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.

The Whiteness of the Whale (Revisited)

"I'm talking morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick." -- Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) explaining his unique interpretation of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" music video in Reservoir Dogs (1992) "Am I boring you?" -- Pip, lecturing his sister on Cytology, in Ricardo Pitz-Wiley's Moby Dick: Now and Then (2007)

Like many Americans of my generation, I read Moby Dick in high school. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I was supposed to read Moby Dick in high school. I was assigned the book for Mrs. Hopkins' Biblical Allusions class. We never actually discussed the book in class, as I recall, but rather, we were supposed to read the "Great American Epic" (as it says on the cover of my copy) by the end of the term and then spell out the ways that it built upon religious themes. I remember starting out the novel with high hopes. I had read the Classics Illustrated comic book and had a picture book which stressed the boy's own adventure elements of the story -- from Ishamel's first encounter with QueeQueg to the final destruction of the ship and the death of Captain Ahab. I knew this book was going to be full of blood and thunder.

What I hadn't anticipated was the "Whiteness of the Whale," the notorious Chapter 42, which is where my efforts to make it through the book ran aground. The book is full of the 19th century equivalent of a data dump, where Herman Melville tells us everything he knows about whales, whaling ships, whaling rigs, the melting of blubber, and in this case, the color of the beast. Today, we might describe this as a richly detailed world. When I was 16, it was just boring.

Somehow, I never got past that chapter.

I tried to bluff my way through the paper and Mrs. Hopkins, who was a Sunday School teacher at our church, called my bluff, leaving me with a big red C and with a note expressing her disappointment in my performance. The fact that I never got past the "Whiteness of the Whale" remains a black mark on my intellectual record down to the present day.

Well, I have taken a vow to read Moby Dick this summer and this time, I plan to eat the "Whiteness of the Whale" for breakfast. My decision to return to the scene of the crime and overcome my childhood trauma is the result of my recent encounters with a truly remarkable man -- Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Last weekend, my wife and I drove out to Pawtucket to see a truly remarkable theatrical production -- Moby Dick: Then and Now -- which has awakened in me a tremendous hunger to dig deeper into the world of Melville's novel.

I first met Ricardo in the fall through the agency of Wyn Kelley, a colleague in the MIT Literature Section who is a leading expert on all things Melville. (Check out Wyn's essay about Moby Dick and digital media.) Ricardo had launched a remarkable project to get a group of incarcerated and at risk kids to read and rewrite Moby Dick for a contemporary audience. As Ricardo explained, he chose this novel because "everyone was already there," because the book included a multiracial cast of characters and thus offered an alternative vision of what America looked like in the 19th century. He claims that Moby Dick speaks to contemporary concerns even as it encouraged us to look back to the past and understand how we got to where we are today. He knew the book was going to be a challenge to these young men -- a kind of literary rite of passage -- but he also knew that he could inspire them to work through this material and something amazing would come out the other side.

The first time I met Ricardo, he was still fresh from the process of working through the novels with this first group of kids. He stood in my office, reciting lines from their script, in his deep resonant voice, and he spoke with absolute conviction that he was going to be able to translate their script into a theatrical experience. Ricardo wants to get thousands of people to read Moby Dick so that they can participate in conversations with young people about their experience of the novel. Those of you who attended the Media in Transition conference heard Ricardo speak about his vision for the play as part of our plenary session on Learning Through Remixing. If you weren't there, you should check out the podcast here.

For the past few months, CMS graduate student Debora Lui and Project nml staff members Anna Van Someren and Margaret Weigel have been documenting the process by which the Mixed Magic Theater brought this script to the stage, interviewing the cast and crew, and recording their creative process. When it is finished, this documentary will be a centerpiece to a curricular package we are constructing around Melville and remixing, in collaboration with Kelley. Basically, our curricular guide will start from the premise that Moby Dick might be understood as a kind of "mashup" of the Bible, Homer, and 19th Century American culture more generally.

Thinking about the "Great American Epic" as a mash-up helps to make sense of the ways that it mixes multiple genres of writing, suddenly stopping the adventure story for sermons, newspaper headlines, or lectures on cytology. Understanding Melville's work not through a lens of original creation but as part of a larger process of sampling and remixing stories and themes already in broader cultural circulation gives us a way to think about the poetics and politics of contemporary grassroots creativity. This idea about appropriation as a core literacy skill was a central concept in the white paper our team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation last fall.

The stage production, Moby Dick: Then and Now interweaves two versions of the story: an adult cast re-enacts the saga more or less as Melville wrote it while a youth cast stages a contemporary version which unfolds in parallel. In the contemporary version, Alba, the Asian-American female leader of a multiracial street gang which calls itself The One, seeks revenge for the death of her brother, Pip, and ventures, with her posse (Que, Stu, Daj, and Tasha), into the heart of the city in search of the "Great White." Where-as Melville's work dealt with the 19th century whaling trade, this new version deals with the consequences of our modern day drug wars. The juxtaposition -- old and new -- is aptly suggested by the Scarface t-shirt worn by one member of Alba's crue -- Ricardo has told me that in some ways, the themes of revenge and self destruction in the Al Pacino film spoke to his young students in much the same way that Moby Dick spoke to him. (Somehow, I pictured Mrs. Hopkins pursing her lips when he said it.)

There's a really amazing moment early in the production when Ishamel in the 19th century and Stu in the 20th century are both reading a newspaper report: "Grand contested election for the Presidency of the United States.... Bloody Battle in Afghanistan." The passage comes from the end of Chapter One in the original novel but as the program notes suggest, it could have come from the front page of a contemporary newspaper.

The adult version of the story contains its own insights into the book. While Ahab in many media versions can seem a one-dimensional character (a mad man relentlessly pursuing his vengeance and his own destruction to the ends of the earth, unapproachable and immovable in his goals), he is portrayed here as someone who struggles with self doubts, who hears the protests of his crew and feels the pleadings of the Rachel's captain, but can't turn back from the path he sees as his destiny. Around the edges, I saw the glimmers of a political allegory with emphasis placed on Ahab as a man who is lead by his guts and not by his intellect and Starbuck seen as a man whose sage caution gives way to timidity, speaking out against dangerous actions but unable to exert the will to stop them.

The visceral quality of the play was suggested from its opening moments -- when a feverish Ahab stabs blindly into the heart of a whale (which may be a creature of his own imagination) and Alba weeps over the body of her dead brother. From here, the company throws in everything from sea shanties to step dances, from hip hop to African drumming, as it tries to give us a sense of the interweaving of cultural traditions and multiracial identities that Pitz-Wiley sees as central to the story. Here, we are less interested in the "whiteness" of the whale than in the multiple hues of the crew, though in the contemporary saga, the play uses the "whiteness" to both address the cocaine trade and to suggest the complex of forces -- economic, legal, political, and cultural -- which link the war on drugs with violence and destruction in the inner city.

So, what has all of this to do with new media literacies? This is a question that Ricardo and I discuss each time we meet and each time, I think both of us come away with a deeper understanding of how we each think about the value of literacy. Ricardo reminds us that we can not divorce the new media literacies from very traditional notions of literacy. Ricardo wants to empower these young people to read challenging books and to become the authors of their own narratives. He doesn't want to see high culture as untouchable but rather wants to see it as something that can be sampled and remixed to more effectively address our own times. As we have watched him work with these young people, he again and again pushes them to dig deeper into the meaning of the words on the page and they have told our team how this project has transformed how they read. He has done so in part by taking seriously their own culture, listening to the power of their words, understanding how they use popular culture references to address some of the same key concerns as Melville and his readers confronted in their own time and through their own media. We hope to find a similar balance between respecting the past and embracing the contemporary as we frame our curricular guide about Moby Dick.

Ricardo knows something else -- he doesn't want to see these kids left behind as other students acquire new skills, access new knowledge, and learn to operate within a networked culture. He knows that his students are smart enough to confront these emerging literacies head on and he wants to make sure they get a chance to do so. Ricardo doesn't call it this but he's talking about what I have described as the Participation Gap. The Participation Gap pushes beyond a framing of the digital divide around issues of technical access and instead understands the challenge we confront in terms of access to cultural experiences and to the social skills which young people are acquiring through their informal participation in the online world. Ricardo has emerged as a strong advocate for the idea that these social skills and cultural competencies need to be accessible to every kid, no matter what their background.

As I listen to Ricardo, I know two things: first, that I owe Mrs. Hopkins -- and I owe myself -- a second shot at Moby Dick and second, that we owe Ricardo and his young people a renewed commitment to do our part to break down the participation gap. I hope some of my readers will join me in both pursuits.

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.

Videoblogging, Citizen Journalism, and Credibility

Today, I wanted to show off the latest in the series of short documentaries on media production which we are producing through Project nml, a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation to foster new media literacies. Regular readers of this blog will recall that we are producing a series of short digital documentaries on various aspects of the new media landscape -- ranging from independent comics to graffiti -- which are designed to get students to reflect more deeply about their own potential roles as media makers and to think about the place of media in their own lives. We have been delighted so far by reports that these videos are starting to be used in schools around the country and we would like to encourage other educators to send us reports of how you might be making use of these materials. Our latest release deals with the growing phenomenon of video-blogging (and as such, compliments the segments we produced last year in which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow offered his advice to would-be bloggers.) The video was produced under the supervision of research manager Margaret Weigel and our recently hired production coordinator Anna Van Someren (who came to us from the Boston Based Youth Voice Collaborative); the primary author of the video was one of the CMS graduate students, Steve Schultze, who was also not coincidentally one of the key organizers of last week's Beyond Broadcast event. Among those featured on this video are Steve Garfield, who has been widely credited as the father of the videoblogging movement; John Barth from Public Radio Exchange; Ravi Jain, another former student of mine who has gone on to fame if not fortune as the host of Drive Time; Jason Crowe from Cambridge Community Television; and Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the producers of Four Eyed Monsters.

One of the high points of the series comes in Segment 2 where we get into the issue of citizen journalism and how it relates to professional reporting:

John Barth: On the Internet, you have this great possibility to compare and contrast among a variety of vetted sources of news.

Steve Garfield: Videoblogging is news. Of course it is. The cool thing about it is that people will all be telling stories, let's say, from an event. So something happens and you'll get five, ten, who knows... right now if you go to an event and you have fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, a hundred bloggers blogging about an event... if you read a number of them you'll get a good sense of what actually happened.

John Barth: So can you trust what you see in a videoblog? How do you know that that's true or accurate?

Steve Garfield: Or if you read a blogger frequently, you know what their biases are and you know where they're coming from. So they become a trusted source for you. With video blogging it's the same thing. Video bloggers will become a trusted source for people of news, and if you have a number of videobloggers out covering the same event, seeing their different perspective on the same event, when you look at all those different videos then I think you'll get the story.

John Barth: You know this whole notion of, "all of us as smarter than some of us", is true. Except, not all of us are videoblogging and not all of us are blogging and not all of us are doing what you're doing. So, all of us don't have the benefit of being equal participants in trying to determine what the story is, or being able to see your videoblog and compare it against someone else's....

John Barth: So what would be so bad if videobloggers rule and mainstream media goes away because they just can't stay in business. Well here's what I think would happen: right now most investigative reporting, for better or worse, is being done by mainstream media. You have really good reporters at newspapers, at major networks like ABC news, and they are really developing their sources and getting to stories that frankly I don't think you and I could with a handheld video camera. We don't have the time, we don't have the money, and we don't know where to go.

Steve Garfield: The cool thing is that videoblogging is not TV. That's what's so cool about it. You don't have to have an intro, a voiceover... you don't have to get both sides of the story. You don't have to do anything. You can do it however you want to do it.

John Barth: Trust is what you're trying to get to. You're trying to get to credibility. So, if you work in a traditional news organization, there are dozens, hundreds of people and they all have points of view - they all have biases. The thing that's supposed to weed out all of that so that all you have is accurate information and good storytelling is that you do have editors and competitors and other reporters who help frame a story and get it out there every day. If you're a videoblogger, it's maybe you and maybe one or two other people and that's all. So, how do people know that what you've put out is accurate? How do you develop that trust? Well, there are some real basic things to understand. If you're going to pursue certain stories, you don't have your conclusion before you begin. That's why you're asking questions. So, a lot of times we get interested in a topic because we're passionately interested in it, but you need to have enough self-control and self-discipline to distance yourself from the outcome and also what you're hearing from different points of view....I think in terms of training people to be good videobloggers, I would argue they should spend some time with traditional journalists and get a sense about how much time it takes to beyond just putting up home movies to really tell a story well and really check some things out.

For those of you who enjoyed my post about Four Eyed Monsters last week, there's a very good segment (Chapter Five) in which the filmmakers discuss the ways they have tapped audience participation to shape the distribution of their independent film.

Susan Brice: Making a film is a very one-directional thing because you make it and it goes out to the world and they watch it and who knows what they really think. But making the video podcast was a really dynamic part of the project because you put it up and immediately people are commenting. Some people are making video comments back. The feedback is instantaneous and it affects the next video. It affects everything really. It affects our whole process.

Throughout the film places a strong emphasis upon the communal dimensions of production and circulation in the videoblogging world, resulting in a strong explanation of the kinds of social networks that operate in the realm of participatory culture.

Steve Garfield: Big media looks at videoblogging as a way to distribute content. The cool and fun and interesting part about videoblogging is this part about community and connection and conversation.

Jason Crowe (Chapter 7) situates videoblogging within a larger history of citizen media in America:

Jason Crowe: The history of citizen media in the United States starts with Thomas Paine, and he handed out pamphlets. So, similarly, people today are able to have their own videoblog and kind-of hand out their own pamphlets. So the tradition of independent voices needing an outlet has always been there, but this is just a new way to do it....

When the telegraph was invented, people thought that with the world being totally connected via these wires, and now that people from disparate parts of the world could talk to each other, that we would create world peace. Well, similarly with the Internet connected all different cultures and people... and you can put your media out, we've seen people say, "Oh well this is going to revolutionize the way that people create media and distribute it." I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's a wonderful way to get your message out, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be the beginning of world peace.

Our hope is that this series of documentary segments will allow educators to generate valuable conversations with their students around some of the core skills we identified in our white paper for MacArthur: among them, collective intelligence, networking, and Judgment. In the coming weeks we will be rolling out the next generation of exemplar videos on topics such as "Big Games," DJ culture, Wikipedia, Cosplay, Documentary Production, and Animation. Our team will also be showcasing this work at a range of conferences focused on education and media literacy, including at a special event we are hosting during the Media in Transition conference which our program is hosting in April.

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

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

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.)

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

The Merits of Nitpicking: A Doctor Diagnoses House

My son and I are both big fans of the television series, >em>House. I watch the show for the characters and their interactions -- especially for Hugh Laurie's performance but also for his interplay with the other doctors. My son has shown a bit more curiosity about the medical dimensions of the series and in search of information, he stumbled onto a fascinating blog, Polite Dissent, which offers medical insight into House, superhero comics, and a range of other popular culture texts. The blog promises us "Comics, Medicine, Politics, and Fun." Its author, Scott, describes himself as being part of a large family practice in Southwestern Illinois. Scott's blog is a good illustration of a mode of fan criticism which sometimes goes by the name of nitpicking. Nitpickers examine their favorite programs through a particular lens -- in this case, medicine -- in which they have developed expertise. I became very interested in nitpicking when I did research for Science Fiction Audiences about the reception of Star Trek at MIT. What I found at that time -- the late 1980s -- was that MIT students were often drawn to our school because of an early interest in science fiction and used science fiction -- especially debates about the lines between known science, reasonable speculation, and implaussible technobabel -- to work through their own mastery of core scientific concepts. The pleasure was in being able to prove to each other what was "wrong" with the science in a particular Star Trek episode and to explain a more plausible or realistic way of dealing with the same themes. Indeed, they classified the ST:NG episodes by discipline, often using the numerical codes ("Course 6") which are most often used to refer to majors within the MIT Context, suggesting just how much the shows functioned in parallel with what they were learning in their classes.

These scientists and engineers in training were not being obnoxious in trying to show their superiority to the program: part of the pleasure for them came in sorting out the differences between real and bogus science. In some senses, this was to look at the series through a realist lens but that's too simple a way to understand what is going on since all science fiction fans recognize that science fiction involves speculation and about social commentary, not simply about reproducing the world of known science but pushing beyond it to explore alternative possibilities. There were just "rules" that governed how far outside known science science fiction "should" stray and in what directions.

The classic nitpicker has a love/hate relationship with their favorite program: the show has to be good enough to stretch the outer limits of their knowledge at a regular basis and yet at the same time, it has to be flawed enough that they can catch it when the authors "fake it" in a particular domain of knowledge.

So, Scott takes House apart in terms of hospital procedure, medical tests and equiptment, and the specifics of the various ailments they appear in the speculations surrounding a particular case. Taken as a whole, Scott seems to enjoy the speculative aspects of the series but to be displeased by the various shortcuts the writers take to get us through a complex medical process in under an hour of screentime. Scott recognizes the tension between story telling and communicating actual medical knowledge but remains frustrated, as he puts it, "when House does a "character show," the medicine suffers."

Here, for example, are some of the key concerns he raised about "TB or Not TB", a second season episode about a grandstanding doctor who works on the medical problems in the third world and who provokes special ire from the series protagonist:

I

f the patient is suspected of having TB, why is no one treating him wearing a mask? Why he wandering around the hospital and not in isolation? Why is he not in a negative-pressure room?

PPDs are not read by sight, but by feel. It doesn't matter how red it looks, but instead how indurated it is.

TB is slow growing. How did the team know almost immediately that it was resistant TB? How did the antibiotics kick in so fast?

A nesidioblastoma would explain most of Dr. Charles's symptoms, but *wow* that's a convenient tumor. Small enough that it can't be seen on x-rays or MRIs. Intermittent, so it only releases insulin periodically. And yet strong enough to lower the sugar level in his CSF. It's more of a deus ex machina than a diagnosis.

When Dr. Charles coded, why did no one in a room full of doctors start CPR while waiting for the paddles to charge?

I'm certainly no surgeon, interventional radiologist or endocrinologist, but the scene where the team is trying to induce the tumor to release insulin seemed wrong. Injecting calcium directly into the pancreatic blood supply may be a legitimate procedure, but I doubt those four are qualified to perform it. Also, since they expected the blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels, they should have had the D50 ready to inject and not scramble for an IV setup

Frankly, most of these questions never crossed my mind: for me, the medical language on >em>House is as much technobabel as anything heard on Star Trek, but I found I had to stop watching Jack and Bobby a few years ago because I got so frustrated in how they dealt with academic life and I am starting to get more frustrated with Veronica Mars along similar lines. It all depends on where your expertise and interest lies but that's part of the value of creating a space where shared texts get examined through multiple lens.

It has been widely observed that procedural shows like House or CSI can play an important role in exciting the American public about the professions being represented. They are often accompanied both by an increase in sales of nonfiction works on the same topics and by increased applications to colleges which offer programs in those areas of specialization. The obvious parallel here is to the MIT students who got turned onto science through Star Trek. In such a context, sites like this one play an important role in providing a corrective to some of the more hairbrained ideas that find their ways into dramatic television or simply to provide further background on the medical conditions and practices discussed on the program.

I wonder how we can incorporate something like the nitpicking process into the educational system. What is the value of getting students to apply their knowledge to deconstruct a popular representation? What is gained by the process of walking through such critiques and then trying to verify competing truth claims through reference to concrete evidence and information? What gets added when we move from a single knowledgible critic like Scott to the incorporation of a larger community of interested people who might bring slightly different expertises to the table or who might have competing interpretations and evaluations of what is represented in the program (as occurs in the comments section of this site)? The key point is that the procedural shows themselves do not have to be 100 percent accurate as long as they offer problems for students to work through and solve and as long as a spirit of playful debunking is built into how they get discussed in the classroom. Indeed, the shows may be a better basis for such an experiment if they are good enough to capture the imagination but ultimately flawed or compromised in their representation of real world practices. Such an excercise would seem to be a great way to introduce media literacy concepts into the biology classroom.

The Sony Game Design Workshop

For those of you following my travels, I am now back in the United States (San Francisco to be precise) where I will be through tuesday. Further legs on this trip take me to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Durham, and New York City, before returning in Boston for the start of the term. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scordose from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

Here's the basic details:

Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age

Prof. Henry Jenkins, Sande Scoredos and Thomas Hershey, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Mon Jan 29 thru Thu Feb 1, 10am-05:00pm, 14E-310

Fri Feb 2, 10am-05:00pm, 2-105

Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)

Signup by: 10-Jan-2007

Limited to 40 participants.

Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)

Prereq: None

Student teams develop story concepts for various media, including motion picture visual effects and computer games. Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), this non-technical activity focuses on the theoretical, historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic elements of interactive narrative and game structures. Morning lectures explore linear and non-linear storytelling across media, audio-visual elements, game theory, and techniques to increase the depth of interactive console games and enhance storytelling. Afternoons run as workshops where participants collaborate in teams to design interactive story scenarios to be presented during a final session on Friday afternoon.

Held in 14E-310. Friday February 2nd will be held in 2-105.

Contact: Generoso Fierro, 14N-207, x3-5038, generoso@mit.edu

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants though there are limits to how many people we can absorb.

The following text is taken from a teacher's guide for the workshop which currently resides on the Education Arcade website. Parts of it have previously appeared in Telemedium. We have also produced a series of reality television style short documentaries showing the process at work and displaying highlights from the final presentations. And we have notes from some of the key lectures during one year's run of the workshop. These are all designed to encourage teachers at other institutions to try their own hands at conducting this kind of workshop process.

The workshop has two basic components - a design competition where teams conceptualize and present their approaches to adopting an existing media property into a game and a series of lectures designed to provide them with the background knowledge they need to complete this task. The contest provides greater motivation for students to pay attention to the information presented through the lectures and to apply it to the specific challenges of conceptualizing their games.

Some aspects of the workshop take advantage of the unique resources of MIT, yet we believe that the basic structure of the workshop could be adopted by local teachers at the high school level. We have had several high school aged students in the past and they have done as well or better than their older counterparts. In any case, the content of the workshop has adjusted slightly each year to reflect the available faculty and their interests.

Educational Goals

This workshop emerged from a series of conversations that Henry Jenkins and Alex Chisholm had with more than 50 different companies, large and small, which might be interested in hiring Humanities-trained media studies students upon their graduation. We were consistently told that while Liberal Arts students are highly desired by employers because of their mental flexibility and breadth of background knowledge, they often lacked some core skills that would make them ideal employees. Among those things most often identified were leadership experience, teamwork, communication skills, brainstorming and problem solving skills, competitiveness, and the experience of carrying a project through to completion. So, one important thrust of the workshop was to give our own graduate and undergraduate students training and experience in these areas.

Team leaders are selected from our own graduate students or undergraduate majors. In the case of a high school, they could be selected from upperclassman and (after the first year) students who had performed well in the previous competition. These students are given some additional training in leadership, brainstorming, and communication skills so that they can insure the success of the workshop as a whole.

At the same time, the workshop was designed to expose students to the basic building blocks of computer and video games - introducing them to current industry trends, technological opportunities of the current game systems, the tools the industry uses to select and develop potential properties - storytelling, genre, character, emotion, space, game play, community building, violence and ethics, gender and generational factors, visual elements, and sound track. Students are introduced to these ideas through the lectures and then apply them to their team projects. The judging criteria for the competition are designed to insure that all of the key concepts get applied.

A third educational goal here involves encouraging students to analyze the key components of an existing media text. Students need to think deeply about what aspects of those texts are essential to defining the 'world' of the story and to insure the audience's recognition and pleasure. Any adaptation involves maintaining certain core features while changing other nonessential features to reflect the specific nature of the medium in which the work is being presented and increasingly, to offer consumers an expanded experience of the 'world' of the story. One reason why we ask students to work with existing properties is that this workshop is designed to foster the analytic skills that we introduce to students through our existing courses on film, literature, or television.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the several dozen teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We typically select graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times.

At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.

The Presentations

The teams have 30 minutes to present their material, 10 minutes to dress the stage, and 10 minutes to respond to the judges' questions. We keep a tight time clock to insure fairness to all involved. The teams have to be well organized in order to get themselves into position by the start of the time and to stay on schedule so that all aspects of their presentation can be heard within the allotted time. We have certainly had teams who fell behind and the team leader had to make decisions on the fly about what should/could be cut in order to get the key ideas into the time. Ideas that don't get presented aren't considered by the judges even if the judges have heard them at earlier points in the process, since the judges have no way of knowing what changes might have been made in the last minute preparations for the presentations. No matter how many times you review the projects, there are always surprising elements in the final presentations as the projects only take their final shape the night before.

The order of the presentations is chosen by drawing slips of paper the day before. Everyone comes into the day knowing when their team will present and what the ground rules are for the presentation.

All participants in the competition have to be in place at the start of the first presentation and no further work can be done once the first presentation begins. All participants hear all presentations. The other teams are pushed out of the room momentarily when the judges ask their questions. Clearly, even with this precaution, later groups have some advantage since they can absorb information into their oral presentation, even if they don't adopt it into their visual materials. But, there have really never been any complaints about unfairness here.

As the competition has continued, the quality and elaborateness of presentations has grown each year. We find consistently that showmanship counts for a great deal in terms of the relative merits of presentations. Groups have become more theatrical. For example, it is very common for participants to create and wear costumes that help to establish the characters contained within their game. These costumes range from glitter rock garb for a Making the Band project to Purple Hats and capes for Willy Wonka. Very often, they will dress the stage with elements that evoke the atmosphere of the story world. For Spirited Away, they created the look of a Japanese bathhouse. Several times, we have had teams use puppets to communicate their ideas. One memorable presentation on Princess Smartypants included both a puppet imitating the regal voice of a princess and a man dressed up like a fairy. Given the technical skills of MIT students, it will not be surprising to learn that they build power point presentations, which can contain very elaborate mock-ups done in Photoshop or flash of what the actual game might look like.

Sometimes, there are very elaborate computer animations that help communicate the core premise. A group focused on Survivor had animations of cracking fires on laptops arranged around the room. The 1984 team, which won last year, turned a video camera on the audience and projected live feed on the wall so the judges and audience had the uncomfortable experience of watching themselves watching the presentation.

More and more students provide give-aways to the judges: one year, for example, a Matrix team provided a gold box with a red and blue sugar pill, asking us to decide which one we would take. Another group, working on Homer's The Odyssey, offered us bottles of root beer with a label designed to imitate the culture of ancient Greece. Some groups mimic the advertising materials or box designs for their products, even going so far as to give us blank CDs in jewel cases mocked up to look like the finished product. For a Fugitive project, each judge was given a 'wanted' poster with his or her own image on it. The groups frequently use music to communicate the audio design of their projects - in most cases, songs sampled from existing CDs, but in a few cases, original compositions the students created for the occasion.

The judges strive to separate out flash which is simply flash from elements carefully chosen to communicate the core elements of the concept and make it come alive for the audience. If there is no serious thinking behind the performance, it can upstage rather than compliment the other elements of the presentation. Throughout the contest, the students are ask to distill down the core features which most be present in order to allow their new product to fit coherently within the existing media franchise. Here is their chance to show you how fully they have achieved that goal. Yet, students need to be aware of the importance of underlying what aspects of the performance are in the game and why. Often, students will play interesting music throughout the presentation but not talk explicitly about sound design elements in their pitch.

We now ask the groups to identify a specific audience to which they are pitching the game. This element requires the groups to do their homework on the different companies which produce games, their connections with other media companies, their existing product lines and preferences, the core market to which they are addressing the bulk of their products, and any notable successes or failures which might impact how they think about your particular product. The group working on Spirited Away, for example, chose to address the Japanese branch of Sony, opening with an extended greeting in Japanese, and drawing on what they knew about protocol and business practices in that culture. Most of the information students need to know about the business can be found on the web.

Students search for games that may be similar to what they are proposing and need to know how well they did and what markets they reached. They can find this by reviewing the large number of games-related websites produced by fans, industry insiders, or journalists. They may look up the property that they are drawing upon to conceive the game to see who produced it, how well it did at the box office, and what other connections may exist between the production company and a games-related company. They may look at other games linked to that studio's properties to see which games companies developed and released them. Those with more business interests can look for trends through industry-oriented publications, which might make the company more or less receptive to the kind of game proposed.

When we first started the competition, these business aspects took a back seat to the more aesthetic dimensions of the presentations, but in recent years, we have attracted more and more management students interested in getting into creative industries. The teacher may need to assess her or his own students to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie and decide how much emphasis to place on this aspect of the presentations. Some focus on the industry, however, seems desirable as a way to help students understand the economic contexts in which creative decisions get made (including the impact of concentration of ownership on the current media environment); this focus on factual information also gives incentive for students to work on their research skills and especially their web searching skills, since this up to the minute information is not going to be found in books.

The goal of the pitch is to put together the key elements of the game in a way that is compelling for the audience. Everything students know about presentation skills comes into play during this part of the process. Students need to think about the ordering of elements - so that the information makes sense to the audience as they are hearing it, so that the most compelling elements get the proper degree of attention, and so that the closing drives home the core elements with an extra persuasiveness. The groups need to make sure that they address each of the elements they will be judged upon while not getting bogged down in local details to such a degree that the judges do not get a clear sense of the game as a whole.

Frequently, students divide up the roles in their presentation based on their expertise and enthusiasm for different aspects of the product. Often, they also identify someone who is their best "finisher," that is, some one who has strong sales skills who can drive home the final pitch at the end of the presentation. We do not require every participant to speak, since we see the value of students who are uncomfortable in front of groups making contributions on other levels. This is, however, a philosophical question, which teachers need to consider in the context of their own programs. If the goal is to get students to really hone their presentation skills and get experience speaking in front of groups, the desire to have every student participate in the presentation is greater than if your goal is to focus on brainstorming and conceptual skills.

The presentations are a time for all team members to drop disagreements and work towards the common good. Often, team leaders instruct participants not to contradict each other during the presentation. If a team member gets hit with a question for which they are unprepared, he or she should make up an answer consistent with the overall approach they are taking and then subsequent team members will need to factor that answer into what they say about the game. One year, we had a group which totally failed to reach a consensus to the point that one group member disagreed about the order in which the PowerPoint slides should be presented and kept flicking back and forth throughout the presentation in a distracting fashion, upstaging and confusing his team mates. Needless to say, this group did badly in the competition and much anger was directed against him after they got off stage.

Judging The Presentations

We recommend having 5 or 6 judges, since each judge will see the presentations in slightly different ways and will focus on somewhat different elements. Having a broad based group of judges helps to take the pressure off any one participant and helps to even out any potential biases the judge may feel towards one group or participant. The judges are given a score sheet. We have established ten criteria of evaluation, which are known by the participants in advance. For each category, the judge gives a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Each judge keeps a running tally throughout the day and reserves the right to adjust scores upwards or downwards as they hear subsequent presentations. Judges often have to rethink their responses to the first few presentations, in particular, since they do not have a very clear baseline of expectations at the start of the day. Each group must be judged by every criterion, which means that they may lower their score significantly if they do not directly address one or another aspect. For some reason, students typically offer much more on game play, narrative, and visual design than they do on sound design.

The judges should set their own standards for each category. As long as they are consistent in applying those standards to each group, then their numbers will be correctly weighted in the final score. It doesn't matter if one judge is strict and another lenient since in the end, it is the total score across all of the judges which we use to weigh the teams. But those judges who are too generous in their grading need to realize that they are flattening out the distinctions between the teams.

In our process, we tally the scores to get a straw poll vote of where the judges have aligned themselves. The judges are often surprised by their own overall scores on the different projects. Subjectively, we will weigh some elements more than others in forming our overall impressions of the team. But if we weigh each element equally, we may find a team did better overall without being the best in any particular category. Once we have a set of scores, we then discuss the presentations to make sure we are fully comfortable with where the collective tally breaks. In some cases, we end up with two teams, which are only a few points apart in scoring, well within the margin of error, and we have occasionally had absolute ties on the first stage of the scoring. Talking through the presentations may help us appreciate things we missed the first time through or think more deeply about potential problems in the team's approach. We often will then recalibrate our scores and retally the results.

Another reason why you always discuss the projects among the judges is because ultimately, we see winning and losing the competition as less important than the critique we are able to provide to each team on its work. Talking it through helps us to identify high and low points on each presentation, which will be discussed as we critique their work. Often, we will give secondary awards which foreground what we see as the biggest strength of each presentation, so that each team has some kind of moral victory in the final presentation. So, for example, we may take each of the criteria and decide which team performed best on each, giving out recognition for best visual design, most faithful to the original content, or most innovative approach to narrative.

When the students come back into the room, we go through each group in order offering our critiques of their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, one tries to be tactful in describing flaws in the presentations but we also feel it is important for all participants to have a sense of how the judges responded to each presentation. Doing the critiques first keeps students focused on what we are saying since they are looking for clues into which group may have pleased the judges the most. Usually, we have one judge designated to lead the critique of each group with the others jumping in as needed to elaborate on key points. It is important for the students to hear how a range of different judges with different types of expertise and backgrounds responded to their projects.

Typically, we spend 5-10 minutes on each group; trying to be even in the amount of time we spend on each. At the end of the process, we then announce the superlatives assigned to each group and finally, the ultimate winner of the competition. In the MIT context, because of our association with Sony, each member of the winning team receives some moderately priced electronic gadget. All participants in the process receive a certificate and many years, Sony brings a book or video tied to one of their current releases for each participant. Teachers will need to think about what kind of prize is appropriate for their students - perhaps a gift certificate from a local merchant.

Singaporean Girls Gone Wild...

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

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

What's Wrong with Singaporean Teen Bloggers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Internet is not a personal space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Hell and Back...

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

Disrespect for Elders -- heart cut out.

Tomb Robbers - tied to red hot copper piller

Stealing -- frozen into blocks of ice

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

rumors -- tongue pulled out.

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

cheating during examinations -- intestines and organs pulled out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Price of Transgression

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

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

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

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

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

An Aside:

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

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part Two)

Over the past six months, I have been closely following the debates regarding the Deleting Online Predators Act. danah boyd and I issued a collective statement at the beginning of the summer based on our research on social networks and participatory culture. I also ran a post here describing some of the ways that banning youth from accessing MySpace and other social network sites in schools and public library might slow the potential use of blogging and other network software for pedagogical purposes. Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series focused on NetFamilyNews and its editor, Anne Collier. Collier's site has helped parents address their fears about MySpace and has kept all of us on top of the latest developments regarding governmental policies that might restrict young people's access to online space. These policies, and the fears that motivate them, play an important role in today's installment.

Many parents express an anxiety that they can not realistically control the flow of media into their homes, let alone know what their young people are doing when they are outside of their supervision. How would you respond to that concern?

I understand that concern and the frustration many parents have about diminishing control over what their children are exposed to. It isn't just parents who are experiencing diminishing control. Schools, corporations, and governments at all levels of society worldwide are too. This is an unnerving, fascinating shift we're experiencing, and I think it's calling upon all of us to think it through together out loud, bringing a whole lot of skill sets into the discussion. Because the situation seems to be requiring us to figure it out together as we go along. Problems in a participatory medium like Web 2.0 are calling for participatory solution development.

At the family level, as I suggested above, the life and tech skills of parents and kids are both needed to find solutions to Net-related problems. In schools, challenges involving defamation or cyberbullying in blogs or social sites need the best thinking of a bunch of people - students, administrators, counselors, network administrators, school-safety experts, teachers, and sometimes First Amendment legal advisers and law enforcement people. In a way, that's really exciting. It used to be that school-safety people, techies, and counselors, for example, had their spheres and hardly ever talked, much less hammered out solutions together. Now the pooling of those areas of expertise is being demanded, and I can't imagine that there won't be some creative and very positive outcomes because of it. Think, for example, about what we're all going to be learning about free-speech rights. Maybe not since the Constitutional Convention has the First Amendment been such a prominent topic in American schools!

Then I look at what's happening in other parts of the world where people are using the participatory Web. I just blogged about a report in The Guardian that, even though the Iranian government "remains a staunch opponent of Internet freedoms ... Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the Net." There are 70,000-100,000 active blogs in Iran, The Guardian article said. Then there's the social site ChinaKids with 800,000 registered preteen users and sponsored by the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party. The Wall Street Journal reported that the site encourages kids to speak

out, "sometimes against authority"! The question of how to control the flow of media into homes, schools, cybercafes, and kids' mobile phones is being eclipsed by what to do about the media that flows out from those places and devices!

You have readers from around the world. What similarities and differences do you see in the concerns raised by parents in different parts of the world?

I do have readers in more than 50 countries, but I don't get email from many readers outside North America, interestingly - only some in the UK. So I mostly rely on English-language news-media coverage of technology in other countries to know what the general concerns are. It does appear that parents' concerns are fairly universal, but there are degrees of differences. For example, European parents seem to be less concerned than American parents about blocking nudity and more concerned about hate speech on the Web. But cyberbullying is a big issue everywhere. In the UK, Europe and Asia, so far it has been happening more on mobile phones than in IM and social Web sites, as we're seeing here. People are being impersonated and defamed in social sites everywhere. I did hear from a colleague in Portugal about harassment in a US-based social site popular there, one case involving a co-worker and another a teenager whose dad contacted him for help. Someone who said he was a teenager in India emailed me recently about his concern that he was accessing porn too much online, that it would hurt his future prospects. I've seen and linked to news reports of "videogame addiction" in South Korea and counseling centers established to help addicted players. Just a few examples.

One thing's for sure: Social networking sites and all the good and bad happening in them are certainly international. India has nearly a dozen social-networking sites and 1.2 million bloggers (compared to China's 19.9m, Japan's 10m, and the US's 50m), India's Economic Times reports; Japan's Mixi recently had a $1.8 billion IPO; Cyworld has saturated the teen and 20-something market in South Korea and its diaspora, so it launched a US version this past summer; LunarStorm reached the saturation point in Sweden (reportedly 90% of Swedish h.s. students) and launched a UK version - and on and on. So all the stuff that's causing worries here in the US, from bullying to piracy to PC security, is causing similar ones in other countries.

You've written a book specifically addressing adult concerns about MySpace. Why do you think social network sites like MySpace have sparked such anxiety? How real are the dangers that are being claimed?

For grownups, MySpace kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't just for teenagers, of course (only around 20% of its users were teens), but to any parent who knew about it, it was a teenage thing, and my guess is teenagers weren't inclined to tell their parents about this new hangout if they didn't have to. So I don't think it was really on the radar for parents until it was all over the news media as a dangerous place where "predators" could contact their kids. An AP story out of Connecticut last February reported that "at least seven" girls 12-16 had been "sexually assaulted by men they met through the popular Web site MySpace." As far as I could tell following the news coverage closely, parents were hearing nothing about MySpace or social networking that wasn't at least negative, and some of it was really scary. It was that combination of a totally new thing adults knew virtually nothing about and very negative news coverage that sparked such anxiety, I

think. Then, too, there was the '06 election; politicians stood to benefit from saying they would act on those fears. It was, you might say, a "perfect storm" of parental-concern creation. By May, when our publisher, Peachpit Press, asked us to write the book ( My Space Unraveled ), there simply was no balance to the public discussion. We wanted to offer some balance - share the views of teens, researchers, children's advocates, and law enforcement people who understood social networking; encourage parents to check MySpace out themselves with simple step-by-step instructions; and explain the actual risks and the research.

How real are the dangers? There are dangers in social sites for out- there, risk-seeking people just as there are for them in "real life." As Janis Wolak, one of the authors of both of UNH's studies about child online victimization, told me last spring, "Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." The first study was the widely misrepresented one about "one in five children" being sexually solicited online that, when actually read, said that "none of the solicitations led to an actual sexual contact or assault" and many of those solicitations came from other teens. The second study found the number of solicitations had gone down, to one in seven, but - though published this past summer - the survey was conducted before social networking took off. So even the second study from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH wasn't about social networking. What these researchers have found in other studies, though - as Janis indicated - is that it's the young people responding to and seeking out sexual contacts with strangers who are at risk.

Most of the research we have so far - or the most publicized research - is about exploitation of online kids by adults. That's important research to have, but it's only part of the picture. We know almost nothing yet about child and teen behavior on social sites, good and bad, or about the impact of online socializing, media-sharing, social-producing, or creative networking. In our book I call it "collective self-expression," this social aspect of all the mashing-up and remixing that's going on with digital media, and I think it's fascinating. I think it's kind of in its infancy, and we have so much to learn about and from it. In any case, a much more complete picture is needed before any conclusions can possibly be drawn, I feel.

But I digress. ;-) There are other "dangers," depending on a person's definition. Certainly some parents would define exposure to nudity or sexually suggestive content as a danger, and there is definitely greater risk of that than sexual predation in social sites. MySpace says it's deleting x-rated content as it finds it, and it has both scanning technology and staff dedicated to finding and deleting it, but users are posting and finding it. The general Web itself, though, is known to have much more hard-core content than anything I've seen on MySpace, if kids are seeking it out.

The risks that I suspect will affect most young social networkers, though, fall under the very large category of bullying, or social cruelty, which parents and kids have probably always dealt with and always will. Since school social life has moved online, so have bullying, gossip, harassment, etc., and they can be particularly insidious online because the behavior can go on 24x7 and be anonymous. Kids and teens often don't think about the implications of their actions because that part of the adolescent brain, the prefrontal cortex, is still in development, so they can impulsively post text and other media about themselves and others and not be able to control the outcome (see my comment above about the teenage girl emailing sexually explicit photos of herself to a boyfriend). Digital media, parents too need to know, can be cut and pasted into Web pages, attached to IMs and emails, and shared on file-sharing networks - they usually can't be taken back. This, to me, is a real risk that I've been telling parents about in NetFamilyNews for years.

Your site monitors legislation designed to "protect" youth from various perceived dangers of the new media landscape. What do you see as the most pressing trends in this area as we enter 2007?

Better-written laws that reflect understanding of the Internet and its users! Most disturbing to me was the now-defunct Delete Online Predators Act, written before hardly any research had been done on the impact of the social Web on the people it was purportedly written to protect.

The metaphor that occurred to me as I was writing a chapter of our book was Penn Station in New York. A tourist walks into that giant, confusing, fast-paced, populated space at rush hour and feels a sudden urge to look for the nearest exit. That's most adults' first experience of MySpace. But like a MySpace user going straight to his or her page, a commuter just heads to his usual platform, gets on the train and goes home. He doesn't remotely see what the tourist finds so daunting. This is changing now, I think, but when we were working on the book last summer, the tourists were in charge of the entire public discussion; legislation was being written by the tourists! For a balanced picture and sound solution development, we've got to have the commuters' perspective too, I think.

Some parents argue that when in doubt, they should simply prohibit social networking sites. What's wrong with this approach? What do you see as positive about social networking sites?

I don't think prohibition is possible, at least it'd be even harder now and with the Internet than when it was given a serious try in the 1920s and '30s. I talk about this above - it's too easy for kids to "go underground" online, with all the free accounts available to them in sites parents have never heard of, proliferating wired and wireless access points, and new Net-enabled products constantly arriving on store shelves.

We're only just beginning to see the positives, with research like that funded by the MacArthur Foundation. But I think we'll discover many positive developments involving digital media and socializing online. I think of how the Rock for Darfur profile got started on MySpace (see this on "Powerful Change Agents ); of a woman I just met in an airport whose teenage granddaughter first started publishing her poetry on MySpace and has since won a prize for her work; of the ski videos my son shoots, edits, and posts at Newschoolers.com and YouTube.com; of the html and other software code kids are learning while embellishing their pages in social sites; of the youth social activism being fostered at YouthNoise.com; of all the future professional writers who got their start vying for and trying to hold their peers' attention in their daily blogging; of the garage bands that wouldn't otherwise be finding fans and signing record deals.

I often receive letters expressing concern about addiction to digital media. Is this a realistic concern and if so, what steps should parents take if they fear that their teen may be addicted to games, social networks, or other digital media?

I'm not really qualified to answer that, but the question of whether there is such a thing as Internet addiction is getting more and more attention in the medical field (and coverage in the news media). In November the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the subject , reporting that an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal published a study that "claimed to be the first large-scale look at excessive Internet use," and "the American Psychiatric Association may consider listing Internet addiction in the next edition of its diagnostic manual." I just talked with a 16-year-old in New York State who loves playing World of Warcraft (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and says he spends 3 hours a night on school nights and 5 a day on weekends playing it, but - from communicating with both him and his librarian mom (who sounds like a great mom) - it doesn't sound like he's addicted. His mother says she's not thrilled by the amount of time he spends in WoW and his grades have gone down a bit, so there will probably be some repercussions, but there are things about his experience with the game that she likes too.

"Game addiction" is coming up more and more. South Korea opened its first game-addiction treatment center in 2002, and the Washington Post reported last June that the country had just launched a game addiction hotline. Europe's first game addiction clinic reportedly opened last summer in Amsterdam (here's an item I ran on it last June last June ).

How much should parents know about the online lives of their youth? Is there a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive?

I do think parents need to know enough about the online part of their children's lives to feel assured that it's safe and reasonably constructive. The best gauge is probably how much parents feel they need to know about their kids' offline social lives. The online part is just as individual. And it changes as young people mature, right? The responsibility for staying safe and assessing risk increasingly shifts from parent to child as the latter grows; that's no different in their online lives, I'd say.

I think there can be a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive, but it's different for every child. Some parents seem to want to remove all risk from their teenagers' lives. So - having heard from a couple of researchers that risk assessment is one of the primary tasks of adolescence and having quoted them in our book - I later asked a prominent pediatrician what he thought about this risk- removal tendency, and he very definitely said we're doing our children a disservice if we don't let them do that assessment work that helps develop their brains.

Much of the legislation that seeks to "protect" youth gets argued on the basis of protecting childhood innocence and yet gets applied to regulating the conduct of adolescents. What role should an understanding of child development play in developing meaningful response to the online lives of our offspring?

My co-author Larry Magid recently quipped that the Delete Online Predators Act was more like the Delete Online Kids Act - in the sense that it would've done nothing to "delete" predators but rather focused on banning kids from social sites in schools and libraries. The legislation that Sens. McCain and Schumer just announced they would be introducing this year is clearly aimed at keeping out predators, because it would require sex offenders to register email addresses and other online contact information in addition to offline data such as phone numbers. This makes sense if it succeeds in extending existing child-protection law into cyberspace. It seems based on what is already known and understood, but I still think more child-development expertise needs to be folded into the public discussion and lawmaking. These have been dominated so far by law enforcement and research on criminal behavior online. There are some wonderful cops out there doing fine child-protection and online-crime-prevention work, but we do badly need to broaden and balance the discussion. For example, state attorneys general have called for age verification of minors in social-networking sites, but they haven't seemed inclined to entertain a full discussion about the implications for children's privacy, and the subject of social networking became so negative and associated with predators late last year that social-networking companies were reluctant to take any position on best practices that might counter-balance politically based regulatory efforts.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part One)

I've spent a fair amount of time in this blog talking about the challenges of educating the next generation of youth so that they acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the emerging media culture. Much of this discussion inevitably centers around what happens in school-based or after-school media literacy programs. But, as I wrote in Technology Review some years ago, media literacy begins in the home. Parents have an essential role to play in helping their young people make sense of the new media landscape and giving them the ethical foundations they need to make meaningful decisions when they go on line. Unfortunately, we offer parents very little guidance on how to perform those roles. Indeed, most of the advice literature can be reduced to a simple message: the less media your kids consume, the better off they are. I don't think this is very good advice for a number of reasons: it reduces media consumption to a social problem rather than recognizing the pedagogical benefits of actively participating in media culture. Such advice, which often talks about media in terms of "screen time," produces enormous anxieties, anxieties which in turn get fed by sensationalistic news reports, shoddy research, and culture war rhetoric from political leaders, until parents are left terrified of this online world that they often know little about and totally uncertain where to turn for thoughtful advice. I often speak to groups of MIT alum as I travel around the country and inevitably, no matter what the topic of my talk is, the questions circle around the anxieties these highly educated and thoughtful adults feel about their children's relaitons to mass and digital media. In many cases, even a little bit of information will calm their fears and offer them another way of thinking about these issues. One of the best places for parents to turn for information about the world young people are encountering and creating for themselves online is a site called NetFamilyNews.com. Here's how the site describes its beat:

* Online safety and privacy news and tools

* New technologies and Web resources for kids

* Research about the impact of digital media on kids

* Legislation affecting children's online experience

* School and library Net-use policy

* How Web-literate kids, parents, and teachers are using the Internet.

Today and tomorrow, I am going to be sharing an interview with Anne Collier, who identifies herself as a journalist and children's advocate. Collier offers a sensible middle ground perspective on the issues which concern contemporary parents: she recognizes both the risks and potentials of these new media, helping parents to see past the sensationalism and focus on the matters they need to really be concerned about. Collier also recently published a significant book dealing specifically with social network sites and young people, MySpace Unraveled: What It Is and How to Use it Safely, and so many of my questions here are designed to draw her out about the specific issues surrounding children's involvement with Web 2.0.

I am excited to call this important online resource to the attention of this blog's readers. I hope you enjoy her down to earth perspective on youth and media as refreshing as I do.

What led you to create Net Family News? What needs do you think it fills for your readers?

A couple of colleagues actually thought of the idea of a monthly email newsletter for parents in mid-'97 and asked me to write it but lost interest in the project after a while and moved on. I felt strongly it needed to continue because it was the only "community newspaper" I knew of serving an increasingly important interest community, so I renamed the newsletter NetFamilyNews, made it a weekly, and incorporated it as a nonprofit organization in '99. Later I added a daily blog and RSS feed to increase accessibility. But it was really just a blog before there were blogs - annotated links to news of tech-parenting relevance.

As for needs being filled: NFN is a news filter for busy parents, educators, children's advocates, etc. I feel it's helpful for people working directly with tech-literate kids to know what's going on "out there," have a sense of context and maybe solidarity. It's almost a cliché now that young people are more tech-literate than their parents. That's true in many cases, but it's also true, and apparently less obvious, that adults and young people use the same technologies differently, and adult Net users make incorrect assumptions about teen Net use. IM at the office is a different experience than IM among middle schoolers. So all these teen tech "anthropology" stories in newspapers and magazines around the world about how teenagers are using Lunarstorm, Bebo, MySpace, Cyworld, IM, mobiles, There.com, and World of Warcraft are, I hope, frequent reminders of and insights into a perspective that can help adults intelligently negotiate this part of parenting and policymaking.

In cases where parents are intimidated by child tech literacy, information is empowering. When I started doing this I saw parents as a "silent majority" in a vital public discussion. I don't think that has changed much, actually. They're still a silent majority, and people are writing laws that would affect their children, the implications of which I think neither the legislators nor the constituents fully understand. So, I figured, people need information before they can have a voice and become active participants, and parents are essential parties to this particular discussion. So "community news" was a start. The next step was our forum, at the moment called BlogSafety.com (we're working on a more enduring name), where people could talk about all this publicly at their convenience. I wrote the mission statement for it back in 1998 but couldn't find funding until social-networking sites saw too that parents needed a place to air their concerns and get answers other than their customer- service departments.

How well do you think the mainstream media covers the issues which concern parents about Web 2.0? What do you gain by addressing these issues through the web?

I think the mainstream media, particularly the big names and mostly print (but also some broadcast) - the New York Times, the Associated Press, USATODAY, the Boston Globe, Business Week, WSJ, NPR, the BBC, etc. - have been doing a great job of covering Web 2.0 developments but not so much Web 2.0 where youth is concerned. I try to alert parents to the implications for kids and families of what tech journalists cover. For example, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry recently took a thoughtful look at virtual communities as another kind of "third place," or hang out, as first considered by Prof. Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Jason wasn't writing about what these places mean to teenagers, but I thought parents might be interested in a piece about how important they have long been to people of all ages (online hanging out is really not a big leap), so I linked to it. That's just one example. There are zillions of topics - recent ones include reports and press releases all over the Web about new social-networking sites and "niches"; a New York Times report on how police are incorporating social sites into their investigative work; coming state and federal about barring sex offenders from social sites; the BBC on how a third of 8-to-13-year-olds in the UK already swap tunes on their phones ; and MTV's "The N," mobile social site Mbuzzy.com, and a market research firm teaming up to turn teen users into "a panel of 10,000 young people for immediate feedback about their lifestyles as well as network programming, advertising, events and other information."

As for what I gain from this project: I'm basically a beat reporter, given (or choosing) an interesting assignment and getting increasingly interested and invested in it as time goes on. Youth and the Internet is the assignment of a lifetime. I got my MA in East Asian studies, focusing on China, and did some TV and print reporting from Asia - which would've been a fascinating, beat right now - but in the early '90s the story that I found truly compelling was the Web. It seemed clear to me it was going to be a story about every part of life - "human interest," education, law, media, business, politics.... I wanted to follow this story for the long term in a way that might be useful to other people too.

Much of the existing advice literature for parents implies that the best advice is to minimize the amount of media children and youth consume and to keep screen technologies out of their bedrooms. What do you see as the limits of this approach?

That second basic bit of advice isn't all bad. My own common sense as a parent suggests to me that keeping screen technologies in high- traffic parts of the house is a good idea if it helps parents to be more aware of and engaged in their children's online experiences. I doubt anybody disagrees that awareness and involvement are good things, where kids' social lives are concerned, online and offline.

General safety tips - like keeping connected computers out of kids' bedrooms - have their place and usefulness (because of the simplicity they suggest, and adults need to know parenting online kids is not rocket science!), but I think anything that suggests parents can completely control their children's media exposure or Internet access is getting less realistic or practical. As the number of access points, devices providing access, and kids' workarounds multiply, we probably need to think more in terms of communication and guidance. "Just say no" and kids can simply go into stealth mode (e.g., set up a new, harder-to-find account from a friend's house or at some drive- by wireless hot spot in the neighborhood), which is increasingly easy for them as access points proliferate; delete an account and six more profiles or blogs can appear in its place in the same or any of hundreds of other social sites.

Another limitation of rules and tips is that they really only reach those who want to comply with them. It has gotten very easy to be noncompliant. I mentioned workarounds above, and there are all kinds - from proxy services that allow kids to visit sites blocked by filters to friends' houses with different Internet rules or absent parents to accessing the Web from anywhere on Web-enabled cell phones. So more thought needs to be given to how to protect kids not reached by safety tips and rules - how to educate them to protect themselves.

What kinds of things worry parents the most about web 2.0? How legitimate are those concerns?

My guess is that, if they aren't talking with their kids about their Net activity and are relying on local TV news or Oprah, they're worried about "predators" on the social networks. They're a factor to be aware of but way over-hyped, politicized, and reported out of context. I'm aware of no comparative research on this, but my close observer's take on the risks of online socializing is that cyberbullying or online harassment and negative self-exposure will affect a great many more young people than sexual predation.

About a year ago a youth officer and detective in Connecticut emailed me about a story that hadn't made it into the local paper, and he felt parents would want a heads-up. A 13-year-old girl in his community had emailed sexually explicit images of herself to a boyfriend. The boy soon became an ex-boyfriend who had shared his account password with a friend, who in turn proceeded to find and post those images on a Web page, then to share the URL with students at their school. The page was shut down, but not before "everyone" had seen it. It's that kind of age-old awful teenage "prank" that can now be so damagingly public in online digital media. Mild versions of that story - basically everyday middle and high school life, happening all over the Web - are being eclipsed by media like Dateline's endless Predator series, which isn't even about the Internet but is reflexively associated with misrepresentations of statistics like the "1 in 7 kids sexually solicited online" out of the University of New Hampshire (people who study that data say most of those solicitations are coming from peers, and none of the "1 in 5" of the original 2000 study on the subject resulted in sexual assaults).

Another risk that has gotten almost no reporting but I think will be getting more attention is what I'd call negative online reinforcement of risky offline behavior, such as eating disorders, self-mutilation, and substance abuse - young people finding support on the social Web for their harmful behaviors. We increasingly need to fold a great deal of offline expertise into the "online safety" discussion - adults who work with youth who have expertise in these behaviors. Actually, the term "online safety" will probably soon go away, as the online/offline distinction collapses. Also, our children the digital natives will be parents before long, right? So they will naturally be thinking more holistically about safety and privacy than we adults are right now.

One other thought: We really don't know how much of the (to parents) disturbing teenage behavior we're seeing on the social Web is really new and how much of it has always been a reality but is just more public all of a sudden. This exposure is probably mostly good. Parents, researchers, psychologists, and child-development experts have a lot more material to work with and learn from; suddenly they can be flies on the wall like never before (for a while, anyway - some teens are aware of this and using privacy tools more, others don't really care). Some school crises reportedly are being prevented because of threats found online. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us last June that, since it established its profile in MySpace, that site's users have become the hotline's largest source of calls - lives are being saved because of its presence in MySpace.

All this exposure itself probably also affects individual and social behavior in some ways, maybe a little along the lines of the Heisenberg theory with all those observers out there affecting the "experiment," and it'll be very interesting to see what coming research tells us about that.

Are there some general principles parents should apply in making decisions about their youth's relations to new media?

Really just the one about how the line between online and offline is blurring for young people, so it makes great sense to apply a family's ethics and values and what one has always known about plain old parenting to the online part of children's lives. The same goes for academic ethics and citizenship. For example, discussions about plagiarism and respecting copyrights (as we watch copyright law evolve!) need to embrace online media use. We want our children to use good judgment about who they socialize with on Friday night; the same goes for who they spend time with online, who's on their friends or buddy lists, right? We ask them questions like who's driving them home, or whether there will be hundreds of people at that party; we can ask them things like whether they know all 375 people on their friends lists, if they're careful about what they click on in IMs, emails, and Web pages, if they use privacy features, and what music they use in the videos they upload to media-sharing sites.

It's getting harder to generalize. Sites like MySpace on Web 2.0, the participatory Web, the user-driven Web - whatever people want to call it - are really whatever any user wants or creates them to be. The profile is a reflection of its owner, is his/her online "self," as is each user's experience in virtual worlds such as Second Life or There, I've learned from researchers such as danah boyd at Cal Berkeley and David Huffaker at Northwestern. So family rules and school policies more tailored to the individual or, at most, to the community are more effective than general rules or federal laws, I think.

In talks, I tell parents that this is about life, not technology. Of course there are some general principles that make all of life better (in fact, they're probably even more important in the more anonymous environment the Net represents), such as the ethic of reciprocity in virtually all the world's faith traditions, or the Golden Rule, as Christians call it. We're all talking about the First Amendment and intellectual property a lot now, which I think is great; maybe Web 2.0 is also presenting us - all the Web's participants - with a prime opportunity to be talking about behavioral ethics and citizenship.

Many parents worry that their children know more about new media than they do. What advice might you have for such parents?

Not just about new media! A friend and educator in the L.A. Unified School District said recently that kids know so much more about just about everything than we did as kids that teachers' jobs are changing. As much as giving students information, they're helping them figure out what to make of it. He said it better than I can, but I think he was simply stating the new reality. Adults have street smarts or life literacy, youth has tech smarts or literacy - one could see these as complementary skills, presenting an opportunity to strengthen parent-child communication and mutual respect. Ask them what they know, turn them into the family CTO, set the preferences in IM software together, ask questions that aren't about confrontation and control but are instead aimed at understanding their online experience and helping them use good judgment online in it.

It's also important to tell our children our concerns and why we have them - not constantly, but clearly and effectively (calmly). I understand if that sounds ingenuous to parents who have uncommunicative teenagers - that has always been a challenge - but I don't think parents can afford to view teenage tech competency as purely negative. If they do, there is a risk of marginalizing themselves even more, from a teen's perspective.

He's Back....!

Didja Miss Me? This week, I am blogging from Singapore so the dates and times of posting are going to be all over the map. When I write will have more to do with my state of jet lag than anything else. I am here, as regular readers will have predicted, doing some ground work for the launch of the MIT-Singapore Games Lab this summer -- as well as giving a big public lecture about Convergence Culture.

I haven't blogged in a little over a week -- it feels like much longer. I can't tell you how deeply blogging has gotten under my skin over the past six months. I am coming back from even this brief break bursting with new ideas which I want to share with my readers. I spent a good hour on the flight just scrawling out some notes about what I might talk about over the next month. And I had already lined up four or five new interviews which I will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

For a long time, I had resisted the impulse to blog out of fear that it would take over my life. It has certainly filled a number of very important needs for me both personally and professionally. My eyes start to roll and fire sparks out of my mouth -- like Mr. Toad in Disney's version of The Wind in the Willow -- whenever anyone starts to talk to me about blogging.

I know when I started this blog some people misread me to suggest I was only going to do this for a short while -- as a publicity stunt for Convergence Culture. I hope by now I have convinced you -- and me -- that I am in this for the long haul. I am still struggling with whether I can maintain the five days a week pace I kept over the academic term. But I am going to keep doing this for a long time to come.

Let me begin the year by congratulating You (us?) or being chosen as Time Magazine's Person of the Year!

Time closed the year with two issues in a row which more or less summed up the themes and ideas we've been discussing here since June. First (December 18), they did a cover story on "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century." The central focus of the story is the release of the report, "Tough Choices for Tough Times," by the New Commission on Skills in the American Workplace. The report argues that American schools have not kept pace with the times and are not preparing young people to be competitive in a global economy where creativity, innovation, media literacy, and social networking skills represent the edge needed to succeed. In many ways, I was struck by the close parallels between what Time identifies as key themes in this report and the kinds of social skills and cultural competencies we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation.

Here are a few excerpts from Time's story:

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy--the ones that won't get outsourced or automated--"put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that's been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations--design and technology, mathematics and art--"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

In other words, the report places a new value on being able to access and meaningfully process new sources of information, being able to participate in social networks and knowledge communities, and being able to think creatively and act globally.

One can't help but note that these are the same skills which are emerging through the kinds of activities which Time documented the following week in its cover story naming You the Person of the Year:

Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos--those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms--than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses--its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses--but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Our schools are failing to teach these skills -- indeed, these are the kinds of meaningful activities that are being killed off as schools are facing increased pressure to insure that their young charges perform well on the standardized tests which are the legacy of No Child Left Behind. But these are the kinds of skills that many young people are acquiring outside of school through their engagement with MySpace and Facebook, YouTube and Second Life, Wikipedia and Flickr, and all of the other kinds of web 2.0 activities that Time is celebrating. Time does a pretty good job identifying the different strands of contemporary social computing -- though it still has a tendency to focus on expressive individuals rather than on grassroots communities, despite its opening rhetoric about moving us from a focus on great men to a focus on the creativity of a democratic culture. It's odd, under the circumstances, that Time didn't do more to draw attention to the link between the two stories -- the idea that these informal learning cultures or what James Paul Gee calls affinity spaces might be the seedbed for the new educational culture which is being advocated by the big Washington think tanks.

Of course, recognizing the value of these various activities is only the first step because then we have to confront what I have been calling the participation gap -- the gap in experiences (and the social connections and cultural knowledge which comes along with those experiences) between those who have easy access to new media technologies at every moment of the day and those who have restricted access through schools and public libraries. If we accept that the world of tomorrow will require those skills we are learning through playing around on web 2.0, then we need to figure out how to insure that every child in America has a chance to explore and develop those skills inside and outside of school. I have said it before and I will say it again: if the key debates in American culture in the 1990s seemed to circle around issues of privacy, the key debates for the 21st century will center on participation.

On my flight over to Singapore, I finally caught up with a great documentary produced by Zoe Silver and hosted by Alan Yentob for the BBC 1, herecomeseveryone.co.uk, which covers much the same ground as the Time magazine cover story -- including thoughts about Wikipedia, blogging, MySpace, YouTube, and Second Life, among other topics and featuring a who's who of the key thinkers on social media, including Clay Shirkey, David Weinberger, Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, the Arctic Monkeys, Chris Anderson, and ahem, Henry Jenkins. It is the kind of documentary that I wish would get produced for American television -- and barring that, I wish would get aired on public broadcasting here. Oddly enough, it hasn't left much of a trace on the web -- though the blog, Feeling Listless has created a pretty comprehensive resource page about the people who get interviewed or discussed in the program. I am mostly featured talking about blogging, which brings me back to where I started this.

Not surprisingly, the BBC picked up on an analogy I drew between what is today a little known social movement in England during World War II, The Mass Observation movement, and the role which blogs play in contemporary culture. There's surprisingly little about the movement in Wikipedia but here's what they tell us:

Mass-Observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires. They also paid investigators to record people's conversation and behavior at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events.

The early prime movers behind Mass Observation were anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Collaborators included the critic William Empson, the photographer Humphrey Spender, the collagist Julian Trevelyan, and the painters William Coldstream and Graham Bell.

Mass Observation has a special place in the history of participatory culture and in the politics of everyday life. As Wikipedia tells us, the goal of the Mass Observation movement had been to record, in as much detail as possible, the everyday lives of Brits in the period during and following the Second World War. They took copious notes on what people ate, what they had in their closets, what they talked about, and these records have become an incredibly valuable resource for social historians. One of the challenges of the mass observation movement was scale - even with more than 500 untrained volunteers contributing, how can you really sample the diversity of life even within a single culture. There was also a methodological concern raised by academic researchers about subjectivity -- can untrained people really chronicle their own real life practices?

We might see Live Journal as continuing this tradition of Mass Observation. Taken as a whole, it is an incredible social document of our thoughts, our everyday lives, our sexual practices, our fantasies, our conversational topics, etc. at the dawn of the 21st century. One can scarcely call LJ a movement. It's hard to imagine a future Wikipedia essay telling us who its leaders were or even what its goals were in the way that it is possible to recount who led the Mass Observation movement. The issue of scalability has shifted in the other direction: the problem isn't collecting enough data; it is processing the sheer volume of information which has been recorded. A researcher could spend their lifetime simply trying to mine the amount of data produced on Live Journal in a single day.

I think about Mass Observation, though, whenever I hear people protest about whether anyone is really interested in reading hundreds of people describe their relationship to their cats or whatever else the pundits want to reduce LJ content to. In fact, there has been a long tradition of efforts by everyday people to document their own experiences as part of a historical record for future generations -- as a way of preserving and remarking upon the details of everyday life and ordinary existence. What blogs do, what LJ does is, in that sense, not new -- though what is remarkable is the scale on which it is occurring.

So, congratulations, You, for becoming Time's Person of the Year. Time's cover suggests just how central the idea of participatory culture has been to popular discourse in 2006. Let's hope that we continue to push to reform society to defend our right to participate.

Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006

This will be my last blogpost of 2006. By agreement with my family, I am going to take next week off, spending as little time online as humanly possible, and relaxing after the end of a term which has included at least 16 talks outside my home institution (and quite a few inside) as well as a period of six months during which I have made more than 165 blog posts. I think I have earned a short break. But have no fear, I will be back ready and rearing for conversation by early next year. I've already lined up some great interviews and have some cool topics in mind. There will also be some cool new announcements from the Comparative Media Studies community. Never a dull moment around here. I want to use this last post to provide a few updates and announcements -- especially concerning the podcasts of our events --- and then share a few thoughts about my recent venture into Teen Second Life thanks to the help of Barry Joseph and the other fine folks at Global Kids. (And I promise to answer or at least explain the title question by the end of this post).

CMS Announcements

We now have all but one of the webcasts of the Future of Entertainment conference up on line. That last one should be up soon.

We promised a while back that we would have a webcast version of Jesper Juul's talk, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" and that podcast went up earlier today. We are experimenting here -- and in the Futures of Entertainment content -- with video podcasting. All feedback on these efforts would be welcome.

I wanted to flag an upcoming event. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

The dates for this year's event will be Jan. 29-Feb.2.

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants. If you are interested in joining us, contact me at henry3@mit.edu. More details will be coming early next year.

Now About the Beard.

From the start, my beard seemed to be the object of fascination and speculation among the teens at Second Life. Barry Joseph told me about this interest following my participation in the MacArthur Foundation's announcement event earlier this term. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted my own avatar so I could enter Second Life and interact with these youth. One of them wanted to know how long it took me to grow my beard. In truth, that's not an easy question to answer. I have had a beard since I left the University of Iowa to start my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin. This means I have not shaved it off completely in almost 20 years. We have watched it grow from black to salt and pepper to grey over that time. Yet, since hair continually replaces itself, it is hard to know how long I have been growing the particular beard follicles which are currently attached to my face.

At one time, we even jokingly discussed making my beard available for distribution on Second Life, though so far this hasn't happened. Part of the issue is to figure out which beard length might be most popular -- the tightly trimmed Henry beard at the start of the term or the long and shaggy one by the end when my schedule has kept me from getting to a barbershop for a trim.

Last Wedsday night, I made my live public appearance on the Global Kids island in Teen Second Life to talk about games, learning, and popular culture. I wasn't surprised when one of the first questions I got asked was when and if I would have my beard put up in cornrows. It is an interesting question -- and one I am pondering deeply as I enter into the Holiday season. So, here's the heart of my response: I welcome any and all attempts to digitally doctor photographs of my beard. I especially throw this out as a challenge to teens in Second Life. If you want to use Photoshop to cornrow a picture of my beard or if you want to fix the beard on my avatar to have a funkier do, then it's fair game. And I promise to share the results here on the blog early next year. Think of it as a technical challenge: how to cornrow Henry's Beard.

My students have long tested their skills against the iconic quality of my persona --dressing up in Henry's costumes (complete with "suspenders of disbelief"), using Barbie Fashion Designer to put me in drag, doing graffiti on photographs of my bald head. So I welcome anyone from Teen Second Life to do their stuff!

How's this for the perfect narcissistic scenario: Last Saturday, I tried out my new avatar for the first time by beaming myself onto a desert corner of the Global Kids Island. I was going to stay for just a minute, try to work through some of the control mechanisms, make sure the connection works. There was no one else in the entire world that I saw on the screen. And then, out of nowhere, someone walks up and says "Are you really Henry Jenkins?" It turns out to be Mariel, a teenaged girl from Mexico City, who has been using some of her work for a school assignment. So, here we are: only two people in the whole world on a Saturday afternoon and one of them turns out to be a fan! It's probably the only time in my life that I hit 100% market recognition! It turns out that Mariel, who introduced me at the event on Wedsday, and asked really probing and intellectually sophisticated questions, is one of the closest readers of my work I've met in some time.

People have asked me why I wanted an avatar for my appearance on Second Life. This goes back to the meaning of the word, Avatar, which is a metaphor which has gotten lost as the word has taken on such common usage. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST: avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means "descent" (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God.

I remind us of this meaning half-ironically. I don't mean to imply that I am somehow a divine being taking earthly form. Rather, I mean to critique what happens when adult speak to youth much of the time. I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the MacArthur event because we -- the panelists -- were speaking from another order of representation (cinematically) in a world occupied by virtual beings. I wanted to get down to the same level (socially, representationally) with the community I was talking with. I think this is a real issue. Too often, adults talk about kids, maybe even speak to youth, but they don't talk with them. And becoming an avatar seemed like the best way to signal my desire to speak on the same level with my audience. Anyway, it made sense to me.

The whole experience was amazing. I will let you listen to the actual exchange which has been recorded and put on line if you wish. There's also a really wonderful video of highlights of the event which is now in circulation on YouTube. Frankly, I come off sounding much more coherent in the video than I did at the time. There was something truly overwhelming about the whole experience.

For one thing, I really am a newbie and so moving around in that body -- and indeed, remembering to keep moving -- was a challenge for me. At one point, I accidentally flew up, planted myself on the top of a sign suspended over the event, and couldn't figure out how to get down. I've had embarrassing experiences speaking before but none like that. At another point, I just slumped over in my chair because I didn't remember to keep poking at my avatar. There's a high learning curve here and doing your learning in public eye can be awkward. My students are talking about creating an animation sequence which has my characteristic hand gestures. Nobody has ever seen me speak for long without gesticulating wildly. I've got a ways to go before I blend fully and comfortably into my avatar but I was really taken with the sense of presence I felt interacting with all of the people attending the event from remote locations.

I kept getting distracted by the sheer array of avatars in attendance -- characters from anime, dancing Pandas in Ninja costumes, a monster from Will Wright's Spore... At one point I made a reference to the struggles City of Heroes had with Marvel over the fact that players might use their character design tools to create a knockoff of the Incredible Hulk and then looked out a moment later to find someone in the audience had turned themselves into the Hulk. And I was blown away by the fact that my avatar has much better moves on the dance floor than I've ever managed to master. He's one cool dude and I am, well, not. So, all in all, it was an amazing experience but I was not at my most articulate as one thing or another distracted me mid-sentence.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and to everyone who turned out to enjoy the show. I hope to have more chances to interact in Second Life in the coming year.

And to all of you who have read and contributed to the blog this year, thanks -- and best wishes on the holiday season.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Five): Interview with Eric Zimmerman

A while back, I ran a series of interviews with Manifesto Games's Greg Costikyan (Part One, Part Two) and Indiecade's Stephanie Barish (Part One, Part Two) talking about the current efforts to spark an independent games movement. Both of them offered some unique perspectives about what independent games are, why they matter, how they fit within the current games culture, and what steps need to be taken to promote more experimentation and innovation in game design. I plan to continue this series from time to time with other interviews which showcase innovators, experimentors, and entrepreneurs who are helping to build the independent games movement. Eric Zimmerman was the person who introduced me to the concept of an independent game some years ago and his work for GameLab consistently embodies for me the experimental mindset I associate with this particular category of cultural production. I run into Zimmerman four or five times a year at various conferences and consistently find him an engaging personality and a lively thinker. As long as I have known him, Zimmerman is someone who has consistently pushed us to broaden our definition of what games can do and who has proceeded to prototype, build, and market games that expand our conception of this still emerging medium. Eric Zimmerman would rank high on anyone's list of the top game theorists -- Rules of Play remains probably the best book written to date about game design and is rapidly emerging as perhaps the most widely taught text in the emerging field of games studies. What gives his ideas about game design such credability is the ways he has put them into action, working with his smart team of fellow designers, through projects like Arcadia, Diner Dash, Loop, Blix, and Sisyfight 2000, among other Game Lab titles. Every Gamelab game has a point -- as we discuss here -- an underlying theoretical question which drives the design process. Each one contributes something vital to our understanding of the medium as well as illustrating that there are a whole lot more different kinds of play and fun that the marketing department of Electronic Arts might care to imagine. The GameLab titles are the best case I can imagine for the value of producing and distributing games outside of the major studios. I will be running this interview over the next two days. The first part deals mostly with the issue of independent games and with the ways GameLab approaches its business. The second part digs deeper into the Game Designer project which Zimmerman is developing with Katie Salen and James Paul Gee -- which promises to be a significant part of the new Digital Learning and Youth project recently launched by the McArthur Foundation.

You have been a longtime advocate of the independent games movement. How do you

define independent games and what do they bring to games culture?

The idea of "independent games" is a slippery but important concept. I think there are a number of ways to consider what they are - I like to use the notion of independent film as a way of thinking through what indie games might be.

On the one hand, it's possible to think about independent film as something which is small-scale in terms of scope of production - a homemade film project on a shoestring budget, as opposed to a major studio release. Related to this is another definition of independent film, which refers to the ways that a movie is funded and distributed - perhaps funded through an arts grant, and distributed via festivals, instead of more mainstream means. Lastly, an independent film might be seen as something which questions the conventions of mainstream cinema through its form or content - from avant-garde experiments to political documentary.

There are other ways of conceiving of independent cinema as well, but these three (production, business, & design) help describe some of the challenges of creating independent games. The game industry is a cultural field that is currently dominated by large-scale games that cost $10 to $20 million or more to create, games that are funded by large corporations, distributed through the bottlenecks of retail, and are largely genre-generic titles. At Gamelab (a company I founded in 2000 with Peter Lee), we try and address these questions, making small-scale experimental games that are still commercially viable.

To me it is less important to define exactly what independent games are and instead figure out how to create innovative games that expand the boundaries of digital games, a form of culture that is only a few decades old and still has vast spaces for experimentation and invention.

What do you see as the major factors enabling or hindering the emergence of the

independent games movement at the present time?

We are more or less stuck in the middle.

It is certainly possible to create new kinds of games through traditional big-money funding and major studio production - Will Wright and his very large team at Maxis are doing some fantastic work along those lines. On the other hand, there are plenty of players and amateur designers creating levels and mods, and games as a form are great at engendering this kind of productive fan culture.

But at my company Gamelab we've chosen a middle route. For our purposes, as a studio with a staff of 35, we need to figure out how to make independent games that are in the middle between huge retail titles and freeware fan culture and still be commercially viable. To solve this problem, we've been attacking it from all the angles I mentioned in my response to the first question - how to keep games small but something that will still generate revenue; how to get these games funded and distributed; and how to explore new kinds of content, aesthetics, and gameplay.

There aren't any easy answers. For example, some look to the business model of downloadable games. [Sometimes called "casual games" - although I personally despise that term, as what musician would say that she creates "casual music"?!] The model of downloadable games seems promising - at first. It allows smaller games to be distributed to a very large audience over the internet. However, the major game portals are surprisingly conservative about what they will put up on their sites. And as a whole, downloadable games are generally quite generic and often shameless clones of other games - hardly a burgeoning sector full of gameplay innovation and cultural insight. Right now there aren't any perfect contexts for independent games.

On your website, you suggest that project-based funding may be a key economic

model for the independent games movement. Explain. What does this mean and how

does it change the way games get made?

Well, at least it sounds good on paper!

Generally, a game development company like Gamelab does not have the money to pay for its own games to be created. The most traditional route for finding this money would be for us to work with a publisher, who funds our games, and then also markets and distributes them. Because of the nature of most game publishing contracts, it is difficult for developers to earn healthy royalties from this kind of deal, even if a game is successful.

Another possibility would be getting venture capital investment, in which individuals or organizations invest in the company, and then own a piece of it. The hope of the investors is that the company will go public (which is unlikely for a game developer) or be purchased by a large publisher or other company (somewhat more likely). We have resisted this scenario so far because our independence is important to us - becoming the kept studio of a large publisher would curtail the kind of experiments we want to explore.

So working with Ruth Charny, an independent film producer, we cooked up a third option, which is project-based financing, a funding model borrowed from the film industry. In project-based financing, investors invest only in one project, or possibly a slate of projects, rather than in Gamelab as a whole. They earn back their money (and hopefully some profits) directly from the revenue the games generate. Gamelab in this scenario is acting like the publisher, marketing and distributing the games.

We have gotten three downloadable games funded in this manner, each with a different partner. We are working with NYC-based animation studio Curious Pictures to create Out of Your Mind, a game about little creatures inside everyone's heads; an individual investor funded a game called Work, a parody of office life; and we partnered with LEGO to create an original, somewhat psychedelic game called LEGO Fever.

Luckily, the process of distributing downloadable games is much easier than distributing them through retail, so it is something that Gamelab can manage on its own - although we will also be working with partners to get the games on cell phones and in retail boxes. It has been difficult to find project-based investors, however. My feeling is that in 10 or 15 years, when there are enough wealthy people that believe games are an important cultural form, we'll see a boom in independent games. Right now, however, the people that invest in independent film aren't gamers and don't see the glamour or importance of games.

We recently participated in an online forum discussing whether games are art.

You offered an interesting response, distinguishing between design and art.

What do you see as the value of understanding games as a field of design? Why

do you resist the concept that games might be considered art?

Henry, Henry, Henry...! I don't resist the concept that games might be considered art. I resist the naïve way that most game developers themselves conceive of the concept of "Art." I recently attended a think tank-style weekend gathering that included many amazing game developers. As we discussed the future of game design, a common note in the conversations was a lamentation of the eternal, oppositional relationship between art and commerce.

Even a little study of art history reveals that for the past 500 years (at least!), the creation of culture has been intimately intertwined with economics. Although today's game developers work with cutting-edge technologies, they cling to a pre-Modern, Romantic idea of cultural production, one that I believe hampers the creation of games that are more relevant to our contemporary times. Games don't have to be self-contained Renaissance windows into coherent narrative universes. In fact, play is always already self-referential and metacommunicative (referencing Gregory Bateson).

For me "design" (instead of "Art") is a way of thinking about game creation that sidesteps these thorny issues. Design in my mind is associated with problem solving rather than with the expression of the artist's inner life. It is also a mode of cultural production that acknowledges the importance of integrated research and an iterative, playtesting-based process. The naïve version of "Art" too often implies a solitary visionary being internally inspired, something at odds with a healthy game development process.

But ultimately the distinction between art and design is more of a tactical one for me than a definitional one. I want to see game developers creating games that can speak to our times, and I don't think that will happen as easily when they are operating from outmoded cultural models.

Most of your games seem to emerge, in part, from your group's interest in experimenting with the basic building blocks of games. Walk us through some of the thinking behind your most recent games --Plantasia and Egg vs. Chicken. What ideas drove this design process?

I'll do even better and talk about a couple of games that we are about to launch - Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind (a game I mentioned earlier). You are definitely right that often our design focus at Gamelab has to do with investigating the "core mechanic" of a game - the repeated action that forms the heart of the interactivity. That's in part due to the fact that because of the downloadable business model, we make small-scale games that need to "hook" players with an addictive play mechanic.

Arcadia Remix , published by VH-1, is a redesign of a small game we did a few years ago, Arcadia. (Henry, I believe you've actually written about Arcadia.) Arcadia Remix is made up a series of tiny, very simple games that are all played at the same time. The mini-games are incredibly straightforward - actually bordering on boring - but playing several of them simultaneously becomes quickly challenging. The play emerges as the player manages her own attention to the different games, with strange, syncopated rhythms evolving from the overlapping play patterns. It's also an interesting game because the mini-games are all parodies of classic Atari-era games, and so we're appropriating our own history as the cultural and formal building blocks for the experience.

Out of Your Mind is a somewhat perverse and silly game in which the player works in a brain spa, removing nasty little creatures called Nega-Tics that live in our minds and cause bad behavior. In this case, the gameplay involves drawing lines with the mouse to spear the creatures and remove "brain gunk" by looping around sections of the playfield. The interaction consists of making quick and elegant gestures with the mouse, as the player's cursor swoops and loops through the space. Again, this kind of play pattern is something we haven't seen in other games.

There are many ways to innovate on the level of game experience. Often, game developers try to create new kinds of stories, content, and aesthetics for their games. In addition to these vectors for innovation, we try at Gamelab to invent new ways to play, which means focusing on new kinds of play mechanics, game logics, and interactions. Both of the games I mentioned will be available for play by the end of January.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Six): An Interview with Eric Zimmerman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part interview with Eric Zimmerman, game theorist, designer, and teacher, during which he spoke at length about his vision for the Independent Games movement and the ways that his company, Game Lab, has developed distinctive and original content. Today, I shift the focus onto some of the public service aspects of Zimmerman's work, especially in his efforts to promote games literacy. Across the term, I have been sharing with you some news about the MacArthur Foundation's 50 million dollar commitment to exploring youth and digital learning. Our own Project NML is part of this effort as was the white paper I published on the social skills and cultural competencies young people need to participate meaningfully in the new media landscape. Another dimension of this effort is the Game Designer Project, which Zimmerman is developing in collaboration with Katie Salens and James Paul Gee. I got a chance to see some early prototypes of this project at the Serious Game Summit in Washington DC earlier this term and was blown away by the wit and imagination, not to mention the pedagogical sophistication, which is informing its design. As Zimmerman discusses below, this is an attempt to use the game platform as a vehicle to teach students about the design process. The goal is not to turn young people into game designers but rather to use the design process to help them to think critically about games as a mode of experience.

In a recent interview on this blog, Greg Costikyan commented, "Consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, Gamelab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market." Do you agree or disagree with that description of the context within which you work?

God bless Greg Costikyan (and I mean that in the secular, idiomatic sense).

Greg is half right. While Gamelab strives to have every game we make be in some way innovative, I believe we are just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kinds of games that could be made. So of course I would love to be doing more radically experimental and unusual work, in terms of gameplay and interaction, narrative and cultural content, contexts for play, audio and visual aesthetics, etc. In this sense, yes Greg, I'd like to be doing more than I am. But when I look around at all of the game companies out there, I'm very happy with what we are doing at Gamelab and I don't think there is another place I'd rather be.

But I certainly wouldn't frame these issues as Greg does. For example, I wouldn't describe the work I want to do as my own personal desire to make games that I want to play. As a designer, I like solving design problems, which doesn't merely mean making games that are fun for me. And even if it did, the intrinsically collaborative nature of game development means that a game is the product of many people's desires, not just those of a single author.

Greg is also certainly over-generalizing the online game audience. Online games include far more than the "middle aged woman" stereotype he invokes. I'd much rather be making games for the Internet, as the players there are vastly more diverse than for consoles and PC retail games. I can say with confidence that the two games I described in my response to the last question, Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind, are not designed just for middle-aged women.

Lastly, I would hesitate to set up an opposition between running a business and "creativity," something implied in Greg's quote. Part of what we are doing at Gamelab is not just engaging with design questions, but engaging with questions of funding and producing and distributing our work as well. And Greg's company Manifesto Games is certainly doing this too. The fact that there are still so many unanswered questions about games - in terms of design, culture, business, etc - is what makes it so exciting to be working in the game industry right now.

Tell us something about the Game Designer project. You hope to help young people develop an understanding of the game design process. Why? What do you see as the benefit of everyday people understanding games on this level?

Game Designer is a project funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in partnership with Jim Gee's research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Game Designer will let junior high and high school students learn about game design by creating and modifying simple games. However, the point of the project is not to train future game designers. It is to engender media literacy.

Our position is that there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call "Gaming Literacy." Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy.

Katie Salen here at Gamelab is leading the Game Designer project design and working directly with our academic partners, who are focusing on research, pedagogy, testing, and assessment. Game Designer is not an open-ended prototyping tool like GameMaker - it is a guided, scaffolded experience that teaches game design concepts. So it is important that the instructional components of the project are really well-tuned. Right now there is nothing like Game Designer out there - and from kids' reaction to our prototype testing, it may be a very popular application.

One obvious analogy might be to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which translates the theory of comics into a graphic novel format. What do you gain by exploring the mechanics of game design through a game as opposed to a book

like, say, Rules of Play?

I hadn't thought of that analogy, but I like it! Thanks for the generous comparison.

Game Designer in some ways is an extension of Rules of Play, in which Katie Salen and I tried to establish a set of concepts for the practice and theory of game design. But that textbook is really designed for a university classroom - a very different audience and a very different instructional context than Game Designer!

One of the reasons why Game Designer needs to be embodied as a game creation application, rather than just as a book, is because one of our emphases in the project is on the process of game design. Interacting with Game Designer won't be just about making games in and of themselves, but will involve sharing them online, having friends playtest your games, as well as writing critical reviews of your games and of others' games. We want to borrow some elements from the practice of game design, because this process also embodies the kind of literacy we want to teach.

You announced at the Serious Games Summit the launch of a new nonprofit entity. Explain how this group will be related to Gamelab and what its goals will be?

We're still in the process of forming the nonprofit, so I can't say too much just yet. But the organization, called The Gamelab Institute of Play, is dedicated to the idea that playing, understanding, and creating games is an important learning experience. Rather than focusing on "serious games," the Institute of Play consists of programs and experiences that turn players into designers, letting them learn about and create games both on and off the computer. A close relationship between the new organization and the commercial game studio Gamelab, will also allow for new kinds of collaborations across the for-profit and not-for-profit divide. We're pretty excited about the Institute of Play! Expect to hear more about it this Spring.

There has been a lot of debate this summer about the value of games criticism and whether the field needs strong and recognized critics who might cultivate the audience for more innovative games. What do you, as a game designer, see as the role of the game critic?

Sorry to hear I missed that debate! Where and when did it happen?

I certainly agree that there is a role for game criticism, as one piece in the puzzle of growing what games are and what they might be. Education and the scholarly study of games is another piece. As are many of the design and business issues I have mentioned here. In many ways, the role of the critic binds all of these diverse elements together. The critic needs to have some kind of scholarly background, although she isn't necessarily writing for an academic audience. The critic has an educational function, although he isn't a formal instructor. And the critic needs to understand the design and business of games, even though the critic isn't selling or creating them.

Critics serve many roles for those of us working in the industry. We're usually too busy to be reading everything out there, so critics are important sources of information about what is happening. Critics also reflect audience opinion, giving us a sense of what our fans might be thinking. They also of course help generate audience opinion, giving us a way to reach our players. At their best, critics can raise issues and concerns about what, how, and why we are making games that we in the myopic industry might not ourselves see.

Props to the critics.

Odds and Ends

It's Awards Season... Many of you are already starting to second guess which films are going to be nominated for Academy Awards. The past few days we are starting to see the major film critic's organization weigh in on the best films of the year -- so far, they are all over the map with no strong consensus behind any particular title. But my own focus is on the Edublog awards. As it happens, two of my projects this year got nominated. The white paper we wrote for MacArthur and which we serialized here on the blog is being considered for Best Research Paper 2006. And the public conversation which I did with danah boyd about MySpace and the DOPA act is being considered for Most Influential Post, Resource or Presentation 2006. Thanks for everyone out there who nominated me -- I am flattered!

Here's how the awards are described:

As the reality and potential of distributed learning and distributed learner identities and communities are increasingly acknowledged, articulated and understood education moves further towards facilitating truly learner-centered and learned driven environments. A lot has changed in the world of educational technology since this time last year. The continuing rise and mainstreaming of easy to use network-as-platform applications, and increasing access to affordable online speed and space, have seen the continued expansion of users of all ages creating and communicating online. Learners and educators still however face difficult issues around network restrictions, around data protection and ownership, and around commercial protectionism. This year has also seen a marked increase in hostility towards social networking sites in the US, demonstrating a widespread lack of appreciation of the informal and formal educational value of user-centered applications. The Edublog awards are more relevant than ever in this climate - a space for us to refocus the debate surrounding young peoples use of technology as irresponsible, dangerous or illegal, and look at the positive, powerful and transformative work which continues to be demonstrated.

Voting amongst the finalists will continue through December 14 with the winners announced on December 15. There are nominees in ten different categories representing a really interesting catalog of some of the most interesting writing online this year concerning youth and digital media. Many of my readers who are concerned with media literacy will find the nomination page a useful resource for further reading and reflection.

That's Transmedia Entertainment!

Paul Levitz, the President of DC Comics, shares some speculations about the future of comics in a fascinating interview with Newsarama.com. Levitz references his participation in the Futures of Entertainment conference and continues some of his thinking about comic's relationship to transmedia entertainment. Levitz thinks deeply about the comic's medium and clearly prepared himself thoroughly for his role at our conference, making a series of very thoughtful comments.

Here's what he said about the experience:

NRAMA: Thinking about the larger picture of the management of the characters and properties, are comics leading the charge in charting new territory? While there are

older properties and those that are as, if not more popular, like Mickey Mouse, but

Mickey Mouse hasn't had continuity or a line of stories that stretch back nearly 70

years.

PL: I was at a seminar at M.I.T. a couple of weeks ago on the futures of entertainment. The panel I was on was titled "Transmedia" which they defined as moving creative ideas from one medium to another. The professor who was running the conference made a similar point - how come comics have been doing all of this? What is special and peculiar about comics? He made the point in terms of superheroes, and I argued back that I felt it was really true about all comics.

I think there are a few characteristics that are relevant. One, by the nature of what comics are, we've generally had to create open- ended stories. Think of the differences between Batman and The Fugitive. Although the founding tragedy might be as tragic, the character of Batman was designed to go on to a seemingly infinite number of adventures.He wasn't restricted to just taking place in a certain narrowcast, or a certain narrow geography. Many of the great comics characters, not just the superheroes, were built with fairly complicated and interesting fictional worlds around them. Uncle Scrooge - for example.

There's also an interesting argument to be made, and I'm not sure if it's right, but McLuhan raised the issue that the less well-defined a character was initially, the more the reader or views has to interpolate into it, and therefore was not stuck in a specific image that they would measure against. Comics, with their rather raw visual structure, work very powerfully into that argument, that is to say that when you're introduced to Batman as a drawn character, you're able to more easily transform your vision between Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale and the different approaches those take, as well as the different visual styles that are developed over time. Compare that to a character you fell in love with because a particular actor was playing him or her in a particular role. That's not a well-researched issue, and there are arguments to be had about it, I'm sure, but there's something in there somewhere.

So I think we've had some natural opportunities available to us because of all of this. We also have the advantage in some comic characters, including Superman and Batman, that for them to succeed from early on, they had to open themselves to different creative talents. That's a very important issue in this world of Transmedia. If you've got something that is being guided uniformly by one great creative mind - which can yield terrific creative results - it's harder to make the jump to multiple other media, because the thing is so intimately reliant on the idea that one person so closely "gets" or sees...or understands.

So, for better or for worse, from early on, it was sort of battle- proven that Superman and Batman were ideas that multiple writers and multiple artists could get into and do good, creative work with.

As I suggested here in some of the outtakes from Convergence Culture, comics have a special relationship to convergence -- indeed, comics have been transmedia from their inception. Today, Buster Brown is best known as a brand of children's shoes but the character spanned across comic strips, Broadway musicals, and a range of other commodities at the turn of the century -- one of the first comic strip characters to make a significant impact on the public. In the first few years of his history, Superman moved from comic books to comic strips, radio shows, live action film serials, and animated short subjects, with each of these media making distinct contributions to the evolution of his mythology. Many historians argue that the character would not have had the same impact on our culture if he had not been so well designed to play out across such a broad range of media platforms. Levitz makes a good case here that it is not just the superheroes but a range of other serialized comic characters (including Uncle Scrooge) have also enjoyed extensive transmedia careers.

Today's No Prize goes to CMS graduate student Geoff Long for spotting this interview and calling it to my attention.

Speaking of Japanese School Girls...

We have been lucky enough to have a distinguished scholar of Japanese manga and popular culture, Sharon Kinsella, teaching in the Foreign Languages and Literature Program at MIT this term. Kinsella, the author of Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, spoke at the last CMS colloquium of the term, sharing some of her work in progress, Girls and the Male Imagination: Fantasy of Rejuvenation in Contemporary Japan. Her talk, "Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation," might have been called "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Japanese School Girls But Were Afraid to Ask," crisscrossing between different media and across political discourse and popular culture, to argue about the ways that the schoolgirl becomes a figure of desire, dread, and fantasy identification among adult males in that society. Her talk included some interesting insights on texts which will be known to many of my readers, including Spirited Away, Battle Royale, and Sailor Moon, but also a broad range of b-movies and soft-core porn titles which helped me to read these cult classics through some new lens. The podcast version of this talk has just gone up on the CMS homepage and is recommended to anyone interested in Japanese popular culture.

While you are at it, you might also be interested in checking out some of the other programming on anime and other forms of Japanese popular culture which my colleague, Ian Condry, has put together through his Cool Japan program. For example, here's the transcript of a fascinating session he hosted on Violence and Desire in Japanese Culture: Anime Capitalism. Podcast of this and other Cool Japan events can be found at the Anime Pulse website.

Sharon Kinsella will be repeating her talk on Japanese school girls at Harvard University through an event being hosted by the Cool Japan program. Here are the details:

Prof. Sharon Kinsella's talk

"Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"

will be held

THURSDAY, December 14

4-6pm

William James Hall, Room 1550

Harvard University

My Mii -- Oh My!

Alice J. Robison, who just finished her doctorate working with James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working this year as a post-doc in the Comparative Media Studies Program. This term, she has taught a course for us on games criticism and next term, she will be offering a course on new media literacies. When she's not teaching in the program or contributing to our various games and new media literacy initiatives, she has been spending time playing with her new Wii. I am still among the uninitiated among the ways of the Wii, despite being very enthusiastic about the concept of the new interface. As I understand it, the Wii ships with an avatar creation tool and players can build their own distinctive anime style characters known as Mii.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In certain games (including Wii Sports, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Wii Play, and The Sims Wii), each player's caricature will serve as the character he or she controls in game play. Miis can interact with other Wii users by showing up on their Wii consoles through the WiiConnect24 feature or by talking with other Miis created by Wii owners all over the world. This feature is called Mii Parade. Early-created Miis as well as those encountered in Mii Parades may show up as spectators in some games. Miis can be stored on controllers and taken to other consoles. The controller can hold up to a maximum amount of 10 Miis.

Inspired in part by the Second Life Avatar which I featured here the other week, Alice has created a Mii in the likeness of, well, me. You might call him a mini-me/mii. The pun's just keep coming folks. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks, Alice. (I am told that she has also built Mii for some other prominent games scholars. Maybe some day we can create a collector set of leading media theorists which graduate students can pit against each other. It will certainly result in my much lively seminars.)

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

lloquium series featured a program about the production of Zigzag, the new video podcast which seeks to capture and convey some of the many fascinating aspects of life at MIT. This week's edition features a profile of the New Media Literacies Project. The video includes footage of several of our graduate students setting up to interview my colleague Beth Coleman for a forthcoming entry in our exemplar library project which will deal with DJs and music remixing practices. The center piece of the documentary, however, deals with the most recently added film in our collection which deals with the New York based Graffiti group, Tats Cru. This is a segment that cuts close to home for me. Indeed, many of the interview segments were shot in my living room. As some of you know, I am proud to have spent the last 12 years of my life as housemaster of an MIT dormitory known as Senior House. (Contrary to the name, the community includes a full range of undergraduates -- frosh to seniors -- and houses many of those at MIT who are interested in alternative cultures.) Tats Cru came to MIT in part at the request of our graduate resident tutors, Andrew "Zoz" Brooks who wanted help constructing a mural which would pay tribute to "Big Jimmy" Roberts, a long time night watchman who was much beloved among our residents and who passed away a few years ago. Our students have raised more than 50,000 dollars to create a scholarship in Big Jimmy's honor but they wanted an icon to help memorialize his role within the dorm. Since he worked between two dorms, the agreement was that they would paint a mural on canvas that would be portable and could spend part of the year in each location. Tats Cru came to MIT through help from the Creative Arts Council and Michelle Oshima and worked with our students to produce something that was worthy of Big Jimmy's memory. While the group was on campus, the graduate students on Project NML also filmed the production of the mural and conducted interviews to help explore graffiti as a form of creative expression.

The story of Tats Cru is a fascinating one: a group of former street artists who have become known around the world for their murals and graffiti, who work with local communities to create memory walls and who work with corporate clients to support their branding efforts. It's hard to pick any group of artists who better embody some of the contradictions which surround graffiti as a form of creative expression.

Grafitti is often discussed in terms of personal expression -- leaving one's own distinctive mark on the environment -- yet it also depends heavily on the trust and collaboration that emerges within the members of a particular Cru. Most of the exemplars so far have focused on individual artists. We very much wanted to examine here what it was like to produce art within a collective:

Nicer: Some of the things we use to do with the kids was: we'd have two guys working on the same name, and then I'll switch the papers and let them copy each other's work. And they would never get it the same. The way you do a circle is unique: it's your circle. No one else is going to copy it exactly the same. The way you create your own lettering, the way you sign your own name, even your signature or the way you write, it's so unique. It makes you an individual and you have to be proud of that.

Red: In this art form, from what I've learned, you gotta push forward. And you can't copy. I could sit there and try to copy Nicer's but it's not going to come out the same. I got to find my way and my defaults and push myself.

Nosm: Sometimes your brain is just empty, and then Nicer comes up with something: "Oh, I got this idea, I always wanted to do that." And then How comes to it and says, "yeah, we should add this and that." And then, next you see everybody's brainstorming, and we come up with a new idea for the mural.

Nicer: It's not any oil painter who can paint on the same canvas with another oil painter. And he'll paint something red and somebody else will go, "no, I want to change it blue." He'll catch some kind of fit, because he doesn't know how to work together with someone. Us, as a group, we've learned that already. And it hasn't been easy. There have been times when I've stepped back away from walls and looked and go, "wow, that red looks good." And then two guys will walk buy and one will stop and change it blue, and they'll walk away from each other. And I'll go, "uh, maybe it looks good blue." So I have to learn to trust their judgment. Because what better kind of artist can you get than a 6-headed, 12-armed monster artist?

Some of the best passages deal with the ways they seek inspiration from the culture around them:

Nicer: I grew up in a neighborhood in the '80s where there wasn't a lot of art programs. So I didn't have a lot of stuff to reference besides comic books. I would look at comic books and they would show me different colorings and outlines and characters and cartoons. And superheroes was a big thing to me. So I started young just tracing and drawing comics. As a teenager I started noticing some guys who were doing graffiti in my neighborhood, and they brought color to the walls: they would have fancy hand styles, and the lettering, the shapes, and the colors of their characters. So, I was drawn to it.

BG: It was already part of my neighborhood. That was, like, the culture. If you walked through the hallways, or walked through the streets of New York City, that's what you saw. And we took the trains, and you saw graffiti on the trains. So that was, like, the first opening of graffiti to me.

Nosm: I was born in Spain and grew up in Germany, and I've been in New York for about 7 years. Me and my brother was a little bit different because we started graffiti back in '88, '89. We saw a couple of books from New York, and we saw the movie Wild Style--it's a famous graffiti movie that is something like a documentary--and based on that, and based on our older friends who were tagging--that's like, writing your name all over the neighborhood--they were doing that and we just copied it. And after a couple of years we realized we could do more with it. Not only tags but also pieces, characters, you know, like faces and stuff like that.

Or consider this passage where Nicer talks about the ways that commercial art -- even advertising -- informs their graphic style:

Nicer: I get inspired by, like, looking at ads in magazines or just a stroll through a local supermarket. Look at the cereal boxes. Every cereal box has got funky lettering, and the coloring is bright, and it's calling the kids, "come eat me, come get me!" And if you look at the characters on these boxes, you know, like Captain Crunch and you got all these, like, Sugar Pops or... it's stylized for kids, but it's just fun. And sometimes we're looking for something fun to paint.

At the same time, they defend their work on the grounds that it introduces aesthetic experiences to people who would never feel comfortable just going inside a traditional art museum:

Nicer: I guess what we do is bring what's in galleries and what's in museums--which is art and color and technique and style--and we bring that to community walls or to neighborhoods that, you know, sometimes these kids in those neighborhoods never would have a chance to go see the MOMA or see the Louvre. So I guess, in a way, by us painting these murals in these communities is bringing a part of that art and culture into their lives.

Part of what's really exciting about these films is that they teach new ways of looking at graffiti as a meaningful form of cultural expression, providing illustrations of key terms and concepts from their world which will give students and teachers alike a vocabulary for talking about what's going on within this community.

Tats Cru doesn't engage in graffiti as a form of vandalism. Their art is authorized by the people who live in the communities being decorated. They often get invited in by the people who own the property to paint murals:

Bio: One of the big reasons that it started to gain popularity in the neighborhood was, it was a way to combat graffiti. Landlords and store owners were tired of going out on a weekly or daily basis to paint over tag signatures. But they noticed whenever we would paint a mural, it was colorful, it was attractive, but, I think, the selling point was that it would go untouched. No one would deface it or what have you. The other artists or the other graffiti artists would respect it. So they began to commission us in an effort to combat that problem.

Nicer: We sell space in communities. We find properties that are abandoned, or people are having problems keeping clean, and we make agreements with the property owners to let us use the space. And we'll keep the rest of the property clean or we'll pay rent on it. And then we'll go to these agencies and say, "listen, we have these walls." And we pick and choose what clients go on there. We're not going to go out and do tobacco or firearm companies, or big alcohol ads. We understand that, at the end of the day, we're the one's responsible for whatever images we put up there.

Yet, they also make clear that there are rules and ethical commitments even among those who produce unauthorized forms of graffiti:

Nicer: The rule is, the bigger, the more time it takes, gets the pass. So there's a pass you're given. Like if you had a throw-up, or two throw-ups and somebody did a simple style piece over it--which takes longer, there's usually like a few colors and fill it in, and an outline, and it takes more time and it's cleaner--so that stuff can go over throw-ups, because it takes more time and more skill. But if you did a throw-up over that, then you're gonna create a problem.

BG: Then you have a mural that will go over anything.

We understand graffiti to be perhaps the most controversial form of expression which we have explored through the exemplar library so far. Many see it as enhancing their community. Others see it as a form of visual clutter or as a form of vandalism. To help us better understand the controversy, we turned to a CMS alum Rekha Murthy, who did her thesis on the mediascape surrounding the Central Square area in Cambridge. Her work focused both on official media -- signage, newspapers, window displays in stores -- and unofficial media -- stickers, posters, handbills, and graffiti. We were lucky to have an expert within our own community who knew a great deal about the politics of street media. Here's some of what she had to say:

Rekha: It's illegal to poster or put stickers or graffiti in the city of Cambridge on any buildings or any surfaces without getting the approval of the city. So, obviously there's someone out there enforcing these laws. I would walk up and down the streets taking pictures for my thesis of different street media. And I would go back every couple of days or so and the whole streetscape would have changed. And I found this guy in the department of public works for the city of Cambridge, and he's actually very proud of his job.

And he said that he sees himself, actually, as helping free speech. The people who poster or who put this stuff up, you know the graffiti artists and sticker people, may just see him as someone who destroys. But he sees himself as keeping the streetscape clear so that more people can share it and more people can communicate.

There's something that I noticed in Central Square that really intrigued me. Something that I didn't go out to look for, but it kept coming back to me. And that was: people seem to respect what they like to look at. So it's not about what's legal or illegal all the time. Sometimes it's something grayer than that. You can't draw a line in it, you can't draw a box around it. It's just what people like or what the don't like, or what makes people feel OK or even happy, and what makes them feel like their neighborhood is going down the tubes.

There are people who set out to deface. There are people who really do vandalize. And they cost local business owners money. That said, there's this other group of people who want to self-express, but don't actually want to deface. And I saw in my research time and again that, some of the people that I spoke with said that they'd be perfectly happy to put art, if there were places on the streetscape that the city kind of made available. That, it didn't have to be unauthorized to be exciting or legitimate. That is just had to be in a place where people could actually see it, that implied it was being taken seriously, and that it was respected, and that there was something community about it.

We hope the documentaries will generate discussion about the borders between art and vandalism, getting people to think more deeply about what graffiti contributes to urban culture and how we might develop urban policies which support more forms of grassroots expression within our cities without necessarily bringing about property damage.

The interviews for this film were conducted by Henry Jenkins and Margaret Weigel. The documentary was edited by Neal Grigsby, a CMS graduate student, whose thesis work is focused on adolescence as a theme across many forms of contemporary media.

Catching Up: Mostly on Media Literacy

The New and Improved Henry Jenkins

I was so impressed by the experience of participating in the MacArthur Foundation's press event, which was partially held in the New York Museum of Natural History and partially held in Second Life, that I sought out Barry Joseph from Global Kids, an organization which regularly runs events through Teen Second Life, to see if there might be a way I could engage with their youth participants. My one concern, as a media scholar, had been that when we spoke in Second Life at the press event, we appeared as cinematic images and not as avatars.

So, in speaking with Joseph, we decided that I should get an avatar if I was going to relate to the Second Life youth on their own terms. Joseph was nice enough to volunteer to get some members of his group to create an avatar for me. Apparently, some of the youth had expressed a particular fascination with my beard and therefore wanted to be able to reproduce it and share it with their friends. (I wasn't sure which Henry beard they wanted since mine comes in various lengths from trim to shaggy depending on what point it is in the term and how hectic my life has been.)

This past weekend, Barry wrote to introduce me to the second Henry Jenkins. I have to say that I bonded instantly with this frisky fellow.

I have heard television puts ten pounds on you. It would appear that Second Life takes thirty or forty pounds off -- not to mention adding some of that vigor and vitality that has been worn away through many years of living the life of the jet setting academic.

Barry says they had two groups work on constructing me an avatar -- a group of adults known as The Magicians and several teens -- 1000 Carlos and Nik385 Doesberg -- and then they combined the best features of the two for the finished product. Thanks to everyone involved. It's been years since anyone has drawn a representation of me that didn't consist of a series of circles -- the bald head, the glasses, and the round little tummy. Indeed, some years ago, a whole Kindergarten class made Henry Jenkins masks by gluing string to paper plates! Even then, my beard was the subject of considerable fascination.

Barry and I are now working on the details of when and where I will be engaging with the Second Life Youth. I can't wait.

Media Snackers

Last week, I did a podcast interview with DK of the British media literacy group, Media Snackers. Here's how they describe their vision on their home page:

Remember the set menu of print, radio and television, delivered at specific times, for the masses and only in the ways the creators defined?

With the arrival of the Internet, digital TV, mobile phones, iPods, weblogs etc.--the media landscape has changed from the linear, to one of many layers, consumed by self-serving and empowered individuals.

Young people are the new 'WWW' generation--snacking whenever, wherever and whatever they like through the multi-channeled and many technological avenues available.

Creating as much as they consume--constantly hungry, always 'on' and totally self-serving!

The Media Snackers podcast series consists of ten minute conversations with leading media educators from around the world -- including, not coincidentally, one Barry Joseph from Global Kids (who always seems to be one step ahead of me!), Rob Williams, Benjamin Stokes, and a wealth of others from around the world. This is a great resource for ideas and insights into youth and new media.

There's also an excellent blog which includes some interesting discussion of major trends in this area. (I am certainly going to add it to my rss and blog list). Already, this blog has gotten me into trouble. They have a fascinating chart prepared by Gary Hays from Personalized Media, which shows the progression from Web 1.0 through to the future emergence of Web 3.0. I saw this chart the same week as The New York Times wrote an article claiming that Web 3.0 was right around the corner. Hosting a conference last weekend about the Futures of Entertainment, I couldn't resist leading our audience in a Countdown to Web 3.0 as a way of marking a transition from our own focus on social networks (web 2.0) into immersive worlds (web 3.0). I fear that this little stunt will follow me around for a while!

For the record, I am deeply suspicious of the whole Web 2.0/3.0 rhetoric. It implies dramatic breaks or ruptures in the media scene, when in fact, media change is gradual and there is a tendency for old media systems to linger even as new media systems are emerging. I do think that there are significant differences between the world of social networks and the world of immersive worlds. I have trouble imagining Second Life replacing all of the functions of the web, however, as might be applied by the Web 3.0 concept that seems to have taken root over the past few weeks. It is this idea of dramatic shifts that I was spoofing by doing a New Year's Eve style countdown to Web 3.0.

Learning Games to Go!

Finally, I wanted to share with you the latest podcasts produced for the Learning Games to Go Project -- a collaboration between the Education Arcade and Maryland Public Television. Previous podcasts have featured interviews with Scot Osterweill and the over-exposed Henry Jenkins. But, the newest one -- the first to include video content -- features Scot interacting with the CMS undergraduate and graduate students who are working on the Labyrinth game which I described here a few weeks ago. It gives you a real taste of the CMS community spirit as each of these creative individuals reflects on a toy or artifact that enabled playful learning and along the way give us a sense of what they didn't like about some of the educational games they played growing up.