Sanjaya Malakar, Leroy Jenkins, and The Power to Negate

As a long-time American Idol fan, I am watching the current controversy about Sanjaya Malakar with morbid fascination. For those of you who are not following the plot, Malakar is a relatively untalented contestant who is surviving week after week as much more widely praised rivals are biting the dust. Simon Cowell this week went so far as to suggest that nothing which the producers on the show said about his performance would make any difference in the outcome of the voting: "I don't think it matters anymore what we have to say, actually. I genuinely don't. I think you are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck!" Elsewhere, Cowell has fanned the flames by threatening to quit American Idol if Sanjaya wins.

Regular readers of this blog will have already suspected some of the forces going on behind the scenes here to essentially "spoil" American Idol and can only imagine the choice words that Simon and the other judges are uttering behind the scenes. I reported here last summer about a group called Vote for the Worst which has adopted an interventionist stance towards reality television programs. The group has taken credit in the past for the surprising longevity of AI contestants, such as Scott Savol and Bucky Covington[See note at end of post], as well as having gotten a number of lackluster contestants onto Big Brother's All Stars series last summer. Here's what the group has posted over on their home page:

Why do we do it? During the initial auditions, the producers of Idol only let certain people through. Many good people are turned away and many bad singers are kept around to see Simon, Paula, and Randy so that America will be entertained.

Now why do the producers do this? It's simple: American Idol is not about singing at all, it's about making good reality TV and enjoying the cheesy, guilty pleasure of watching bad singing. We agree that a fish out of water is entertaining, and we want to acknowledge this fact by encouraging people help the amusing antagonists stick around. VFTW sees keeping these contestants around as a golden opportunity to make a more entertaining show.

They have a point: research suggests that American Idol attracts essentially two different viewerships. There are people who watch the first part of the series -- up until Hollywood -- enjoying the "gong show" like segments where bad singers get spotlighted. (That's why William Hung remains one of the most infamous contestants to ever appear on the show and why the producers consistently replay the footage of his mangled and tone-deaf performance of "She Bangs.") And then there are the people who tune in once the producers have gotten all of that out of their system to watch the talented few compete, get feedback, and try to win the hearts of the American public.

So, it is hard for the producers to claim that "vote for the worst" is not in the spirit of the show. The Vote for the Worst fans are simply acting out of turn, asserting their own right to pick which bad singers should get on the air and how long they should last.

Vote for the Worst, by itself, probably doesn't have the clout to really carry this very far, in the end, but this time around, the site has won the support of Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed "King of All Media," who is using his satellite radio program to encourage listeners to vote to keep Sanjaya on the show. Stern has drawn real blood in the past. In 1998, Stern ran a successful effort to get a regular on his program, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, selected as one of People Magazine's list of the most beautiful people in the world. This was an early experiment in the use of the web to encourage reader participation. Hank won over Leo DeCaprio, the pretty boy actor who was then riding high off his Titanic appearance, and the dwarf got a lot angrier and perhaps a little drunker when the magazine refused to feature him inside the print edition of their publication.

Of course, as with this earlier election, the whole process exploits several bugs in the system: first, it takes advantage of the fact that viewers can call in more than one vote. It is not just that a relatively small but determined number of people could indeed cast enough votes to keep Sanjaya at the middle of the pack but it is also the case that people can vote for Sanjaya and not sacrifice their ability to also vote for a favorite performer. So, it becomes a no cost gag vote, which can turn out to have bad consequences for individual contestants who have off weeks and end up going while Mr. Malakar remains. Of course, all of this might end quickly if viewers voted to eliminate contestants, rather than to keep them. Surely, there are more people who want Malakar off the show than want him to remain on the air. But the producers have consistently argued against having people vote to eliminate contestants, feeling that would bring a negative tone to the proceedings.

As this has occurring, there have been growing expressions of outrage among fans of the program. Vote for the Worst proudly posts a segment from The O'Reilly Factor during which civil litigator Danielle Aidala tries to argue that the fan's efforts to keep Sanjaya Malakar on the air represent speech that should be exempt from First Amendment protection -- comparing voting for the worst to inciting a riot. For once, O'Reilly comes across as the most rational voice on the program!

And check out the ways that YouTube is responding to the Malakar Matter, including what we can only hope is a tongue in cheek promise to go on a hunger strike to encourage people to vote him off the air.

So, what of the fairly sweet and relatively harmless young man caught in the center of this whole brouhaha? At first, it was pretty clear he was clueless about these efforts on his behalf, shocked when he stayed on the air in the face of seemingly inevitable elimination, seeming fragile in the face of the judge's withering comments. One news story quoted a family friend: "He's so young and so sensitive, it's hard for him to go out on that stage and not have that devastation affect his performance."

By this week, when he appeared in a campy Mohawk and mugged throughout his performance, it seemed to me that like William Hung before him, he had caught onto the joke being made at his expense and was willing to ride things out as long as it kept him in the spotlight. My wife thinks he is still playing to win and is under the mistaken belief that he really does have an army of teenyboppers behind him. Watch the clip for yourself and see what you think.

How might we make sense of all of this?

For starters, we are witnessing the public's periodic fascination with its power to negate. "America", as the Idol judges like to call us, at least when they are happy with our decisions, has a stubborn streak. There have certainly been cases when the public votes to keep someone on the program precisely because the judges were harsh to them and long-time Idol viewers have long speculated that the judges use this power to condemn tactically to generate public support behind certain contestants they want to keep on the air. The fans are also deeply suspicious of other efforts by the judges to game the system and there have been, as I outlined in Convergence Culture, ongoing controversies about the reliability of the voting system itself. In what other context would we trust the results of an election when no vote totals were ever released? And there are certainly cases where backlash emerges when the judge push a contestant too heavily and at the expense of fan favorites. It is telling that the winner of American Idol often sells fewer records than the also rans, suggesting that to the bitter end, the public wants to exert its ability to cancel out whatever the judges tell us to do.

I certainly saw Hank the Dwarf winning People Magazine's contest over Leo DeCaprio as a kind of populist response to the culture of glamor and celebrity -- as a push towards the anti-celebrity, the anti-heroic, the anti-glamorous, and the untalented as emblematic of a segment of the population that feels under-represented, under-counted, and under-appreciated.

In that sense, Hank and Sanjaya might be compared to LeRoy Jenkins, the hapless World of Warcraft player whose misadventures have developed a cult following among hardcore gamers. I was recently asked by a reporter to comment on the LeRoy Jenkins story -- assuming of course that I had to be a Jenkins expert (Can't imagine why?)-- and I suggested that we might see him as a new kind of American everyman, an embodiment of our collective feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. I remarked on the odd happenstance that the American everyman of World War II was Kilroy -- with G.I.s scribbling "Killroy was here" across the landscape as they recaptured Europe from the Nazis -- while the American everyman of the current war in Baghdad might be LeRoy, the guy who never had a chance. As I explained to the reporter, ""For the first time, we as a society get to decide who's famous. Having gained the right to project celebrities forward, we often choose losers, because in the past it was always success that connoted celebrity. If Leroy Jenkins can become a celebrity, anybody can."

Of course, the populist underpinnings of all this are tainted, I would argue, by the fact that this is being taken out of the hands of the grassroots Vote for the Worst campaign and transformed into a battle between two media powerhouses: Cowell vs. Stern.

And here's a question I have been struggling with. My sense is that Stern's listeners were laughing with Hank as he walked away to victory over the Hollywood hotshots, while they are laughing at Sanjaya Malakar as he remains uncomfortably caught in the spotlight, in way over his head, on American Idol. So, how do we account for the difference?

How long will all of this last? It's anyone's guess. My hunch is that it will last another few weeks in any case -- until the pack thins out a bit more -- and then the number of fans needed to stay on the program will grow well beyond the reach of Vote for the Worst and Howard Stern. There are probably a lot more people who want to see some of the other contestants win than want to see Sanjaya stick around but for the moment, the votes are split and so he will outlast many more worthy contestants. Could Howard Stern pull it off with American Idol as he did with People? Probably not. For one thing, the number of votes being cast on Idol far outweighs the number needed to win a web-based contest in 1998 and for another, Stern doesn't have nearly the reach he once did, given the lackluster revenue being generated by Sirius Radio at the present time. At the end of the day, Malakar is going down and Cowell will be able to once again play king-maker on his own program. And if he doesn't? Well, he won't be the first winner on American Idol whose record sales didn't reflect his standings in the competition. And even if Malakar won the contest, the producers would be able to make a mint off some of the other talent in the competition.

Editor's Note: Readers correctly point out that Bucky Covington was never a target of the Vote for the Worst campaign. I have left the original reference so that their comments would make sense and so that it would clarify a common misconception. I have read multiple news reports which did list Bucky as a VFTW target but I can't find any trace of him being so on the actual site. Sorry for any offense caused to his loyal fans. As it happens, I kinda like the guy myself.

Awkward Conversations About Uncomfortable Laughter

Dear reader, please welcome me to the age of enlightenment. A few weeks ago, the MIT dorms, where I live, finally started to receive Comedy Central and I am now able to enjoy a daily dose of John Stewart and Steven Colbert rather than hoping that the hotels where I stay get the channel and that I can remember when they are on. (Of course, the MIT dorms, razzle frazzle, are no longer getting HBO or BBC America so it continues to be one step forward, two steps back). I am receiving Comedy Central just in time to see the early episodes of Sarah Silverman's new television series. So far, the series has not lived up to my hopes or expectations. It feels more like a female remake of Curve Your Enthusiasm about a woman whose self-centeredness becomes the basis of anti-social and politically incorrect conduct on a recurring basis (not that there's anything wrong with that from most people's point of view but I have never quite connected with Curve.) But the show is drawing very strong ratings so people out there seem to be liking what they are seeing.

I have been long interested in Silverman's work and wrote something about her film, Jesus is Magic, for Flow a few years ago. While I am reproducing my essay here, you may want to follow this link back because the essay generated a pretty rich and far reaching response when it first appeared. Silverman's film uses comedy to ask questions about how we are dealing with issues of race in America today, questions which may only be asked by pushing hard on the borders between jokes and insults. She has, as a consequence, found herself the center of controversies about inappropriate jokes.

I wish that were the problem with the new Comedy Central series which seems pretty tame compared to her earlier standup work. There were some moments which made me wince in an episode in which her character believes she's gotten AIDS and manages to turn efforts to combat the disease into a totally self-serving exercise, sending up the ways that celebrities gain status through attaching themselves to various causes or when she gets into a conversation with a zombie about the insensative ways that her people are portrayed in the media. But, in the end, the series falls back into safer sitcom territory rather than using comedy to probe our hot button issues as a society.

What follows is the essay I wrote for Flow:

In her book, Implicit Meanings, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the roles jokes play in mapping points of tension or transition within a culture. Only a thin line separates jokes and insults. The joke gives expressive form to an emergent perspective within a culture -- something which is widely felt but rarely said. When a joke expresses a view already widely accepted, it becomes banal and unfunny. When a joke says something the culture is not ready to hear, it gets read as an insult or an obscenity. The job of the clown is thus to continually map the borders between what can and can not be said. This is why a good comedy routine is accompanied as often by gasps as by laughter.

I was reminded of Douglas's perspective on jokes when I recently participated in a screening and discussion of Sarah Silverman's new film, Jesus is Magic. For those of you who have not heard of her yet, Silverman is a former Saturday Night Live writer who sparked national controversy in 2001 when she told a joke about "chinks" on Conan and when she defended the joke on Bill Mahr's Politically Incorrect. The Silverman controversy has resurfaced in recent months both because of a rather memorable appearance in The Aristocrats and because of the release of a film documenting her standup comedy show. She has recently been profiled in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and is currently shooting a pilot for her own series on Comedy Central.

To understand the controversy, we have to return to the now infamous joke she told on Conan in 2001. She was explaining that her various efforts to escape jury duty and her friend's suggestion that she could try to come across as prejudiced on the questionnaire by writing "I hate chinks." Silverman pauses, suggesting that she would consider being embarrassed to make such a comment, even in jest, and so instead she wrote, "I LOOOVE Chinks -- and who wouldn't."

Greg Aoki, the president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, argued that the network showed a double standard in allowing the word, "chink," to air when it would almost certainly have bleeped "nigger." The network and host later apologized for the decision to air the joke but Silverman refused to apologize, contending "It's not a racist joke. It's a joke about racism." The controversy is one which looks differently depending on whether our focus is on the words used (Aoki rightly sees "chink" as a word deeply entwined in the history of racism in America) or the meaning behind them (Silverman is right that her comedy ultimately raises uncomfortable questions about how white people "play the race card.")

Writing in Asian Week, columnist Emil Guillermo argues that rather than seeing Silverman's joke as "fighting words," Asian-Americans should use it as "talking words," as the starting point for discussing the current state of American racism. This is not what Aoki experienced when he tried to challenge the appropriateness of Silverman's joke during their mutual appearance on Politically Incorrect, where the host and guests questioned his sincerity, made fun of his name, called him names, and cut him off when he tried to link the jokes to recent incidents of racial violence. And it is not what Silverman experienced when her critics simply label her a "racist" without exploring what she was trying to say.

How can we distinguish between racist jokes and jokes about racism, especially with the deadpan irony that is Silverman's hallmark? Most of us have no trouble thinking of cases where jokes have been directed against minorities as a racist exercise of power. Yet we should also keep in mind the many different ways that comedy has been used to challenge racism -- think about the first generation of African-American comics who went into black, white, and multiracial clubs and confronted their audiences with words and concepts that were designed to create discomfort; think about the ways that underground comics like R. Crumb sought to "exorcise" the history of racial stereotypes in his medium by pushing them to their outer limits; think about shows like All in the Family which exposed the ways that previous generations of sitcoms had remained silent about the bigotry which was often at the heart of American domestic life. And then there are jokes which are funny simply because they are "politically incorrect," that is, because they thumb their nose at anyone who would set any limits on speech whatsoever. Perhaps most strikingly, there are jokes which deny the reality of both race and racism simply by refusing to talk about it at all. When was the last time that you heard a joke on a late-night talk show (Okay -- outside The Daily Show) that you remembered the next morning, let alone one which provoked debate four years later.

Critics have read Silverman's comedy as simply "politically incorrect." There are plenty of times when Silverman's jokes are, to use Douglas's definition of obscenity, "gratuitous intrusions." Yet, at its best, her comedy reflects on the problems of living in a culture where old racial logics are breaking down and new relationships have not yet taken any kind of definitive shape and where there seems to be no established language for speaking to each other across racial lines. Her most consistent target is a white America which is so busy trying to watch its step that it falls on its own face. Several deal with the challenges of negotiating mixed race or multi-ethnic relationships. For example, she gets upset when her half black boyfriend objects to her "innocent compliment" that he would have made "an expensive slave" because he has

"self-esteem issues," smugly insisting, "He has to learn to love himself before I can stop hating his people." This is after she has suggested it would be more "optimistic" to say that he was "half white" rather than "half black."  At another point, she describes a particular audience as "black," then corrects herself to say that it was "African-American," then decides it was "half and half." Or again, she talks about how she and her Christian boyfriend will explain their religious beliefs to any future offspring: "Mother is one of the chosen people and Dad believes Jesus is magic."

Silverman's jokes do not in any simple or direct way represent her personal views; rather, she has adopted a comic persona (perhaps multiple personas) through which she reflects confusions and contradictions in the ways that white America thinks about race and racism, much the way some hip hop performers have argued that the views about race, criminality, and sexual violence they express through their songs are attempts to make visible some of the issues confronting their community. In both cases, critics have tended to read such personas literally. There are no words to describe whiteness which have the same sting as "chink" or "nigger" and so she has to perform whiteness, against a backdrop of other racial identities, so that it can recognize itself in all of its insensitivity and self-centeredness.

Consider, for example, a Silverman routine about her lust for a jewel which is formed by de-boning and grinding down the spines of starving Ethiopian babies. There is a level to the joke which is simply funny because of the cruel and insensitive way she is speaking about human suffering; there is another level, however, which works not unlike the way that Jonathon Swift's similarly-themed, "A Modest Proposal," works, exposing the infinite flexibility with which we can rationalize and justify the exploitation of the third world. Silverman delivers the joke with what New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear calls "quiet depravity." The expression that lingers on her face is usually one of tentative confusion or chipper self-satisfaction, as if she had finished her homework and cleaned up her room, and were waiting for a gold star. She doesn't smirk; she honestly thinks she has no real prejudice or animosity even as she bases her everyday decisions on gross stereotypes. Hers is the face of what cultural critics have called "enlightened racism," the smug satisfaction with which white Americans excuse ourselves for our own lapses in taste and judgment as long as they do not become too overt or openly confrontational. As she describes this jewel, she hits a moment of conscience, realizing that they probably exploit the "unions" which mine the babies' spines, but then concedes, "you have to pick your battles."

Early in the jewel routine, she describes her acquisitiveness as a "JAP," then pausing to explain that she doesn't mean "Jewish American Princess" (a stereotype which she has self-consciously embodied throughout the routine) but rather "Japanese." Instantly, she moves from a stereotype which is more socially acceptable (if only because she would be making fun of her own group) and into one which is totally unacceptable (and the joke only works if we recognize the offensiveness of the word). Indeed, she plays often on the ambiguities of her own status as white and Jewish -- sometimes speaking as a member of an oppressed minority, other times blending into a white majority, and often making this desire of Jews to escape their minority status a central theme in her work. It crops up for example when she makes bitter comments about contemporary Jews who drive German-made cars or when she tells a joke about Jews who want to escape racist charges of having killed Christ by blaming the Romans (and then pushing this historical scapegoating one step further by suggesting that personally she blames the blacks.)

Silverman's comedy depends upon the instability created as we move from thinking of race in black and white terms towards a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. A previous generation of comics would not have made jokes about Asian-Americans or Hispanics because they simply were not part of the way they envisioned America. Much contemporary race theory has sought ways to move us beyond simple black/white binaries in the ways we think about racial diversity. As recent demographic trends suggest, America is rapidly moving towards a time when Caucasians will be in the minority but they are not being replaced by a new majority culture: rather, America will be more ethnically diverse -- some would say fragmented, balkanized, or disunified -- than ever before and there has been few successful attempts to build coalitions across those diverse populations.

A musical number in Jesus is Magic self-consciously maps the fault lines in this new cultural diversity: dressed like a refugee from an Up With People concert, strumming a guitar, looking her most wide-eyed and innocent, she wanders from space to space, gleefully singing about how much Jews love money, how little blacks like to tip, how well Asians do at math, and ends with a particularly choice lyric about blacks calling each other "niggers." Then, the little white woman looks over and sees two angry looking black men who glare at her for a long period of silence; then they start to laugh and she tries laughing with them; then they stop laughing and glare at her even more intensely and for an agonizingly long period of time. It is hard to imagine a comedian who is more reflexive about the nature of their own comic practices or more insistent that the audience stop laughing and think about the politics of their own laughter.

Much of the Silverman controversy centers around what anthropologists often call joking relations: in any given culture, there are rules, sometimes implicit, often explicit, about which people can joke with each other, about what content is appropriate for joking in specific contents. During times of social anxiety, these rules are closely policed and transgressions of these boundaries are severely punished. Yet, in times of greater security, cultures may suspend or extend the rules to broaden the community which is allowed inside a particular set of joking relationships. But who determines which jokes are safe and permissible? She openly courts such questions by appearing on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, doing verbatim versions of Dave Chappel skits. Can a white woman make the same jokes as a black man or does changing the race of the performer change everything?

Comedy in the 1990s seemed often about securing boundaries as comedians emerged who could articulate the self perceptions and frustrations of different identity politics groups: Asians made Asian jokes, Blacks made black jokes (and sometimes about white people), Jews made Jewish jokes, and white comedians mostly avoided the topic of race altogether. This places an enormous burden on minority performers not simply to speak on behalf of their race but to bear the weight of any discussion about racism. And of course, when black comedians made jokes about black people, they often did so in front of white or mixed audiences. Just as white comedians were uncertain whether they could joke about race and under what circumstances, white audiences were uncertain whether they could laugh about race and under what circumstances. Silverman has thrust herself out there, saying it is time for white comics to joke about race, and has faced the inevitable push-back for trying to change the rules of discourse.

Contemporary cultural theorists have been urging a move away from identity politics towards one based on coalition building: race will not go away simply because we refuse to talk about it and we cannot meaningfully change how we think about race as a society by remaining within our own enclaves. Consider, for example, Frank H. Wu's Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Wu is an Asian-American professor who has chosen to teach at Howard University Law School, a historically black institution, because he wanted to create a context where Asian-Americans and African-Americans can learn to communicate across their racial and ethnic differences. Wu argues that for such coalitions to work, one has to put everything on the table, confront past stereotypes, examine historic misunderstandings, give expression to fears and anxieties. We can't work through the things that separate us until we feel comfortable discussing them together. This isn't simply something that has to take place between different minority groups: there has to be a way where whites can express their own uncertainties about the future without being prejudged.

Jokes may fuel such social transformations because they force us to confront the contradictions in our own thinking. They are valuable precisely because the same joke will be heard differently in different contexts and thus can help us to talk through our different experiences of being raced. As Wu writes, "Race is meaningless in the abstract; it acquires its meanings as it operates on its surroundings. With race, the truism is all the more apt that the same words can take on different meanings depending on the speaker, the audience, the tone, the intention and the usage." Mary Douglas similarly suggests that the reason our culture has such trouble drawing a fixed line between jokes and obscenity is that unlike traditional cultures, we do not occupy "a single moral order" and there are no agreed-upon boundaries.

And that brings us back to Guillermo's appeal that Silverman's "chink" joke might be used as "talking words." From my perspective as a white southern-born male, Silverman is raising important questions about race and racism which white audiences need to hear if they are going to come to grips with a multicultural society. From Aoki's perspective, the same joke evokes a painful history, using words that many Asian-Americans hear too often. At the risk of sounding naive and idealistic, maybe that's something we should be talking about, however awkward the conversation is apt to be.

The Future of Television (Circa 1999)

Bill Densmore of Clickshare recently shared with me the text of an e-mail I had sent him in May 1999 describing what I saw as one scenario for the future of digital culture. I decided I wanted to share it with you to spark a conversation about how far we have gone towards realizing some of the key elements of this scenario as well as how far we have yet to go on other fronts. (the reference points to The X-Files and My So-Called Life give you some sense of the time when this was written.) I was responding to an essay he had written about micropayments and the struggle to insure the diversity of digital culture. Everything from here is part of the original text:

My own research has centrally concerned the ways that popular audiences consume and create value from the resources provided them by the mass media. As I suggested yesterday, I don't find the lowest common denominator model helpful for thinking about the success of most popular entertainment. Rather, I see the popular audience composed of a coalition of different

audience interests who may share certain programs, films, stories in common but who get fundamentally different things from them and who interact with them in different ways. The most creative producers understand this now, while the broadcasting paradigm helps to mask the degree of diversity and fragmentation of the contemporary media audience. It is clearer when we go on line and survey the range of web sites constructed around a particular series or parse through the flame wars on fan discussion lists which occur when radically different reading publics are brought together.

A second focus of my research concerns what I call "cultural convergence," which refers to the social and cultural changes in how we relate to media content in our everyday life that help prepare the way and establish the market viability of technological convergence. When we try to understand what is happening in our culture, we see two things: a growing desire to participate

more fully in our media culture -- not just as passive consumers but active transformers of media content -- and a growing tendency to tighten corporate control over intellectual property law. This is resulting in a crackdown on fan web sites, MP3 files, etc. and thus a closing off of the cultural participation encouraged by the web.

Now, here's what I imagine occurring when we add something like your clickshare to the mix -- along with dramatic improvements in the delivery technology for digital media:

1)All television content becomes available via some form of webtv, including past episodes. If I want to join a series midprogress, I can go back and watch earlier episodes for a reasonable rate with micropayments as the means of exchange between me and the television producers.

2)Television series will be annotated to link back to relevant back story information. If I am watching X FILES and there is reference made to Muldar's sister and her disappearance, I can be offered the chance to see those earlier scenes, again at a modest price. This will enable even more elaborate form of serialization and backstories in American television, a tendency that has grown in the two decades since the introduction of the VCR.

3) Fan websites will play an important role in the cultural economy, if they are allowed to function not unlike the Amazon Associates program. Fan sites will comment on or annotate the aired episodes, thus establishing reasons why various kinds of viewers might want to see them for the first time or watch them again. They can link back to the producer's sites where the

episodes can be downloaded for a viewing fee and the producers will in turn provide an incentive to the fans for creating sites which essentially help market their products. At the same time, fans should be allowed freedom to discuss, comment, and appropriate the material in any way they want since doing so helps to establish niche market value for the content.

4)Certain series may debut on network and then move rather rapidly to the web where their continued support will come from viewers paying to watch them. This will be attractive in cases -- such as MY SO-CALLED LIFE -- where a series attracts an intense following in a definable demographic group but does not register a broad-enough viewership to be powerful according to the Nelson Ratings measurement. The ability to collect payments on a per view basis for a broad audience will enable continued production of such series assuming price scale can be resolved.

5)New networks may emerge which reflect under-served segments of the population that are geographically dispersed and therefore couldn't be addressed by existing broadcast and cable structures. Examples might include various language groups that constitute immigrant populations or the gay and lesbian community. Here, original programming is produced and made available for a modest pay-per-view fee.

6)International circulation of media product is facilitated. We can imagine viewer-supported networks emerging for British/Australian comedy or Japanese Anime for example, which will enable these products fair access to the American market. It will be possible to access television without regard to its original point of origin. Again, this depends on some structure that allows us to pay for what we watch at a modest enough scale to make this attractive to the average viewer on a regular basis.

The micropayment structure would seem to offer the best basis for this model, which leads us step by step towards a more diverse media culture that more fully reflects the range of viewer taste and interest. It will create new basis for profits for the entertainment industry while also enabling more popular access to media content. What is needed is a structure which can lower the per unit cost (and thus broaden the potential base of viewership), can be collected quickly and efficiently, and can be distributed to a range of different media producers as opposed to create narrow gateway companies that will once again determine what we can and cannot see based on broadcast models of the mass audience.

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.

Supernatural: First Impressions

Late last fall, I asked for readers of this blog to pimp their favorite shows. Overwhelmingly, the most popular choice was a CW series called Supernatural -- of course, there was a concerted campaign within the show's fan community to write in and share the love for the series in hopes that it might generate greater awareness of the program. Here's just a few of the things readers had to say about Supernatural:

Every week is like a new little horror movie that, most times, is really quite frightening. But that's not what really drives it. The true strength of Supernatural lies in the absolutely touching family ties and brotherly love exhibited every episode by Sam and Dean.

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

The tight brotherly bond, driven by the love of their father is what keeps the fans coming back. The lore [hellhounds, demons, vamps, wendigos] keeps the fans sticking around for more and a crossover from the [Joss]Whedonverse thrills us! Each week a new puzzle piece is put down in the mystery of their family's trials and tribulations and we LOVE Eric Kripke for such a great show.

*****

John, Sam and Dean are a dysfunctional family, and so intriguing with it that all the exchanges they have about their family issues have us fan(girls, mostly, I think) squee in delight. They all have a definite character, differences and similarities quite cleverly written and filmed (the way Dean and John move, the way in which John and Sam say the same words, etc). The feelings implied in looking out for each other not only as fellow hunters but as a family make the tension in the fighting/dangerous scenes raise up a notch. We want to see Sam telling it all to his father, we want to see what Dean would do, who would he side with, we want to see John worried about his boys. In short, we want to see MEN EMOTE for each other, and the family ties allow for a narrative that can play with this instead of justifying it.

******

Usually when there's a friendship that fan glom onto, there will be hints of it onscreen--banter, and maybe once or twice per season they save each other's lives. It's the fans who had the really deep, strong emotional undercurrent in fanfic. But in Supernatural, the intense bond between the brothers is part of the text.

*********

It's got a lovely mix of an overall mytharc as well as standalone bits and episodes.

********

The arch narrative is threaded all throughout the first season, picked up in some episodes and just mentioned in others, but it's what gives the series a fundamental unity and reason d'eitre.

*******

The continuity is fabulous, and works in all sorts of extra information, both on the characters and whatever myth they're investigating. I find myself re-watching episodes, figuring out what's going on, and the researching the history of the legends.

Each of the paragraphs above comes from a different reader but they represent steps in an argument that certainly got my attention. All I can say is that your campaign worked -- at least in my case. I had only a vague awareness of Supernatural before I started getting flooded by these earnest pleas and recommendations. Frankly, I had lumped it together with Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, seeing the whole lot as basically TV knockoffs of The Sixth Sense. But, once I read those recommendations, I know I had to see it for myself and so I put the Season One DVD boxed set on my Christmas list. I've been watching Supernatural while coping with jet lag during my trip to Singapore -- maybe not the best choice under the circumstances because instead of putting me to sleep, I keep wanting to watch just one more and end up staying up later than I should be. I more or less ended up inhaling Season One -- watching the last eight episodes more or less back to back on the flight back from Singapore, and I am now craving season two.

I kept planning to write a midterm report on my viewing but given the choice between watching another episode and writing about the series, I kept choosing to watch another episode. Every statement I quoted above is absolutely true -- this is a show which delivers real haunted house style horror every week and does so while giving us an extensive look into the emotional life and personal growth of its core protagonist. Each episode is self contained enough that you can watch it out of sequence and get something rewarding out of the experience, yet there's a powerful cumulative effect of watching the episodes in sequence and thus seeing the character's inner lives come bubbling up again and again. The writing is crisp; the characters have a distinctive voice.

You can try to compare it to X-Files or Buffy or Night Stalker, all of which it superficially resembles, but this series does things its own way (as I hope to illustrate in a moment).

It's hard to imagine how or why a series this good is suffering from such total neglect from the network, from the critics, though clearly not from its most hardcore fans.

Let me tell you I was nervous going in. Having decided I wanted to write something in response to the community's push, I was terrified I wasn't going to like the show and would then have to write something negative. I never want to pee on someone else's fandom but I was starting to see some folks out in LJland grumbling because I hadn't said anything about Supernatural while I had posted about Heroes, the runner up show in my contest (You know who you are). I was already writing Heroes; Supernatural took homework and the end of a term is not the best time to be adding on extra assignments.

As it happens, the first few episodes didn't quite grab me -- they were good enough, they worked well within the terms of the genre, the characters and plot had potential, but I wasn't hooked. For me, the episode that pushed me over the edge was "Skin." And from there, it just got more and more intense. Retrospectively, it was all there from the beginning.

For those who, like me, got it confused with some of the other supernatural shows that hit television around the same time, this one deals with two brothers who are traveling across America doing battle with demonic forces and searching for their missing father. The creatures they encounter in any given episode are the stuff of campfire stories -- they are inspired by roadside Americana and by urban legends. It is supernatural horror of a kind which movies rarely give us any more -- spin tingling without being overly gory (other than an odd preoccupation with dripping blood). Indeed, its dependence on shadowy figures owes something to the vintage horror films of producer Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) than anything in contemporary horror cinema. On the making of tape, Eric Kripke cites a range of filmic exemplars, including Poltergeist, An American Werewolf in London, and The Evil Dead movies.

The film scholar Robin Wood has identified the core formula for the horror film -- "normality is threatened by the monstrous" -- and suggested that the formula breaks down into three elements - normality, the monstrous, and the relationship between the two. And it is on that level that we can understand what separates Supernatural from many of the other horror series on television.

Joss Whedon has described the vampires and demons represented on Buffy as "metaphors" for teenage experience in America: they embody the horrors to be found in the hellmouth that is American public education.

The monsters in The X-Files ultimately became clues within the vast governmental conspiracy that Scully and Muldar wanted to uncover: the truth was out there and each monster we unmask brought us closer to the truth. Earlier in the series, everything hinged on the debate between faith and science, with the two partners contesting the validity of each other's world views.

Something similar can be said of Lost where the supernatural elements are few and far between but seem to be just one more tantalizing clue to the puzzle that constitutes the series.

In Supernatural, the monsters are, in effect, emotional scars and psychic wounds. They represent unresolved emotional issues, often within the context of family life, and they are also external correlatives for the emotional drama taking place in the lives of the series' protagonists. Sam and Dean go out there looking for things that are strange and unfamiliar and they end up seeing themselves and their relationship more clearly.

This is the stuff of classic melodrama: Peter Brooks tells us that melodrama externalizes emotions. It takes what the characters are feeling and projects it onto the universe. So that the character's emotional lives gets mapped onto physical objects and artifacts, gets mirror backed to them through other characters, gets articulated through gestures and physical movements, and on a metalevel, speaks to us through the music which is what gives melodrama its name. Supernatural is melodrama in the best sense of the term.

On one level, it is made up of classic masculine elements -- horror, the hero's quest, sibling rivalry, unresolved oedipal dramas -- but on another level, it seems ideally suited to the themes and concerns which have long interested the female fan community. Heck, this series is one long hurt/comfort story. Every episode seems structured as much around the character moments as around the monster of the week plotlines. Everything here seems designed to draw out the emotions of the characters and force them to communicate with each other across all of the various walls which traditional masculinity erects to prevent men from sharing their feelings with each other. Dean in particular seems to hate "chick flick moments" and has a running commentary on how much he would like to avoid getting in touch with his feelings but this doesn't prevent us from having some real emotional revelations in almost every episode and the last few episodes of the season force each character to decide what matters most to them and to weigh their goals against their ties to their family in the most immediate ways possible.

I am someone who is definitely closer to Sam than to Dean in my outlook on life and indeed, there are moments in the series that I absolutely hate Dean, yet the series is well enough constructed that each time you reach that point, they peal back another layer and show some other aspect of his character. There are several episodes near the end of Season one which show us why he acts the way he does and suggests that his emotions run a lot deeper than his machismo will allow him to admit.

What gives the series its epic structure is the quest for the demon that took the life of the boy's mother. The goal is what holds the dysfunctional and centrifugal family together; it is also what pulls them apart (since each of them holds within them some secrets about what happened that night that they have never shared with each other and the trauma has hit each of them on a different level.) Not every episode contributes directly to this core quest narrative -- though many of them are connected to it in ways that are not immediately clear and the quest gains momentum as you move into the last third of the first season (and perhaps beyond). This is not an ensemble drama of the kind which most often wins recognition from critics these days: the focus is strongly on the two protagonists but around them, we accumulate, episode by episode, a richly drawn set of supporting characters, some of whom are recurring, some of whom appear in only a single storyline. It is not always clear which is which when we watch an episode and a real strength of the series is that what may at first seem to be throw away or one shot characters may resurface later. The series spends enough time setting up many of these characters that it produces considerable negative capability: we want to know what happens to these characters after the episode ends and in the case of the various family friends we encounter, we'd like to find out more about their history with the father before the series itself starts. There's more than enough suggestions of back story here to sustain an army of fan writers for a long time to come.

A real strength of the series is the construction of female secondary characters, all the more unusual in a series which is so centrally about its core male leads. But each week, we seem to introduce one or two women who are struggling not only against supernatural forces but against the circumstances life has thrown their way. As Carol Clover suggests in Men, Women, and Chain Saw, horror films have traditionally offered a range of strong roles for women in part because men can accept the experience of risk and vulnerability at the heart of horror by mapping it onto the female victim. Clover describes the role of the Final Girl in the slasher film genre, for example, showing how the women overcome and ultimately face down their fear in the course of the action. These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion. The result are some of the most compelling male/female relationships I've seen on prime time network television.

I am trying to write this without giving away too many spoilers. Part of my pleasure here was going into this series without knowing what to expect. Yet, I am hoping that I can lend my voice to the other fans of the series who wrote in this fall to pimp this show. You can certainly discover some of the virtues I've identified here in a single episode seen out of context but there really is a value in going back and watching this series from the beginning. There is a growth in the emotional life of the characters which is best experienced watching several episodes in a gulp. This is the kind of series that dvd box sets are made for.

I hope to write some more about Supernatural down the line. One of the things I am still working on are the parallels between Supernatural and Heroes, the other show which did very well with readers of this blog. There are several plot elements here -- the theme of dopplegangers in "Skin" for example parallels the Niki/Jessica storyline in Heroes and the slow discovery of the extend of Sam's powers has a lot in common with what happens to the various protagonists on the NBC superhero drama. I also think there's a fair amount to be said here about what I see as the surprisingly negative portrayal of fans in "Hell House," especially given the discussions we've had here about the "Love & Monsters" episode of Doctor Who.

I still have read none of the fan commentary beyond what's been posted here or the fan fiction so I don't know for sure what elements fans are picking up on in this series. That will be the next step once I get caught up with season two. But for the moment, I think you can add me to the list of Supernatural fans.

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

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

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

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

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

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

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

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

Treasuring My Translation

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

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

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

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

films as seriously as politicians do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Fandom Goes Mainstream...

The most recent issue of Flow includes a range of different responses to the Flow conference, which I referenced here a few weeks ago. One of the articles would seem to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, because it refers to the panel on "Watching Television Off-Television" which I helped to organize, because it addresses the shifting nature of fan engagement with contemporary media, and because it was written by Kristina Busse (co-editor of the book, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which was previously discussed here). Previously I have contrasted the context in which I wrote Textual Poachers (a world where fan culture was largely marginalized and hidden from view) and the context described in Convergence Culture (a world where fan participations are increasingly central to the production decisions shaping the current media landscape).

Busse's question, though, is whether we are really talking about the same fan culture in the two instances. Here's part of what she has to say:

Throughout the panel "Watching Television Off-Television," the emphasis was on how such behavior has become mainstream: casual media users now can engage with a universe that exceeds the television show via cross-media, cross-platform texts, thus creating a synergistic "overflow" experience. Thus, Jason Mittell offered the examples of Alternate Reality Games and additional online-only available footage, Will Brooker presented various fully immersive web sites that invite viewers into the shows' diegetic spaces, and Henry Jenkins commented on the current ease of streaming or downloading television shows. The mainstreaming of fannish behaviors is thus seen as advantageous even if (or maybe even because?) the industry clearly attempts to create such behavioral patterns in order to sell their products and/or supplementary materials....My central question is: How alike or different is such a commercially constructed position when compared to the space media fans have traditionally eked out for themselves?

At least some fans have gained power and influence in the context of convergence culture. As I suggested here the other week, there are more fan friendly shows on the schedule. Shows which attract strong fan interests have a somewhat stronger chance of surviving. Producers interested in engaging with fans are generating more additional material which expands the fictional universe. We are seeing a thawing of the relations between media producers and fans as the studios are reassessing their attitudes towards even some of the more controversial aspects of fan culture. (We saw some signs of this détente during the Fan Culture panel at the Future of Entertainment conference.) And fannish modes of engagement with popular texts are spreading at a dramatic rate across more and more segments of the population.

And that's part of what concerns Busse:

What ultimately separates "fans" from casual TV viewers who engage fannishly? Or, more specifically, how can we define fans without invoking a category so expansive that it includes all media audiences or one so narrow that it excludes large numbers of individualist fans? How can we create a continuum that acknowledges the more intense emotional and actual engagements of many TV viewers today without erasing the strong community structures which have developed through media fandom?

What gets lost as some of these fannish values and reading practices spread across the entire viewing public? Is there still a value in understanding fandom as a distinct subculture with its own cultural hierarchies and aesthetic norms, its own forms of social engagement, its own traditions of interpretation, its own system of genres for cultural production, and perhaps its own gender politics? Is this just another case of a subculture fearing a loss of "authenticity" as it moves into the mainstream? Or read from another angle, what happens to fan studies when it moves from the study of subcultural practices to the study of dominant or at least widespread forms of media consumption?

To some degree, fandom has already started to lose some of its distinctiveness as a subcultural community. Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic expansion in the amount of fan fiction being produced, for example, with many of the newcomers entering the space not through social interactions with other fans but rather from reading fan fiction online. In some cases, old time fans would argue, some core norms of the fan community have been shredded and old taboos have been violated as these "unsocialized" fans have pulled fan fiction in their own directions. Communities which might have been separated geographically and culturally have been brought together online, resulting in a series of flame wars and feuds over disagreements about how texts should be interpreted or rewritten in a "fannish" way. As many of these reading practices spread further, reaching fans through commercial channels who have had no real direct contact with fandom as a subculture, further changes are likely to occur.

Busse links this shift in what it means to be a fan to what seems destined to become an important conceptual debate in the field of fan studies -- between a focus on fan cultures (which runs through my own work) and the emphasis on the emotional experience of the individual fan (best embodied by Cornel Sandvoss's Fans. Sandvoss seems to want us to return to the idea of the isolated, individual fan at the moment where most of the rest of the world is discovering the power of social networks, embracing an "architecture of participation," and recognizing the importance of the kinds of knowledge communities that have always been central to the concept of a fan culture. Yet, Sandvoss is correct to argue that a great many people who call themselves "fans" have no direct engagement with the larger social community which fandom represents and our research paradigm privileges the most visible and distinctive fans over the more "causal" fans who can be difficult to locate or document. For these people, being a fan becomes a form of media consumption but not necessarily a kind of social affiliation.

This leads Busse to suggest we make some basic distinctions in our discussions of fans and fan culture:

I want to suggest that we distinguish between fan and fandom as well as acknowledge that there are different trajectories that combine into levels of fannishness. In other words, an intense emotional investment in a media text that is wholly singular may create a fan but does not make the individual part of a larger fandom, whereas a person enacting fannish behavior may not define him- or herself as a fan. It thus might be useful to consider the overlapping but not interdependent axes of investment and involvement as two factors that can define fannish engagement. Moreover, we need to consider models that can differentiate between people who are fans of a specific text, those that define themselves as fans per se, and those that are members of fandom.

This last bit seems particularly important to me. From the start, media studies has been most interested, it seems to me, in the study of fans of particular texts. My early work on fans keeps getting described as a study of Trekkers (if I am lucky) and Trekkies (if I am not), even though the idea of nomadic reading was absolutely central to Textual Poachers account of fandom. Whatever Poachers was about, it wasn't about the fans of a single series (Star Trek or otherwise), though I do spend a chapter talking about the fans of Beauty and the Beast and tracing their shifting relationship to the series. Rather, I would have said that the book was much more about a kind of cultural logic which shapes how fans read across a range of different texts and even more importantly, about a specific social and cultural community -- mostly composed of women -- which actively translates the experience of watching television into various forms of cultural production.

My second book on fans, Science Fiction Audiences (written with John Tulloch), suggested that there may be multiple fan communities with their own interpretive and creative practices which grow up around the same series. There, I am focused on Star Trek but try to show a larger context for the differences in the way the series gets read in the technologically-focused community at MIT, in the female fanzine culture, and among the members of the Gaylaxians, a queer fan organization.

Yet, still, my emphasis was on fan communities -- the shared social contexts within which fan reading and creative practices occur -- and not on fans per se. Indeed, most of fan studies has ended up being a study of fandom -- as in the practices and creations of a specific subculture of fans -- rather than the study of fans -- what we assume to be a somewhat larger, socially fragmented, group of people who feel a strong emotional investment in television content but who may never translate that attachment into the kinds of creative and social activities which we study. Sometimes, we get around this distinction by describing the most socially active group as fans and the more causal and isolated individuals as followers but this simply creates a misalignment between academic terms and popular usage.

Busse's essay, then, is dealing in part with how academics conceptualize fandom but I also think she is expressing concern over the mainstreaming of fan culture and I understand her concern. There has been a pretty long history of media producers nuzzling up to fans in the early days of a franchise when they need help attracting an audience or staying on the air and then creating more distance when the show reaches a certain level of commercial success. Fandom as a subculture seems closely associated with the idea of niche success, where-as a mainstream success may depend on a more diffused notion of what it means to be a fan.

Busse writes:

Commercially encouraged modes of engagement that employ modes of fannish identity do not create instafans; moreover, the types of engagement often vary, not only with intensity but also with creativity. In the end, I feel it is important to realize that playing a computer game or looking around a website may not be wholly the same as participating in a fannish gift exchange or contributing to a shared fictional universe.

Yes and No. In some cases, these commercial materials represent a point of entry into other, more elaborate forms of fan activity -- they represent one gateway among many into fandom and it is up to the individual participant whether they are satisfied with playing in the shallow end of the pool or whether they want a deeper immersion into fan culture. In some cases, such as the creation of immersive shared worlds around fictional programs or the deployment of alternative reality games, there may be more creativity and social engagement going on here that Busse is estimating from the vantage point of someone who comes at fan culture from a different point of entry.

There are also important gender distinctions here in terms of what activities count once fandom goes mainstream -- with the commercial industry finding it easier to absorb some of the collector or geeky aspects of male fan culture more easily than it can deal with the issues of emotion and sexuality that run through female produced fan fiction. I am struck in my own work that gender was much more central to Textual Poachers, written at a moment when fans were marginal, than in Convergence Culture, written at a moment when fan culture is more central to the ways the media ecology operates. Does this reflect a lack of segregation of interests in these newer fan cultures or the continued marginalization of interests and tastes that have historically shaped women's participation in fan culture?

We need to continually refine our categories of analysis and this essay makes a great contribution by bringing some of these questions out into the open.

A Few Links of Interest to Aca/Fan Readers

For those of you interested in science fiction...check out the webcast version of my conversation with Joe Haldeman on the Craft of Science Fiction which I publicized here a few weeks ago. I felt like it turned out very well with lots of insights from Haldeman about science fiction's place in contemporary culture and some interesting discussion of the representation of war in his own writing. One of my favorite moments came when he discussed the influence of Ernest Hemmingway on his work -- not exactly a common topic of the SF convention circuit. And he also reads from his forthcoming novel -- a time travel story set at MIT.

For those of you interested in Harry Potter... check out Episode 10 of Spellcast, a podcast created by the fine folks at Fictionalley.org. Gwen does an interview with yours truly about Convergence Culture with a particular focus on fandom and Harry Potter.

A Bit of Metablogging...

I have noted that there has been a decrease of late in the number of comments being posted to this blog despite a continuing increase in the number of people reading it. I have struggled for some time to think about the best way to address this when I spoke to a friend in Live Journal community who said there was some perception that there was no point posting comments here because they were being filtered.

Let me explain what's going on: This blog receives more than a hundred spam messages a day, most of them things that I really don't want going up on my site -- promises to expand the size of the various private bits of our variously gendered anatomies, footage of young women taking full advantage of their local menagerie, or promises of imagines of certain prominent media personalities engaged with what they would call in the world of wrestling, foreign objects. So far, even spam filter I have tried either lets significant numbers of these messages slide through or cuts out many of the most substantive posts and in most cases, both occur. I have moved away from a policy where things go up instantly on the site and then I have to take down all of the porn spam to one where everything goes into hold until I can filter through it manually.

I actually try to do this several times a day though when I travel or am running a conference or... there are days when I may only get to this task once every 24 hours. The only messages in the end, other than the unspeakable spam, that actually get filtered are those which are asking me to fix some bug on the site -- like a bad link (and there I just fix the problem) or those which clearly want to speak with me personally (and I just respond to the person directly).

Otherwise, it is my belief that every message I get is going up on the site within 24 hours of when it is posted. I know that is slower than most Live Journal entries which offer instant gratification but don't seem to face the same volume of spam. (I am told that the amount of spam is connected to the number of links to your site so the spam problem is a product of how successful we've been at generating more productive kinds of conversations. Ironic, isn't it?)

If for some reason your message doesn't go up within 24 hours, please ping me at henry3@mit.edu since I very much want to get your messages out there. We have created a really astonishing community of readers around this blog and I'd like to have you guys talking with each other more often.

I plan to continue to run periodic posts like the Pimp My Show one last week which are intended to generate a lot of traffic from readers but honestly, I'd love to get your reactions -- positive or negative -- to all of the posts here. Almost every given post seems to be generating discussion on other blogs targeted at some subset of the readership and I am grateful for all the shout outs. But it would be great, given the mix of industry folks and fans, for example, who read this blog to have more exchanges among you here. I see these posts as conversation starters, not the last word on the subject. I am not always able to respond personally to every comment but I am trying to use them to guide the content I put up here on the blog and they are extremely helpful to me.

Pimp My Show!

The title says it all. We are already a few months into the Fall 2006 television season -- some of the new series have already come and gone, others have started to develop solid fan followings. I wanted to invite my loyal readers to share with us which new shows have really caught your fancy and why. (Of course, it's always fun to hear which new shows have bored or disgusted you, too.) It's been a while since we've had a really good conversation going with the readers of this blog so I am hoping you will rise to the occasion and share with us what you think have been the most interesting new shows this season. And of course, since I've got lots of international readers, don't presume we are just talking about American shows. I'd love to hear about amazing shows out there in other countries which are generating fan interest.

To get the ball rolling, I dug out some notes I sent to the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium this summer, before any of the shows had actually reached the air. I tried to predict which new shows would be "most fan friendly." It's interesting to see how well I did.

First, let's define "fan friendly." By fan friendly, I mean programs that attract strong, committed and highly visible followings as manifested in such activities as fan fiction writing, convention discussions, and online forums. Such programs may or may not enjoy ratings success by traditional standards. So, the CSI franchise consistently ranks in the top tier of the Nielsen ratings but doesn't generate anywhere near as much interest within the fan communities as a lower rated show such as Veronica Mars. Indeed, historically, fan favorite shows enjoyed a marginal position on the schedule, having strong niche appeal but struggling to stay on the air. That's why there have been so many letter writing campaigns through the years to keep their favorite shows on the air. It is only in recent years where cult shows like Lost also happen to be ratings leaders that the line between the two has started to blur.

Yet, even if fan favorites are not top ratings earners, they serve other vital interests for networks -- as I suggest in Convergence Culture. They are "must see" TV at a time when appointment viewing is in decline. They tend to rank higher in terms of paid downloads or digital video recording than many shows that do better in the ratings. And early research suggests that people watching their favorite shows are more engaged with the advertising as well as the content. They are also more willing to seek out further information about the series, resulting in more touch points and a greater receptiveness to convergence-based strategies. And for lower ranked and cable networks, a strong niche audience may make or break a program.

For my current purposes, I am really talking about two different but sometimes interrelated fan communities: one mostly female and focused around the production and consumption of fan fiction and the second, mixed gender and focused on online speculation and discussion. Keep in mind that there are other possible fan communities - sports fans, soap fans, music fans, etc. who will have their own criteria and interests.

So, what kinds of shows are most apt to attract strong fan followings?

Fan Friendly Programs:

1. Focus heavily on characters and character relationships. In some cases, fans will pull secondary characters from the margins of a series if they are not interested in the central protagonists. In particular, they are looking for the following:

--Strong emotional bonds - especially partnership, mentorship, and romance (probably in that order if you are talking about the female fan writing community)

-- Strong focus on the formation of alternative or utopian communities (again, this is especially true with the fanzine community).

-- Intelligent characters who use their brains to solve problems

-- Outside characters or characters with strong internal conflicts.

--Strong, competent, and active female characters

We can understand each of these traits as in some ways reflecting how fans see themselves and their social network. Fans see themselves as intelligent, strong, independent, socially committed, and nonconventional and they are drawn to characters who share those characteristics. They contrast themselves to what they call "mundane" viewers. These traits also reflect the genres that have emerged in fan fiction. Given the presence of a strong fan tradition about male partners becoming lovers, for example, there is a tendency for fans to be attracted towards shows that have strong partnership themes. So, a show like House meets all or most of these criteria including intelligent protagonists, a focus on friendship, romance, and mentorship, a strong sense of community, etc.

2. Focus on genre entertainment. While many fans watch realist or quality dramas (such as The West Wing) or sitcoms, these programs rarely cross over into their activities as fans. They do not generate the same level of discussion online or at cons nor do they inspire the same amount of fan fiction. Historically, organized fandom started in response to science fiction but with each new series that fits the other criteria but does not fall into the science fiction genre, the tastes of this community has broadened. So, at the moment, fan favorites can include crime dramas (Prison Break), mystery (Veronica Mars), adventure (Lost), science fiction (Battlestar: Galactica), historical drama (Rome), westerns (Deadwood), Buddy shows (Entourage), medical shows (House), etc.

3. Provides a strong sense of continuity. Even before there were fully elaborated story arcs on television, fans were inclined to read the episodes as if they formed some larger continuity. Series which rely heavily on continuity tap the collective memory of the fan community and allow them to show the kinds of mastery that comes from systematically watching a particular series. The management of continuity in turn becomes a favorite activity in online fan discussions.

4. Contain secrets or problems to be solved. Take this back to a distinction I make in my book, Convergence Culture between attractors (that is, shows that draw together like minded individuals) and activators (shows that give the fan community something to do - some roles and goals they can pursue together in relation to the content). The power of a show like Lost is that it is continually opening up new secrets, posing new mysteries, and creating new opportunities for fans to pool knowledge (see the much-discussed example of the map this season). This also accounts for how reality television programs such as Survivor, Big Brother, or American Idol find their way into the emerging fan cannon - because they offer either plenty of room for speculation between episodes or explicit opportunities for evaluation and participation.

5. Often have strong pedigrees. Shows by creators of previous fan shows (such as Abrams or Whedon) can more or less insure that their fan bases will turn out and give a first look at any new series they produced. Since part of the challenge is to produce a series that will be an attractor, this is a huge advantage going in. Despite the focus on characters within fan aesthetics, the same has not always proven to be true for actors. While there are fans for specific actors who will follow them from series to series, fans of a character may or may not be interested in something else from the same performer.

These are traits we can judge from advanced information about a series. There are other elements that are harder to read. It is not enough that a show operate within a well defined genre; it has to respect those genre conventions and satisfy the audience demands that draw them to the genre. It is not enough that characters be compelling on paper but there's an element of chemistry that emerges as these characters are embodied by specific performers that can make or break a series.

What happens when we apply these criteria to the series announced for this fall.

First, most shows do not stand a chance of reaching this kind of committed fan viewer because they do not meet most if not all of these criteria. By my count, there are 14 shows that have the potential to be fan friendly. A surprisingly high number are explicitly comparing themselves to Lost, hoping to become mass-cult successes.

What's striking in looking at the fall lineup is that networks have gotten the idea of continuity and serialization almost too well. Many of the series are designed to last a season or even half a season. They have plots or gimmicks that are going to be compelling in short bursts but will be hard to sustain over time. Some may go the route of 24, generating a new plot for each new season. Some will be canceled before each the first story arc runs its course. And some will make the mistake of avoiding resolution and thus drawing out a plotline well past its likely audience interest. If American television operated like British television, say, where you have a firm commitment for x number of episodes going in and then a series ends, whether or not it develops strong ratings, then we would know how to calibrate expectations about these series. But, many of them are artistic time bombs which may take off strong and then blow up in the networks' faces as they move into season 2. Of course in a world where the vast majority of shows never make a second season, this may not be a total disaster....

If I had to pick the most likely fan favorite of the lot, I would go with Heroes, followed by Vanished, Six Degrees, Jericho and Runaways. Studio 60 is the wild card in all of this - It will certainly be watched by a large number of fans but will it motivate fanish activities. (Either way, Studio 60 is probably the new show that is going to be most eagerly awaited in my household.)

Of these shows, at this point, Heroes and Studio 60 are the only ones that are still on my Tivo. How about you?

On Blogs, Lost, and Jag Studies...

For those of you interested in the blogosophere (and I have to assume you are or you wouldn't be reading this blog), there are some fascinating statistics to be found on Technorati's State of the Blogosphere report. Technorati is now tracking 57 Million blogs -- with a growth of 100,000 new blogs added each day throughout the last quarter. The number of blogs doubles every five to seven months.

They publish an interesting chart which shows the peak moments in blog posting and their relationship to specific news events. On the one hand, this chart suggests how vital politics is to what motivates people to post and on the other, it suggests that the increased number of bloggers means that each major political event is likely to generate more traffic and discussion than the last. We can speculate whether all of this reaction to news is likely to be divisive as some critics have argued, leaving us more likely to read each new development through an ever narrower and more self righteous ideological frame or likely to enable real discussion and community building as others have argued because we have a greater understanding of how politics impacts the everyday lives of a diverse array of people.

Blogs remain a highly decentralized mode of expression, even though some blogs (topped by Endgadget and Boing Boing) are beginning to compete directly with the websites offered by the major media companies in terms of traffic. Only three blogs make it to the top fifty most trafficked news sites while another nine make it into the second 50 most trafficked sites.

The egotist in me was interested in their classification of blogs as influential based on the number of other blogs which link to them. By these criteria, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, which I launched in June, has already made its way into "the very high authority group," thanks no doubt to the number of "thought leaders" and fellow bloggers who read this site, since our readership numbers are a good deal lower than many of the other blogs to make it to this status. You are an elite, dear readers, and you work hard to spread the word about some of the information posted here. For this, I thank you very very much.

Another Aca/Fan Takes Up Blogging

One of these new bloggers is none other than Jason Mittell, a regular reader and commentator here, an academic friend who teaches at Middlebury College and went to my Alma madder, UW-Madison and who is one of the academic advisors to the Convergence Culture Consortium. Mittell wrote Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture and is now working on a new book on complexity of American television. Here's a link to an essay Mittell published recently which touches on many shows that are much beloved in the aca/fan community. I have added Mittell's new blog, JustTV, to my blogroll and I suspect many of you will want to add it to their rss feeds.

The blog is only a few weeks old. So far, for my money, the most interesting post has dealt with the midseason finale of Lost. It is written from the perspective of a hardcore fan of the series as well as someone who is closely examining the growing complexity of American television:

One of Lost's strengths thus far has been a mastery of final acts, both of season and episode. Throughout season 2, fans complained that many episodes were 40 minutes of boring set-up for a great final 3-minute sequence. I was always fine with that, as I recognized that those set-ups were usually needed to deliver the final moments, and they served to deepen character and plot arcs in often subtle ways. And Lost has delivered in the season finales both years, albeit in different ways. Season 1 ended with some frustrating suspense, peering down the hatch, but the capture of Walt was an immensely satisfying twist. Season 2's finale was simply perfect, answering tons of questions about Desmond & the hatch, while opening a great number of mysteries to keep us pondering all summer (cue Giant Foot).

Now Lost is going with a split-season model, delivering a 6-episode mini-season this fall before going on hiatus until February. Last night's episode, "I Do," seemed poised to deliver on wrapping up many of the issues raised this season, and creating enough momentum to sustain interest for three months. It failed at both tasks. What was wrapped up? The only thing I can see is the resolution of the Kate/Sawyer/Jack love triangle - Kate & Sawyer are the couple, as Kate doesn't do taco night (and Jack's all about taco night). For some fans, this is huge, but I'm not a "shipper," nor do I think that's the main draw for the majority of Lost viewers. We got nothing about the motivations, history, or plans of The Others (as a friend of mine says, they seem omnipotent simply for omnipotence sake), no clues into Desmond's transformation or any other insights into the Swan's implosion, and no better sense of the numerous dangling clues (giant foot, Eyepatch Man, Mrs. Klugh, Alex, Penny's listening station, DHARMA/Hanso/numbers, Walt, Libby, shall I continue?).

What about narrative momentum? The cliffhanger seemed more out of 24 than Lost (which is not praise on my blog) - Jack holding Ben's kidney hostage, Kate trying to escape from mini-island peril, Sawyer at gunpoint. None of these developments are surprising, and the suspense is pretty low as well, as we know all three characters will survive this, and probably Ben will too. Lost's strength has been not in generating "what will happen?" suspense like typical thrillers, but creating "why are things happening?" intrigue. We know why Ben wants surgery, we know why Jack wants to save himself and Kate, we know why Kate & Sawyer want to get it on in a cage. I won't spend 3 months wondering what will happen to these characters, but I'm still pondering many "whys." The only dangling mystery we were given was Locke's revelation on Eko's Jesus Stick - but it's a clue with no payoff and no immediate resonance. I'm sure it'll matter in February, but who cares until then. [Plus as an added gripe, Kate's flashback completely wasted the glorious Nathan Fillion, only making me want to watch Firefly/em> again.]

More generally, Mittell has been responding to journalistic discussions which have suggested that there may be a backlash afoot against serialization and complexity this season as reflected by the lack of audience interest in many of the new dramas. Here's some of what Mittell has to say about The Nine, a series about which I am still trying to make up my mind:

While there's much I like about the show - strong cast, high production values, engaging characters, and a clever idea - something has bothered me from the beginning of the show. For those who haven't watched it, the concept is that nine people are held hostage in a bank robbery, and the show traces the after-effects of the event on their lives and relationships. The show's storytelling gimmick is that the 52 hours of the hostage situation is not revealed directly to the audience - each episode fills in a bit more of the events at the beginning of the show, and through flashbacks that characters have throughout the rest of the episode.

This storytelling device is clearly inspired from Lost, where flashbacks reveal a character's back-story that illuminate their "current" situation on the island, as well as other programs that have used flashbacks & flash-forward (temporal manipulations called anachrony in the narratology jargon) in creative ways, like Jack & Bobby and Boomtown. But my problem with The Nine is that there is no clear motivation either for withholding the events in the bank from the audience, or the way in which they are revealed. In fact, the viewers seem to be the only ones who don't know what has happened inside the bank -- whereas in other programs using temporal complexity, a character's discovery process or the act of retelling to another character motivates narrative revelations. More than any other show using such innovative storytelling strategies, The Nine seems to use its devices only as an externally-imposed gimmick without a clear motivation emerging from the story world itself.

For my money, Mittell is one of the best writers about contemporary television, one who regularly combines astute perspectives on the industrial context as well as a solid understanding of the formal construction of individual series and specific episodes. He watches television closely and isn't afraid to tell us what he thinks matters there.

Developing a Taste for JAG

Mittell was one of the many interesting people who I got to interact with at the recent Flow conference which was hosted by the University of Texas-Austin. I often mention Flow here because I see it as an important experiment in making academic criticism of television and new media more accessible to a general audience. Many of you might be interested to check out some of the short position papers issued by the conference participants around a range of topics.

Mittell participated on a session, for example, which centers around issues of taste and opened up a far reaching discussion of the role of evaluation in contemporary television studies. One of the most provocative statements came from my long time friend, Greg Smith, who currently teaches at Georgia State University, and who is finishing up a book on Ally McBeal. Smith asked conference participants to reflect on what does and doesn't receive academic attention and how this is bound up with academia as a particular taste culture. He ended up framing what became known as the "JAG question.":

TV studies, like all subcultures, was born out of a particular set of historical relations to the larger culture, and so we emerged out of film studies (by way of cultural studies) by tending to distance ourselves from the sometimes elite interests of our "parent discipline." From this pioneering work we gained a particular understanding of the popular as potentially unruly, a Rabelaisian source of energy that propels texts/viewers across social space. While we have grown to nuance our understanding of the politics of texts, this particular understanding of the popular still colors the choices we tend to make in examining texts. The more clearly a TV text fits this concept of the popular, the more likely we are to study it. I'll pick on Buffy here (a show I love) because its rise as one of the most explored texts in academic television studies has much to do the fact that it fits this specific notion of the popular. Its irreverent play with social categories, its sense of the grotesque as populist metaphor, its ardent following among an interpretive community: all these things place Buffy squarely within the center of our notion of the popular.

We need to recognize that this particular understanding of the popular is a value of our academic subculture, one that leads us to privilege certain text/viewer relations over others. In contrast, where is the analysis of JAG, a popular show that flew under the critical radar for 10 seasons? This has something to do with JAG's creators being less visible and less adept than Joss Whedon, but I also suspect that this is because JAG does not fit our primary notion of the popular. JAG is far too square to be interesting to television studies.

And thus the blind spot that I call "hipness." I initially considered discussing this distinction in terms of a preference toward the lowbrow and against the middlebrow, but the terms lowbrow/middlebrow feel too much like properties of the text to me. I prefer the term "hip" (and its opposite, "square") because it more clearly places the interpretive community into the mix. A text is hip or square to a particular community, and what's hip to one subculture may not be hip to another. And so Star Trek may be considered unhip by broader society while being the granddaddy of hip for TV studies. But what of texts that are squarer and yet immensely popular by the standards of broad viewership? Where's the field of Raymond studies? My suspicion is that (in spite of - or perhaps because of -- the fact that everybody loves him), Raymond studies would just not be as much fun (another taste category).

About this point in the discussion, Will Brooker, a British scholar who has written books on Alice in Wonderland, Batman, and Bladerunner (themselves hip or fannish shows), stood up and jokingly accused me of being responsible of misdirecting the entire field down the Aca/fan path, suggesting that every young academic is now a fan writing about the object of their own fandom. I am not sure I am ready to take the blame or the responsibility for this redirection of the field. But if I am responsible, let me suggest that to me, being an aca/fan involves being honest about one's relationship to their object of study and not necessarily simply writing about television shows one loves. For me, you don't really begin to understand the nature of popular culture unless one can engage with the emotional impact it has on the viewer and as such, we can not write about it without examining more closely our own emotional investments.

One of my first television studies teachers said to her class that they should always study television programs they hated because that was the only way to get enough emotional distance from them to examine them critically. I have always resisted that impulse to see hate as somehow objective or objectivity as the preferred stance for writing about television. It has never been a requirement that a Shakespeare scholar hate their object of study for example in a way that it used to be routine for television scholars to express their disdain for the medium.

Part of the problem may simply be that there is so little real ideological and cultural diversity within television studies per se. I would argue that our inability as a field to write intelligently about shows like JAG has something to do with our sense of cultural isolation from those people who live in Red States. One challenge may be to broaden our object of study. An even bigger challenge may be to expand who studies television and what kinds of perspectives are welcome at our conference. Very few folks at the Flow conference rose to defend JAG as a worthy object of study. My bet though is that there are people out there reading this blog who regularly watch JAG. Indeed, it was one of my late father's favorite programs and I found watching the program with him helped me to understand how his generation saw the world.

Multiplatform Entertainment: A View From China

Last week, I posted about the rapid speed with which television content has moved into new channels of distribution and the degree to which the American public seems to have embraced the ideal of rerun on demand, television for download, call it what you will. One of the key lessons of media studies is that the same technology may get adopted in different ways and at different speeds in different cultures around the world. This is one of the real value of taking a global perspective on media change. My post inspired one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students, Rena Huang, to post some thoughts on her blog about how this same process is playing itself out in China and I asked her if I could repost these remarks here. Huang is a second year Masters student who is doing a thesis on the growth of the Chinese animation industry and is working with CMS faculty memberJing Wang, the Chair of the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, to construct a digital archive of Chinese animation in collaboration with the Beijing Film Academy. She was also part of the team from our Convergence Culture Consortium who participated in Project Good Luck this summer helping to document mobile culture in China. For those who haven't checked that site in a bit, they are still uploading pictures and interviews from the trip, including an interesting exchange with the Back Dorm Boys, the Chinese students who became famous for their lip-sincing video at You-Tube.

The following was written by Rena Huang:

Henry's "television goes multiplatform" interests me a lot since when I was back in China for the summer, I heard a lot of talks about and saw some real happenings of TV on other platforms, but not quite the same kind of platform as described in Henry's article. There are less downloading (the legal kind) of TV programs in China for various reasons. The broadcasting system, which features an overabundance of similar TV channels and a relative shortage of original content, has made frequent program rerun on different channels a common practice. One who misses his or her favorite episodes can soon catch it up on other channels. I couldn't believe that during the summer, the Westward Journey series (which was premiered 20 years ago and I really love it), is being aired to audiences old and new, on at least ten different channels. It keeps you safe in the competition to show what others are showing if you don't have better things to show.

Much of the talks I heard about alternative forms of TV-watching came from the corporate and the government. The idea of watching TV on various mobile devices is being infused to the public with greater efforts.

Watching TV on your cell phone is one way to do it. Most people are aware of and are exciting about 3G technology, when they don't yet have to worry about their 3G phone bills. But the corporate goes the easier way. Video transmission technology that is being developed and deployed for mobile receiver in China is mainly the digital multimedia broadcasting mode, that is, to broadcast through terrestrial or satellite broadcasting system. This is what Japan and South Korea are employing in their mobile TV service. But it's not happening in the US, since unlike Europe and other parts of the world, the US has failed to allocate the two kinds of radio bands that are required for this kind of transmission. With this type of relatively low-cost technology, people can watch TV on mobiles devices such as cell phone, PDA, mobile TV, and so on, for FREE, which is one major reason why we're so optimistic about the future of mobile TV-watching in China.

If massive television watching on personal mobile devices such as a cell phone is still a talk, then watching TV on communal mobile devices is already an everyday experience for many urban Chinese. It's the mobile television on public transportation. Beijing All Media and Culture Group (BAMC), who owns Beijing Television and Beijing People Broadcasting Station, set up a mobile television company and started trial broadcasting in May 2004 on 1000 Beijing buses. As of this writing, they've laid 16,000 TV sets on 5000 buses, 5000 taxies, 1,000 government vehicles and 4 subway cars to air programs to 4.5 million audiences per day, and are planning more in more public spaces.

A direct incentive behind the Chinese government's support and advocate for this initiative is the 29th Olympics to be held in Beijing in 2008. "Watch the games while you are on the go" is the picture that has been unfolded in front of people for them to grab. It is planned that, by year 2008, mobile TV broadcasting will be available across the country for people to watch on their cell phones. But the government, of course, looks way beyond 2008. The infrastructure that remains after the game will put China well ahead of others in the development and application of such technology. I was so unused to the fact that I didn't need to worry about my cell phone signals any more when I was in Beijing, no matter how deep I was under the ground. Every corner of the city is covered with cell phone signals, and will be covered with TV signals soon.

But you may wonder now, what do people watch on these mobile media. As for BAMC, a major technology, as well as content, provider in Beijing area, they have 17 hours programs (including repeats) to show to bus passengers a day, some licensed, some home-made. These programs are mainly on entertainment, life style and travel, the fast food, grab 'n go type. One interesting portion of the show is the live broadcast of traffic situation in the city which taps into the traffic cameras set up by the police on major roads. Any accident happened on the road will be released to the audience within three minutes. And of course, there are commercials and other sort of weird things. Once I noticed there was an interactive game playing on the TV screen while I was sitting on the bus. People called in to play a quick game using their phones. It costs 1.5 yuan per minute for the call, and you can win gifts. I was amazed to see that every 1 out 3 or 4 players won a big award of 80 or 120 yuan. How could the host make money? "You believe that those are real people winning? The TV is just playing tricks and trying to hook callers innocent like you!" my husband laughed at me.

Yes, that was stupid of me believing that you can actually make a fortune by playing games with mobile TV. It's true that, unlike in the US where people download and watch what they demand, here we don't have much control over where we would like to watch, nor what we can watch. A Beijing bus commuter actually went so far as to sue the bus company for "imposing TV commercials" on him when he doesn't want to see them. And he lost the lawsuit of course, since "there is no law saying that buses are not allowed to carry advertisement". He can go on to complain with the Administration of Environment, the judge suggested, if he feels bothered by the noise made by the bus TV. I don't think he can win that complaint either, 'cause for me at least, the audio of the bus TV is hardly recognizable on noisy roads and crowded buses of Beijing.

Television Goes Multiplatform

It's hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that Apple launched the video Ipod and the ABC television group was the first to announce a serious commitment to make its top rated television shows accessible to consumers via legal downloads. Within a few weeks time, the other networks were forced to cut their own deals with Apple paving the way of a new era of rerun on demand. A document shared with me recently from one of our corporate research partners gave me a glimpse into just how dramatically the landscape of American television has changed, providing a breakdown network by network of the various platforms through which one could access their content.

ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox all make at least some of their series available for download through iTunes, as do 41 different cable networks.

ABC has been experimenting this summer with ad-supported (i.e. free) downloads of episodes of Commander in Chief, Grey's Anatomy, and Lost at ABC.com and plans to extend the service to include a range of other series this fall.

CBS has launched a similar service over at Intertube -- for example, my wife and I have been catching up this week on a full season of episodes of Big Brother: All-Stars -- and the network has already announced that people will be able to download free episodes of Jericho, NCIS, and the various CSI series the day after they are aired. The other major networks are so far only offering streaming clips and news reports, not yet full episodes. The free episodes come with commercials embedded but so far, it is relatively easy to scan past them.

Several of the major networks are producing extensions of their regular series specifically for those accessing via these other platforms: NBC, for example, is offering mobisodes of The Office via NBC.com; ABC has a special behind the scenes podcast for Lost and will soon be adding Lost Video Diary, which focus on secondary and rarely seen characters for those watching on mobile phones.

All of the major networks are doing at least some experiments making content available via mobile devices, including deals by ABC (with Verizon), Fox (with Sprint and Verizon), and NBC (with Verizon).

CBS is making content available via both Yahoo.com and Google Video; Fox via MySpace and CinemaNow; NBC via YouTube.

All of this points towards a world where consumers can watch the content they want when they want it and where they want it and they can do so with a range of different options from paying to watch advertising free content to watching advertising-supported content for free. Not every show is available in all formats yet. Most of the networks are testing a few platforms at a time. They are still offering only selected series. But there's no question at this point that these various platforms are going to be increasingly central to the ways we watch television.

The cable networks have been even quicker to embrace these alternative media platforms -- though there is some tension between the network's desires to reach the broadest possible public (including many who simply do not have access to the networks via their local cable companies) and the affiliate's desire to have exclusive access to content which they can sell to their subscribers.

Some see these trends as representing the next step towards the disagregation of television content -- that is to say, consumers will follow individual series with little regard to their time slots or network placements. For some of us, that moment is already here. I have students who never watch live television, prefering to download everything they watch (legally or otherwise). In my own case, I am moving more slowly in this direction. I got started watching highlights of The Daily Show on the web because the MIT dorms don't get Comedy Central. I ended up watching the season finale of Survivor via CBS's website later the same day because I was traveling when it first aired. I ended up watching most of Season 2 Lost via various downloads (mostly legal). And as mentioned earlier, I am now catching up with Big Brother since I was without television reception most of the summer and people had told me it was one of the better runs of the series. (Indeed, having seen most of the episodes, I would agree).

Rerun in Demand is the logical response to the increased serialization of American television: we've seen over the past decade more and more shows which have tightly interwoven plots, extended story arcs, recurring emphasis on backstory and program history. Such series reward regular viewing and punish people who miss episodes. Such episodes historically were considered high risk by networks. They could lose viewers who became disinterested but they were hard to join in progress and old style broadcasting gave viewers no way to go back and see what they missed. Tivo provided viewers with some tools to stay on top of series they were watching thanks to the season pass feature but they offered no good way to go back and join an ongoing series until, minimally, the end of the season, when the episodes might be available on DVD. Often, the DVD sets have come out at the very end of the summer or even into the fall, making it hard to catch up before the second season episodes started to air. This season, a high percentage of the new series have story arc structures: indeed, many of them seem designed to last a single season or less. We should be watching to see if any of them benefit from the combination of word of mouth via the web and alternative ways of accessing previously aired materials? Will some of them experience increases in viewership as the season moves forward? And if so, which ones?

As I was finishing this post, I received a link to an interesting story about SciFi Channel developing a web series to generate interest around Battlestar Gallactica. Here's what the New York Times had to say about it:

The 10 Web segments, each just a few minutes long and viewable on devices ranging from iPods to laptops to desktops to full-size television sets, feature characters from the television show. And they have the same dark feel of broadcast episodes of Galactica, a post-apocalyptic survival tale of humans on the run after their home planets have been destroyed. The mini-episodes will go online, one at a time, on Tuesday and Thursday nights until "Galactica's" season premiere on Oct. 6. They focus on two soldiers in a new city built by humans fleeing Cylons, a race of machines that has wiped out human civilization elsewhere. The two face difficult choices about how -- or whether -- to fight back against a new Cylon invasion, the climactic moment of last season. Their decisions will help explain their actions in future on-air episodes.

This sounds like a classic example of what my book calls transmedia storytelling -- the use of the web not to remediate existing content from the series but to develop an extension of the fictional world which enhances our experience of watching the series. I am not watching this particular series but would be interested to hear from fans of the series about their impressions of what these web-based episodes bring to the experience.