are they aren't going to feel the need to change their style. That's fine, the world needs laughter. However, what does bother me is the possibility -- hell, the reality -- that amateur artists are copying this exaggerated anatomy and making these mistakes their own. So, in hopes of reaching those for whom this advice may actually have some impact, I have utilized my meager knowledge of anatomy and admittedly unpolished art skills to bring the world a brief tutorial on one of the comic artists' greatest challenges: the breast.

I don't want to push the parallels here too far but it seems to me that they are both fascinated with showing the absurd and inaccurate representation of anatomy which comes from artists who don't really understand the first thing about the subjects they are trying to depict.

Cataloging and Collecting

Melville, like modern day fans, refuses to restrict himself to a single text or even a single mode of representation. As he explains, "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." (Chapter 82) And indeed, some of the most productive modes of fan interpretation involve rampant interdisciplinarity and free association, creating unexpected juxtapositions of texts, tracing real and imagined allusions to other works, or simply doing the kind of "connect the dots" activity that is expected of readers of transmedia stories. Melville reads everything he can get his hands on -- ancient books, religious texts, paintings, scrimshaw, currency, tavern signs, even the stars in the sky, as he tries to find every available reference to his object of fascination. He exhibits here the fan's fascination with cataloging and collecting:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

I particularly like that last bit about becoming part of a "fraternity" of others who share his passions and knowledge for this touches about as well as anything I've read on the social bonds which link fan communities together. Doesn't this sound like someone trying to pimp his fandom?

Appropriation and Transformation

So far, I have shown Melville to be in many ways a classic fan boy -- trying to master a complex body of knowledge and show off to his fellow fans by nitpicking less satisfying works. Nothing we've described so far would be out of place on a contemporary discussion list -- although this last passage suggests that he sees his fandom in terms of his relationships with other fans and not just as a personal quest towards knowledge. Yet, there are brief passages in these sections of the novel that he may also be more openly rewriting classic stories to better satisfy his own fancies and that act of rewriting pushes him closer to contemporary fanfic practices. Consider, for example, how Melville manhandles the canon in his retelling of the story of St. George and the Dragon:

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda- indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it- is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowers we are much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

Fans might describe what Melville does here with St. George as a kind of Alternate Universe story: what if St. George had been a sea-faring rather than land-loving man? Indeed, we can see him here as involved in a struggle with another fan community over which one of them "correctly" captures what is interesting about this character and his adventures. Why should we not be surprised that Melville was involved in a battle with another "ship"! :-)

But like many later fans, Melville also struggles with how much fidelity the fan writer owes to the original. The author discusses the ways that multiple whalers approaching the same creature determine who can assert ownership over it, declaring some whales to be "fast-fish," that is, already harpooned and bound by a particular ship, and others to be "loose-fish," that is, free of any binds or constraints and thus subject to being grabbed by whichever ship approaches them first. Melville, then, extends this metaphor to talk about the work of the imagination: "What are you, reader, but a Loose-fish and a Fast-fish, too?" (Chapter 89) In other words, Melville is exploring to what degree we get hooked into a story and thus get captured by its authors and to what degree our imagination remains unmoored, capable of taking the story where-ever we want it to go. In a sense, that's exactly what fans are trying to make sense of when they debate how much they need to follow canon and to what degree they can construct their own fanon.

Read in this way, we can see Moby Dick, often described as the Great American Novel, as a piece of fan fiction which grows out of Melville's fascination for the whale and his mastery over whaling lore. Drawing on a range of stories, responding to competing representations, Melville constructs his own original fiction, which he asserts better captures what fascinates him about man's eternal struggle against the natural order.

Melville was one of us. Pretty cool, huh?

How We Make Media Theory at MIT...

In getting ready to teach our graduate prosem on Media Theory and Methods, I have been rereading some passages from Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. This term, I am trying something different with the class, beginning with an extended examination of the role of theory and media production in the history of MIT as a way of helping our entering CMS students think about the place of our program within this institutional history. Turner's book is an ideal introduction to this topic in part because he has so much to say specifically about MIT but also because he speaks to the roles of both formal institutions and informal networks in shaping the production and dispersion of media theory. Turner's book is a study of the ways what he calls "network forums" have shaped our current interpretation of digital technologies. In particular, he is interested in how Stewart Brand, his primary subject, "began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks." Turner continues, "

Drawing on the systems rhetoric of cybernetics and on models of entrepreneurship borrowed from both the research and the counter-cultural worlds, Brand established a series of meetings, publications, and digital networks within which members of multiple communities could meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community. These forums in turn generated new social networks, new cultural categories, and new turns of phrase."

Turner is interested in documenting the various "contact zones" where different subcultures of researchers were brought together and the kinds of "border languages" that were created to enable their ideas to flow from one discipline to another. Turner focuses less on Brand as a person than on the various social networks within which he participated -- The Whole Earth Catalog, the Well, and Wired, chief among them.

The book opens with some insightful analysis of what happened when MIT Professor and administrator Vannevar Bush convinced FDR to fund the National Defense Research Committee during World War II: this brought about a different set of relationships between corporate, government, and academic research. According to Turner, Bush, Norbert Wiener, and others of his generation created a context for multidisciplinary research at MIT. Writing about the "RadLab", Turner explains, "

It brought together scientists and mathematicians from MIT and elsewhere, engineers and designers from industry, and many different military and government planners. Among these various professionals, and particularly among the engineers and designers, entrepreneurship and collaboration were the norm, and independence of mind was strongly encouraged. Formerly specialized scientists were urged to become generalists in their research, able not only to theorize but also to design and build new technologies. At the same time, scientists and engineers had to become entrepreneurs, assembling networks of technologists, funders, and administrators to see their projects through. Neither scientists nor administrators could stay walled off from one another in their offices and laboratories; throughout the Rad Lab, and even after hours, in the restaurants and living rooms of Cambridge, the pressures to produce new technologies to fight the war drove formerly specialized scientists and engineers to cross professional boundaries, to routinely mix work with pleasure, and to form new, interdisciplinary networks within which to work and live."

Studying Turner's book has given me some core insights into the institution where I have worked and thrived for the past sixteen plus years. One of the first things I observed when I came here was the difference between the ways that MIT students engaged with theory from the ways it is often discussed in the Big Ten institutes where I did my graduate work. In a liberal arts classroom, students tend to circle a theory like a pack of raptors and rip it to shreds in the course of a discussion, leaving only the tattered bits on the table, or they choose sides, some embracing, others critiquing the theory, and butt heads together like charging rams, to see which one can withstand the pressure. At MIT, the tendency is to tinker, to take the theory apart, reduce it to component elements, and then reassemble it again in a better form. It is a brainstorming and problem solving culture: a theory is only valuable if it allows us to do something we want to do and the test of a theory is its applications in the real world.

The Comparative Media Studies program's emphasis on "applied humanities" reflects these habits of mind: we are interested in figuring out what the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences might have to contribute to helping our society adjust to a profound and prolonged period of media change and our goals are to embrace and promote the emergence of a more participatory culture. To achieve these goals, we have tried to create a "lab culture" for the humanities at MIT. In the MIT tradition, we have created centers and labs which emphasize experimentation and research, organized conferences which bring together researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds, and participate in larger national networks and projects which bridge between different spheres of activity. Perhaps most of all, we place an emphasis on the public communication of our ideas so that they can make a difference in the world and in the process, we try to strip our language of specialized terms or concepts that might impede its ability to circulate within these larger social networks. I have struggled a lot through the years with the question of what it means to be a humanist at MIT. Every so often, I get a glimpse of how well, in fact, our program fits within the MIT culture and how much I have absorbed of the institutional values and practices of this place.

Turner's book has also helped me to better understand MacArthur's current initiative on Youth and Digital Learning. The Foundation speaks openly about trying to construct a new field focused on understanding how young people incorporate new media technologies into their everyday lives, giving rise to new forms of civic engagement, cultural participation, and informal learning. Our Project nml is simply one node in this much larger network of researchers, drawn from universities and centers around the country, built up from people working in very different disciplines. Collectively, this network is doing field work and ethnography on young people's existing practices, developing curricular materials to support new media literacies, rethinking the place of the library within an information culture, forming after school programs and experimental schools, designing and distributing computer and video games designed to foster computational and design skills, editing and publishing books to guide parents and policy makers, creating and maintaining a blog to insure the circulation of these ideas to the larger public, and much more. The Foundation has done an extraordinary job in enabling intellectually meaningful connections between these various projects, bringing various mixes of researchers together for in person meetings and telephone conferences, creating shared projects that build upon our individual endeavors, insuring that we each have stakes in the success of the initiative as a whole. And they have done a good job of publicizing their efforts so that they have started to capture the public imagination. Increasingly, as I travel around the country, I am asked about what MacArthur is trying to do and my role in the larger process. Above all, MacArthur has instilled in us a sense that what we are doing can make a difference in the world.

Over the next few weeks, my students and I will be taking a look at: the development of cybernetic theory, the experimentation with strobe photography and its impact on our understanding of photography as a medium, the role of MIT as a center for video art and cinema verite documentary, several generations of thinking about the political impact of news and information, and several major traditions for thinking about the value of new media for education and self discovery. My hope is that these case studies will not only introduce our students to some core debates in media theory but also give them insights into how these theories originated, the institutional contexts within which they circulated, the discursive practices that shaped how they got picked up by the outside world, and the particular relationship which MIT has developed between theory and practice.

Part of the process of putting this class together has been to reconnect with researchers from these various traditions who are still actively part of the MIT community. For the most part, my students will be getting first hand reports on how these theories emerged at MIT and the contexts which shaped them. I hope to share some of what we learn through the blog in the weeks to come.

MIT is a particularly rich site for exploring the evolution of media theory because of the ways that social and cultural theories take shape here through interplay with technologists and designers, scientists and engineers, industry leaders and public policy makers, rather than in a self-contained academic discipline. I am going to be interested in exploring the kinds of "network forums," "contact zones," and "border languages" which support and sustain the production of theory here at MIT. From there, I hope to maintain at least some focus on the institutional contexts within which theory originated -- from Eisenstein's blurring of film theory and practice through to the Frankfort and Birmingham Schools and to contemporary digital theory (including the work of modern media makers/theorists, such as Scott McCloud or a growing number of folks in games studies.) I'd be curious to hear how other academics are getting students to focus on their own institutions and their historical evolution.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation...

Several weeks ago, I played hooky from writing this blog to attend an Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society. At the time, I promised to share some of my experiences with you but have been so focused on starting the term that I am just now getting back to you. Here's how the Aspen Institute described their goals for the event:

The purpose of the Forum is to develop recommendations for leaders in media, government, and other societal institutions to promote positive social and democratic values through the various communications media without undue governmental regulation. The Forum will explore how the new technological and behavioral environments are changing the way that media -- old and new -- will serve customers (advertisers/subscribers), users (readers/listeners/viewers/contributors), communities, and the broader social good. After an introductory plenary session describing the drivers and impact of the new media, the Forum will consist of three distinct roundtable tracks, exploring the ways that media may be used to promote an informed citizenry, civic participation, enhancement of community life, and consideration of intellectual property rights and interests.

The Forum brought together government leaders (including U.S. Representatives, current and former members of the Federal Communications Commission), the chief executives of major media companies (old and new), leading academics from a number of different disciplines, lawyers and policy makers, and heads of foundations and non-profit organizations with strong stakes in shaping the future of our media environment. The Aspen Institute events are legendary for creating a social and intellectual climate where people from very different perspectives can exchange views and arrive at meaningful compromises that move forward public policy on a wide array of topics. It was fascinating to watch this process work -- not only through formal events (including plenary conversations with heavy hitters like Michael Eisner, Arriane Huffington, Madeleine Albright, and Arthur Sulzberger, round table exchanges among clusters of participants, and more focused working groups designed to brainstorm and make policy recommendations) and informal exchanges (over breakfast, in the line for lunch, or at the cocktail parties and receptions in the evening.) Charles M. Firestone, the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society programs, was an adept moderator, making sure that every position got aired, cutting off conflict, and pushing us towards practical and pragmatic solutions.

One can get a sense of the caliber of the conversations by checking out the streaming webcast versions of some of the key events. While the videos don't preserve the work process, they do include some of the plenary exchanges which were a highlight of the event. (I am told that videos of the roundtables are forthcoming.)

Sparks flew during the opening session which featured Eisner, Huffington, music industry defender Jon Diamond, and advertising industry leader Lynda Resnick, for a passionate exchange about the current state of the media landscape. Taken as a whole, the group offered us some glimpses into the conflicted and sometimes self-contradictory thinking which is shaping old media's response to the emergence of a more participatory culture. Here, as throughout the sessions, disagreements about how to handle intellectual property in the digital age shaped more or less every other potential point of contact between old and new media companies.

Another memorable exchange, also available via webcast, paired current FCC chairman Kevin Martin with Vivianne Reding, his counterpart on the European Union's Commission on the Information Society and Media. Here, we were given textbook illustrations of the difference between how media policy operates under commercial and public service broadcasting models, as well as hints at the very different cultural and political traditions shaping media policy in Europe and the United States.

A third session on the Future of the Newspaper featured Sulzberger (New York Times), Caroline Litttle (Washington Post), Jake Oliver (Afro), Dean Singleton (MediaNews Group), Craig Newmark (craigslist), and Scott Moore (Yahoo!).

I was delighted to see new media literacies emerge as a central theme at the conference from the very opening session. An excerpt from our white paper was circulated to attendees as part of the packet they received in advance of the meeting and seemed to have heightened participant's awareness of the topic. The idea of young people's relationship to emerging media was posed by opening remarks from Jeff Cole (USC Annenberg School for Communication), who outlined a series of shifts in the ways younger Americans got their entertainment and information. By the end of the first roundtable, the need for robust and widespread media literacy education (for adults as well as for youth) had become part of the group's consensus.

This shared investment in media literacy provided me a context for raising what I saw as important issues about the ways that current ambiguities in copyright law are having a chilling effect upon our efforts to develop and circulate materials for media literacy education. It was clear that almost no one at the event had considered the connection between these two issues before.

Here's how I explained it: I am both a Professor of Literature and a Professor of Media Studies. As a Professor of Literature, I have a pretty good sense of what claims I can make on Fair Use in my work. In writing a printed work about a literary text, I understand roughly how much of a given work I can quote for the purposes of critical commentary and in what contexts; I also know when I need to seek additional permissions and where I can go to get those permissions; for the most part, a system is in place that allows me to pay an appropriate and reasonable rate for my use of those materials.

None of this applies to my work as a media scholar if what I want to do is directly quote from a media text in my own media work for the purposes of critical commentary. There is a pretty well established set of principles and agreements which allow me to show clips in class to my own students and even to break encryption if necessary in order to duplicate and archive those clips. But there is no such protection in place if I wish to circulate materials I have produced amongst other media educators.

Renee Hobbes, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are doing research for the MacArthur Foundation, trying to understand teacher's attitudes towards copyright and how this impacts media literacy education. So far, they are finding enormous fear and much uncertainty regarding many standard pedagogical practices which involve reproducing and sharing media content. Their long term goal is to develop principles of fair use which would provide greater protection to educators, but the effectiveness of these principles rests in part on getting them accepted within the media industry itself. If you want to learn more about this work, you can listen to a podcast of a plenary session we hosted at last spring's Media in Transition conference.

For the most part, Hollywood has been so aggressive at defending its trademark and copyright control over their content (especially in the context of current battles over Napster and YouTube) that university attorneys typically tell us that we run a risk of legal action if we directly excerpt any segments of commercial media content for distribution in any form or in any context. Surely, these attorneys are being conservative and the courts would no doubt recognize at least some limited notion of fair use defending our use of these materials. But this fear of legal action is creating a chilling effect on the development of instructional resources for media literacy.

If educators wanted, however, to get studio permission for our use of these materials, the history has been equally problematic. There is no established clearing house for identifying and contacting rights holders. The studios often do not respond to our queries and when they do, they set arbitrarily high prices. In one recent case, a faculty member was quoted a price of a thousand dollars a minute for the use of Hollywood content for an educational project -- a price which would have quickly bankrupted the initiative. Some organizations are producing media literacy documentaries which include clips from mainstream media, but they have historically felt they were taking major risks in doing so and this has in turn impacted how widely they publicize their efforts.

Thanks to the Aspen Institute, my story was heard by some of the key policy makers and leaders of the entertainment industry. My hope is that this issue will be part of the policy recommendations released by the Institute in the aftermath of our session and that we can use this as a rallying point in brokering a meeting between the Hollywood establishment and key media literacy educators (a possibility raised by several of the industry participants at the event). None of us are ready to declare victory yet but the particular climate of Aspen, which brings key decision makers together in the same space to talk about vexing issues of cultural policy, has made it possible for us to make some real progress on this issue.

One final aside about Aspen: As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.

Digital Media and Learning Competition Announced

I've written here often about the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative, which has funded our Project nml. The Foundation has made a 50 million dollar commitment over the next five years to help foster a field devoted to understanding "the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life" through their use of new and emerging media technologies. So far, the Foundation has tended to hand select researchers and community leaders to participate in the initiative, but earlier this month, they announced an open competition designed to identify innovative projects which might make a difference in this space. What follows are some excerpts from the press release announcing this competition:

"An open competition is an excellent way to identify and hopefully inspire new ideas about learning in an increasingly digital world," MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton said. "We do not yet know how much people are changing because of digital media, but we hope that this competition will help support the most innovative thinking about learning, the formation of ethical judgments, peer mentoring, creativity, and civic participation, all of which are increasingly conducted online."

Awards will be given in two categories:

* Innovation Awards will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. These innovations might range from a teacher add-on for MySpace that allows for safe assigning of a class group discussion, to a platform co-developed by teachers and students to facilitate digital literacy and peer-mentoring between college students and high-school drop-outs earning their GED degrees, to a digital learning festival for the leaders of a worldwide youth environmental campaign.

* Knowledge Networking Awards will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. For example, a team of teacher bloggers who already reach hundreds of thousands of readers may now seek to provide multimedia coverage and translation of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins' recent white paper on media literacy.

The open competition will be administered by a network of educators and digital innovators called "HASTAC" (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). HASTAC was founded and is primarily operated at two university centers, the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. HASTAC has a network reaching more than 80 institutions globally. The choice of HASTAC, one of a new breed of "virtual institutions," reflects MacArthur's goals in promoting next-generation learning.

"We are already teaching a generation of students who do not remember a time before they were online," said Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC. "Their social life and informal learning are interconnected. They don't just consume media, they customize it. These students bring fascinating new skills to our classrooms, but they also bring an urgent need for critical thinking about the digital world they have inherited and are shaping."

As part of their prize, awardees will receive special consultation support on everything from technology development to management training. Winners will be invited to showcase their work at a conference that will include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, educators and policy makers seeking the best ideas about digital learning. Applications are due Oct. 15, 2007, and prizewinners will be announced in January. Detailed information on the competition is available online at www.dmlcompetition.net.

"With the digital media and learning initiative, the MacArthur Foundation is playing a leading role in reshaping both institutional and informal learning practices," said David Theo Goldberg, HASTAC co-founder and director of the University of California's Humanities Research Institute. "Traditional learning practices are being supplemented and supplanted by new digital media, which both enable and extend their reach through virtual institutions like HASTAC. This is a natural partnership."

I know many of my readers are doing interested work in this space. I'd like to personally encourage you to pull together a proposal for this competition. Many of us have been frustrated by the climate of fear which so often clouds public policy as it relates to young people and new technologies. MacArthur is offering us another model -- one which is governed by reason and research rather than sparked by fear and ignorance, one which puts theory into practice to redesign public institutions and practices which touch the lives of children and youth.

The New Mr. Spock?

I am being forced to relive the 1960s as journalists seek ways to describe my work. Last year, Howard Rhinegold dubbed me "the 21st century McLuhan," a comment my publishers felt compelled to put on the front cover of Convergence Culture. And I've been hit again and again ever since with questions about my relationship to McLuhan. Short answer: McLuhan and I differ in our conceptual starting points. McLuhan starts from the communications technology to explain its potential impact on society (his famous "the medium is the message") where-as I tend to start from the culture and focus on how social agents redefine technologies through their uses. McLuhan was important to me, however, in so far as he paved the way for comparative perspectives on media (moving us beyond medium specific debates which had limited the discussion in my opinion) and in that regard, he ranks alongside Harold Innis and Ithiel DeSola Pool in terms of being a founding figure in Comparative Media Studies.

McLuhan also provides me with a role model: he was someone who was willing to talk with media corporations and policy makers alike in his efforts to shape his culture; he was deeply invested in the concept of media literacy; he was a public intellectual who saw the value of engaging with the news media and with the public in an attempt to make his ideas more widely accessible; he was the head of a center which brought together intellectuals across many different disciplines; and he was someone who constantly experimented with new media platforms, including newsletters, records, video, and photographi collages, in his effort to spread his ideas more widely. These are all goals I try to embrace in my own work, though so far, I haven't been interviewed in Playboy, been the subject of jokes of Laugh-In, or made a cameo appearance in a Woody Allen movie. :-)

This past week, the analogy shifted with Stephanie Olsen from ZDNet News calling me "The Internet's New Dr. Spock." I was initially bemused by the comparison, especially since most of what I had said during the interview about Spock had ended up on the cutting room floor. But I was even more amused by the fact that several people out there responding to the interview have confused Dr. Benjamin Spock, the leading child advice writer of the 20th century, with Mr. Spock, the Vulcan first officer on board the Enterprise on the classic Star Trek series. Talk about generational differences in perspective!

Here are some comments from the Talk Back section following the article:

....Doctor Spock?

I thought it was Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy??

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

Aye, Aye Scotty!

Reader post by: Commander_Spock

Story: The Internet's new Dr. Spock?

Prepare To Beam Us Up For This Debate!

On Board Enterprise Warp.

Commander_Spock

Of course humans are not the only ones to make such confusions. The ad words that cropped up spontaneously on one site which mirrored the article pointed consumers towards a range of Star Trek related products, including, no joke, rubber Spock ears.

Leonard Nemoy struggled his whole career with people who confused Dr. and Mr. Spock, a confusion which normally resulted in an arch of his eyebrow. As it happens, I have written extensively both about Mr. Spock, through my work on Star Trek fans, and about Dr. Spock, through an essay I published in the Children's Culture Reader.

For the purposes of identification as this discussion continues, this is a photograph of Mr. Spock from Star Trek:

And this is a photograph of Dr. Spock, the child rearing expert and anti-war protester:

As it happens, there is a NEW Mr. Spock, as Entertainment Weekly reported a few weeks ago: Zachary Quinto, the actor who plays Sylar on Heroes, was recently cast to play the young Mr. Spock in the next Star Trek film which is being produced by J. J. Abrams.

I have been having fun imagining what readers thought Stephanie Olsen meant when she compared me to Mr. Spock: Is it some kind of comment about my logical mind, my (hardly) stoic attitudes, my commitment to "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," the fact that every seven years I go into Pon Farr, my lust for Jim Kirk, or some other aspect of the television character's personality which escapes me. Of course, I always fancy my job as going where no humanist has gone before, so there may be some resemblence to THAT Spock after all! :-)

It occurs to me reading such comments that it would be useful to spend a moment explaining who Dr. Spock was for a generation which may have grown up without his sage guidance or seems to have no clue who he was.

Wikipedia provides a pretty good summary of Benjamin Spock's life and work:

Benjamin McLane Spock (May 2, 1903 - March 15, 1998) was an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its revolutionary message to mothers was that "you know more than you think you do." Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals, whereas the previous conventional wisdom had been that child rearing should focus on building discipline, and that, e.g., babies should not be "spoiled" by picking them up when they cried.

I wrote an extensive discussion of Spock's work for my book, The Children's Culture Reader, and that essay is reproduced on line for anyone who'd like to read it. Essentially, this article argues that Spock was one of a generation of post-war children's advocates who began to reassess the power relations between adults and children and who also helped the society come to grips with Freud's discoveries about infantile sexuality. I argue in the essay that this post-war parenting advice prefigures and predates later discussions of adult sexuality in important ways:

The recognition of children's sexuality as a positive, rather than as a negative, force led to a close examination of how parents should respond to and facilitate children's erotic awakenings. Children, so often, in our culture become the bearers of our own utopian fantasies for a better world. In this case, the world which was being envisioned was a world without erotic inhibitions, a world which was open to sexual pleasure and free from guilt and negative self-images.

By looking closely at children, their bodies and their desires, permissiveness developed an ideology about sexuality which helped to prepare the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. First, sex was rendered "wholesome," natural, biologically necessary, and in the process, old superstitions and moral prohibitions were pushed aside. Second, sex was stripped of its ties to procreation, with the child's masturbatory exploration of its own body and its pursuit of pleasure assuming positive values in and of themselves. Third, healthy sensuality extended to the entire body and not simply the genitals. The child's polymorphous eroticism was to be retained in adult life as a new and more vivid form of sexual experience. Fourth, pleasure was seen as beneficial, necessary, and the body was depicted as knowing its own needs. The body doesn't lie; if it feels good, it can't be bad. Fifth, all aspects of life, especially learning and creativity, assumed an erotic dimension, as practices of re-direction and sublimation transformed sexual energies into other kinds of activities, and the desire to explore the world was understood as primarily sensual in origins. We know through our senses, and as a result, we should awaken our senses to the broadest possible range of experiences. Sexual frustration and perversion were seen as resulting from boredom and understimulation. Sixth, sexual openness within the domestic sphere was viewed as positive, including some "healthy" interplay between parents and children, yet sex was, by its design, a private act, which should be performed behind closed doors and held in check by public expectations. Morally charged concepts, such as "sin" or "guilt," were gradually displaced by socially-directed concepts, such as "privacy" and "propriety." Most of these conceptions of eroticism would become core tenants of the self-help books or liberation literature of the sexual revolution; they would become the common wisdom of a generation which sought to expand the place of recreational sex within American life and to prolong the period of childhood sexual experimentation into a richer, fuller erotic life as adults.

So, what does this have to do with my work on youth and digital media? Not a lot. I am a media scholar, not a pediatrician or child pyschologist. But for the baby boom generation, Spock functions as short hand for all advice literature for parents. In practice, Spock himself was deeply distrustful of mass media even though he himself used the media very effectively to get his advice out to parents. Subsequent children's advice writers have tended to say very little about media or reduce their advice to parents to what I call the "just say no to Nintendo" position. That is, good parenting comes through restricting access to media: keep it out of the children's bedrooms; limit the number of hours.

I would argue, however, that parents have a constructive role to play in actively shaping young people's relations to media, helping them learn skills which will allow them to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape and develop a healthy, ethical, creative, and intellectually engaged pattern of media use. As I wrote in Technology Review several years ago, media literacy begins at home and parents have an active role to play in insuring that children acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed to become full participants in the emerging media culture.

It is not even clear that there could be a Spock of the Internet Age. Spock's books emerged within the context of a consensus culture; they were being read at a period of mass migration in which the dominance of the extended family was breaking down as children moved away from their hometowns as they started their own families and thus needed a different form of advice than their parents had required. Spock's books were read by almost everyone in the society where-as today's market for advice literature is increasingly fragmented, responding to a multicultural society with many different definitions of what a family is and what values should shape the interactions between parents and children.

But if we look at what Spock said in his books, we might construct some core principles of what advice to parents would look like:

1. Spock felt that parents should remain calm and trust common sense to get them through most problems. In the case of the Internet, parents would do better to try to find analogies between what occurs online and other more traditional forms of activities. So, in what ways is hanging out in MySpace like the teen haunts of previous generations? In what ways is joining a guild in a multiplayer game like signing up for sports? In what ways is Live Journal like writing for the school newspaper? And so forth. These analogies would only get us so far but starting from an idea of radical difference may cause parents to freak out about every aspect of their teen's online lives rather than focusing on real points of conflict or weighing risks and benefits of certain activities.

2. Spock worked hard to insure popular access to the latest thinking of academic experts. We've already argued that he was a popularizer of Freud and psychoanalysis; he also helped to bridge between cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead and the American public. He wanted to insure that parenting was governed by reason and reliable information rather than having parents strike out blindly. He wanted parents to see their jobs in a larger social and cultural context and that's something which could help contemporary parents find the right solutions for their own families.

3. Spock taught parents to respect their children and see them as citizens within a democratic society rather than subjects of a totalitarian regime. Permissive child rearing doctrines then and now got a bad reputation because people imagined children as becoming tyrants and parents as reluctant to set limits. But Spock, in fact, shifted back and forth over time in his advice trying to counter both the authoritarian impulses of parenting in the immediate post-war period and the excesses of totally permissive parenting which came in its wake. Respecting children, listening to their point of view, but also providing leadership and governance within the family was at the heart of the social ballance he advocated. And that ballance is totally off at the moment where the internet is concerned. Some parents remain ignorant and indifferent of what their children are doing online, while others employ all kinds of surveillance tools to snoop on their kids. The key is, as I said in the interview, to watch their backs and not snoop over their shoulders. Parents need to engage children and youth in a process of reflecting on their own ethical choices and educating them about the risks they face as they move into this unfamiliar space. And that means adopting an informed perspective on the online world rather than acting in ignorance or fear. Spock's advice literature helped another generation learn what it needed to know in order to confront the social transitions of the post-war society. A new Spock would need to give them the information they require to manage the cultural, economic, and technological transitions of our own era.

To borrow a line from Leonard Nimoy, I am not Spock. I suspect there never will be another Dr. Spock given the fragmentation of our culture. But we can all learn things from Spock's legacy which would help parents deal with some of the challenges they face right now.

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

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

and "From Blacksburg to Bay Area."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

belong to us.

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

work through the components that YR offers:

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

iTunes, and our own website

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

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

for terrestrial and web radio

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

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

Current TV to YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to decide what would bring me the most fulfillment.

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

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

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

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

high school.

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

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

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

different points of view.

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

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

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

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

adult media professional counterparts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

national and international audiences on a regular basis.

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

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

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

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

Our extensive youth correspondent network links individual young people across the

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

share your perspective on this topic here.

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

convert their media productions into concrete new opportunities in higher education

and/or living wage work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

intelligence once the group disbands or the project ends?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

story's wake.

For further information, contact elisabeth soep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

outlet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oversee or facilitate the learning experience surrounding a given media production

experiment; they actually join in the production process itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

students following in their footsteps.

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

and podcasts?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

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

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

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

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

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

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

listens to youth radio?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News is everywhere. So how credible is every source?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics (Part One)

Earlier this summer, I shared with my regular readers some selected passages from this year's Comparative Media Studies thesis. Today and tomorrow, I wanted to share another sample of the kind of work being produced by our students. Peter Rauch came to CMS with a strong background in Philosophy; what he wanted from our program was the chance to employ those tools to think deeply about games, trying to explore in what sense it was appropriate to think of games as ethical and moral practices. In this section from his thesis, he walks us through his core framework for thinking about the ethical and moral dimensions of games. Next time, I will share a passage where he deploys this conceptual model to think about the game, Fable. Enjoy! Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics

by Peter Rauch

Many dictionaries consider morals and ethics to be synonymous, but in common usage, at least in American English, the two words can have a variety of subtly different meanings. My definitions are provisional, and while they can be used in general discussion, they are specifically tailored to be applied to the interpretation of videogames.

I define ethics as a discourse concerning what is correct and what is incorrect. What is ethical is dependent on a specific activity, determined entirely by an explicit, constructed system of rules, and cannot be questioned by the participants. I define morals as a discourse concerning what is right and what is wrong. Morality, unlike ethics, is not tied to a specific activity, but can be applied over multiple activities, and possibly all experience. Moral rules enjoy considerably more variance than ethical rules: because they are wider in scope, they are more nuanced, and subject to interpretation.

Ethical frameworks, while they might attempt to model moral behavior--as in the examples of ethical codes for doctors or lawyers--need not have any connection to morality at all. In chess, that players should try to capture their opponents' pieces is an ethical rule, not a moral one. It has no relevance to the world outside chess. This rule is also not subject to interpretation or argument. It is simply, factually, true. A player that makes no effort to capture the opponent's pieces is not playing chess. The same cannot be said of moral rules like "love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus' formulation of the "golden rule," nor can it be said of "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law," Kant's categorical imperative. These rules concern the very act of being human, but one does not cease to be human if he or she rejects or violates them. They are much less specific than the rule concerning the capturing of pieces in chess, and open to many more interpretations.

Morals and ethics exist independently of each other, and while they must each be internally consistent, it is possible for the two to explicitly contradict one another. Law is an ethical system that is constantly revised to prevent such conflicts. Torture, for example, is illegal under international law. Assuming one accepts the existence of international law, the legality of torture is not open to debate. The morality of torture, however, is fundamentally unconnected to its legality. Torture is not less moral now than it was before the Geneva Convention. Conversely, it would not become more moral if the U.N. were to repudiate the Geneva Convention tomorrow.

Any game that has a "win condition" has an ethical framework. This applies to all games, not just videogames. First and foremost, these games are possessed of an overriding ethical imperative: win. If the game has a win condition, a player who does not try to win is not playing the game. As Johann Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, a player who does not try to win faces greater censure from society than a player who cheats in order to win (11). One interpretation of Huizinga's claim is that a player who cheats breaks only those rules concerning the means of play, whereas the player who throws the game violates the goals of play. The goal constitutes what players must do, while the rules offer only clarification on how the goal is to be accomplished--what actions are correct, and what actions are incorrect. A strategy or technique that helps a player win, while not explicitly violating any of the rules, is always ethical, in terms of the game in question. The ethical framework comprises both goal and means, and although the former is more fundamental to the game than the latter, they are both necessary for a game to function. The game's ethics, which determine how it should be played, are inextricably bound in the game's rules, which determine how it can be played.

I use the term "ethical" to denote imperatives that are dependent on the accepting of a role, as in the specific ethics of a given profession, and also in terms of play in general--playing a videogame ethically could be seen as the player's agreement to play the role allotted to her by the designers. Some degree of freedom is present, of course; were such freedom absent, it would not be play. However, just as an actor may be allowed to improvise, but must ultimately play his role to the author's conclusion, the player must play "in character" to play the game. If the player does not accept this role, she is not playing the game, but rather playing a game with a game.

This activity of "metaplay," in which the player designates goals unrelated or contrary to the game's internal ethics, has a wide variety of forms, some showing clear principles of ludus (adding or removing barriers to make the game easier or more difficult), others showing behaviors associated with paidia (exploration for its own sake), and still others being more difficult to determine (making machinima). Metaplay, at least in single-player games (where there are no social expectations of ethical play), is not "cheating" in the sense that the word is used in everyday speech. It simply means that the player in question is not, strictly speaking, playing the game.

In addition to the ethical frameworks inherent in any games, videogames can potentially add an unprecedented level of narrativity. This narrativity is achieved by mapping recognizable symbols onto the rule system. This mapping process allows for the suspension of disbelief necessary to involve the player emotionally in the gameworld.

The interaction of these symbols gives videogames the potential for rich narratives. However, if the narrative is not sufficiently integrated with the rule system, it will appear arbitrary, and fundamentally disconnected from the experience of play. This disconnect between narrative and rule systems is one of the central problems for the potential of videogames as a communicative medium, forcing a distinction between authorial narrative (the story written by the designers) and emergent narrative (the story enacted by the players). Even in the most non-linear games with the greatest potential for emergent narrative, the rule system and choice of symbols are selected by the designers, and as such the players' freedom of interpretation is inherently limited. In videogames, the author might be dead, as was famously suggested by Roland Barthes, but she is still the author, and she must not be confused with the reader. To make the transition from ethical imperatives to moral argument, the designers must fully embrace authorial status.

Narrative alone is not sufficient for morality, of course, since without a connection to the ethics, the gameplay and the narrative will operate independently of one another, as is often the case in games that rely extensively on cut-scenes. Moral imperatives can exist in a game only when the ethics can be interpreted and applied to the world in which the game is played, and this can only be achieved by connecting internal ethics to the external world through narrative. Most, if not all, of the game rules must be connected to recognizable symbols, and those symbols must have referents in reality.

Rules and a win condition are all that is necessary for an ethical framework, because ethics point inward to a specific activity. Conversely, because morality must gesture outward to the world at large, it cannot consist only of abstract symbols. For a game to have a moral framework, it must have an ethical framework, a narrative that can be connected in some way to what we speciously refer to as "real life," and a careful integration of the two. Specifically, the moral argument of the narrative must be connected to the win condition. It might be necessary, in making distinctions between what is right and what is expedient, to develop some new ideas as to what constitutes "winning." This will require a somewhat nuanced perspective on the avatar.

The avatar, in most games, is more than an extension of the player into the gameworld. Rather, the avatar is simultaneously an extension of the player and a different character that is not the player. I refer to this different character as the protagonist. Since the protagonist has only diegetic information, his motivation for interaction in the world must be entirely diegetic. The player, who has access to the game's non-diegetic information, will have additional goals, often involving tasks with no narrative meaning such as scoring points or unlocking content. Narratives, even videogame narratives, have a logic of their own, and even when the narrative fails to emotionally invest the player in the story, it can usually be assumed that the protagonist is quite involved. The narrative, even when viewed by players as epiphenomenal, is the entirety of the protagonist's reality.

[...]

1This term is not synonymous with "metagame," the term Henry Jenkins uses to describe the social context in which games are played ("Effects and Meanings" 214 )

Peter Rauch is a graduate of the Florida Atlantic University Honors College,

holding a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a concentration in American

Studies. He has no major experiences, accomplishments or credentials, but is

nonetheless interested in politics, theology, and all manner of media texts,

from literature to videogames.

Rauch recently completed a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He is currently at work on a number of articles concerning the interplay of videogame texts and culture with philosophy, religion and politics. He lives in Cambridge with his partner Alana and cat Shazzer.

If you enjoyed this excerpt and would like to read more of Rauch's thesis, you can find it at the Comparative Media Studies website. We are in the process of making more of our thesis available online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part Two)

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

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

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

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

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

Social Networks as Political Interfaces

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

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

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

Credability, Partisanship, and Wiki-Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Valuable Resource

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

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part One)

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

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

Politics YouTube Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigating a "Remarkable Wilderness": In Tribute to Peter Lyman

When Peter Lyman passed away several weeks ago, after a long struggle with cancer, his students and colleagues paid tribute by revising his Wikipedia page. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had spent his lifetime helping us to better understand how we live with information and information technologies. Peter was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information and a former university librarian. I didn't know Lyman well, we met only a few times, but I have come to know and admire many of his students and through them, I have been touched by his passing. Today, I want to pay tribute to Peter and all those who have worked through him. The world is a better place because he spent time with us. The man I remember was soft-spoken, gentle, and nurturing, but also someone who was full of intellectual curiosity and a passion for learning. I did not meet him in good times -- he was already struggling to maintain his professional life in the face of the treatments he was undergoing for his illness -- and yet I remember him as a man who was full of joy and courage and who was still at the very center of the community of scholars he had helped to create.

The first time I saw Peter Lyman, he was speaking before the governing board of the MacArthur Foundation at a meeting held inside the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and describing the work that his team had done through the How Much Information Project, a multi-year initiative which he ran with Hal Varian. The How Much Information Project sought to identify how much new information emerged per year and which spoke to the challenges we face in being able to process all of that new data. Looking to confirm my memories of this research, I found the Executive Summary on the project's home page. Here's some of what Peter and his team found:

Print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections....

The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.

How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper....

Information explosion? We estimate that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002....

Information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

These statistics were staggering when I first heard them, giving a count (although one so vast that it is beyond my comprehension) of the amount of data -- good, bad, and indifferent -- we pour into the media-stream on a regular basis. This research helps us to understand the overwhelming challenges we face as a society in weighing the information that passes between us and placing even a small portion of it in a meaningful context.

Yet, as someone who cared deeply about libraries and the kinds of learning cultures they fostered, Peter was concerned about this information overload but also in his own quiet way set to work to shore up the structures we as human beings create to help us confront these insurmountable challenges.

Looking to get closer to Peter, I stumbled upon a 1998 talk he presented on "Designing Libraries to Be Learning Communities: Toward an Ecology of Places for Learning." Here are a few excerpts which give a taste of his perspective on the human dimensions of information:

Today we speak of people in the library as "users." The term, "user" suggests that it is the relationship to the information technology that is central, just as the term "reader" used to refer to a relationship to printed collections. While this is certainly a valid perspective, there is a certain social isolation implicit in each of these terms, suggesting that the library is a public place where strangers might gather to work side by side in peace, but remain strangers. And clearly, the creation of a public place within which such peaceful strangers might dwell is a substantial achievement in an urban civilization. But while some people can learn some things alone by reading books or computers, much learning is collaborative and tacit, and requires a social dimension as much as it requires access to information. While individual people do come to libraries in order to find answers to informational questions (or perhaps to be entertained, overcome loneliness, or get out of the rain), information is often only a necessary but insufficient condition for learning. Beyond information alone, learning may require the exchange of information between individuals, and ultimately a sense of membership in a community of learners....Digital libraries are often described as 'information resources' yet it is difficult to use digital information, for it provides no sense of place. It has no boundaries, for in principal every networked information resource may be linked to every other, and indeed many encompass the globe. The structure of digital information is defined by technical standards, but unlike print or other media, there is no authority in cyberspace that might determine the quality of information....Information is not a landscape; it is a remarkable wilderness, needing the vision of a technological Capacity Brown.

These two passages are taken from a document which seeks to explain to librarians in technically precise and yet accessible terms the nature of the new digital landscape. Yet, the tone of this passage suggests the human touch which Peter Lyman brought to his work -- the wry acknowledgement that people go to libraries for reasons beyond reading the Great Works of Western Civilization, the focus on the social life of information and the fascination with the very human structures we create for processing and engaging with the very inhuman amount of information that passes between us. For him, libraries were not simply data bases but were fundamentally cultural institutions and learning wasn't simply what occurred within the single, isolated mind but what passed between minds and formed the basis of our social contact with each other. These are powerful ideas that we lose track of at our own peril and they were at the heart of what Peter Lyman contributed to the world -- someone who understand the nature of our changing mediascape and yet also held onto the traditional values which have long shaped human societies.

Another of Peter's essays spoke about "the poetics of the future," analyzing the various metaphors -- Information Highways, Digital Libraries, and Virtual Communities -- which we deployed to make sense of our new and evolving relationship to information technologies. Throughout this powerful essay, he insists that we should discuss our relationship with information as "citizens" and not simply "consumers" and demanding that we address such matters out of a concern for social justice and out of our highest hopes for the kind of world we want to inhabit in the future. Peter wrote:

Highways and libraries are useful metaphors, but are taken from an industrial society, and related to networked information only in their functions of transportation and information management. The term, community, originally referred to social relationships in feudal villages and if anything, modern life in an urban industrial society is marked by a lack of community. I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with the use of metaphor in general -- indeed, poetic thinking is among our most important resources -- but the subject may deserve better poets and poetry. Thus my project today is to test these three metaphors, to see how well they function as heuristics for thinking about economic and social justice in the information age.

After a precise and thoughtful analysis of these three well worn metaphors, he concludes with a call for new imagery: "Poetry comes from the street, and the second research task I propose that we jointly undertake is to listen to the language of cyberspace for new poetry, new images that will take us farther than the noble but tired language of industrial society we now use."

I am not sure whether the search for social justice or for "new poetry" led him to focus on youth and their relationship to digital learning in the final years of his life: I suspect a combination of the two. But it was in that context that I met Peter. Along with Mimi Ito, Peter was the director of the Digital Youth Project, a three year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which explores how kids use media in their everyday lives. I had a chance to watch Mimi, Peter, and the researchers on their team present the first year's findings from this research and have followed it closely ever since. I know I will be reporting on their findings in the future here in the blog. As a group, the team is exploring young people's use of Wikipedia and Live Journal, their engagement with anime, fan video, music mashups, multiplayer games, and fan fiction, all topics of interest to regular readers of this blog. I have come to consider them to be the sister project of our own Project nml, part of the powerful social network of researchers from around the country and across a range of disciplines that the MacArthur Foundation has brought together through their concerted effort to understand and help to shape the kinds of informal learning that kids engage with as they travel across the new media landscape.

Peter's presence will be missed as his team, and the MacArthur network more generally, takes the next steps towards redefining how we think about youth, informal learning, and participatory culture. Yet, there's no question that his early interventions will have pushed all of us towards a greater understanding of the human dimensions of information technologies and perhaps nudged us to keep an eye open for the "new poetry" that is emerging as kids take these media in their own hands.

How Class Shapes Social Networking Sites...

danah boyd knows more about social network technology than anyone I know. I was lucky enough to have her as a student in my Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture class some years ago and she's been teaching me things ever since. She and I conducted a public conversation at South By Southwest this past year which was well received, and we are going to be running a similar session at the YPulse's Mashup 2007 conference in San Francisco later this month. danah's bright, articulate, playful, and extremely well informed about how young people are constructing their own cultural identities through their use of new media technologies. Last week, she published an important statement through her blog about the role which social class plays in defining which social networking site young people use, which I wanted to call to my reader's attention.

boyd struggles with the concept of class here. As Americans, we don't tend to want to talk about class very well and our class structure is squishier, less clearly defined, than the way class works in the various caste systems of Asia or Europe. Drawing on sociologist Nalini Kotamraju, boyd argues, though, that class works through lifestyle choices and social networks rather than purely economic stratifications:

In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income....Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus "class."

Trying to avoid loaded terms, boyd distinguishes between "hegemonic" youth (upwardly mobile, college bound) and "subaltern" youth (operating outside those norms defined for them by their parent's generation), identities which she suggests have implications in terms of where these young people congregate on line:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

These divisions reflect where these social networks started (MySpace's early users including rock bands and their fans; FaceBook starting at Harvard and radiating outward through other colleges) and what they have become. With social network sites, young people tend to go where their friends already are, using their face-to-face community as a starting point for connecting with like-minded others. And as a result, the membership of these sites reflect social divisions within youth culture -- who knows who and who knows what:

While teens on Facebook all know about MySpace, not all MySpace users have heard of Facebook. In particular, subaltern teens who go to school exclusively with other subaltern teens are not likely to have heard of it. Subaltern teens who go to more mixed-class schools see Facebook as "what the good kids do" or "what the preps do."... Likewise, in these types of schools, the hegemonic teens see MySpace as "where the bad kids go." "Good" and "bad" seem to be the dominant language used to divide hegemonic and subaltern teens in mixed-class environments....

To a certain degree, the lack of familiarity amongst certain subaltern kids is not surprising. Teens from poorer backgrounds who are on MySpace are less likely to know people who go to universities. They are more likely to know people who are older than them, but most of their older friends, cousins, and co-workers are on MySpace. It's the cool working class thing and it's the dominant SNS at community colleges....

In so far as social class gets defined through lifestyle, it is reflected through aesthetic choices, including those surrounding the design of personal profile pages. The patterns she identify here are familiar to anyone who has read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, which develops a sociological theory of how taste and aesthetic judgements get mapped onto class differences in very powerful ways. Tastes, he argues, are systems of choices, which point towards a basic division between bourgeois restraint and working class excess, rather than individual or local decisions. Anyone who wants to see this dramatized should check out the classic 1930 melodrama, Stella Dallas, where a mother, who is proud of her "stacks of style" (as played out in excessive make-up, jewelry, and fru-fru clothing) must ultimately distance herself from her more "tastefully" restrained daughter if she is to insure the girl's class mobility.

In many ways, this same notion of "stacks of style" carries over into the design of MySpace pages. Again, here's boyd:

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook... are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics....That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

And in return, these stylistic differences play themselves out in public policy where there is a moral panic about the sexual excesses of MySpace while teachers, parents, and others have tended to accomodate FaceBook because of its associations with higher education. It is as though FaceBook represented a gated community and MySpace the sketchy section of town.

boyd shows how this even translates into military regulations, where MySpace preferred by enlisted men has been banned as a drain on bandwidth, while Facebook, preferred by officers, remains uneffected. She speculates that this decision may have more to do with the military's concern about recruitment than about any technical issues:

MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit....Young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which means that they're connecting to almost everyone from their high school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they're in Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working class communities who the Army intends to recruit?

At Project nml, we have argued that social networking skills are one of those core cultural competencies young people need to master if they are going to become full participants in our society. More and more of us use such sites to manage our professional contacts and learning how to move from our core contacts to others who have skills, knowledge, or connections we need is part of what it means to be upwardly mobile in the digital age. We have often drawn an analogy to older writings about the "hidden curriculum" -- the ways that children who grow up in middle class homes, where they regularly experience high culture and political discussions, often perform better in schools because their cultural style is better aligned with the expectations of their teachers.

We are just beginning to understand how class manifests itself in the ways children relate to new media technologies. This discussion takes us beyond the Digital Divide which had to do with unequal access to the technologies themselves. It certainly includes the Participation Gap which has to do with unequal access to the social skills and cultural competencies which emerge from participation in online worlds. But boyd's essay suggests ways that class works to divide and fragment this generation of young people even where youth are embracing the online world and developing new media literacies. This is somewhat distressing to imagine given how lofty the rhetoric has been about a cyberspace where no one knows you're a dog, erasing differences of all kind that hold people back in the real world. Anyone who cares about the principles of participatory culture should care about the invisible forces which work to segregate our communities or exclude people from participation.

At the same time, boyd is warning us against the impulse to use this new knowledge to regulate or influence where young people go online. It is too simple to embrace Facebook and reject MySpace without understanding what these sites mean to the young people who choose to congregate there. As boyd notes several times, much "misconduct" occurs on Facebook but it gets read differently because of the class and educational status of the people involved.

I am still processing some of the implications of boyd's analysis of how class operates in social networking sites. I am hoping her post may spark some thoughts and comments amongst my readers.

WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART TWO)

RETHINKING EXPERTISE At a time when schools still emphasize the autonomous learner and most kinds of research collaboration get classified as cheating, the Wikipedia movement emphasizes a new kind of knowledge production Pierre Levy has described as collective intelligence. As Levy notes, collective intelligence exploits the potential of network culture to allow many different minds operating in many different contexts to work together to solve problems that are more challenging than any of them could master as individuals. In such a world, he tells us, nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment's notice.

Indeed, such groups are strongly motivated to seek out problems that are sufficiently challenging that they can engage as many members as possible:

"Members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore...Not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development....Unanswered questions will create tension with cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required."

What holds a knowledge community together is not the possession of knowledge -- which can be relatively static -- but the social process of acquiring knowledge -- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties. The Wikipedians bond by working together to fill gaps in their collective knowledge.

Wikipedian Kevin Driscoll proposes a suggestive analogy for thinking about such collaboration:

"The only thing that i can think of in my life that's similar in an "off-the-internet" kind of way is sometimes when you go to the beach there will be a bunch of people making a sand castle. And you can just come over and start making another part of the sand castle and then join them together. And then somebody sees like "wow those guys are making a huge sand castle." And then they get involved and then the thing gets so big, you might not even ask the other peoples' names. You still built the thing together. And nobody owns that sand castle. You all built it together. You're all proud of it. And you all get the benefit of each other's work so you're all really relying on each other. And Wikipedia is like that sand castle except no ocean is going to wash Wikipedia away."

Part of what young people can learn through contributing to, or even consuming, Wikipedia is what it is like to work together within a knowledge culture.

It might be helpful to trace some of the ways that this idea of a knowledge-generating culture contrasts with what Peter Walsh has called the Expert paradigm:

1. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which can be mastered by an individual. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence are open-ended and profoundly interdisciplinary.

2. In the expert paradigm, there are some people who know things and others who don't. A collective intelligence assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis.

3. The expert paradigm uses rules about how you access and process information, rules which are established through traditional disciplines. Within the collective intelligence model, each participant applies their own rules, works the data through their own processes, some of which are more convincing than others, but none of which are wrong at face value. Debates about rules are part of the process by which knowledge gets generated.

4. Experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual which designates them as among those who have mastered a particular domain, most often through formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system and knowledge that comes from real life experience may be highly valued.

(These ideas are developed more fully in the Survivor chapter of Convergence Culture.)

Learning how to weigh different claims about expertise should be part of Hobbe's "informed skepticism." We might, for example, ask young people to talk through the differences in the kinds of expertise displayed by a couch and a ballplayer, a librarian and a researcher, an actor and a director, a mechanic and a race car driver, an architect and a construction worker, or a biologist and a nurse. Some of these people gained their expertise from formal education, other through practical experience; they know different things because they play different roles in a shared process; and having all of these people contribute to the production of knowledge is likely to result in richer and more valuable insights than weighing one's perspective above the others. At the moment, I am playing the part of an expert in writing this article. Perhaps some individual readers see themselves as having greater expertise than I do and at least some cases, they may be right. But there's no question that there is more knowledge in the combined readership of this article than I have at the time I am writing it. The Wikipedia movement is allowing people with very different backgrounds to work together to share what they know with each other.

Of course, Wikipedia is simply one of a broad range of online activities that involve the collaborative and coordinated production and circulation of knowledge. For example, alternative reality games -- large-scale informational scavenger hunts -- are being designed so that they occupy the interests of several hundred players working together: any given problem might require a mix of skills and knowledge drawn across different disciplines and domains. Writers

like Steven Johnson and Jason Mittell have shown that television narratives are becoming increasingly complex, involving many different characters and subplots, as they are being consumed in very active and collaborative ways by online fan communities.

Games researcher T.L. Taylor has shown how the guild structure of a massively multiplayer game such as World of Warcraft may encourage people with very different skills to work together to meet challenges that are designed for this kind of coordinated activity; the community may develop its own mods and toolkits that help them to monitor and organize such large-scale activities. Similar tools, institutions, and practices have emerged around Wikipedia as the community has sought to flag problems to be addressed and identify people with the skills and knowledge needed to solve them. The Wikipedians we interviewed stressed the broad range of skills needed for the project to succeed.

Participating in the Wikipedia community helps young people to think about their own roles as researchers and writers in new ways. On the one hand, they are encouraged to take an inventory of what they know and what they can contribute. The school expects every student to master the same content, while Wikipedia allows students to think about their own particular skills, knowledge, and experience. Wikipedia invites youth to imagine what it might mean to consider themselves as experts on some small corner of the universe. As they collect and communicate what they know, they are forced to think of themselves writing to a public. This is no longer about finding the right answer to get a grade on an asignment but producing credible information that others can count upon when they deploy it in some other real world context.

On the other hand, participants are encouraged to see themselves as members of a knowledge community and to trust their collaborators to fill in information they don't know and challenge their claims about the world. Composition theorist Kenneth A. Brufee has emphasized the power of collaborative writing to change how young people think about the relationship between readers and writers:

"Most of us are not in the habit of thinking about writing nonfoundationally as a collaborative process, a distanced or displaced conversation among peers in which we construct knowledge. We tend to think of writing foundationally as a private, solitary, 'expressive' act in which language is a conduit from solitary mind to solitary mind....When each solitary reader in the socially unrelated aggregate reads what we write, what happens, we suppose, is that another mind 'absorbs' the thoughts we express in writing. Our goal is to distinguish our own distinct, individual point of view from other people's points of view and demonstrate our individual authority....Once we understand writing in a nonfoundational way as a social, collaborative, constructive conversational act, however, what we think we are doing when we write changes dramatically. The individualist, expressive, contentious, foundational story we have been telling ourselves about writing seems motivated by socially dubious (perhaps even socially immature) self-aggrandizement.... We use a language that is neither a private means of expression nor a transparent, objective medium of exchange, but a community construct. It constitutes, defines, and maintains the knowledge community that fashions it. We write either to maintain our membership in communities we are already members of, to invite and help other people to join communities we are members of, or to make ourselves acceptable to communities we are not yet members of. "

Contributing to the Wikipedia might encourage students to adopt the very different kinds of rhetorical goals and mindset Brufee claims emerges through collaborative writing activities.

Again and again, the Wikipedians we interviewed for our documentary made reference to certain shared principles that shapes the group's activities and offers a framework for adjudicating disputes. Rather than arguing each point, the group agrees to work together to insure that all points of view get heard. This is what Wikipedians call adopting a "neutral point of view", which is understood here as a goal or ideal shaping the writing process as much or more than it is seen as a property that can be achieved by any given entry.

This focus on neutrality takes on special importance when we consider the global context within which the Wikipedia operates. While Wikipedia projects are being created within a broad array of different languages, many of which are dominated by a single national context, all of these groups want to insure that their perspectives are fairly represented in the most widely consulted English language edition. So, we might consider the very different way than a topic like the Winter War, the Russian invasion of Finland during the Second World War, gets represented in Russian and Finnish history textbooks as opposed to the challenges of producing an account acceptable to Russians, Finns, Germans, Americans, and everyone else within the shared space of the English language Wikipedia. Mastering the protocols concerning "neutrality," then, might provide young people with good skills at navigating across the cultural differences that they will encounter elsewhere in the digital domain. Network culture is bring people together who would never have interacted face to face given geographic distances but who now must work together to achieve shared goals.

What Knowledge Counts...

The decentralized nature of knowledge production in the Wikipedia movement results in some surprising gaps and excesses. Historian Roy Rosenzweig notes,

"It devotes 3,500 words to the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, more than it gives to President Woodrow Wilson (3,200); American National Biography Online provides a more proportionate (from a conventional historical perspective) coverage of 1,900 words for Asimov and 7,800 for Wilson."

Rosenzweig models one of the core critical activities that students might perform in examining Wikipedia: systematically comparing how the same topic gets dealt with within traditional and emergent kinds of reference works. In doing so, we can flag the selection process which goes into the production of any kind of texts. How do we decide how much space to devote to any given topic?

Remember that the relationship of space to prioritization operates differently within the economy of scarcity that dominated print culture and the plentitude that surrounds a digital resource. The amount of space given a topic in a printed encyclopedia reflected its relative importance because space cost money. Wikipedia space is free and unlimited so the amount of space devoted to a given topic might reflect a range of other factors, including how much the community knows or feels able to communicate about the subject, how many people know about the topic, and what kinds of contexts this information gets used. There isn't someone out there -- an editor or publisher -- deciding how much space to grant a given topic, though the group may sometimesprune entries that they feel are over-inflated. Rather, someone who cares deeply about a subject takes the first crack towards writing an entry and others who share her interests may also contribute, thus often swelling its word count.

The Wikipedians discuss this issue in terms of what they call "systemic bias." Our documentary on Wikipedia features the following exchange between Wikipedians Mark Pellegrini and Jim Giles:

Jim Giles: Some groups of people really like Wikipedia, like scientists, computer programmers, mathematicians. Technically-minded people seem to like Wikipedia. So they write really good articles. So on those topics, Wikipedia is likely be stronger than on say, poetry.

Mark Pellegrini: It's called a systemic bias is how we refer to it as. We, originally our draw was, yeah, people who are really technologically savvy, you know, white males in the Western world. And so the hope is that as we get larger, the systemic bias will kind of go away.

The greater focused place on a science fiction writer over an American president reflects this systemic bias: early participants in the Wikipedia project were more likely to reflect the biases and values of geek culture. The solution, the Wikipedians argue, is to become more inclusive, to draw together a more diverse range of participants, and thus to expand what

topics get discussed and what kinds of information get included. Collective intelligence places new emphasis upon diversity: the more diverse the participants, the richer the final outcome.

Accordingly, the Wikipedians argue that the question isn't what knowledge matters but rather what knowledge matters to whom under what circumstances for what purposes. Indeed, the whole point is to produce a work which can serve many different purposes and thus which may offer many different structures of information. This is consistent with what David Weinberger argues in his new book, Everything is Miscelaneous; one of the defining characteristics of a networked culture is that it enables information to be configured and reconfigured in many different ways:

"It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest....It's not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else's experience. It's how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links... A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself."

While networked culture will generate many different institutions and social structures which individually and collectively help us to sort through information, the final decision about which process works rests not with traditional gatekeepers but with the community of participants.

The Wikipedia Project's openness to knowledge not valued in academic settings, for example, has made it possible for young people to more actively contribute:

Ndesanjo Macha: Most of the kids who come to our Boys and Girls Club are very very good consumers of information tools and knowledge. They know how to chat, how to email, how to do MySpace, Facebook, how to play video [and] computer games, very very good consumers. But they're not producers of knowledge and information. And if knowledge and information are going to be the key elements that are going to define this moment of history, I think it's very very important for kids in schools to start being producers of these things.

Andrea Forte: So one of the things that happens on Wikipedia that makes it different from other encyclopedias is [that] people start writing about popular culture. So this is an area where young people far far outstrip their older peers when it comes to being able to contribute new knowledge about the world.

Kevin Driscoll: Some of my students are super big fans of a T.V. show or a sports team. And I think that those two are things that people document really heavily. Because what happens is that there's a new--another football game every week. And there's another episode of the TV show. So there's something new to add to the Wikipedia entry.

Similarly, people from different class, race, religious, ethnic, and gender backgrounds will choose to write about different topics, including many which are under-represented in standard reference works. This again places new emphasis upon the problems caused by the participation gap: by locking some segments of our society (let alone the world's population) out of full participation online, we deny the society at large access to the things they know and the ways they know them.

As Levy suggests, a knowledge culture sees such gaps as an incitement to activity. It is certainly valid to ask what information is not included in the Wikipedia and why. However, critics then should roll up their sleeves and taking responsibility for making sure that topics that matter to them gets full and adequate representation

At their most passionate, they see Wikipedia as part of a larger process of insuring a more democratic culture by taking seriously what each member has to contribute:

Joe Abraham: The idea that a few "experts" tell us how we should live our lives,what battles we should fight in, is going to, I think, go by the wayside and we as a collective community, as a democracy, as a world of equals will decide together where we should go and what we should learn. "Raymond's law," that is destined to be one of the great comments of history, which is funny because it's a rather geeky expression: "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." That if enough people are looking at something, that you will find the bugs--the errors. And once you identify the error, you will almost always very quickly find the solution.

Mark Pellegrini: If you look at the "What the Wikipedia is Not," it says "Wikipedia is not experiment in democracy" and I know that because I wrote it! But it has the trappings of democracy, which is to say it's driven by the collective will of the people.

Joe Abraham: What makes a democracy so different is that each of us has our hand on the wheel of the ship of state.

Kevin Driscoll: I imagine that Wikipedia is the beginning of a much larger movement for us to be sharing our knowledge with one another in a real, world-wide way. So there are all of these parts of our culture and parts of our society that have not yet been experimented-on the way that the encyclopedia was experimented-on. And Wikipedia proves that it's possible to find a different way to build these things--a cooperative way--that people who don't ever meet each other can work together. But I believe that this idea will endure, because it's so powerful. And people care about it so much. And when you see that happening, that is something that can't be beat.

If we understand the Wikipedia movement as fostering civic engagement, then it becomes all the more important that we insure the diversity of participation. We should take steps through classroom and after school activities to broaden who gets to participate in this process of knowledge production and evaluation.

Wrapping Up

I have tried to suggest throughout this essay that the Wikipedian movement might be one space where young people could acquire the kinds of social skills and cultural competencies necessary to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape. The Wikipedia movement is a place where young people and adults work together to achieve shared goals. The group itself has worked to make its standards, practices and protocols as transparent as possible, giving us the tools we need to evaluate the information the group produces. Wikipedia assumes an active reader who asks questions about the factual claims presented, the evidence supporting the claims and the sources that were consulted.

In particular, I have identified several key skills which are potentially enhanced through active engagement with Wikipedia:

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

But, we need to help our students to develop a larger context for identifying the strengths and limitations of its particular model for knowledge production. As we do so, we need to return to the core questions which Project Look Sharp has central to the Media Literacy movement and rethink them in relation to this changing context of media production, circulation, and consumption.

1. Who made - and who sponsored - this message, and for what purpose? In this case, we need to understand this question from the perspective not of someone who is consuming media produced elsewhere but of someone who is invited to actively participate in the production and circulation of media content.

2. Who is the target audience, and how is the message specifically tailored to them? In this case, we need to focus on the sets of norms and shared ideologies that are shaping the Wikipedia movement.

3. What are the different techniques used to inform, persuade, entertain, and attract attention? In this case, we need to focus on the rhetorical tools which establish credability or motivate participation.

4.What messages are communicated (and/or implied) about certain people, places, events, behaviors, lifestyles, etc.? In this case, we need to consider the different kinds of expertise that different participants in the Wikipedia movement bring to the project, looking at the ways that these diverse perspectives get negotiated through the production of any given article.

5. How current, accurate, and credible is the information in this message? In this case, we need to focus attention on the devices which make the research process more transparent and the ways we need to deploy them to test the reliability of the information.

6. What is left out of this message that might be important to know? In this case, we need to reflect on the systemic biases of the project and how they emerge from the participation gap and from other obstacles which limit individuals ability to access technologies and participate within networked culture.

Clearly, the media literacy community has lots of work to do if we are going to develop as rich and nuanced an understanding of Wikipedia as we have created together over the past several decades around older media forms such as print advertising or television news. But I hope that this article -- and the documentaries and curricular guides being produced by Project nml -- will represent a step towards integrating Wikipedia into the range of topics that media literacy education seeks to address.

Special Thanks to Alice Robison, Neal Grigsby, and Anna Van Somerin for their help in developing and presenting this paper and to the MacArthur Foundation for their ongoing support of Project nml.

Since I am getting a new influx of readers from the Media Literacy world as a result of my talk on Monday, I wanted to provide a few links to earlier posts which may be of interest to you:

Behind the Scenes at MyPopStudio

Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education

What DOPA Means for Education

Cory Doctorow as Exemplar

The Education of Sky McCloud

Making Comics

"The Only Medium That Can Make You Blush in the Dark": Learning About Radio

Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape

In YoYogi Park

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier

The Sony Games Workshop

The Merits of Nitpicking

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer

Big Games with Big Goals

Of course, most of the other topics we cover here are also very relevent to media literacy instructors so I hope you will browse a bit and then settle down as regular readers.

WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART ONE)

The following is based on the keynote lecture which I presented on Monday at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis. A more polished version of this talk will eventually appear in the media literacy journal, The Journal of Media Literacy, but I am offering this in a rawer, less processed form now in hopes of getting some more feedback from my readers and also of making this available to the conference attendees. Watch for a notice here later this summer when the exemplar about Wikipedia goes on line. n Fall 2006, Vermont's Middlebury College found itself the center of a national controversy when its history department took a public stand against students referencing Wikipedia in their research papers. The ban had been inspired by one faculty member's discovery that a large number of his students were making the same factual error (dealing with the role of Jesuits during the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th century Japan) which could be traced back to a bit of misinformation found in one entry of the online encyclopedia. Despite the publicity that surrounded it, the statement was scarcely a condemnation of Wikipedia: "Whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful, it nonetheless suffers inevitably from inaccuracies deriving in large measure from its unique manner of compilation." Students were asked to take responsibility for the reliability and credibility of the information they used in their papers; Students were told not to use Wikipedia as a scholarly source.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, publicly supported the Middlebury History Department's decision: "Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested -- students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn't be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either. If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don't listen to rock'n'roll either." Despite Wales's statement, Middlebury's announced policy inspired a series of national editorials:leading journalists and scholars weighed in on the perceived merits of the Wikipedia and on the credibility of online information more generally. The Middlebury History faculty were cast as poster children in the backlash against Web 2.0 and its claims about the "wisdom of crowds."

Wales's analogy between Wikipedia and "Rock'n'Roll" suggests that the Wikipedia debate has also become emblematic of the divide separating the generation that grew up in a world where digital and mobile technologies are commonplace from their parents, teachers, and school administrators for whom many of these technologies still feel alien. As Jonathan Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, wrote in an op-ed piece published on the eve of this conference,

"The real gap between tomorrow's digital haves and have-nots will be a lag in competence and confidence in the fast-paced variegated digital universe building and breeding outside schoolhouse walls.... Today's digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem- solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too... In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing."

Responding to these challenges, the MacArthur Foundation has committed 50 million dollars over the next five years to support research which will help us understand the informal learning which takes place as children interact within the new media landscape and how we might draw on the best practices that emerge from these new participatory cultures as we redesign school and after-school programs. I was part of a team of MIT based researchers which drafted a white paper that accompanied the MacArthur announcement and sought to identify some of the core social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to be full participants in this new media environment. And I am the principle investigator for Project nml, a MacArthur funded effort to develop resources to support the teaching of these skills through in school and after school programs. As it happens, we are just now completing a documentary about the Wikipedia movement and an accompanying curricular guide. This documentary is one of a number of short films produced for online distribution through the Project nml exemplar library.

Here, I will draw on the interviews and research behind the documentary to explore what Wikipedia (and the debate around it) might tell us about the new media literacies. Through looking more closely at what young people need to know about Wikipedia, I hope to suggest some of the continuities (and differences) between this emerging work on New Media Literacies and the kinds of concerns that have occupied the Media Literacy community over the past few decades.

THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES

According to a recent study from the Pew Center for Internet & American Life, more than half of all teens have generated media content and roughly a third of teens online have shared content they produced with others. In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures. A participatory culture is one where there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, where there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others, where there is some kind of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced gets passed along to newbies and novices, where members feel that their contributions matter, where members feel some degree of social connection with each other at least to the degree to which they care what other people think about what they have created.

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these emergent forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude towards intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which kids will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter schools and workplaces.

Not all of these skills are dramatically new -- they are extensions on or elaborations of aspects of traditional research methods, text-based literacies, and critical analysis that have long been valued within formal education. In some cases, these skills have taken on new importance as young people move into emerging media institutions and practices. In some cases, these new technologies have enabled shifts in how we as a society produced, dissect, and circulate information. Those interested in reviewing the full framework should download the report.

While some have argued that these new media skills represent the different mindsets of "digital natives and digital immigrants", that analogy breaks down for us on several levels. First, the participatory cultures we are describing are ones where teens and adults interact but with less fixed and hierarchical relations than found in formal education. It is a space where youth and adults learn from each other, but it would be wrong to see young people as creating these new institutions and practices totally outside of engagement with adults. Second, the "digital natives" analogy implies that these skills are uniformly possessed by all members of this generation; instead, young people have unequal access to the technologies and cultural practices out of which these skills are emerging and so we are facing a growing participation gap in terms of familiarity with basic tools or core cultural competencies.

Even if we see young people as acquiring some of these skills on their own, outside of formal educational institutions, there's still a strong role for adults to play in insuring that young people develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the place of media in their lives and engage in meaningful reflection about the ethical choices they make as media producers and participants in online communities. While the MacArthur researchers take serious youth innovations through media and respect the meaningful role that these experiences play in young people's social and cultural lives, they also value what teachers, parents, librarians, youth workers, and others bring to the conversation. We want to help these adults respond to the changing circumstances young people face in a period of prolonged and profound media change. It is our belief that these new media literacies need to inform all aspects of the educational curriculum; they represent a paradigm shift in how we teach English, social science, science, math, and the other schoolroom subjects. If these skills are going to reach every American young people, it is going to require the active participation of collaboration of all of those individuals and institutions who impact young people's moral, intellectual, social, and cultural development.

Our initial report raised three core concerns, which suggest the need for policy and pedagogical interventions:

1. The Participation Gap -- the unequal access of youths to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge which will prepare them for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

2. The Transparency Problem -- The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shapes our perceptions of the world.

3. The Ethics Challenge -- The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization which might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

Educators need to work together to insure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, has the ability to articulate their understanding of the way that media shapes our perceptions of the world, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards which should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities.

This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and afterschool programs to foster what we are calling the new media literacies -- a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.Just as earlier efforts at media literacy wanted to help young people to understand their roles as media consumers and producers, we want to help young people better understand their roles as participants in this emerging digital culture.

In the discussion of Wikipedia that follows, I am going to be emphasizing four of the eleven skills we identify in our report:

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

Wikipedia Reconsidered

Many educators express concern about young people's increased reliance on Wikipedia as a resource for their homework assignments and research projects. These teachers worry that youth aren't developing an appropriate level of skepticism about the kinds of information found on this particular site. There are legitimate concerns about the credibility of online information and the breakdown of traditional notions of expertise which should be debated. Our documentary project, and this article, reflects our assumption that these vital debates need to be shaped by a clearer picture of the Wikipedia movement. Our ultimate goal is not to convince you to use Wikipedia in your classes, but rather to argue that in a world where many young people are turning to this as a key source for information, educators need to understand what is going on well enough to offer them meaningful advice and guidance.

Much as educators responded to the debates in the 1990s about "political correctness" and multiculturalism by arguing that we should "teach the debate," today's educators should help young people to understand competing arguments about the value of Wikipedia. In this context,

it is not enough to construct policies restricting the use of Wikipedia as a source if we don't help foster the skills young people need in order to critically engage with a site which has become so central to their online lives.

I am reminded of a powerful statement by Renee Hobbes about the role that media literacy education should play in shaping young people's relationship to news and information:

"Some students, when asked to ask questions about the believability of media texts, may respond from deep within the familiar adolescent state of alienation and mistrust. In a more or less conscious way, they may answer, "I can't believe in any of this information. Nothing is believable." This cynical perspective is the antithesis of what the educational experience strives to foster. It is informed skepticism and a sense of the power of communication as a form of action to transform and shape society that educators hope to impart to students."

The same might be said of teachers and their relationship to Wikipedia: educators need to adopted an "informed skepticism" rather than a dismissive attitude. Wikipedia is a very rich site for teaching young people about many of those things that have historically been at the heart of the media literacy movement but we can only capitalize on its potentials if we understand how it works and what it is trying to do.

Here's what the About Wikipedia site tells us about the project:

"There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 5,300,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there are 1,843,251 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia."

All of this development has occurred since Wikipedia launched in 200. This volunteer army of writers, editors, and fact-checkers has been supervised, if we can use that word, by a paid staff of roughly five people. So much negative attention has been directed against Wikipedia that it is easy to forget the idealistic goal which motivates all of this activity. As Jimmy Wales explains, "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

Wikipedia has benefited enormously from its use of the encyclopedia analogy. People already know what an encyclopedia looks like; they start from a shared understanding of the kinds of information it contains, language it deploys, and functions it serves. This familiarity with basic genre conventions allows large numbers of people to roll up their sleeves and starting working and even more people to go to use Wikipedia as a central reference work.

Yet, like most analogies, calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia clarifies some aspects of the phenomenon while obscuring others. Describing it as an encyclopedia emphasizes Wikipedia as a product rather than focusing attention on the ongoing process by which its community pools information, debates what knowledge matters, and vets competing truth claims. Encyclopedias we have known in the past were depositories of an always already completed process of writing and research.

Wikipedia is something different. Andrea Forte, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher who has studied Wikipedia, told our production team,

"When you first come to Wikipedia, it really seems like a collection of articles. It seems like a bunch of pages about different topics. Now when you talk to people who are very involved in Wikpedia, it becomes a collection of people who are carrying out a project....Wikipedia was a place where people were coming together to write about the world and figure out what's true about the world and what kinds of facts are important to know about the world. These are the kinds of things I think students should be doing."

Critics also argue that the analogy to an encylopedia is misleading. Robert McHenry, a former editor of the Encyclopedia Britanica, argues,

"To the ordinary user, the turmoil and uncertainty that may lurk beneath the surface of a Wikipedia article are invisible. He or she arrives at a Wikipedia article via Google, perhaps, and sees that it is part of what claims to be an "encyclopedia". This is a word that carries a powerful connotation of reliability. The typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do."

Surely, the appropriate response to the problem which McHenry identifies is not to turn our backs on the enormous value of the Wikipedia project but rather to help young people place Wikipedia in a larger context, developing a deeper understanding of the process by which the its information is being produced and consumed. Wikipedians would push us further, arguing that we also should develop a more critical perspective on other, more traditional sources of information. If McHenry is correct that most people don't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, that should be an indictment of how our schools teach research skills, not an excuse to blindly accept Britanica.

The Wikipedians sought to make the production of knowledge more transparent to everyday people. The practices around Wikipedia preserve traces of the disputes and disagreements that typically go on behind the scenes through the editorial processes that shape traditional reference works. Jason Mittell, a media studies professor at Middlebury College, explains,

"Wikipedia is transparent in its goals and rules, explicitly listing its policies and guidelines. As far as I know, other encyclopedias offer no such reflexivity as to what they are, how they work, and what type of content and form they follow. As an educator, transparency provides an excellent teaching opportunity to get students to reflect on sources and their usage."

Mittell's blog documents some of the teachable moments as his students tried their hands at producing their own Wikipedia entires:

Aaron was one of the first to dive into Wikipedia, choosing to edit an entry on a Columbian volcano that he'd previously written a research paper about. As he blogged about his experiences, the act of becoming an editor made feel invested in a topic that he'd otherwise just learned about as an assignment. Simply the act of sharing his knowledge made him feel like an expert and care about a remote subject. He followed up by considering how other people's edits to his information made him feel part of a community, even though the other editor was anonymous and remote...

Paxson created a new entry on Eagle Peak, a mountain near his hometown in Alaska. He discovered that unlike Aaron's entry, nobody seems invested in this topic, as he's the only editor who has contributed. But he did learn a lesson about copyright, as he uploaded his own photo of the mountain, which was immediately tagged for lacking the proper copyright - he needed to give it a public domain, GPL, or Creative Commons license to fit with Wikipedia policy. Although we'll be reading about copyright issues later in the semester, this hands-on experience with the practicalities of the system are far more pedagogically striking.

...Scott had a less productive experience - he created an entry for the Middlebury College hockey team, which was "speedy deleted" for not justifying its notability. Scott & I sat down and together rebuilt the entry, following the template for other college sports teams with me teaching him some of the language & protocols for wiki editing, an experience which certainly increased his fluency and strengthened his awareness of how Wikipedia functions as a self-regulating process.

Wikipedia empowers students to take seriously what they have learned in other classes, to see their own research as having potential value in a larger enterprise, and to take greater responsibility over the accuracy of what they have produced. Much as young people become more critical consumers of media when they have engaged in production activities, young people ask better questions about the nature of scholarship and research when they contribute to Wikipedia.

Educators ask the wrong question when they wonder whether Wikipedia is accurate, because this implies a conception of Wikipedia as a finished product rather than a work in progress. Wikipedians urge a more skeptical attitude:

"Wikipedia's radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example, it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is certainly more subject to subtle vandalism than a typical reference work."

The key word here is "at any given moment." The community has taken on responsibility to protect the integrity and accuracy of its contents; they have developed procedures which allow them to rapidly spot and respond to errors, and the information they provide may be more up-to-date than that found in printed encyclopedia which in school libraries might sit around for decades. As historian Roy Rosenzweig explains,

"Like journalism, Wikipedia offers a first draft of history, but unlike journalism's draft, that history is subject to continuous revision. Wikipedia's ease of revision not only makes it more up-to-date than a traditional encyclopedia, it also gives it (like the web itself) a self-healing quality since defects that are criticised can be quickly remedied and alternative perspectives can be instantly added."

Yet, the accuracy of an entry has to be judged "at any given moment." Some entries, which receive heavy traffic, also receive more regular attention than others which might represent tide pools that lay stagnant for extended periods of time. Someone using the Wikipedia needs to assess the state of a current entry. The good news is that Wikipedia provides a series of tools that help us to trace and monitor the process by which an entry is taking shape.

We can see this process in action if we visit the entry on the Shimabara Revolution which caused such controversy at Middlebury. At the top of the site are two warning tags. The first tells us that "This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject" and if we follow a link there, we find ourselves in a Talk section where participants weigh in about the contents of the entry, including discussing extensively the criticisms raised by the Middlebury history faculty. This section tells us the entry is being reviewed by the WikiProject Japan, which is seeking to improve the quality of entries on Japanese history and culture and by the Military History WikiProject, which gives the entry a B for its overall quality. The section includes a list of details under dispute and tasks which still need to be completed.

Going back to the top level of the page, we see a second and even more troubling flag: "This article does not cite any references or sources" and a link to a page which lays out standards of verifiability:

"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed."

If one reads the history pages of most Wikipedia entries, one can see vigorous debates about what counts as reliable evidence. Many of these pages offer compelling case studies that teachers could use to teach the logic through which historians, or other scholarly communities, interprete, evaluate, and contextualize the information they gather.

Wikipedia taps the power of networked culture by providing hyperlinks where-ever possible; this make it very easy for readers to return to the original source and weigh its evidence for themselves. Wikipedian Kevin Driscoll has proposed a game, much like the popular "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," where students challenge each other to see who can find the quickest pathway between two seemingly unrelated concepts. So, for example, we might ask whether one could trace the connection between William Shakespeare and the Apollo Space Program in five or fewer links: We could go from William Shakespeare to his play, The Tempest (move one), from The Tempest to the science fiction film, Forbidden Planet, which was losely based on Shakespeare's plot (move two); from Forbidden Planet to the larger category of Science Fiction Cinema (move three); from Science Fiction Cinema to La Voyage Dans La Moon, one of the earliest science fiction films (move four); and from La Voyage Dans La Moon to the Apollo Moon Mission (Move five). This trajectory takes us between high and low culture, across the divides between science and the humanities, across several periods of human history. and across three national borders.

In doing so, students follow their curiosity, tap their knowledge, and draw connections between topics that might not seem intuitively linked. As Joseph Wang, one of the people we interviewed at the Wikimania conference, explained,

"You have to just, every now and then just step back and say, "What do I think is fun? What do I want to learn?" As you learn more you realize how much there is in the world that you don't understand. And that's really fun. And the thing that I find fascinating about Wikipedia is that there is all this cool stuff that I didn't know I didn't know."

Just as young people coming of age in a hunting based culture learn by playing with bows and arrows, young people coming of age in an information society learn by playing with information. This playful relationship to learning and knowledge is one of the things that motivates the community's participation, though the Wikipedians are quick to stress that they also take on very hard tasks, such as proofreading and fact checking pages.

The practices and tools that sustain Wikipedia are designed to insure the highest degree of transparency -- the most controversial entries come with the maximum numbers of warnings. Yet, realistically, many young people are going to the site in search of quick data and may lack the critical vocabulary necessary to use its contents meaningfully. So, at the most basic level, a media literacy practice around Wikipedia needs to focus attention on the basic affordances of the site, so that students are encouraged to move beyond the top level and see what's going on underneath the hood.

Researchers have shown that the current generation of young learners often exploits digital tools to copy and paste information, sometimes getting confused about where any fact came from, or blurring the lines between their own insights and those from secondary sources. Preliminary work from the researchers at a MacArthur funded project at the University of Southern California suggests that differences in access to digital technologies further impact young people's research practices. Those children who have the most extensive access to networked computers are most likely to look critically upon the kinds of information that they draw from Wikipedia: they have the time to experience knowledge production as a collaborative process. For those young people whose only access is through schools and public libraries, however, they need to get in quick, get the information they need, and make way for the next user. These time constraints encourage them to see the web as a depository of information and often discourages them from taking time to closely examine where that information comes from or under what circumstances it was produced. This is only one of the many consequences of what we are calling the participation gap.

The participation gap is shaped by uneven access to technologies but also by unequal access to formative experiences and thus unequal opportunities to acquire the social skills and cultural competencies we are calling the new media literacies. Participation in these online communities constitutes a new hidden curriculum which shapes how young people perform in school and impacts the kinds of opportunities they will enjoy in the future.

TO BE CONTINUED

Want to Work for Comparative Media Studies?

I know that a fair number of Media Literacy teachers and facilitators read this blog. So I wanted to flag for your attention a new position opening up in our programing working as the Project Manager for Project nml. Official Job Title: Project Manager

Position Title: Comparative Media Studies/ New Media Literacies Project Manager

Payroll Category: Sponsored Research Staff/Administrative

Normal Work Week: 40

Starting Date: August 1, 2007

End Date: June 30, 2009

Salary: 50K- 60K annually full time plus competitive benefits package

Supervision Received: Henry Jenkins, CMS director and Sarah Wolozin, Program Manager

Supervision Excercised: New Media Literacies staff and students

Project: The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. This four-year project - through collaborations with MacArthur's "Digital Kids" research project at UC/Berkeley and a community of educators, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, academics and media professionals - will establish how to define new media education, how to implement it, and how to sustain it once the project is completed.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities (Essential Functions): Serve as primary contact and coordinator for the New Media Literacies Project based at MIT Comparative Media Studies, directed by Henry Jenkins (MIT), and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

Specific role will be tailored for qualified candidates, but minimum duties include:

-- Implement the vision of the Principal Investigator during Phase II of the research project, overseeing current activities, maintaining current collaborations, and forging new partnerships to facilitate upcoming project initiatives;

-- Ensure the dissemination of the project's key ideas and findings through publications, conference presentations, online communities, parent resources, and teacher training programs, and 1-2 NML conferences per year;

-- Oversee the development and management of project-related communications, including a new website and other media production in a variety of forms (i.e., written, audio, video, PowerPoint, etc.);

-- Guide the research process, ensuring a high level of team coordination to facilitate the process of refining pedagogical models and the continued production of multimedia curricular materials;

-- Oversee the processes of prototyping and testing project's curriculum materials;

--Develop advisory board and serve as primary contact; send out regular communications; ensure participation in project; organize annual or bi-annual meetings with board;

--Together with Comparative Media Studies Program Manager manage all administration for project including but not limited to overseeing and managing budget; resolving legal, contractual, copyright and IP issues; generating necessary reporting for funder, CMS program, and MIT; managing and monitoring all documentation and reporting for the program, including coordination of reports with the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects and the Office of Foundation Relations; ensuring project is in compliance with CMS program and MIT policy; handling personnel issues including hiring, training, and terminations.

-- Keep abreast of developments in media theory, educational design, entertainment, popular and youth cultures, and consumer electronics and bring such knowledge to bear on the development of teaching modules;

-- Communicate with corporate, government, educational, and academic leaders who traverse appropriate K-12 and undergraduate market spaces;

-- Coordinate regular communications and formal updates for the MacArthur Foundation and other stakeholders;

-- Present research findings at conferences and in publications.

Qualifications/Technical Skills: Experience in managing media research projects, developing learning environments, implementing educational innovations in media- and/or technology-rich classroom settings, and producing digital and multi-media projects, conducting quantitative and qualitative research, as well as possessing an understanding of the application of a wide variety of media in learning, especially to develop multiple literacies across media. Ability to communicate with a wide variety of contributors and audiences, including both university instructors, educators, designers, artists, comparative media specialists, and current and future sponsors AND young adults, teens, tweens, and children, is critical. Secondary school and/or college teaching experience, strong research skills and a commitment to publication agenda in education or media studies expected; experience in commercial media and/or product design and development preferred. Proven ability to bridge multiple research disciplines and apply theory to effective practice a must. Minimum of Master's Degree in education, media studies, instructional technologies, or related fields; Doctoral candidates with ABD status are strongly encouraged to apply.

Send inquiries to Sarah Wolozin, swolozin@mit.edu.

We will also be looking later this summer for:

Post-Docs to work with the GAMBIT Lab (for games research) and for the Knight Center for Future Civic Media.

A Research Manager for the Knight Center.

An Outreach Coordinator for Project nml.

If any of these sound like they might be a good fit for you, send e-mail to swolozin@mit.edu.

Big Games with Big Goals

Last September, the Project nml team went to the Come Out and Play Festival in New York City, cameras in hand, ready to document the so-called Big Game Movement. The finished product, the latest in our series of films for the Project nml exemplar library, recently went up on the web and will be relevant to my many readers who are interested in the serious games movement more generally. What's a big game? Here's the provisional definition offered by some of our supporting materials:

Games for big groups of people in real world spaces (such as a park or the

streets) that use mobile communication technologies like cell phones to link

people together in gameplay.

In its early chapters, the film both shows some of the large-scale public games staged in Manhattan during the festival, including Cruel 2 B Kind, a game developed by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, which becomes the central example running through the piece. It also offers some historical analysis of the emergence of the Big Games movement (Future GAMBIT director Philip Tan discusses how today's Big Games relate to Assassin and other live action role play games and c3 researcher Ivan Askwith talks about their relations to alternate reality games). As Askwith notes, McGonigal turns out to be the key connector between the world of ARGS (such as I Love Bees, The Beast, and The Lost Experience) and the world of Big Games, in part because of her interest in using games to promote greater social interaction and spatial exploration:

What Jane McGonigal really kind of brought to the mainstream in ARGs was the idea that rather than just being online and using email and going to webpages to find information, you would actually have to in real life play in the game yourself. You would go out, you would do something, you would be somebody and interact with other people in real time. Her idea was that games could be a communal activity, which is something they stopped being when we started playing video games like Mario Brothers where you would sit at home by yourself.

As the documentary continues, McGonigal becomes a key spokesperson describing the kinds of learning which can occur through engagement with these kinds of large scale games:

Jane McGonigal:

There are a couple different categories of skills that I think players leave the game with. The first is just really basic familiarity with mobile computing technologies.

A lot of players who had come to play the game had never even used the sort of texting function of a cell phone. They didn't know how to switch from numbers to letters on their cell phone pads, right, and people came and played the game and suddenly knew how to use all the features of their cell phone that they had been ignoring.

For "ilovebees", which was the game that we did in 2004 with 42 Entertainment, we involved a lot of GPS navigating. For a lot of players that was their first experience working with GPS coordinates and going out to navigate physical space with this kind of virtual data to make them feel like really powerful users of the technology. Anyone who played that game now is clearly an expert and could go out and continue to feel like an expert when it comes to using technologies in real life.

For me, it has to do with how you are able to be an effective citizen in massively networked culture. So, are you able to collaborate with people at a really big scale. For Cruel 2 B Kind, one of the design choices that I made was the idea that, after you got killed, instead of getting thrown out of the game, you actually worked with the people who killed you.

You have to make decisions together in real time, all 40 bodies moving together, with the same goals, with the same purpose and to execute the strategy that was collectively decided upon. For a lot of the players, that part of the game got really hard, and was hard to keep everybody together, was hard to have everybody stay involved. For some game designers that would be a sign that it was a bad- maybe we should make the game so that you're only working in small teams, right, but because Cruel 2 B Kind was a research game, one of the goals really is to see how we can bring players into this sort of unfamiliar sort of future forward-looking social interaction. You know, as we look at all kinds of collective intelligence applications unfolding on the web, and smart mobs where people are, you know, individually becoming part of a large mob, how can we take all of that and teach players how to have massively scaled real time collaboration face to face. You're sort of learning skills for the future is one way to think about it.

The players will be the people who were first on the scene, the first people to learn these skills and techniques and hopefully 10 years from now, they're going to be the people who are in charge of companies, and in charge of non-profits, and in charge of community groups- the real leaders and innovators.

Another game designer, Mattia Romeo describes how playing some of these games changed the ways he thought about the urban landscape:

One game that I enjoyed very much was "Conqwest", which was game that Frank Lantz and I worked on for the cell phone company, Qwest, and that one involved teams of players from local high schools, going, gaining control of certain territories of downtown by taking pictures of these semicodes, these stickers with information that were spread out throughout the space. One of the great things about that experience was that, because the stickers were of a certain size, the players' experience of the city got broken down to that size. The entire city became spaces this big that contained an object of this size, which was an amazing experience to watch people have that- all of the sudden, they're used to seeing the city in terms of like, "There's a store here and there's a street here, and there's this restaurant that I go to," and all of the sudden it was, "That lamppost is just the right size, or has a little opening in it that's just the right size to be able to fit one of those things in there and so it just changed their perspective of the city immediately and where they played it."

Late in the film, Jane McGonigal describes her desire to move players from role-playing games (based on fantasy) and towards real-playing games (based on real world identities and challenges.):

In a role-playing game, everybody has to agree to live in the same fantasy world, and people's fantasies actually probably differ more from one another than we might expect, so it's actually not as inclusive as it could be. You have to be able to project your inner vision of this fantasy world or this fictional world. You have to really act as if you believe it in and it can be really hard for people who just want to experience more like the interactions, social interactions- it can put them off.

The reason why I don't do any role-playing games is- I don't design role-playing in my games is because I prefer people to be themselves in the game world because when the game is over, you are still yourself, and so, anything that you learn in the game, experience in the game, and want to bring into your everyday experiences, it's much more possible that you'll be able to do that because you're yourself, you're not this, sort of, dark shadowy figure. So I consider my games to be real play, rather than role play.

In her own research into the player communities that emerge around ARGS, she has found that teams that formed to solve puzzles in fictional games are increasingly pushing to apply their collective intelligence to try to confront real world challenges (from tracking down the identity of the Washington DC sniper to documenting examples of campaign finances abuse). McGonigal's more recent projects have pushed her to identify ways that these groups might more fully realize their ambitions, trying to use game play to spark greater political awareness and civic engagement. When Jane was in Cambridge recently, we had a conversation about World Without Oil, a new ARG which explores environmental and energy related topics, which will launch later this month. McGonigal described the project in some depth during an interview in Gamasutra:

It's a different kind of ARG -- a collaborative alternate reality. There's a lot of content creation on the part of players that is not traditional to ARGs. What is traditional to ARGs is that there are characters and a full life online, which people who are starting to poke around the website now are finding. There are hints of how you might find these characters. There's a chat transcript posted amongst a bunch of characters. Maybe you could send them a message.

Maybe you could find out how they met under these mysterious circumstances, find out what it is they've been told that makes them think something terrible is going to happen on April 30th. That sort of investigative poking that happens before April 30th will be much like I Love Bees. Those coordinates went up a number of weeks before you had to show up at the payphones. Your job was to figure out what the hell you had to get ready for. It's same way here. There's no information really on the surface about what you're being asked to prepare for, but there are ways you could start to figure that out.

When the game launches, the internal narrative being generated by the puppet masters will be specifically about how the country is falling apart. Every player who signs up can start to tell stories about their part of the country. The game will respond. In traditional ARGs, there's a lot of pushing of the system to see how far it can go. If I get on the phone with a character and I tell her something crazy, will the puppet masters build that into the story? Will the puppet masters have to kill off the character? How much of an impact can I have?

The World without Oil game is really going to let people use any means necessary to drive the story, to test the limits, everything from posting, documenting things with photo, video, to live flash mobs. You get to decide what's happening, and by documenting it, you force us to build it into the story.

The sort of end game is, does the country recover? The characters might all be dead by the end of the story depending on what the players do. We're keeping it pretty flexible because the idea is that when you start to play you join as a puppet master. In that way, it's sort of the first collectively puppet-mastered game ever. We're giving away more power but holding the reins enough so that it'll be a satisfying experience. We're taking you to the next level.

If we want it to be collective, why don't we let the players run it collectively and see what they come up with? The subject of the game is a very real scenario. If we did suffer an oil shock, it would be the ordinary people, the players, who would be ultimately shaping what the hell happened, whether we descend into chaos or whether we band together. It's better to see what the people really think and want to do now. Play it before you live it.

As always, the Project nml films are funded through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation as part of their ongoing efforts concerning Youth and Digital Learning. Watch here for the roll out of other films in the series, including work that is currently being completed on Wikipedia, dj culture, and Anime fandom, among other topics.

Anna van Someren supervises the production of all of the films in this series with our graduate students working as primary producers on the individual titles.

In this case, the primary producer for this film was Deborah Lui, a first year CMS masters student. Lui is a 2003 alumna of MIT with a double major in architecture and management science, and a minor in theater. Deb has long been fascinated by the relationship between space and performance. As an undergraduate, Deb explored this interest by working as a researcher with the Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Lab, and through the MIT Eloranta Undergraduate Research Fellowship, studying the relationship between performance and architecture in theater. Following graduation, Deb has gained experience in the arts (working at the Tony Award-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre) and design (with Tom Ip & Partners Architects in Hong Kong). She has continued to pursue her interest in theater by working with several amateur and semi-professional performing groups as a director and an actor.

The Escasy of Influence and the Power of Networks

Today, I want to call to your attention two recent articles which speak to themes that have been recurring interests in this blog since we launched last June -- the first deals with the relationship of intellectual property and creative expression, the second deals with web comics as a site of experimentation and innovation. Both warrant closer looks. Jonathon Lethem , an author whose fiction consistently plays around with themes of fandom and popular culture, has published a provocative essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence," in the most recent issue of Harpers, which explores the ways that copyright has operated to constrain and plagiarism and appropriation to expand the richness of our culture. Lethem's statement is impossible to summarize here because it expresses its ideas as much through its form (composed of remixing a range of writers who have dealt with the contemporary debates about copyright, including Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Richard Posner, Lewis Hyde, David Foster Wallace, and Henry Jenkins).

Something of the piece's argument can be determined by its opening quote from John Donne:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated."

For those who are curious, Lethem mashes up a passage from Textual Poachers with the Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life, the book which provided me with my theoretical underpinnings:

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own--artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not "having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle"), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. "Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become "real" without being actively reworked: "Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: "It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby." Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

As a fan of Lethem's fiction (The Fortress of Solitude), I am tickled pink to see my own writing included in this context. Every so often, journalists, who see me as an advocate of very loose copyright protection, ask me how I would feel if someone took and used my work without my permission as if it were a kind of gotcha question. In reality, I am delighted to see people engage with my ideas; I give much of my own intellectual property away on a daily basis -- here in the blog and elsewhere -- because I care much more about having an impact on the debates that impact our culture and in providing resources for my readers than I am interested in regulating what they do with my text. Of course, it is nice when they acknowledge that I wrote the material, as Lethem does here, but I also understand as the quote from Donne suggests that new works get built on the shucks of old works and that to be part of the conversation is to become the raw materials out of which new texts get generated or perhaps simply the compost that allows them to grow.

This blog has periodically touched upon the artistic innovation which has occurred in and around web comics in recent years as well as the various scenarios which might support their future development. I wanted to flag for readers a very interesting overview of the space of web comics today which was developed by Joshua Pantalleresco over at the ComicBloc. Again, this is apt to seem self-serving since I was one of the people he interviewed for the story but Pantalleresco's article is most interesting for the comments he was able to gather from the web comics artists themselves, talking about what they see as the benefits of working in this medium. What follows are just a few of the better quotes from the article:

"I think the biggest advantage is also, ironically, the biggest disadvantage: distribution... The glory of online comics is that readers don't have to go to a comic book shop to read them and can instead read them at home, at work, the library or anywhere there's a computer with a high-speed Internet connection." -- Dirk Manning, creator and writer of both Nightmare World and Tales Of Mr. Rhee

"Really the sky is the limit at this point for self publishing. If you really have the will to put your stuff out there, the tools are all available...There's nothing to stop you except maybe fear. Fear of rejection, fear of taking risks, fear of failure.... Creators can get there work out there without the constraint of publishing or distribution companies. Sure, there will be more books out there that probably never should have existed, but the good books, the really good books will rise to the top.--Tom Stillwell, creator and writer of Honor Brigade

"You MUST have a website that looks professional and is user friendly...Blog on this site, post images, give free previews ...provide as much information about you and your books as possible. You also MUST make sure people can find this site. If you build it, they won't come. They won't know it exists. You need to bring them there. You get people there by self promotion. You aren't just selling the book. You are selling you as a creator."-- Stillwell

If you want to read what I had to say, you need to actually read the article.

What struck me about the two articles is that they both emphasize some of the skills we have been discussing through our work for the MacArthur Foundation. The first makes the argument that artists learn and grow through a process of appropriation and transformation of existing materials, the second that networking constitutes an important aspect of contemporary authorship. These are core insights we should be making available to our students, especially those who aspire to enter the creative industries.

And, oh, while I have your attention, MIT World recently posted a webcast of a very interesting lecture by John Seeley Brown, the former Director of Xerox-PARC and a key thinker on the social life of information. I was in the audience when Brown delivered these remarks which speaks about collective intelligence, participatory culture, and digital education. I recommend this webcast to anyone who regularly reads and enjoys this blog. Here's part of the summary that MIT World posted:

We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe "pouring knowledge into somebody's head," says

John Seely Brown. We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

While the wired world may be flat, it now also features "spikes," interactive communities organized around a wealth of subjects. For kids growing up in a digital world, these unique web resources are becoming central to popular culture, notes Brown. Now, educators must begin to incorporate the features of mash-ups and remixes in learning, to stimulate "creative tinkering and the play of imagination."

With the avid participation of online users, the distinction between producers and consumers blurs. In the same way, says Brown, knowledge 'production' must flow more from 'amateurs' - the students, life-long learners, and professionals learning new skills. Brown describes amateur astronomers who observe the sky 24/7, supplementing the work of professionals in critical ways. A website devoted to Boccaccio's Decameron welcomes both scholars and students, opening up the world of professional humanities research to all.

The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web - this very long tail of interests - into a "circle of knowledge-building and sharing." Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core "that gets at the essence of critical thinking," paired with "passion-based learning," where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects. Brown envisions education becoming "an act of re-creation and productive inquiry," that will form the basis for a new culture of learning.

The Beatles Win the IAP Games Competition

A few weeks ago, I shared with readers of this blog some of the thinking behind our annual workshop on translating traditional media content into interactive entertainment experiences. This is a workshop we have done for the past seven years in collaboration with Sande Scordes from Sony Imageworks. Students with different skills and backgrounds are put onto teams together and asked to select an existing media property that they think would form the basis for a compelling game experience. In the course of the week, these teams think through issues of narrative structure, character development, graphic presentation, interactivity, audio design, market potentials, and business models to come up with a 20 minute "pitch" for how and why they think such a game might succeed. The students worked long, long, long hours trying to pull together their presentations and on Friday, they gave their pitches and got feedback from our panel of judges (which combine industry and academic expertise). Every year, we get blown away by the quality of the presentations and this year was no exception.

The winning team this year, led by CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby and including Cabell Gathman, Ben Decker, Sarah Sperry and Laura Boylan, imagined a unique partnership between Apple Music (which owns the rights to the Beatles's songs and likenesses) and the Nintendo Wii (which offers an exciting platform for a new kind of games/music experience). The presentation opened with a montage of clips designed to display the unique sense of humor and comradary that one associates with the classic Beatles movies, the game like potential of some of the sequences from Help and A Hard Day's Night, and the ways that the Beatles themselves had experimented with the construction of animated avatars through the Yellow Submarine and other projects. Their high concept -- "Grand Theft Auto meets the Fab Four" -- a "sandbox" game experience which allows players to take on the role of the Beatle of their choice. As they explained, people have strong feelings about which Beatle they want to be and might not take kindly to starting out the game as Ringo and working their way "up" to John or Paul. They might also have strong feelings about which period of the Beatles' lives they wanted to inhabit or preferences about which of the many imaginative realms introduced through their songs they might want to visit first.

The Wii would allow novel play mechanics which might range from trying to "net" the Blue Meanies or deliver flowers to "all of the lonely people" to performing as a band -- they even imagined a level which might be called "Sitar Hero" which reflects a particular memorable moment in the group's development. Periodically, the player might be besieged by mobs of screaming fans that rip off their clothes and delay their movement through the levels. As they successfully complete a level, they would get to perform another hit song from the group's repertoire and they might be able to enter a more surreal, psychedelic realm such as the Octopus's Garden or Lucy in the Sky with Gardens. Each level starts with a muted palette designed to mimic the black and white of their classic films but as the Beatles master the challenges and spread love through their music, they color our world.

The group's witty presentation was peppered with a range of compelling slogans -- "All YOU need is Love. Wii provide the rest" or "Let it Wii." They even were able to offer some convincing arguments that this project might not be as far fetched as it might seem, given Apple's recent venture in allowing Cirque du Soleil to repurpose and remix classic Beatles cuts for their new performance piece.

And if anyone wondered what the Fab Four would look like as game characters, they ended with a series of Beatles Mii (see above) that drew their inspiration from their previous embodiments in animation.

Another team, headed by CMS graduate student Orit Kuritsky, tackled the challenge of converting the classic television series, The Twilight Zone, into a new kind of psychologically inflected Survival Horror title, partnering with Buena Vista Games. Disney has made a good deal of money off of the Twilight Zone attraction at their various amusement parks worldwide, while the rights to the Rod Sterling series belong to CBS. The game would include the figure of the narrator, modeled in Sterling's likeness, who provides unreliable and sometimes wickedly witty guidance to the player by stepping outside the action and providing comments on his/her fate. The game tried to capture the film noir look and feel of the classic series while taking advantage of the potential of digital media to create distorting and disorienting representations of architectural space. Like the classic series, which drew heavily on classic short stories and original works by top flight genre writers, the episodic content of the game would be developed by contemporary masters of fantasy, suspense, horror, and science fiction, including Michael Resnick and Carol Emshwiller, while music would be provided by Masami Ueda, the composer behind the Resident Evil and Okami games.

The doors (famous from the opening credits) would provide portals into different game worlds where situations would mix elements familiar from the original series with new elements that reflect the extension of Sterling's social commentary into such contemporary issues as cloning or terrorism. Many elements of the world will be familiar to those who are fans of the series: one can rejuvenate by kicking a can, for example, or one might look outside the window and see a monster on the wing of your airplane, suggesting the creator's affection towards the original, yet new generations of gamers will anticipate twists and surprises around every corner and Disney would expect tie-ins to its ride.

Another team, headed by CMS undergraduate students Chris Casiano and Kenny Peng, asked us to imagine what would happen to the Harry franchise once J. K. Rowling had published the last book in the series. Rowling has hinted that she might not be opposed to further fleshing out the world around Hogwarts even if she doesn't plan to write any more stories about Harry himself and has expressed some disappointment in the quality of the Electronic Arts games based on the films. So, what if they could get J.K. herself to help flesh out the back-story of James Potter and the Marauder's Map -- that is, the story of Harry's father and his classmates. As they noted, the Marauders have been central figures in the fan fiction which has grown up around the Potterverse and the books have provided just enough information to interest even more casual readers in their adventures. In that regard, Harry Potter would not be the first fictional world to use games to broaden the scope of its narrative: they pointed to the success of the Knights of the Old Republic titles in the Star Wars franchise.

Like the Beatle's team, they were drawn to the Wii as a platform which could allow for an immersive player interaction and they offered a spectacular and playful demonstration of how the controller might support the casting of spells, wizard battles, and quiddich matches. They envisioned a cooperative multiplayer game similar in style to the Zelda Twilight Princess game that is already offered for the Wii but based on elements from the Potter books and associated materials (such as the Fantastic Beasts book which Rowling did as a side project). While we all felt fans would have competing ideas at this point about the story of Harry's father and mother, we agreed that Rowling was probably the only person who could flesh out those plot elements in a game and have it maintain a high level of credibility with fans. They imagined if the game was successful it could be the springboard for further sequels which took the Potter family into its fateful confrontation with Voldemort and his legions.

The fourth team, led by CMS graduate student Andres Lombana, proposed a heist game set in a virtual Las Vegas and modeled after the Ocean's 11 movie franchise. They pitched Ubisoft on what they envisioned as a "thinking man's multiplayer game" which built on lessons learned from the Splinter Cell titles about how to create a breaking and entering play mechanic and which might redeploy some of the assets developed for the company's recent Rainbow Six Las Vegas title. Players could be either the thieves trying to rob a major casino or the guards assigned to prevent the robbery from taking place. Guards might have capacities such as the ability to use trained dogs to sniff out identifying residue or lie detectors to determine what statements are false. The movie already provided a range of different character types, each of whom offered their own skills and introduced new play mechanics into the series: the pickpocket, the card shark, the acrobat, the pyrotechnic, the weapons expert, the hacker, and so forth. The thieves have to keep an eye on their suspicion meter let it tip off the guards prematurely; they might be able to diminish suspicion through the use of disguises or by spending more time at the gaming tables (involved in various minigames). The game would preserve the smooth style and bantering dialogue of the original franchise, hopefully drawing in George Clooney and the other members of his brat pack to provide original voice acting for the title. Barring that, they envisioned a lower cost alternative where Julia Roberts led a team of original female characters who were trying to beat the boys at their own game. (Robert is noted to be a hardcore Halo fan, according to some interviews, so the speculation is that she might like to be the protagonist of a game series.)