Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Three)

This is the third part of my interview with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. This time we talk about the relations between old and new media and explore how YouTube, fan fiction and Facebook can be deployed in meaningful ways through school. So far, we have been talking about new media, but it is clear that they do not replace the old ones.

Almost never do schools think about the relationships between new and old media. Some people may have the idea that some of them will replace the old ones. A study of American college students preparing to enter ten different professions found that educators in training were the least likely to play videogames or participate in social networks. Teachers have defined themselves as defenders of book culture, often in what they perceive as opposition to the new digital culture. This protective stance no doubt reflects the rhetoric of the digital revolution which imagined that new media was going to displace if not destroy old media. And thus, for digital culture to thrive, book culture must die.

In fact, the opposite has happened. The new media has built upon and around existing modes of communication. The average person has access to a greater array of different books now than ever before thanks to online book dealers. The average teen writes more, thanks to e-mail and online discussion forums, than the previous generation. We will live in a world where books and printed matter still matters even as students get more information from computers than ever before. They are going to need to go where the information is, know how to assess the reliability of information which comes without comfortable gatekeepers, and be able to communicate their ideas through many different channels to many different publics.

Therefore we need to use multiple media.

This situation doesn't allow us to make any easy choices between teaching print and digital literacy: students clearly need both and more importantly, they need to understand the relationship between the two. They need to understand the different structures through which traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia produce and evaluate information, for example. They need to be able to read charts, maps, and graphs, but also to be able to produce and interpret information through simulations. They need to be able to express themselves orally, with pens and paper, and with video cameras and digital editing equipment.

Many of them are already acquiring such skills outside of the classroom through informal learning practices that thrive in this participatory culture but others are being left to be raised by wolves, not able to find their way into generative practices and supporting communities, and acquiring none of the ethical norms that might govern their future activities. Howard Gardner's Good Play Project at Harvard found that many young people don't apply ethical standards to their online conduct because they don't believe that what they do online matters. We can see this as an ironic response to adults who have dismissed such activities as worthless or meaningless, rather than asking questions about how or what they are learning through their participation in this practices, recognizing their accomplishments, or advising them on their ethical conflicts.

Schools, libraries, and other educational institutions need to be both embracing the potentials and confronting the challenges of this emerging culture not as a replacement for existing print practices but as an expansion of them.

Can we think then that schools lose many of learning opportunities supported by new media?

New Media platforms, such as YouTube, have expanded our access to the rich archives of existing sounds and images from the past. We have access now to recordings that were once buried in the archives but which we now can summon up at a moments notice. We can navigate the entire media scape on the fly, at a second's notice, in response to the flow of a classroom discussion.

We could, at least, if schools were not often blocking access to these very same tools and platforms out of fear of inappropriate content or risky forms of participation. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! It is as though we were closing all the libraries out of concern that young people might track down the pictures of topless women in National Geographic!

Beyond that, the new media tools allow young people to edit and respond critically to those moving images in new ways, to create presentations which have the explanatory power of well crafted documentaries, though again, they are often blocked by schools who are uncertain about the legalities of copyright protection and thus unwilling to allow them to remix and recontextualize content. So, right now, at least in American schools, and in many other counries around the world, the opportunities afforded us by these new digital archives are being shut off through school policies that are born more from fear and uncertainty than from reasoned pedagogical goals.

Maybe your idea of transmedia phenomenon may be a way to explore opportunities offered by the media. For example, teaching students how to write narrative texts when using the Harry Potter books, movies or video games.

What I'm describing as transmedia storytelling has been a fundamental part of human expression since the dawn of time. Certainly we need young people to develop a critical understanding of how contemporary media franchises like Harry Potter operate, both recognizing the aesthetic opportunities for authors to construct worlds which are bigger than single texts or even single media, but also understanding the commercial imperatives which are marketing extensions of popular stories to them.

But this idea of transmedia might also help us to understand the world of the church in the middle ages, say. Unless you were literate and in the priesthood, you would not have experienced the stories of the Bible through a single text. Instead, those stories would surround you, conveyed through every available communications system. They would be performed on carts, expressed through stainglass windows and the structures of cathedrals, painted on the ceilings, proclaimed from the pulpet, and sung by the choir. Go back even further and think about the early cave paintings which historians believe were used as sites of performance: the live storyteller interacting with the painted image to convey the experience of the hunt. So, the earliest representations we have might have been part of a transmedia experience.

Many of the works we teach took elements of oral culture and translated them into printed prose, again suggesting that we need to understand how stories move across media if we are going to understand why and how humans tell stories. Too often, teachers have been indifferent about media, teaching the texts of plays without regard to the conditions of their performance, for example. But now, we want teachers to explore art and literature with a heightened awareness of the media through which they were produced, distributed, and consumed.

And what about social networks, a new widespread medium of communication among young people and also among many adults?

One way to understand the new power of social networks is to understand what roles these platforms and practices played in the recent Obama presidential campaign. A traditional political website works by linking individual voters to the campaign; a social network site works by linking voters to each other. At a certain point, Obama's supporters were able to take over much greater control of the political campaign. They could organize local events quickly without having to go through the centralized campaigns. They could pool resources, each member contributing what skills they could, to the shared effort. Once he's in office, they can continue to mobilize in response to public policy debates or rally around other candidates who share their vision of progressive change for the country.

These social network sites are transforming the nature of civic engagement and participation. Young people need to learn how to become a part of these powerful new kinds of communities, need to know how to navigate through social networks to connect with people who have skills and knowledge that they need, need to understand the ethics of social life within these networks, and need to understand the risks as well as the opportunities of interacting with people they do not know face to face. The Obama campaign worked at both the national and the local level, but these social networks now work on a global scale.

What is the role that these networks can play in schools?

Schools have long used pen pal programs to connect their students with children from other parts of the world. The deployment of social networks through education allows young people ongoing interactions with a global community of learners who share common interests and goals; it allows schools to dramatically expand the human resources they can draw upon in their ongoing pedagogical activities. As we think of social networks as sites of learning, we can see two levels of pedagogy -- acquiring access to the broader range of expertise supported by the networks and acquiring the skills needed to deploy social networks for a variety of purposes in the future.

As with all of the new literacy practices we are discussing here, some youth will have extensive experience deploying social networks outside of school and deploying them in the classroom will allow them to direct that experience towards mastering new content, while other youth will not know how to work through social networks and schools can provide them with a safe, supervised context for mastering those skills.

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Two)

Last time, we ran part one of a four part interview I did with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. This time, we dig deeper into the concepts of participatory culture and the participation gap and talk about how the new media literacies can impact how we teach literature.

Is there anything really new in the idea of new literacies? Is it different from other processes such as reading and writing much more related to the printed materials?

Yes and No. In many ways, they are expansions of skills we've always taught which is why many of them will feel familiar to teachers and will fit comfortably within existing disciplines. In some ways, they represent the expansion of research skills into the more diverse information environment or an extrapulation of what it means to read and write to cover a broader range of communication practices.

But they also reflect habits of mind that emerge in response to networked communications or a converged media landscape. So, there is a much greater emphasis on literacy as a social and collective rather than an individual practice -- on learning to collaborate and exchange knowledge with others. There is a greater emphasis on the challenges of moving through a dispersed media landscape, interacting with groups who come from different backgrounds, shift attention between multiple channels of communication, or deploying different tools for processing information. These new skills do not so much emerge from new technologies as from new social, cultural, and educational opportunities that have emerged around those platforms.

Perhaps there is a generation gap when people use new media.

There are certainly generational differences in our experience and comfort with these new Technologies and their affiliated practices. Most adults encountered the computer first in the workplace, where-as many young people encountered it first in the home or the school. They approached it with different goals and expectations which means that they understand it in fundamentally different ways.

It isn't just that young people have grown up with the technology while adults came to it later in life. They have a totally different attitude towards what a computer is and the place it holds in their lives. That said, we have to be careful about drawing too sharp a generational dividing line here. First, the most powerful forms of participatory culture are those where adults and young people interact together in more fluid ways than would be found at school, work, church, or home. They are motivated by shared interests; they actively seek to learn from each other; and they are valued less on their age than on what they can each contribute. When we assume adults are locked out of the digital realm, we close off those opportunities for transgenerational experiences.

Second, we need to be careful about assuming that all young people have had access to the full benefits of the digital age. There are many inequalities not simple in terms of access to the Technologies but also in terms of opportunities to participate. That's what I call the participation gap. Some young people have been invited into the digital realm and feel free to express themselves there in as public a manner as is possible, while others feel excluded, cut off.. They don't understand how participatory culture works; they haven't been encouraged to participate; they don't think anyone will care what they have to say.

What could do educators to overcome these participation gaps?

Educators have key roles to play here in terms of creating a space where those who have been previously excluded can be welcomed into the new knowledge communities and can find their voice through the emerging participatory culture. But to perform those roles, they need to overcome their own fears and uncertainties about the digital World. They have to learn about the online world the way many young people have learned about it -- through active participation. They need to experiment with the various tools and platforms; they need to find a community which shares their interests and passions and plung into it deeply so they know what it is like to share knowledge through a social network and to create things through dispersed collaboration.

To do this, they may well need to sit down with a young person they know who is deeply immersed in this world and seek their advice and mentorship, reversing the normal role in the classroom, learning from their students or their children. In doing so, they will be trading different kinas of expertise -- matching the exploratory spirit of youth with the experience and wisdom of adulthood. But they need to avoid closing off the communication and learning too quickly by assuming that they already know everything the young person is going to teach them.

In these new contexts of communication we not only speak about Participatory Culture but also about Convergence Culture.

When people in the media industry use the term convergence they are often talking about a technological process -- the bringing together of multiple media functions, the uniting of multiple communication channels through a single device. Imagine say the iPhone as a tool which performs many different media functions -- from playing games to taking photographs -- and connects us to different networks -- from telephone to the internet. That's often what gets described as a convergence device.

I want to argue though that convergence is also a cultural process, one where stories, ideas, images, move across all media platforms, shaped both by the desire of companies to expand markets and by the desire of consumers to gain easier access to meaningful media. In many ways, it doesn't matter whether or not our tools are talking to each other; we are forming an integrated information ecology in our heads. Storytellers are learning to disperse information and experiences across media platforms, encouraging their readers to explore and map the storyworld through a series of encounters. Educators are discovering that we learn or do research in a similar manner, putting together dispersed pieces from many different media platforms, to form a coherent picture of the world around us. So, teachers need to encourage students to develop a core competency in transmedia navigation.

Are any specific skills necessary to take part of this new Participatory and Convergent Culture?

Transmedia navigation is simply one of a range of new competencies which we think schools should be exploring. In a white paper I helped to write for the MacArthur Foundation, we identified a series of core skills and competencies which we think are needed for young people to be able to fully enter the new participatory culture. These skills include the ability to deal with simulations and visualizations, the ability to explore the environment through play and identity through performance, the ability to deploy information appliances and social networks in processing information, and the ability to negotiate around cultural differences encountered in diverse online communities. Project NML has been developing a range of resources to help educators acquire and promote these new skills.

Could you explain what are those resources developed in the project New Media Literacy?

Our Learning Library, for example, provides a range of pedagogical challenges (a cluster of activities which allow young people to encounter, explore, experiment with, and ethically evaluate some of the emerging media practices.) which illustrate and embody the 12 skills. The library's resources are modular, so that they can be appropriated and used in a range of contexts from home schoolers to formal educators. They are multidisciplinary so that teachers can take ownership over those skills which are central to their own disciplines and thus we can integrate these skills across the curriculum.

The library is designed as an open platform which allows educators and students not simply to consume existing activities but also to contribute their own, sharing what works in their classrooms with other educators, appropriating and remixing each other's content so that we can all learn from each other. In other words, the learning library takes seriously what I've already said here about participatory culture and collective intelligence.

Who can use this library?

We are encouraging different organizations to develop their own collections for this library and are especially excited at the prospect of educators from many different countries sharing something of their own media cultures and practices through the library, allowing us to explore and learn on a global scale. I'd like to personally invite Spanish educators to try their hand at developing challenges which reflect your local educational and cultural practices.

What could be role of the curriculum content in learning new literacies?

My philosophy has been to be conservative in content and innovative in method. That is to say, we believe that these skills have something to contribute to even the most traditional of curriculum and that they are relevant across the full range of school subjects. Every field of knowledge today has been reshaped through the changes that have impacted our information environment. Scientists and social scientists for example regularly work with digital simulations and new modes of visualization as they process their data, yet these practices have scarcely impacted the way science and social science get taught in schools. Contemporary artists and writers are deploying remix practices that transform how they think about authorship but these insights about creativity have scarcely made it into the language arts classroom.

Could you mention some examples of how the curriculum can be introduced by using methodologies emerging from these new environments?

Through our Teacher Strategy Guides on Reading in a Participatory Cultture and Mapping in a Participatory Culture, we've been modeling new ways for integrating these skills into the classroom. For example, our Reading project took the American novel, Moby-Dick, as its starting point, seeking to better understand how its author, Herman Melville, created through borrowing and recontexualizing stories found in Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, and contemporary whaling lore, as the basis for his own creative expression.

We also explore how subsequent artists and authors have used Moby-Dick as a starting point for their own creation and thus how Melville has exerted a living presence in our contemporary culture. In doing so, we encourage students not simply to critically read but also to creatively rework elements from the novel to reflect their own perspectives on the issues Melville raises. And we encourage them to reflect on the ethics of appropriation -- what artists can take freely, what obligations they owe to previous generations, and so forth.

I'd imagine that this same approach might be applied productively to Cervantes. Don Quixote is a novel which centers around the imaginative life at a moment of profound media change -- not simply through the protagonist and his relationship to romantic fictions but also through the ongoing discussions of books and printing. There are so many ways that this novel can be taught in order to heighten our understanding of the personal and social consequences of changing the way a society receives and conveys information in a way that also opens students up to discuss the world they are entering at our present moment of profound and prolonged media change.

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I received a message in the mail from Ariel Glazer at University of Buenos Aires sharing this video, which remixed some footage from the interview I gave to the producers of Digital Nation. In many ways, it captures some of my core themes and concerns better than the PBS documentary and in the process, it helps us make connections with a range of other conversations taking place around the world about New Media Literacies.

When I taught my New Media Literacies class last semester at USC, I asked my students to interview a student or teacher about the ways that the issues in our class impacted their lives. Because these students came from many different countries, we ended up with glimpses of what was taking in classrooms from the Laplands to India, from Bulgaria to India. In almost every case, the young people interviewed described deeply meaningful forms of learning which were taking place through their engagement with affinity groups and social networks online, yet they each described school practices which shut off that learning once they entered the classroom. The teachers, on the other hand, talked about struggling to keep up with their students, about a lack of formal training to help them make the transitions being demanded, and about their fears of losing control over their classroom.

I wanted to stress the international nature of these exchanges because this week I am going to be sharing with you an extended interview which I did with Pillar Lacasa, a Spanish researcher, who has spent two blocks of time as a visiting scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program and whose work has been featured on this blog before. Lacasa is a close friend and she knows enough about my work to ask questions which help position it for readers back in Spain. Since this interview will appear later this week in Spanish in Cuadernos de Pedagogia, I asked her if I could share the original English language version here. I hope that this will be of interest especially to the many parents and educators who read this blog and may represent a response to some of the issues raised in the Digital Nation documentary.

Children and young people like to spend their free time in front of the screen. Could you give us some good reasons to that could persuade educators to introduce new media and screens in schools

At the end of the day, it isn't about the technology. It certainly isn't about the screen per se. It is about the informational affordances and cultural practices which have taken shape around the computer and other interactive technologies. It isn't about the computer replacing the book. It is about a world where students learn with a book in one hand and a mouse in the other, rather than one where they are taught that book culture is so fragile it needs to be protected from the computer.

Jenna McWilliams, until recently, part of our Project NML staff, writes powerfully about reading with a mouse in your hand. She tells us that teachers often encourage students to read with a pencil in their hands -- not simply letting the words pass over their eyeballs but critically engaging with them, taking notes, asking questions, critiquing as they go. When students read with a mouse in their hands, they take this one step further: they assume that they must actively respond to what's been put in front of them; they are poised to participate; they take responsibility over the quality of information and correct it publically if it is wrong.

Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, tells us we respond to the culture differently when we see it through the eyes of a participant rather than a consumer. And it is this participatory culture which has been facilitated by the new digital media in a way that stretches far beyond the imagination of previous generations.

Reading your book I noticed that you establish an interesting distinction between mass media and technology. How do you understand both of these concepts?

For me, a medium is more than simply a technology. It also includes the social and cultural practices that have grown up around us. So, when we talk about television, we are not simply talking about an electronic appliance; we are talking about the programming strategies and conventions which have emerged to shape our experience of television and we are referencing the particular mind set that has evolved around watching television often in our homes with little chance of engaging with its contents directly or publically. When we are talking about the internet, we are talking about all of the activities we perform through this new information infrastructure and the mindset which emerges through our ongoing engagement and participation in the great public conversation that emerges through it.

Beyond the individual medium there is a media ecology -- all of the different kinds of communications systems which surround us and through which we live our everyday lives. Right now, for example, we inhabit a world where mass media, top down systems of communications, co-exist with grassroots media, which enable much broader opportunities for our participation. We are just starting to understand what happens when these two systems collide.

You introduce the idea of a Participatory Culture in relation to new media. Can you explain the relation between the two concepts?

Participatory culture didn't begin or end with the internet. Most of what I am describing as participatory culture can be found in any thriving folk culture. At its best, a folk culture is defined through the expanding opportunities for participation. Everyone who wants to join is accepted. Everyone who has something to contribute is embraced. Experienced members share what they know through informal mentorship with newcomers because it expands the expressive resources of the community. The exchange of folk artifacts is reciprocal, based on the ideals of a gift economy, rather than hierarchical or commercial.

This idea of dispersed expression broke down in the 20th century as most forms of cultural production became professionalized and commercialized. We moved into a world where we consumed but did not produce the resources of our culture -- never totally but largely. Throughout that period, though, there were all kinds of underground and grassroots practices which held onto the idea of shared cultural expression and participation. These practices have re-emerged and gained greater public visibility in the era of Flickr and YouTube.

These technologies have brought cultural expression down to a human scale; they have placed the exchange of stories or songs in a social context; and they have opened up a space where all of us can be welcomed as potential participants. All of the research shows that the communities of practice which grow up around this participatory culture are powerful sites of pedagogy, fueled by passion and curiosity and by a desire to share what we learn and think with others. As with older folk cultures, informal pedagogies thrive as people get together to learn based on shared interests rather than fixed roles and responsibilities.

Participatory Culture could be relate with a Collective Intelligence as present in the media too?

In a networked society, literacy is a social skill not simply an individual competency. Understanding how information circulates becomes as important as knowing how to put your ideas into words, sounds, or images. Creation is iterative: we reshape what we've created in response to critical feedback from others in an ongoing process of innovation and refinement.

There are new forms of collective authorship which have emerged around principles of collective intelligence. Take Wikipedia for example, where any given entry may have multiple authors, each vetting and refining what was written before, each adding what they know to what others have already contributed. This is different from traditional forms of individual expertise and autonomous learning.

Pierre Levy tells us that in a networked society, nobody knows everything (Forget about the ideal of the Renaissance Man), everybody knows something (expand the range of possible expertises) and what any given member of the community knows is available to the group as a whole as needed. The result is an ethics of information -- an obligation to share what you know with the group, a need to respect yet critically engage with multiple ways of knowing, an active push to embrace diversity because it expands the creative and knowledge capacity of your network.

We are evolving towards this much more robust information system where groups working together can solve problems that are far more complex than can be confronted by individuals. And schools can actively prepare students for such a world -- by allowing them to develop and refine their individualized expertise, by providing complex problems which require collective effort to resolve, by teaching them the ethics involved in working in such a highly collaborative and open-ended context. Right now, schools are often using group work but not in ways which encourage real collaboration or shared expertise -- in part because they still assume a world where every student knows everything rather than one where different kinds of knowledge come together towards shared ends.

The project New Media Literacy relates participation to new forms of literacy?

What we are proposing is an expanded conception of literacy which includes all of the ways which we communicate our ideas to each other. This concept moves beyond the idea of critical consumption which is often what people call media literacy. You wouldn't consider someone literate if they could read but not write text and we shouldn't consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media. Over the past fifty years, we have expanded the resources through which humans can communicate with each other, in some cases making tools like video cameras more widely available, and in others creating an infrastructure which allows anyone who goes online a chance to communicate their thoughts to the world.

Schools need to prepare young people to use these new resources creatively, effectively, and responsibly if they are going to prepare them for the lives they will lead in the 21st century. Such power can be under-used if they are not taught to use it creatively or effectively; it can be abused if they are not taught to use it responsibly. Teachers need to recognize both the risks and the possibilities of these new opportunities for human expression.

Will New Law Block Many Slash, Anime, Manga Sites in Australia?

The following guest blog post came about as a result of some e-mail correspondence with Australian researcher Mark McLelland, who described to me some significant shifts in media policy in his home country, Australia, which we both felt should be better understood not only by fans there but around the world. Certainly, the issues around this new internet filter policy have cropped up in many other parts of the world and serve as a helpful reminder that fans need to understand how local, national, and international laws may impact their fan writing practices -- especially those writing and circulating controversial or risky stories. The issues raised here are important ones, especially in the context of an increasingly globalized fan culture. Australia Set to Introduce Internet Filter that Could Block Access to Thousands of Anime, Comics, Gaming (ACG) and Slash Fan Sites

Mark McLelland, University of Wollongong

In December 2009 the Australian government announced that it would be proceeding with legislation to introduce an ISP-level internet filter aimed at blocking access to material that would be 'refused classification' (RC) under the National Classification Scheme. 'Such material includes child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act'.1

A report by three leading Australian media studies scholars also released in December 2009 pointed out a large number of gray areas which might lead to censorship creep and vastly increase the number of sites that could end up on the government's blacklist. These include sites debating the merits of euthanasia, sites set up by community organizations promoting safe drug use, sites for LGBT youth where some participants detail their sexual experiences and sites discussing the geo-political causes of terrorism that cite actual material published by terrorist groups.2

However, so far in the debate, no-one has taken into consideration how Australia's anti- 'child abuse publications' legislation might massively increase the scale of sites requiring blacklisting. How so? Because in both federal and state legislation in Australia 'child abuse publications' refer not just to pictures (whether real or digitally altered) of actual children, but to any 'representation of a person', fictional or otherwise, 'in a sexual context' or 'as the victim of torture, cruelty or physical abuse'. The definition of 'person' is very broad and covers depictions in a computer game, animation, comics, art work and even text.3

Different State legislatures have exhaustively detailed the nature of prohibited representations. In New South Wales (Australia's most populous state and home to Sydney), the Crimes Act 1900 SECT 91FA, states that '"material" includes any film, printed matter, electronic data or any other thing of any kind (including any computer image or other depiction)' (italics mine). The reference to 'any other thing of any clearly leaves no scope whatsoever for imagination and fantasy outside the law.

This legislation has been tested in the courts. In 2008 an appeal against a conviction on the charge of possession of child pornography (in this case digitally manipulated images of The Simpsons children, Bart and Lisa) was launched on the basis that cartoon characters could not reasonably be described as 'persons'. In his interpretation of the legislation, Justice Adams disagreed, and upheld the judgement of the original magistrate, commenting:

In my view, the Magistrate was correct in determining that, in respect of both the Commonwealth and the New South Wales offences, the word 'person' included fictional or imaginary characters and the mere fact that the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of a human being did not mean that such a figure was not a 'person'.4

This ruling is of great importance for Australia-based ACG and slash fans, since it clarifies that in Australia child pornography legislation applies equally to 'fictional or imaginary characters', even in instances when such characters 'depart[..] from a realistic representation'. Given the ubiquity of such representations on both ACG and slash fan sites, it is easy for fans to stumble across material that would put them at the risk of prosecution. As the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 makes clear, an individual is guilty of an offense if said individual, among other things, 'uses a carriage service' to access child-pornography material, cause the material to be transmitted, distribute, publish or otherwise make the material available.5

Hence Australian fans of ACG and slash who routinely access sites that may contain or link to representations of under-age characters in sexual or violent scenarios run the risk of arrest, prosecution and entry into the sex-offenders' list. This material is already illegal to create, posses, access or share in Australia, but once the filtering legislation is enacted it will become difficult if not impossible to access these fan sites from Australia.

But surely this is the price we must pay as a society to fully protect our children? Is it not the case that allowing even fantasy representations of child sex creates a 'climate of acceptance' that encourages the acting out of the real thing? This is certainly the government line and those who have spoken out against the censorship creep endemic in the filter proposal have been criticized for failing to 'think of the children'. However, if we look at some scenarios of content that may be blacklisted this naïve media effects argument makes little sense.

Take for example, the massively popular 'Boys Love' (BL) fandom, a genre of anime, manga and illustrated novels originating in Japan in the early 1970s which imagines sexual interactions between 'beautiful boys' (in this context adolescents). In Japan, Boys Love novels are sold in high-street stores, circulated at fan conventions and shelved in public libraries. This fandom went global in the late 1990s and now has a massive fan base in China, Korea and North America - the US even hosts a Boys Love convention - Yaoi-con 'A Celebration of Male Beauty and Passion in Anime and Manga'.

There are over 52,000 Google hits for "Boys Love manga" in English alone. These stories are overwhelmingly authored by women for an audience of young women and schoolgirls - but don't imagine these to be manga versions of Harlequin romances, for as fan scholar Kazumi Nagaike points out, 'BL narratives include all kinds of sexual acts, such as hand jobs, fellatio, digital penetration of the anus and S/M'.6 If Japanese schoolgirls can handle fantasy depictions of boy-on-boy sex without turning into raging pedophiles, you'd think that Australian adults would be able to look at these depictions without going off the rails? Apparently not.

Let's take as another example, 'Wincest', that is, imagined sexual scenarios between the two Winchester brothers in the hit TV show Supernatural. 'Wincest slash' turns up 109,000 Google hits - a lot to filter out. But surely Wincest is OK because the brothers are adults? Not so, because under the existing classification system 'incest fantasies' are refused classification. Hence, although it is not currently illegal to read Wincest in Australia, since incest merits an RC category, Wincest is eligible to be placed on the blacklist to be filtered out. Again, I would be interested to see research into the Wincest fandom that could establish links between these fantasy narratives and the increase of actual incestual relations among the fandom.

But maybe these concerns are just a storm in a tea cup? After all, the proposed filter blacklist is to be compiled on a complaints-based system. The government is not proposing to recruit an army of censors to track this stuff down (and given the scale it would require an army) but has instead entrusted the Australian Media and Communication Authority (ACMA) to investigate and make referrals to the list on the basis of complaints. Surely no-one in their right mind would waste ACMA's time referring BL stories of boys bonking or Sam and Dean Winchester getting it on to ACMA?

Sadly, this is not so, as we saw just a few years ago in the 'Great LiveJournal StrikeThrough of 2007'. This saw the mass deletion of fanfic blogs containing, among other things, Harry Potter slash (because of its underage content) and Supernatural slash (because of the incest). The take down was prompted by threat of legal action against the site's administrators launched by a right-wing Christian group, Warriors for Innocence, who accused the site of harbouring material that promoted 'rape, incest and pedophilia'. The administrators suspended a large number of journals based only on key words listed in their profiles and without checking for the context. The majority were fan sites but others included support sites for sexual abuse survivors.7

Although an instantaneous and massive backlash by fans saw the administration reverse their policy and reinstate most of the deleted material, such a balanced approach could not eventuate in Australia. As outlined, the law in Australia is clear, the material discussed above would be refused classification because of its content and as such would be eligible for the blacklist. Australia has no First Amendment rights to freedom of expression. End of story. This makes Australian fans and the academics who study fandom extraordinarily vulnerable to right-wing pressure groups.

If the filter proposal becomes law, it could shut down Australian fans' engagement with broad and well-established international fandoms. The filter will also make it impossible for Australian academics to study ACG and slash fandoms, at least while they are resident in Australia. This would result in the absurd situation that academic inquiry carried out routinely in the US would become impossible in Australia. Critics of the proposal have highlighted how introducing this level of internet filtering will place Australia in a similar category to states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Where fan activities and fan studies are concerned, this is no hyperbole.

To take action against the Australian government's proposed filter, go to nocleanfeed.com.

1. Consultation Paper, 2009, 'Mandatory Internet Service Provider (ISP) Filtering: Measures to Increase Accountability and Transparency for Refused Classification Material', December, available online, (accessed 16 January 2010).

2. Catherine Lumby, L. Green and J. Hartley, 2009, 'Untangling the Net: The Scope of Content Caught by Mandatory Internet Filtering', online, (accessed 19 January 2010).

3. Criminal Code Act 1995 (Commonwealth) s.473.1, available online, (accessed 6 December 2009).

4. McEWEN v SIMMONS & ANOR [2008] NSWSC 1292, 2008, online, (accessed 7 December 2009), para 41.

5. Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995, 474.19, online: (accessed 6 December 2009).

6. Kazumi Nagaike, 2003, 'Perverse Sexualities, Perverse Desires: Representations of Female Fantasies and Yaoi Manga as Pornography Directed at Women', U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, 25, 76-103. For a description of the globalisation of the fandom see the essays in Mark McLelland, ed., 2009, Japanese Transnational Fandoms and Female Consumers, Intersections, issue 20, (accessed 7 December 2009).

7. John Casteele, 'LiveJournal StrikeThrough '07', online:

Mark McLelland is an Associate Professor in the Sociology program at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has published extensively about Japanese popular culture and was the 2007/08 Toyota Visiting Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan. His paper 'Australia's Proposed Internet Filtering System and its Implications for Animation, Comics and Gaming (ACG) and Slash Fan Communities' is forthcoming in issue 134 of Media International Australia, in February 2010.

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part One)

Anyone who has read my blog long knows that I am not big on counting things. Some of it is that I have math anxiety -- a serious vulnerability for someone who spent the first 20 years of his career at MIT! Some of it is that I think people often act as if counting things is the same thing as analyzing things or that the only things that count are things that came be counted. I often wage a one-man struggle against the push to quantify the universe -- perhaps as if (arbitrary science fiction reference warning) the world would end if we could just capture all of the billions of names of God. That said, I am finding myself mellow more than a little now that I am at USC, am watching my former graduate students struggle to grasp quantitative methods, and getting to know some of my office mates and colleagues who count things for a living. And there is a particularly value in trying to understand the scale on which certain changes in our communication environment are occurring -- at least to capture some order of their magnitude. And that's why I have been following with some interest the emergence of a research team at Harvard focused on understanding Twitter and its place in the "web ecology." Many members of the team are graduate students I worked with in a range of capacities during my time at MIT and have come to value their insights into digital media. Their data is already helping me to reframe some of the thinking I am doing about spreadable media and knowing how many people come to this blog now through my tweets, my bet is that you will find what they are doing interesting as well. In this first installment, the responses come from Dharmishta Rood, who I met through the Knight news challenge a few years ago and who took several of my classes during my final year at MIT. I featured one of her essays on the blog last spring. Next time, she will be joined by some other members of the research team.

What do you mean by web ecology? What does the name of your group tell us about the assumptions guiding your research?

We summarize our research by the statement that Web Ecology studies the relationship of the nature of data and the behavior of actors on the internet.

Web Ecology as a field, rather than focusing on the Internet from various fields such as Sociology, Humanities, Business or Media Studies, focuses on the Web itself, combining methodologies from multiple, often interrelated disciplines, to decipher activity online both quantitatively and qualitatively. In our personal research practices we frequently use large-scale data mining to inform our research questions and to further our understanding about the cultures and communities evident online. In addition to providing quantitative analysis about the social layer of the web, we see our role as Web Ecologists to provide tools for other Web Ecologists in an open manner for the community of researchers. We also see the advantageous position of this type of resarch for businesses interested in marketing and online presence.

What can you tell us about the core methodology you are applying to understanding how Twitter works?

We try to break down Twitter into quantifiable interactions. We understand that there are many factors outside of Twitter--both time specific, such as breaking news, the hour of a TV show or a holiday, but also new trends and information being spread throughout the web. We try to look at all of it within the ecosystem of Twitter itself. At Web Ecology we try to look at what we can measure--namely retweets, mentions, @replies, #hashtags and common keywords within the sea of tweets.

We understand that the web is constrained by various forces and configurations. Rather than a utopian or deterministic perspective, Web Ecology recognizes that the web is not limitless or truly divorceable from various geographic, social, historical, and other realities.

Web Ecology endorses the systematic creation and testing of models, which leads us to a heavily quantitative approach, that can then be paired with a qualitatitive exploration of these findings. We also don't overlook Internet phenomena as transient cultural fads--we see cultural creation on the Internet as impartially as possible, and also that code and users are part of an inseparable aggregate web phenomenon.

Some of your earliest results dealt with the role of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran elections. What kinds of data emerged from your investigation? What did that tell us we didn't already know about the twitter traffic surrounding these events?

Our report cites much of the popular media that both creates the term yet also criticizes the hasty declaration of a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran.

Using 12 keywords and hashtags, we found that 58% of relevant twitter conversation did NOT contain the common hashtag #iranelection. This allowed us to get a much more comprehensive overview of the Twittersphere during the Iranian election.

One of the most interesting findings to emerge out of the report were these two facts in conjunction: The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets and one in four tweets were retweet of another user's content, showing that the users who tweet the most are not always the most influential.

You've also looked at the Twitter traffic following Michael Jackson's death. What similarities and differences did you find in the discussion surrounding these two events?

Similarly to the Iran election, with Michael Jackson's death on Twitter there were many keywords. One of the most interesting findings was the trajectory of each event over the Twittersphere. In the case of Michael Jackson's death, there were over 279,000 tweets within the first hour of mainstream news reports of Jackson's death, whereas with the Iranian election, there were 2,024,166 tweets total (over eighteen days), but never more than 17,500 tweets in any given hour. These tweets fluctuated during times of unrest.

Since the excitement on twitter decreased over time, especially after the first hour, the type of content was inherently very different. We spent time hand-coding tweets (in the Social Science sense, having individuals read and analyze the tweets according to certain metrics) rather than strictly doing data analysis. The Michael Jackson report sought to understand sentiment on Twitter, rather than the trajectory of a real-time event spanning many days.

How important is retweeting to the ecology of the web?

Within twitter specifically, retweeting is only one of the many ways people can interact with content. It becomes important when new audiences see content from users they do not follow, but another important feature of Twitter is search. Users following a particular topic of interest can come across new content to consume and share.

What do you think Twitter is doing that is different from other kinds of social networks?

Twitter allows users to follow one another asymmetrically, meaning that users do not have to follow those that follow them. From this an interesting dynamic emerges wherein follower counts are meaningful in a separate way than the number and type of people a user follows. A user is often valued more for the amount of followers--an account with immensely more users they are following than follow them is likely spam, whereas a user like Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) only follows ~300 users but has almost 4,000,000 followers.

Twitter, as it's been deemed many times over is a "micro blogging service," meaning the updates contain news and information like blogs, but with many fewer characters. This micro-update style is now a relevant part of other social networks, both during and after the increase of Twitter's userbase.

Dharmishta Rood is Director of Research Relations at the Web Ecology Project and a recent graduate Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Her work deals with large scale and interpersonal communication systems like social networks and news. These types of platforms allow users to generate and consume information in ways that further social connections and learning. She is a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner for Populous Project, a free and open-source platform for online news, holds a degree in Design | Media Arts from UCLA and is a Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media. She tweets @dharmishta and blogs at dharmishta.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates (zephoria.org)

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part Two)

Circular Nexus of Screens Why does Click Click Ranger need this complicate maneuver over multiple forms of screens, and for what purpose? In order to dissect the discursive logic behind this nexus of screens, we need to understand the current configuration of these screens in Korea.

Mobile Phones: The prodigy of Korean IT mythology.

Click Click Ranger's experiment of incorporating the mobile phone into a television show directly corresponds to the recent development of Korea's mobile phone industry in the convergent media paradigm. Since ETRI and the consortium of corporations launched the world's first commercial CDMA mobile phone service in 1996, Korea has been a step ahead in exploring CDMA based technological innovations and the latest mobile media services including mobile TV (DMB: Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and Wibro (the first wireless high-speed broadband). Following SK telecom (the major wireless network provider in Korea)'s 3G mobile content service June in 2002, Korean wireless companies have explored the diverse forms of mobile multimedia content. I conveniently categorize content for mobile phone into two types: "migrated mobile content" which refers to repurposed and repackaged content from conventional media and "original mobile content" that is initially produced for mobile screen devices such as mobile cinema and mobile drama)(Ok, 2008). In the midst of industrial effort to find the 'right' content for mobile screen, these new hybrid forms of moving images explore the aesthetics of convergence that continues and at the same time disrupts the conventions of existing media forms. Mobile TV has expanded the horizon of the mobile screen by combining mobile telecommunication technology and broadcasting.

While mobile phone content service and Mobile TV serve as extended venues for conventional media, the conventional media have also tried to incorporate mobile screen technologies into their formats in many different ways. Overall, the most heated concern for both parties is how to develop 'new' content that fit the condition of media convergence, which is often expressed as a 'media big bang' and 'content war' in popular media in Korea (Kim & Lee, 2005). Click Click Ranger is an early attempt to tackle this challenge on the television network side, which continued to the fever of UCC (User Created Content). Following Click Click Ranger, other television networks and popular media organizations launched similar programs such as SBS's "Uporter" system. Literally, "Uporter" means "ubiquitous reporter" and it mobilizes citizens to capture news on the street with their digital camera or mobile phone camera, which are then selectively shown through regular News shows on SBS.

Click Click Ranger's use of mobile phone imaging directs attention to the multifaceted nature of the mobile phone. Notably, MSM (multimedia short message) which allows users to attach pictures or short video clips to a mobile phone message is generally discussed as a private communication tool or a vehicle to expand private space with the combined practice of blogging. Although the formation of shared 'community'- whether it is exclusive or relatively open to the general public- has also been discussed, the prevailing assumption is on the practice of 'private imaging' among individuals. Compared to this model of private imaging, Click Click Ranger's adoption of mobile phone imaging is closer to and continues the practice of "citizen journalism" only with changed technologies- from the (video) camera and to the mobile phone-. Hence, while being true to the technological premise of the medium that provides 'personal mobility' (for the mobile rangers and citizen reporters), their mobile phone imaging resides in and further serves to reinstate the value of the public. Most of all, it is the particular use of the outdoor screen with the mobile screen that distinguishes Click Click Ranger from other home-video shows or citizen reports programs and enables it to construct a broader discourse of the 'public space' out of mobile screen usage in Korea.

Outdoor Screens

City Hall Square during World Cup Soccer in 2002

Okay. Click Click Ranger was able to find a way to connect the mobile phone to the television. Now, what makes this nexus of screens unique is the presence of the large LED screen as an integral part of the television show. Simply put, in Click Click Ranger, the large LED Screen technically functions as an additional outdoor TV to broadcast its program. Although the use of the mobile screen is also equally unconventional, the potential of mobile phones as screen media has already been explored in diverse ways. Yet the large LED screen, in spite of its ubiquity in urban landscapes of the global metropolis, has received little attention in the conventional media industry other than in the outdoor advertising business. Becoming one of the latest form of screen media, the Large LED screen not only succeeds the function of the commercial or public advertising that outdoor billboards once fulfilled but also continues the visual pleasure of the urban spectacle. Since 2000, the LED screen in Korea was moved from the category of 'outdoor advertising' to the 'LED display screen broadcasting,' becoming one of the 'broadcasting-telecommunication convergent media' that would be governed under the new broadcasting laws.

Compared to the traditional TV at home, the experience of outdoor TV is deeply conditioned by the material condition of place, as TV screen is usually an implemented part of the architectural surroundings. That is, the location where outdoor TV displays, whether it be waiting room, subway/train station or rooftop of building, tends to predetermine the content and flow of content on outdoor TV screens. At the same time, the meaning of place is also rendered by the viewer's activity of watching TV: If in Seoul, the subway station might turn into a living room momentarily for the passengers who enjoy entertainment show clips on ubiquitous screen panels installed inside the train and/or waiting area, beyond its practical functions. In Click Click Ranger, it is the symbolic meaning of 'public space' (as in the location of Seoul City Hall) that the commercial LED screen in City Hall Plaza embodies and that Click Click Ranger systematically appropriates and reproduces. Then, why is the location of Seoul City Hall Plaza crucial for linking up-to-date screen technologies?

Physically located at the busy intersection of the political and economic center of the downtown Seoul, the Seoul City Hall Plaza has served as a central place for many important national events. By running the show on the rooftop of city hall building following the fashion of 'live news report on spot,' Click Click Ranger successfully appropriates the sense of 'liveness' and intentionally adds 'moral weight - news-worthy-ness-' to the clips. This simulated urgency and liveness that supports the show's goal of being connected to everyday realities of Korea is intensified on the symbolic level since for Koreans the Seoul City Hall Plaza is the emblematic center for national identity as manifested during the World Cup Soccer tournament in 2002.

The image of the Seoul City Hall above illustrates the scene of World Cup Soccer frenzy during which, with the unexpected achievement of the Korean national team going on to the semi-final, crowds gathering in front of the large electronic screens to cheer reached the point of becoming a nation-wide ritual. The intensity and enthusiasm represented by the image of the 'wave of Red Devils' (the official name of Korean team supporters as well as the icon of 2002 World Cup) left an unforgettable impression on Korean popular imaginary. In fact, many Korean scholars agreed that World Cup Soccer frenzy in 2002 does not simply reflect interest in a national sports match but rather represents a demarcating historical moment in Korean society- a culminating point to celebrate regained national pride and strength after the collapse of the economy in 1997. More interestingly, the 2002 World Cup syndrome parallels the increasing self-awareness of Korea's position as a world- leading player in the global information technology industry.

It is not a mere coincidence that the 'mobile phone' and the 'screen' were two of the primary export products of Korea at the time. Led by the semi-conductor chip, various sorts of screens (PDP, LCD/LED screens, computer screens, and the traditional electronic screens) and mobile phones ranked among top three export products in 2005 (Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, 2005). The first pivotal moment when large LED screens came into the public media awareness in Korea was also around the World Cup Soccer in 2002, when it served as a key display venue for broadcasting the Korean national team's matches in public places. The large LED screen that Click Click Ranger deploys is one of the several LED screens that drew large crowds around Seoul City Hall Plaza. In its pilot episode, Click Click Ranger explicitly delivers this intertwined discourse of the screen and the nation. The show dwelled on the significance of City Hall Plaza by inserting clips of City Hall Plaza scenes during World Cup Soccer 2002 and charts with the statistics of mobile phone exports sales. In this way, the culturally accumulated meaning of the particular place of Seoul City Hall Plaza- a center of the civil and nationalistic ideology- enhance Click Click Ranger's attempt to replicate the sense of 'liveness' of live broadcasting and foreground the 'collective' meaning of being networked.

All Together: Networked Public in Wired Korea

Overall, Click Click Ranger represents multilayered meanings of the physical and the discursive movements of images within current Korea: images migrate from the 'micro' screen to the 'macro' screen, from private space to public space and as a result, individuals are assumed to occupy the position of citizens. For instance, in Mobile Ranger, the implication of 'private imaging' constantly changes as it travels across diverse screens: from private imaging to public exhibition on outdoor screen, and back to the private viewing on Mobile TV. In this circulation, mobile phones and Mobile TV, which represent personal screen devices, are mobilized into the formation of 'public space' by conventional media. By creating public space within the domain of private space, Mobile Ranger inevitably questions the fixity of the boundary between private and public space which is considered to be contingent on the specificity of media. When the show is eventually broadcast in mobile TV, the flexibility of the public and private space becomes more intensified. Due to the mobility given to the viewer, the previously established and spatially fixed 'public' dimension of the outdoor screen in city hall square is disrupted as the diverse viewing situations of individual Mobile TV viewers multiply the meanings of space for themselves.

In the end, Click Click Ranger's complicated exhibition process does not simply aim to increase the pleasure of experiencing images, but to foreground the very technological competency of appropriating new technologies. The realization of the idea of 'connecting' these up-to-dated screen technologies symptomatically reveals the social discourse about the importance of 'networked public in wired Korea'. Considering that mobile technology becomes a source of national pride, the cultural use of mobile technology in Korea, especially mediated through the conventional media practices, often invites the individual to the formation of national identity. Not only doesClick Click Ranger resonate with the popular techno-nationalistic discourse around the mobile and new media technologies but it also reproduces it through its construction of imagined citizen within networked screens. In this way, mobile phone imaging meets television and the outdoor screen in City Hall Plaza and in this more or less blunt self-explanatory gesture, Click Click Ranger conjures up the mobile phone exactly at the center of the 'current' Korea.

Works Cited

de Certeau', Michael, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)

Kim, Taek-Hwan & Lee, Sang-Bok, Media Big Bang: Korea changes, (Seoul, Korea: Knowledge Supply Publishing Company, 2005)

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (NYU Press, 2007)

McCarthy, Anna, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2001)

Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, "Suchiro Bon IT 2005 ( IT 2005 by Statistics)," 29 December 2005.

Ok, Hye Ryoung, "Screens on the Move: Media Convergence and Mobile Culture in Korea," ph.d dissertation, Department of Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, University of California, 2008

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part One)

I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation. She has done some groundbreaking research on the deployment of transmedia practices in Korean television, projects which have gotten very little attention on this side of the world, but which have a lot to offer as an alternative model for how mobile technologies and public space can be deployed as part of a transmedia strategy. Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television

by HyeRyoung Ok

By now we all know that the mobile phone is not simply a phone anymore. Since its introduction, the mobile phone has evolved into something that constantly broadens and transforms its boundary. Indeed, it is one of the most convergent media devices available that materializes the paradigm of media convergence. In most countries where mobile technology is widely adopted, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming a new outlet for traditional media industries responding to the "visions of wireless phones becoming hand-held entertainment centers." Yet the mobile phone's entry into the existing media environment is not a natural and homogeneous process. Continuing, disrupting, and mixing existing media practices to a newer form, rather, it came to terms with conventional media in heterogeneous ways depending on the socio-culturally specific contexts.

Then, here comes the story of the mobile phone in Korea, the country recently known as "IT powerhouse" where the adventure of the mobile phone ever continues. The mobile phone in Korea is literally a focal point where technical, industrial, and cultural innovations to explore the 'newer' forms of media service converge (see my blog posts on general review of Korean IT practices). What is particularly unique about Korean mobile culture is the continuing emphasis on the potential of mobile phones as 'screen' media. It is not surprising phenomenon considering the weight of 'screen' related - all dimensions of hardware and software - industries in Korean society. I would like to illustrate how the mobile screen is positioned in the flux of these transmedia experiments across new and old media in a culturally specific way through the case of Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, an entertainment program on channel MBC in Korea.

Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, is an interesting case that shows how the media content is designed to be produced/consumed based on the principle of "connecting" multiple forms of screens: mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor LED screen. Click Click Ranger is one of three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark which was broadcast from December 2004 to August 2005 on channel MBC - one of three major television networks in Korea. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen is used in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Although it was short-lived, this show set up a model for employing mobile phone technology thematically as well as formally into the television program format and inspired other shows in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues on the relation between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, let's begin to explore how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of 'convergence of spaces.

Click Click Ranger (aka Mobile Ranger): Capture Korea's Today

Click Click Ranger's catchphrase of "Capture Korea's today" literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to citizen reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and "mobile rangers," a group of pre-selected young college students and volunteers (in total, 100 members). Technically, mobile rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips 'in real time' to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the 'flow' of content across media (Jenkins, 2007). The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters as is illustrated in the picture above. Hence, what the viewers on a regular television set at home actually watch are alternating shots between the outdoor screen display, the MCs, and small video clips in quick-time movie format. Later on, the program re-runs on Mobile TV, particularly on the channel BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots ('hot screens') in the current mediascape of Korea as diagram below illustrates.

Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition

To the savvy viewers, who got used to all sorts of strategies to utilize the mobile phone for the television show by now, early attempt of Click Click Ranger may not look so fresh. What makes this show unique is the way in which it attempts to employ the mobile phone, an icon of personal media, in the service of constructing the 'public space' within a commercial entertainment. As a matter of fact, from the beginning, ! : Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a 'public value concerned entertainment' program. Previous and current sub-sections of the show have adopted 'human documentary' or 'news report' format in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the 'good civilian life and consciousness' in the fashion of a public service campaign. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: "Let's read books," "Let's obey the traffic sign," "Let's eat Breakfast," "Street Lessons," "Open your Eyes (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind)," "Asia Asia (Illegal worker's home visiting project)" and so on.

Partially, the show's strategy to foreground public good within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC: MBC is private but at the same time closer to a public broadcasting network. It runs as a private company but is in fact indirectly owned by the government (by KBS, a major public network) and under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. This dominant discourse of the program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents such as violation of minor civil laws, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak, elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, if the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show's host calls up the mobile ranger on the scene and runs to there to give the samaritan a reward-a golden badge.

(To be continued)

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Transmedia Tacos? You Bet!

I recently asked the students in my Transmedia Entertainment and Storytelling class to write short analytic papers on examples of transmedia extensions. I ended up with papers on amusement park attractions, mobisodes, web sites, comic books, computer games, and a range of other media which have been used to expand our experience of popular media franchises. I was impressed across the board with my students's grasp of core transmedia concepts which have proven elusive in public discussion of the concept. Of these papers, this one by Benjamin Burroughs caught me by surprise, since it is exploring the way that transmedia tactics are moving from the entertainment industry to other sectors - in this case, the food industry. Here, Burroughs describes the ways that a local LA vendor has become the source of fascination for highly wired local residents, creating a mystique and perhaps even a mythology around the migrations of a taco truck. Indeed, as this paper suggests, I started to hear rumors of this truck before I even moved to LA, suggesting that the spread of this information extends well beyond the local community.

I would be curious to know whether readers can point to other examples where transmedia strategies are being deployed to create or promote local brands.

Transmedia Tacos: Hybridity, New Media, and Storytelling

By Benjamin Burroughs

The first way I ever heard about the legend of Kogi begins with two ever-present facets of my life, hunger and late nights. While deliberating on where to possibly satiate this beastly hunger at such an hour a group started talking about food and re-telling experiences of recent adventures in dining. This is where I was told about the Kogi myth.

Uncle John (no relation, a local Hawaiian title for esteemed family friend) told my wife and me about his first trip in tracking down an elusive Kogi kimchi taco. He explained that the truck stops at different areas and, despite being hesitant, he agreed to go with his friend to get this taco he heard so much about. He said when his friend took him to the spot there was a really long line. He waited in the line for a half an hour and then an hour and just as he was going to get a taco they ran out.

I was not only puzzled but stunned that an engineer like Uncle John was going to wait that long for just a taco. He said they go to a place and serve until they are out of meat. I found it silly to a certain degree but promptly looked at my wife as if to say, 'I got to get me one of those kim chi tacos' (and I don't even remotely like kim chi).

That began our first foray into searching out the 'Kogi dragon'. I googled the thing, read the website, looked up its twitter feed, jumped in the car and literally tracked its movement to a place in Little Tokyo not far from our apartment. Uncle John would no longer be the only privileged purveyor of information. When we arrived I was awed, a huge crowd of people--a diverse cross section of Los Angelenos had converged on this taco stand at just after 11 pm at night. We waited in that line for what seemed like hours (because it was!) and I tasted the forbidden elusive fruit for the first time. I hate kim chi and cilantro but oddly enough I really like these tacos, especially the short rib tacos and kim chi quesadillas. Seriously, you should go try some.

So what could be remotely transmedia about a taco? How can a taco be conceptualized as an integral part of the transmedia storytelling process? It's just a taco not a new medium, right?

We begin by diagramming some of the transmedia components that construct this particular transmedia franchise built around food before moving on to its theoretical justifications. What exactly is this Kogi I was hearing so much about? Kogi has not been around for very long. The company started with one truck last November and has since spawned what some have called a mobile eating revolution. Kogi has gone from one truck to many trucks, including a stationary sit-down restaurant. Awards have come pouring in, along with plenty of media coverage, as Kogi has been reported in every major newspaper from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times, even being listed as one of Jonathan Gold's 99 top LA eating experiences.

As we unpack the buzz surrounding this purported new media innovation, we hope to uncover through our own personal familiarity how this tiny truck stand is blazing a path for transmedia possibilities in food distribution and consumption. It is important to note that we are not looking at a mature transmedia franchise but are looking for where this my take us in an attempt to synchronize the transmedia model to more seamlessly sew together online and offline disjunctures as well as multiple media platforms.

Transmedia Mechanics

Kogi is first and foremost a truck and it is safe to understand the stand and its food content as the 'mothership'. Trucks are one of the oldest modes of food distribution and taco trucks have a particularly rich tradition. With a truck you can constantly be advertising and the truck can construct a unique dialogue with the consumer saying--look, we are one of you, we drive around to the same places and serve you food in your own locales. We are not different, abstract entities or identities but part of the community.

However this form of appeal has seemed limited, trucks as the primary form of food distribution as a business model have largely been untenable, especially in terms of franchising and expanding a company beyond a particular locality. Kogi's uses of new mediated technology and multiple platforms of this technology have attempted to bridge the gulf between the producer and consumer. No longer is the chef a distant 'other' in the back of a large restaurant but is now in close proximity and spatially there is the perception of closeness.

Taking the food to the streets takes on a form of renaissance--a return to a perhaps mythic, forgotten age when food was more interactive and participatory. The truck not only gives a sense of 'street cred' and raw authenticity associated particularly with Mexican taco stands (eating 'real' Mexican as opposed to Taco Bell, although Taco Bell has now gotten into the mobile taco stand game as well, mimicking the perceived success of these start-up franchises). Kogi also has a certain novelty about it because of its manipulation of new technology. Mobile food stands are not new to the cultural food landscape, but this recent re-articulation has been acclaimed as such because it is not just building a relationship with one community but enables a linkage to the cultural heartbeat of an entire city, even one as vast and diverse as Los Angeles.

If we understand transmedia as the reading of multiple texts that help to tell a larger story can we not see the truck as a text not only in its self promotion and banners but in its very form? The truck is speaking to an age of increased mobility, flexibility (flexible specialization), and fluidity in our culture. Can we not read the taco as a text that speaks to the hybridity of a culture and society where Korean kim chi and Latino tacos are representative of larger forces of cultural fusion?

Lastly, as we learned on the very first night of our taco pilgrimage, there is a sociality present in these long lines. These crowds identify and interact with each other, relating experiences with the food--what one should try, particular favorites, where else one could eat in a great blending and sense of communal participation inherent in any vibrant, lasting transmedia franchise. These sorts of informal media channels can and perhaps should be included to enlarge our understanding of transmedia. In our Kogi example this form of knowledge exchange and 'encyclopedia capacity' (Murray 1999) exists less in mediated spaces than other transmedia franchises but there is certainly potential for future transmedia food projects to explore more deeply how to connect consumers in the purely online context. Again, however, it seems important that we not de-value the informal gift exchanges of information that happen in specific communal contexts such as the public practice of waiting in line.

Tweets and Eats

This brings us to the next transmedia component: an online presence. So we have the taco and the stand and even the line as transmedia extensions but what ties these together is the utilization of new media technology. '

First you have the Kogibbq.com website run by the sister of one of the founding members, Aliiiice (this is how her screen name is presented on the blog). Interestingly enough, she lives in New York. She has her brother send her pictures of the food as she updates the community on what is going on with Kogi, portraying an interactive story of the growth and some of the inner workings of the company. She makes things very participatory, engaging the audience by allowing the community to help decide on the names of the new trucks, introducing the personalities of the staff, and explaining the stories behind new foods coming out. This is where Kogi adds a level of seriality (Haywood 1997).

Not only is seriality built into the food process, wanting to eat more after chowing down on a tasty morsel but Alliiice gives you the latest creation from chef Roy Choi so you have a reason to go back every week. People like what they have already eaten so when presented with a new concoction they are hooked into coming back. This is also the logic behind the majority of food advertising but such grand productions lack the intimacy and trust that Alliiice has massaged by being close to the community. She participates quite deeply with the readers of the blog, often commenting herself in the comments section of the blog in a very personal and 'real' manner.

What is most compelling however, is not only the intimacy, but the descriptions of the food. I have on more than one occasion sought out the truck because of what I had read. Sometimes the food is a one day special, so you are literally compelled by the pictures and descriptions to not miss the food served only on that particular day. I am currently thinking about needing to go and get the 'Ride or Die Sweet and Sour Chicken' I just read about.

These are essentially food stories, narratives that shape our encounter with the product and add layers of meaning to that experience. Recently this story was put on the website about a Cuban pressed pork dish. Alliiice writes:

"Once upon a time, there was a bun of Pan BLanco. A piLLow-soft, innocent loaf of angeLs' bread fresh from the warm confines of a simpLe baker's oven.

::SLiiiiiiiiiiiCE!!::

It was a quick and siLent death. Witnesses caught but the quick fLash of a cook's knife and two, snow-white ovaLettes faLLing away from the unforgiving bLade of the kitchen guiLLotine.

Two hands grabbed the symmetricaL, soft remains of Pan BLanco and shoved them face down on a redhot griLL. Fat sLices of juicy red summer tomatoes and spicy pork gathered 'round to mourn her death. But before they couLd pay their proper respects, the Hands of Death snatched her from her grave and sLathered her insides with fatty, unctuous gLobs of chiLi mayo."

It is hard not to get hungry just reading that. But this is not the only level of storytelling that is going on. The use of Twitter has moved these stories from static places online to dramatic emotion laden episodes that one can act out as adventures.

A series of youtube videos sprung up around the beginning of Kogi as part of its marketing strategy but also spontaneously as active audiences filmed and put on the web their own personal treks to find the Kogi tacos.

One of the first to do this was a local area DJ named akaider, the title was called "Chasing the Dragon (The Kogi BBQ Adventure)", who was later invited to start performing alongside some of the trucks stops in Little Tokyo in response to his video.

The twitter feeds make this very participatory. There is an emotional resonance when people are given a space to play and perform as audiences feel empowered to collect the information and connect the dots of where the truck will be at any given place and time. There is a certain degree of prestige in uncovering the buzz, but also great pleasure in sharing that gift in and through social exchanges.

This is mobile hypersocial technology (Ito 2008), as twitter allows for a conversation never before possible. Twitter feeds and tweets tell about the truck coming to an area, if it is stuck in traffic, if the cops made them move to a new area, or if they ran out of food for the day. People want to collect this information and have that 'insider' information on the next big eating thing. This knowledge is especially valued in eating circles as a form of status and coolness associated with the pooling of privileged information.

Transmedia Futures and Cosmopolitan Aesthetics

Food is compelling; it is an integral part of our lives. Although not being altogether obvious, it is not too far a stretch to contextualize the purchasing, eating, dining--the consumption practices of food as interwoven in the very fabric of our lives. Food is conducive to good stories. Food is universal and ubiquitous; we all eat (although economic and cultural stratification are prevalent and important processes beyond the scope of this paper). The consumption of food is often a highly public, commercial enterprise. Food consumption is a hypersocial activity.

Living in an age of convergence culture (Jenkins 2006) where consumers are the point of convergence, appropriators and re-mixers of form and meaning, how will this shape our relation to something as recurrent as eating? A convergence culture is participatory and demands for the reorganization of production.

Kogi is a small example of the new spectatorship that creative artists can maneuver to empower a deeper synergy between production and consumption (or future prosumption) as chefs and diners, food critics and passive consumers can all benefit from the increased connectivity and emotional resonance afforded through transmedia productions. What is going on is the sharing of privileged knowledge and information conveyed as a narrative construction.

Perhaps we really are what and how we eat. Kogi can be representative of larger shifts and cultural trends. It is a Korean and Latin fushion cooking driven by new mediated technologies and platforms that allow for increased sharing and participating. Transmedia has a certain cosmopolitan aesthetic and democratic participation that should be cultivated as we move further into the hybridity and diversity of a networked world.

Sources

Jennifer Haywood, " Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial," Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), pp. 21-51

Ito, Mizuko. 2008. "Networked Publics: Introduction." Pp. 1-14 in Networked Publics, edited by K. Varnelis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmeda Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

Janet Murray, "Digital Environments are Encyclopedic," Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83-90.

Ben Burroughs is currently completing a double degree Masters program from the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism and the London School of Economics and Political Science in Global Media and Communications. He has authored several publications including "Kissing Maccaca: Blogs, Narrative, and Political Discourse "(2007), and is hoping to pursue a PhD in the coming fall. His research interests include: civic transmedia, politics, emergent fandoms, and media anthropology. Ben is a former high school French teacher, who grew up on the North Shore of Oahu. He and his wife presently reside in Los Angeles.

Youtube in the Amazon: Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet

The following account will appear later this month in an issue of In Media Res, the newsletter of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. It was written by Audubon Dogherty, one of the graduate students I am working with this year. She is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media, which is funded by the Knight Foundation. Youtube in the Amazon: Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet

by Audubon Dogherty

We arrived in Cajamarca in northern Peru just in time for an information and communications technology (ICT) training session for local internet entrepreneurs from rural villages across the country. The training site was picturesque - a large house surrounded by cows, streams, mountains, dirt. The minister of technology was in attendance, as was the project manager from FITEL - a public fund distributing subsidies to national telecommunications companies to set up wireless internet in thousands of villages - as well as representatives from various NGOs. I had come to film some of the trainings and try to get a sense of how technology for development was being implemented.

All this was part of a documentary I was making on the use of new wireless internet in extremely rural areas of the Peruvian Andes and Amazon, a project funded in part by the Carroll Wilson Award via MIT's Entrepreneurship Center. An old friend of mine had become the chief project manager for Rural Telecom, a Peruvian company based in Lima. The company had won a government subsidy to provide internet and basic tech and business management training to people in 2,000 rural villages, locals who volunteered to become entrepreneurs and start their own internet "cabinas" or cabins.

The idea was that cabina proprietors would independently finance the purchase of a few computers (often by selling cattle or taking out bank loans), and Rural Telecom would build a wireless tower to provide internet access and sometimes public pay phones, then conduct an initial training with end users in the community. Entrepreneurs would charge a small hourly fee for local internet users, often young people, which they would use to pay monthly connection fees (about $40 USD) to the telecom.

The project, dubbed Banda Ancha Rural, began in 2007, and I had come to assess its progress and the impact the internet was having on communities. Due to safety and language concerns, I hired Maurice, a bilingual Peruvian photographer and videographer, to accompany me on the trip and help conduct interviews in Spanish with entrepreneurs. He was an invaluable asset, but neither of us really understood what we were getting into.

Over the course of six weeks, we spent endless hours on buses, planes, taxis, four-by-fours and hiking on foot to visit communities in Andean regions (Cajamarca, Huancayo), rural areas outside Lima (Cañete, Huaral) and tribal areas in the Central Amazon (Satipo, Pangoa). I had expected to find mixed reactions by villagers: perhaps the adults are wary of the internet and computers, I thought. Perhaps they don't feel it's valuable for agricultural societies. Perhaps some entrepreneurs have gained advanced skills from the technology trainings and are now using the internet to sell their goods online and improve their local economy. Perhaps they've learned to blog but don't want to write about their village because they're not interested in encouraging tourism.

I was wrong about all that.

What we did find were communities that had embraced internet implementation, understood its value and its potential for education and business development, but who had not received enough training to fully utilize internet services and most often had huge problems with the wireless connection. We visited over 40 villages, more than half of which had slow or broken connections.

But telecom representatives had no idea there were problems because the government subsidy they received was not sufficient to cover further technical assessments or in-person trainings for every internet cabina, especially since these communities were often difficult or impossible to access by public transportation. And the communities that did have working internet still needed help promoting its use since their financial intake was usually barely enough to break even after paying for electricity and internet.

To counter this, Rural Telecom has endeavored to forge private contracts with NGOs, universities and technology corporations interested in supplementing funds for the project. They also hold ICT trainings a few times a year for groups of internet entrepreneurs who have the time and money to attend. Presently they are beginning a pilot project to provide online trainings (via the open source platform Moodle) to 120 entrepreneurs with reliable internet connections.

'Critical Hub' for Learning

What struck me was how internet proprietors see themselves: sure, they are entrepreneurs running a business, but they also see themselves as contributing to the cultural and technological development of their community. A majority of cabina owners define themselves as educators, responsible for training children and young adults in media literacy. Most villages have one local school, usually without internet, and no library; the internet cabina therefore becomes a critical hub for learning.

Cabina proprietors help kids with their homework online, teach them how to search for information and make sure they don't visit questionable websites. Although many adults lack the time or literacy level to use computers, some farmers come to research agricultural prices; mining areas often receive business from engineers and other professionals who rely on the internet for communication; and some local adults learn to use email and chat for communicating with family members in other areas.

It was striking to see how important computers became for cabina proprietors whose standard of living was otherwise extremely low. In one village outside of Cajamarca, we visited a cabina that was part of the entrepreneur's house. It had dirt floors, thatched roofs, chickens everywhere and an outhouse several meters away. But for the proprietor, keeping the computers in his home was a top priority. This man had studied computer science and was also an elementary schoolteacher; local kids saw him as a resource, and began to rely on the internet cabina as a place they could go to get help online with math or history lessons.

The proprietor's six-year-old son worked quietly at one computer as we interviewed his father. When the interview was finished, I asked the child what he was doing on the internet. "I'm looking for my favorite video," he told me in Spanish, inputting the word "dinosaur" (in English) into YouTube's search field. "This is it," he said, clicking on an animation about dinosaurs and hooking up external audio speakers into the hard drive so he could hear the narration. A few minutes later, he was searching for juegos, online games, from an educational gaming site in Spanish.

Although the proprietor joked with me about his son's technological prowess, it spoke to a crucial need for ICT projects in rural communities: sustainability. Many entrepreneurs start internet businesses but then leave the area to pursue job opportunities elsewhere; conversely, older cabina owners rely on their children to run the business, only to be left without managerial or technical skills once their kids go elsewhere for college or to find employment. Training the younger generation is essential, the proprietor told me, not just for their own education but for the continuation of the business itself, and to enable villagers to communicate with the outside world.

A few hours away was another teacher who doubled as an internet entrepreneur. She complained about the inconsistent internet connection and the competition from cheaper internet cafés in the nearby city of Cajamarca but explained that young customers from the village still preferred to come to her cabina because of the personal assistance they received. She envisioned turning her small cabina into a library of sorts, not with books but with online references and one-to-one teaching. She wanted to learn VoIP applications like Skype to allow users to make free calls online, as well as upload news and information about her community to a website. Although Rural Telecom offers a section of their website for entrepreneurs to upload information about their village (contactorural.com.pe), many proprietors don't receive enough training on the web interface or don't fully understand citizen journalism and the incentive for publicizing their village.

Paying for Access

The downside of garnering a loyal clientele is that internet users become upset when the connection goes down. We met young users, now used to relying on the internet for information and communication, who will commute to the nearest city to find an internet café - a trip that is often long and unsafe. A few proprietors we met have begun to supplement internet services with offline gaming consoles, such as Playstation, so that thy can stay open and make a little money even when the internet connection breaks. One woman used the revenue from gaming to pay her electricity bill, which had gone up with the installation of new computers.

Some entrepreneurs we met were also artisans, hoping to sell their stone carvings or painted crafts online, although still without the tech knowledge to do so. Alejandro Cipriano lives in a mountainous area outside Huancayo and runs a family business making traditional painted gourds (mates burilados). He became an internet entrepreneur after a friend in Lima started taking orders for his crafts via email, which came in from as far away as Japan. Although his internet connection has been down for months, he still hopes to eventually have his own website and sell his goods directly to international consumers online.

We also heard about a nearby Andean village that had transformed their economy through online self-education. A governmental ICT manager told us how the community made money from selling fresh river trout but could only sell the fish to local buyers. With the arrival of the internet, they found online resources outlining the process for canning trout. This revitalized their industry, allowing them to sell preserved river trout as far away as Lima.

The Peruvian jungle presented a completely different context. Native tribes still live throughout the Amazon, and despite tribal protests over land disputes that blocked roadways for weeks, we were able to visit two native villages where internet had been set up. Although leaders from both villages were wary of tourism and wanted to preserve their traditional way of life, culture and language, they saw technology as a critical means through which to develop their community - to further education for children, to stay informed about the latest prices for agricultural products, and to communicate with people in other areas.

We spoke to a teacher in one native community who emphasized the need for more governmental support for technology education, including more computers and lower rates for internet connections. "I would also like my school to have a video camera like yours," he told me, "so the students would be able to put footage from this village online."

Perhaps if I embarked on this project five years from now, I would be able to focus on the innovative uses of internet and communication technology in areas previously cut off from all forms of communication. But the rural internet project is still in development. Until the government or private telecoms can increase funding to secure stable, affordable wireless connections and expand training for entrepreneurs, there is little progress.

While pressing needs for basic services in extremely rural areas remain - for better education, phone lines, improved roads - there still exists a great desire by rural Peruvians to develop their communities through technology. Cell phones, for instance, have become the primary means of communication in remote areas. Perhaps the next time I visit Peru, internet will be in wider use through mobile devices, and I can make an entirely new documentary - from my phone.

Audubon Dougherty is a filmmaker and digital activist interested in the role of media in international development. She studied writing at Emerson College before transferring to Smith College to complete a degree in anthropology with a focus on visual culture. This led her to the field of human rights, where she traveled to Southeast Asia in 2006 as a blogger and photographer to assess disaster relief projects assisting tsunami survivors. She returned to Thailand the following year to provide multimedia training for an organization serving Burmese migrants and undocumented workers. As a communications specialist for a labor union, she helped develop a new media program which utilized e-communication, streaming video and mobile messaging to help organize 22,000 home care workers in Massachusetts. Outside of work, Dougherty formed her own video production collective, producing and directing films for exhibition at festivals and on the web.

District 9 (Part Two): Out of Afrofuturism?

Last time, I focused on District 9 as adopting and expanding some core strategies of transmedia branding, linking it to True Blood, Cloverfield, and the granddaddy of them all, The Blair Witch Project. I should note that about the same time that post went live, friend and Convergence Culture Consortium consultant Grant McCracken posted an interesting provocation about what's behind the success of this season of True Blood. I also should point you to the early "Save the Date" Announcement for this year's Futures of Entertainment conference which went live yesterday: an entire day of the event will be focused around issues of transmedia entertainment. This is an event you will not want to miss.

Today, I am coming at District 9 from a somewhat different angle, suggesting that it might best be understood as borrowing from and contributing to a larger tradition of Afrofuturist science fiction. You could understand the last installment without confronting any spoilers. This time I need to deal with the larger story structure of the film so there are spoilers galore. So read at your own risk if you have not seen District 9.

Over the past decade or so, there has been an emerging body of criticism and theory around the concept of "Afrofuturism." For a good introduction to this concept, check out the Afrofuturism website or watch John Akomfrah's 1996 documentary, Last Angel of History, which traces the emergence of Afrofuturist concepts through science fiction and popular music of a much earlier vintage. For other good discussions of Afrofuturism, check out the special issue of Social Text which Alondra Nelson edited in 2001. Here's a decent short definition of Afrofuturism, taken from the Afrofuturism home page:

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, music writers and cultural critics like Mark Dery, Greg Tate, Mark Sinker and Tricia Rose brought science fiction themes in the works of important and innovative cultural producers to our attention. They claimed that these works simultaneously referenced a past of abduction, displacement and alien-nation, and inspired technical and creative innovations in the work of such artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra. Science fiction was a recurring motif in the music of these artists, they argued, because it was an apt metaphor for black life and history.

Now a new generation of AfroFuturists are exploring these themes in a variety of genres: DJs Spooky and Singe in music and digital culture, Fatimah Tuggar and Keith Piper in the visual arts, Kodwo Eshun in music criticism, McLean Greaves in cyberspace, and Nalo Hopkinson in speculative fiction.

Are recurring futurist themes in these different genres just coincidences? Are they aesthetic a/effects of our millennial moment? Or have futurism and science fiction become the most effective way to talk about black experiences? How do these themes refer to the history of the African diaspora, yet imagine possible futures, futures that enable a broad range of cultural expression and an ever-widening definition of "blackness?"

Afrofuturism offers us a fascinating way of thinking about how the themes of science fiction emerge across a range of different arts, including music, rather than remaining in the space of literary, filmic, and television science fiction which have traditionally been dominated by us white guys. And as the images of science fiction circulated through those channels, they took on new shapes and meanings, becoming a set of metaphors for thinking about issues such as slavery and cultural oppression. In many cases, the alien became the vehicle through which oppressed people represent that have protected and enforced the values of the status qou. As these images took shape, they drew new artists to science fiction -- including a growing number of artists of color -- who brought these themes back into science fiction literature. A smaller number of films -- most famously Brother From Another Planet -- consciously contribute to Afro-Futurism.

It is an open question whether District 9 can be called, in the strictest sense, an "Afrofuturist" work. One way of understanding Afrofuturism would be race-neutral, refering to the deployment of a set of metaphors drawn from the realm of science fiction to understand the history and future of race relations (or conversely the borrowing of concepts from the history of race relations to envision how we would deal with other forms of difference and diversity). Many of the works most often cited as Afrofuturist texts fall into this category, including often-cited parallels to District 9 such as Alien Nation and the Planet of the Apes cycle.

Yet, in so far as the Afrofuturism movement has also functioned to call attention to the future of blackness or the responses of black artists to new tehcnology, then we might say that District 9 appropriates an Afrocentric movement and repackages it for a "mainstream" (i.e. majority-dominated) marketplace.

Clearly, as a South African born artist, Blomkamp has much to contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of apartheid and how its structures and ideologies might return should we confront alien visitors. Blomkamp has been explicit about the links between District 9 and his experiences growing up in South Africa:

It all had a huge impact on me: the white government and the paramilitary police -- the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment. Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go.Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.(LA Times)

District 9 is clearly intended to shock us out of our preconceptions about South Africa (and for that matter, about what kind of society might be central to a science fiction drama). Blumkamp wants to get past some of the defense mechanisms that have emerged through previous discussion of the conditions of segregation and poverty that have shaped the recent history of his country by telling that story through a different lens. Blomkamp displaces discussions of race onto aliens much as Art Spigelman's Maus displaced discussions of the death camps onto mice, cats, and pigs Blomkamp has every right to make such a film. Yet, it would have been nice if he had also connected his work to this larger conversation about the intersection of race and technology. Discussions of the film have rarely acknowledged the larger Afrofuturist tradition, though again Hollywood in general has rarely acknowledged its borrowings from literary science fiction.

District 9 seeks to construct a science fiction narrative which isn't about the global powers that dominate most work in the genre. It purposefully doesn't deal with what the Americans, the Brits, the Japanese, the Russians, or the Chinese are doing while aliens are visiting South Africa. True enough, Multinational United is a global organization but we see MNU embodied in the film through characters who come from South Africa. There's something really powerful about making the peripheral central, about dewesternizing science fiction. Again, a growing body of science fiction literature has made this move along time ago imagining the future from the perspectives of Eastern Europe, India, Brazil, African countries, the Arab World, Jamaica, and so forth. I picked up a recent catalog of science fiction books and was blown away by how many of them were set in the developing world as people seek ways to acknowledge a future which will not be simply an expansion of Americanism across the universe. For an excellent sampler that explores the relations between science fiction and postcolonialism, you might pick up a copy of Naola Hopkinson's So Long Been Dreaming:

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasyis an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color.

Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre "speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves."It's an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology.

The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the "third world."It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the "developing"nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into.

The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures.

Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhou

So far, film and television has lagged behind print science fiction in embracing this more global perspective -- reflecting a fear that western viewers won't be interested in a film set primarily in the developing world. So District 9 does important work in bringing this perspective to the screen.

Yet, this exclusion of first and second world powers in the film also poses questions about power relationships. It is hard to imagine, given what we learn in District 9 about the ways that the international arms industry wants to acquire access to the alien weapons, that the Americans and the other super-powers would simply step aside and let the Africans exert this level of self determination.

That said, we also have to note that District 9 falls into several of the traps critics have noted in other representations of the future of race relations in mainstream science fiction films. First, there is an over-arching logic of the film: we move from alienation from to identification with the "prawns" . The disturbing opening scenes really make them seem sub-human. The design of the aliens make them look like insects and crustaceans, neither of which typically engender compassionate or sympathetic responses. And their actions are beastial as they gnaw into meet or clammer through trash heaps. Only their eyes hint at something more soulful underneath their shells.

As the film goes forward, though, we are moved to critique the human population's treatment of the aliens. So far, so good. But in order for this to happen, two things have to occur: we have to stress the "inhuman" qualities of the human characters (through depictions of their baser motives) and we have to reveal the "human" characteristics of the nonhuman characters -- for example through the film's representation of the "Prawn" protagonist as a caring father and a loyal friend. In short, the emotional power of the film depends on a logic of assimilation: we can care about the aliens because they are more like us than we initially thought. And it depends on a logic of liberal guilt - we should care about the aliens because after all, we are treating them much as we've treated other underclasses in the past.

For me, the most disturbing moment in the film comes when Wikus, our central human character uses a flame thrower to exterminate a nest of alien eggs, laughing and bragging that they explode like "popcorn" when exposed to heat. Given what we learn later about their family attachments, it is hard to redeem the character who was responsible for this genocidal act. There is no moment of self recognition where Wikus fully acknowledges what he has done. He mostly pursues his own self interests and has only a few moments where he recognizes the stakes for the "Prawn" and aids their cause.

You can read the main "Prawn" character as the alien version of the "magic negro" found in so many contemporary Hollywood films. Hollywood believes we can tell the story of oppressed people only through the lens of more sympathetic members of the dominant group. And often, this means that the oppressed people become sympathetic to us through their mentoring and assistance to the white protagonists. District 9 is more complicated than this largely because its human protagonist doesn't ever really develop full consciousness and by the end, we understand the alien character more than he does. We start to value the alien's motivates and needs above his in the process. This is no Dances With Wolves where the white man becomes a better Indian than the "redskins" and takes over leadership of the tribe. By the end of the film, Wikus is still totally outside the alien community, but has just had a glimmer of what it's plight might look like.

The second trap, such films often to portray people of color as part of the system of oppression. So, here, we see how the Nigerians exploit the "Prawns", we see black Africans in the man on the street segments justifying the segregation or deportation of the aliens, and we see black authority figures who are part of the state apparatus working to contain and relocate the "prawn." All of this suggests that blacks would have behaved no differently than whites did if they were in a position of authority in Apartheid South Africa. It makes oppression a basic element of human nature and thus erases some of the moral culpability of previous generations for their racism. Here, again, though, the film does hint at the unequal status of whites and blacks within MNU through, for example, a scene suggesting that a black recruit is not being given the same body armor as the whites in the same expedition party.

Here's hoping these observations spark greater discussion. I suspect many of you will disagree with my criticisms of the film. I fully expect to be called "politically correct" which is the language we use to deflect honest discussions about the impact of race and racism upon culture.. District 9's cultural importance is that it provides us with new resources through which to reflect on the history and future of race relations in our world. I am not asking that the film be "politically correct": for me, it is enough that it provokes reflections, encourages conversations, and forces us to think more deeply about the world around us. Part of that discussion should resolve around lingering racial assumptions even in works which are otherwise progressive in their goals. Let me return to what I said in my opening of this two part series: District 9 is a very important film, perhaps the best released so far this year, and will make a lasting contribution to how we think about science fiction in screen-based media. But it did not "come out of nowhere" and we will understand it better if we situate it in a larger historical context.

How Susan Spread and What It Means

I've done four interviews over the past few days -- with the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Mainichi Shimbun (Japan) -- which in one way or another have touched on the dramatic story of Susan Boyle, the dowdy and musically gifted contestant on Britain's Got Talent who has become the new queen of both broadcast and participatory media.

What I've been telling all of them is that Boyle's success is perhaps the most spectacular example to date of spreadability in action, and indeed, since we've discovered a fair number of busy corporate types out there who don't feel like reading the eight installments of "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," I figured I'd use this space to spell out again some core principles of spreadable media and show how the Boyle phenomenon illustrates how they work.

The statistics are moving so fast that it is impossible to keep track of them but here's the basic data points as reported on Monday by the Washington Post:

According to Visible Measures, which tracks videos from YouTube, MySpace and other video-sharing sites, all Boyle-oriented videos -- including clips of her television interviews and her recently released rendition of "Cry Me a River," recorded 10 years ago for a charity CD -- have generated a total of 85.2 million views. Nearly 20 million of those views came overnight.

The seven-minute video that was first posted on YouTube and then widely circulated online easily eclipsed more high-profile videos that have been around for months. Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin has clocked in 34.2 million views, said the folks at Visible Measures, while President Obama's victory speech on election night has generated 18.5 million views.

But it's not just in online video where Boyle, the unassuming woman from a tiny Scottish town, has dominated. Her Wikipedia entry has attracted nearly 500,000 page views since it was created last Sunday. Over the weekend, her Facebook fan page was flooded with comments, at some points adding hundreds of new members every few minutes. The page listed 150,000 members at 1 p.m. Friday. By last night there were more than a million.

By comparison, the 2008 Season finale for American Idol, one of the highest rated programs on American broadcast television, attracted almost 32 million viewers, or between a third and a half the number of people who had watched Susan's video as of Monday of this week. So, what's happening here?

Contrary to what you may have read, Susan Boyle didn't go "viral." She hasn't gained circulation through infection and contagion. The difference between "viral" and "spreadable" media has to do with the conscious agency of the consumers. In the viral model, nobody is in control. Things just go "viral." In the Spreadability model, things spread because people choose to spread them and we need to understand what motivates their decision and what facilitates the circulation.

While she originated on British broadcast television, her entry into the American market was shaped more by the conscious decisions of 87 plus million people who choose to pass her video along to friends, families, work mates, and fellow fans than by any decision by network executives to put her on the airwaves in the first place.

This is not to say that the original video was not professionally produced and edited in such a way as to maximize the emotional impact of what happened to her at that particular talent composition. This is not to say that our interest in the content wasn't shaped by our general familarity with the genre conventions of reality television (leading us to expect another William Hung kind of moment) or by our particular perceptions and investments in one Simon Cowell, whose boyish grin and sheepish expression represents the ultimate payoff for her spectacular performance (which we can appreciate because we've seen American Idol and know what a tough-minded SOB Simon can be). And that's not to say that the visibility of Susan Boyle hasn't been amplified as she's gotten interviewed on Good Morning America and spoofed on the Tonight Show, to cite two examples. We have to understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon as occurring at the intersection between broadcast media (or to use Amanda Lotz's term, television in the post-network era.) In other words, this is convergence culture at work.

The Susan Boyle phenomenon would not have played out the same way if there wasn't YouTube, if there weren't social networks, if there weren't Twitter. Indeed, the very similar video of Paul Potts making a similarly surprising success on the same program generated nowhere near the same level of circulation a year ago (though it may have also prepared the way for the public's interest in this story). What allowed the Susan Boyle video to travel so far so fast was that it could travel so far so fast.

For most of the people who saw it and decided to pass it along, they had a sense of discovery. They could anticipate that they were sharing the video with people who probably hadn't seen it already, precisely because the content was not yet being broadcast on commercial television. The fans found Susan Boyle before the networks did -- much like that old saw that by the time a trend makes it to the cover of Time Magazine, it's already over. There was an infrastructure in place -- across multiple communication systems -- which would allow anyone to share this content with anyone else who they thought would like to see it with minimal effort. We can send links. We can embed the content in our blogs.

The role of Twitter in all of this is most interesting. Twitter Twits did what Twitter Twits do best -- they tweeted alerts about an interesting bit of content and were able to embed micro-links so their followers could quickly access the content. I think of Twitter as like a swarm of bees that spread out in all directions, searching for interesting materials to share. When someone finds it, they come back to the hive, do a little honey dance, and send the swarm scampering behind them. This is how collective intelligence outsmarts the broadcast decision-makers: The Twitter Tribes can figure out what content the audience wants to see because the Twitter Tribes are the audience, making decisions in real time.

Equally important is that we had the agency to decide which content we wanted to pass along -- out of all of the possible video clips posted on YouTube last week or indeed, out of all of the many segments of media content which are circulating around us.

We believe that we can only understand what happened here by identify the choices which consumers made as they decided to pass along this content and not that content. The USA Today on Monday sought to identify a range of different motives which shaped the decisions to pass along this particular content: "Vindication . . . Surprise . . . Guilt . . . Shame . . . Psychology . . . Hope . . . Distraction . . . Empowerment . . . Authenticity . . . Spiritual Solace."

There's no need to identify a single cause for why people spread this content. Different people spread this content for different reasons. Hell, often, the same person spreads this content for different reasons. I sent the link via e-mail to my wife with a note saying "want to feel warm and fuzzy," to a close friend with a note suggesting "this will crack you up," and to my Twitter and Facebook mobs with the suggestion it illustrates something important about reality television because you wouldn't believe this if you saw it in a movie. My sharing of the video meant something different in each of these relationships. We can certainly identify a range of common reasons for why the emotional structure of this video might motivate people to circulate it.

Does the wide-spread circulation of reality television suggest the triviality of what constitutes public interests? I don't think we can answer that question without knowing what we are using Susan Boyle to talk about. Her meaning doesn't reside in the video itself -- we won't exhaust it no matter how many times with watch it. The meaning rests in the conversations that Susan Boyle enables us to have with each other. As it starts to circulate, the Susan Boyle video gets inserted into all kinds of ongoing conversations across a range of different communities, so that I've stumbled into prayer circles for Susan Boyle; I've found scientists talking about how someone with that body could produce such a sound; I've seen discussions amongst Karaoki singers about her techniques, and I've seen reality television fans trying to explain why her success would never be possible given the rules of American Idol which exclude someone her age from competing in the first place. Susan Boyle circulates because she's meaningful on many different levels and after a while, all of this has started to go meta so that we are spreading Susan's videos to talk about how fast they are being spread.

For many of the people who are spreading her videos, the transaction is understood through the lens of a gift economy. We share her because she allows us to make someone we care about have a somewhat better day. We share her because of what she allows us to say about ourselves, our world, and our relationships. I sent Susan to my wife as something like a Facebook Gift -- a short, quick, friendly gesture on a day when we weren't going to see each other until much later.

Yes, there were other groups who had other motives for getting me to pass along the content -- the producers of the programme and the network on which it aired, perhaps YouTube itself -- but their motives had very little to do with why I chose to share that video with people I cared about. So my circulation of the video needed to be negotiated between their interests and mine.

The fact that YouTube makes it easy to embed the content makes it easier for me to share it. The fact that Bit.ly allows me to reduce the length of the url allows me to tweet about it. And all of these technical innovations makes it that much easier for the video to spread, but at the end of the day, it also spreads because I and all the rest of us have become more literate about social networking, because we are linked to more people and have more regular contact with them, because we now often interact with each other through sharing meaningful bits of media content.

Keep in mind a fundamental fact: many of the 97 plus million people who downloaded the video are part of a surplus audience from the perspective of the people who produced and marketed Britain's Got Talent. Indeed, beyond a certain point, Susan Boyle's rapid visibility becomes a liability rather than an asset. Keep in mind that Boyle stars in a British program which does not get commercial distribution in the United States. I can't turn on a television network -- cable or broadcast -- and watch the next installment of Britain's Got Talent. I can't go on Hulu and download that content. And I can't at present go on iTunes and buy this content. Market demand is dramatically outpacing supply.

What I can do, though, is consume illegal downloads of the series via various torrents or fan distribution sites, which have the flexibility to get the content into circulation without having to negotiate international deals or work through protectionist policies which make it hard to bring international content into the American market. Even with Cowell's production company already having working relations with multiple American networks, my bet is that he can't get that show on the air quickly enough for Americans to be able to catch up with the Brits.

Sure, Simon Cowell has already signed her to a contract and talks about how ""there's every chance Susan Boyle will have the number one album in America" if she appears on Oprah . But the record can't go on sale fast enough to capitalize on this burst of public interest and by the time it reaches the market, there's a good chance that her 15 minutes of fame will have expired.

Wired tells us that even where the media producers might have made money from the spread of Sarah's video, they are so far choosing not to do so: "a Google spokeswoman responded to our e-mail and phone queries with some surprising news: "That video is not being monetized." We've contacted Sony (Simon Cowell's label) and FremantleMedia (the show's producer, owned by RTL Group not Sony as appeared in this update earlier) to try to determine why the $500,000 or more Boyle's video should have generated so far is apparently being left on the table -- despite the fact that both companies are confirmed revenue-sharing partners of YouTube." So, whatever calculations have gone into getting us to help spread this video, they don't make sense in terms of a simple and direct economic equation. This isn't about counting impressions and raking in the cash.

Keep in mind that what we've seen so far is her first appearance in a season long competition and the implication of this blockage becomes clear. I've argued here that piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers. It isn't that people will turn to illegal downloads because they want the content for free. My bet is that many of them would pay for this content but it is not legally being offered to them. We can compare this to the global interest generated by Ken Jenning's phenomenal run on Jeopardy: Jeopardy was already syndicated in markets around the world so when he generated buzz, he drew people back to the local broadcaster who was selling the content in their markets. They could tune in and see day by day whether he stayed in the game. Right now, everyone's still acting as if Susan Boyle was only one video but they will wake up tomorrow or the next day and discover that lots of those people want to see what happens to her next.

When many of us write about the global circulation of media, the American circulation of British reality television isn't necessarily what comes first to mind. Indeed, there's some kind of mental block in terms of understanding this content as international in the first place. Yet, there is already a strong fan base in the United States for British media content which had already been downloading and circulating Britain's Got Talent, even though no commercial producer had guessed that this series might generate this kind of American interest. And that fan base is now in a position where they may need to service Susan's growing audience.

Part of the reasons Americans like Susan Boyle is that she's so damned British. USA Today says her story is like "a Disney movie," but it isn't: it's like a British movie, like Calendar Girls or Billy Elliot or The Full Monty, one of those down to earth dramas where average Brits cut across class and taste boundaries and do something extraordinary. The mixture of gritty realism, portly stars, eccentricity, class consciousness and wild-eyed optimism is what draws many of us to British media in the first place.

We are used to talking about things that could only happen in America. Well, Susan Boyle is something that could only happen in Great Britain -- get used to it because the next one will be something that can only happen in India or Japan. When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand.

And as we discover we like someone like Susan Boyle, we seek out more information. Suddenly charity records she made years ago spring up videos on YouTube. Suddenly there's a flood of interest on Wikipedia about this previously unknown figure. And people are seeking out videos of Elaine Paige, the queen of British stage musicals, who Susan identified as her role model. Many Americans had never heard of Paige before so we can chart dramatic increases in downloads on her videos though they are dwarfed by the Susan Boyle original. Most of the thousands of comments posted on the Paige videos make unfortunate comparisons with Susan Boyle, suggesting that even though she has been a much bigger star historically, has a string of commercial successes, that for this week at least, Susan Boyle's got a more dedicated fan base. Just to give us a baseline, some of the Elaine Paige YouTube videos reach more than a million viewers, where-as the rest don't get over 100,000. My theory is that Susan Boyle's fan base have discovered some of them and not others, accounting for the huge gap in traffic.

Or consider the fact that Susan Boyle gained more than a million Facebook subscribers in less than a week at a time when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have been battling it out to see who could be the first to get a million subscribers on Twitter. (Yes, Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter but it's still an impressive accomplishment!) This is not to say that long-term Oprah could help Susan Boyle open up her record to a much larger audience, just that in this frenzy of interest, she doesn't need Oprah or any other old style broadcast celebrity to turn YouTube on its ear.

So, that's what Susan Boyle can teach us about Spreadability. So what happens next? Talk among yourselves. And while you are at it, spread the word.

Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

The above video is one of a large number posted via Youtube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening.

Huma Yusuf, a recently graduate Comparative Media Studies student, has shared an important analysis of the role which grassroots media played during the crisis through the Center for Future Civic Media website. While in our program, Yusuf wrote a thesis, "Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi, Pakistan," which she hopes to turn into a book about how everyday citizens in her home city make sense of the everyday experience of political violence. A native of Pakistan and a professional journalist, Yusuf offers a significant third world perspective to our understanding of the impact of new media on the public sphere. There's a wealth of significant information, including links to key blogs and videos, contained in "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)."

Yusuf's analysis was deeply informed by concepts she learned during her time in the Comparative Media Studies Program and her involvement with the Center for Future Civic Media, especially her understanding of the "hybrid" and "converged" media landscape which effected the flow of communications in her home land and her consideration of the ways that mobile technologies might be helping to close the participation gap, offering unique ways of bridging between the discourse of university students and the average man and woman in the street. In the post that follows, I want to flag some of her key findings in hopes that they intrigue you enough to check out the fuller report.

Yusuf offers this summary of the report's key findings:

This research finds that the Pakistani media landscape is multifaceted, comprising a combined--or alternating--use of different mainstream media sources, digital technologies, and new media platforms, depending on availability and security. Moreover, the study finds that the participation gap--the ability to meaningfully use digital technologies and new media--impacts participatory behavior and civic action far more than the digital divide, which is often overcome through the combined use of different technologies. The study also concludes that new media platforms are increasingly effective as tools for community organizing and information dissemination, that authoritarian regimes are quick to adapt digitally networked technologies to their own ends, and that news reporting in Pakistan is gravitating towards a hybrid model whereby old and new media platforms collaborate to keep the public informed.

Over the several month long crisis, the government sought to repress alternative channels of communication almost as fast as they emerged, yet activists and citizen journalists were able to exploit the proliferation of different communications channels to stay one step ahead of censorship:

As an increasing number of Pakistanis turned to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and SMS text messages as alternate media portals, the government clamped down on these sources. Between March 2007 and February 2008, cellphone networks were jammed, internet service providers were instructed to block the YouTube website, internet connectivity was limited or shut down, and blogging softwares were banned. Moreover, the authorities came to monitor the public's use of new media platforms: images of anti-government rallies posted to Flickr were used to identify and arrest protesters....

The only antidote to the government's control of digital and new media tools, this paper shows, was the widening of the networked public sphere to include Pakistanis in the diaspora and global media sources. For example, when the government blocked news channels and jammed cellular networks in November 2007, young Pakistanis across the globe continued to plan and organize protest rallies via the social networking site Facebook. Similarly, when university students demanding the restoration of an independent judiciary realized that security officials had prevented journalists from covering their protest, they submitted self-generated video clips and images to CNN's iReport, an online citizen journalism initiative. Indeed, as Pakistan's media landscape became a hybrid model in which professional and amateur journalists generated and disseminated news by whatever means possible, international mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the BBC, and the UK-based Channel 4 increasingly sought out hyperlocal reporting posted to local blogs, YouTube, and Facebook.

As students and other concerned citizens began to recognize the growing centrality of these grassroots modes of communication to public understanding of the crisis, they took on more and more responsibility, insuring detailed documentation, taking their cell phone cameras into the streets to record what was happening and sending it to the outside world as quickly as possible. Often, students inside Pakistan were working in concert with Pakistani students elsewhere to insure the smooth flow of information. Yusuf, for example, cites the efforts of Harvard undergraduate Samad Khurram, who helped mobilize protesters in Pakistan from his Cambridge dorm room by maintaining an important newsletter and mailing list.

In some cases, especially in regard to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, citizen journalists played a key role in undermining official accounts:

Soon after Bhutto's death had been verified, its cause was contested. Eyewitnesses in Rawalpindi reported hearing gunshots before an explosion. Members of Bhutto's entourage and her colleagues in the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) claimed that the leader had been shot. In the immediate wake of the attack, a team of doctors examined her body and stated in a report that she had an open wound on her left temporal region. A day after the assassination, government officials claimed that Bhutto had died when her head hit the lever of the sunroof of her car as she ducked to avoid an assassin's bullets and/or in response to the sound of a blast caused by a suicide bomber. The question of whether Bhutto died of gunshot wounds or a head injury riveted the nation because the truth would have implications on allegations about lax security and government complicity in the assassination.

An important piece of evidence to help settle this debate came in the form of images and an amateur video generated by a PPP supporter at the rally where Bhutto was killed and subsequently circulated by a popular Karachi-based blogger. By making the footage and images available to the mainstream media and public at large, these citizen journalists sparked an accountability movement that eventually forced the Pakistani government to revisit its account of Bhutto's death.

The web also served ritual functions in the aftermath of Bhutto's death, providing a means for the country as a whole to mourn the passing of a popular leader:

New media platforms were also embraced by young Pakistanis looking to express and archive their grief at the news of Bhutto's passing. Hours after her death, YouTube was inundated with tributes to Bhutto that edited together images from her life to the soundtrack of spiritual music or the national anthem. Online memorial websites such as Respectance.com also became spaces for national mourning featuring biographies and images of Bhutto, testimonies from Pakistanis across the diaspora, and memories of interactions with her. Flickr was also used as a memorial site, as users uploaded their favorite images of the former prime minister, tagged them with prayers and appreciative titles, or contextualized them with commentary on her legacy. Other users uploaded images of flowers and gardens as gifts for the departed leader. The popular social networking site Facebook also became a venue for reactions to Bhutto's death and the news of her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari's appointment as her successor. In the wake of Bhutto's death, over 400 Facebook groups commemorating her or showing solidarity with her politics emerged on the site.

Here, I am reminded of the ways digital media served similar functions for American students in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings or for that matter, although the web was at a different stage of its development, in the aftermath of 9/11.

When mainstream journalists were blocked from overseeing the elections in Pakistan, citizen journalists took on new responsibilities to monitor the polls and to spread the word about political violence:

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), an independent coalition of non-governmental organizations, enlisted over 20,000 civilians to observe polling stations and pre-election campaigning in more than 250 election zones. Such recruitment was unprecedented in FAFEN's history. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, the executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, another election monitoring group, said, "Never before has there been such large-scale mobilization for a Pakistani election.... The role civil society is playing has been a real positive."...

Mediated civic engagement was not restricted to activists, citizen journalists, and civilian monitors alone. On election day, average voters used SMS text messages to urge their friends, family, and colleagues to vote. One SMS that was widely circulated on the morning of the elections read: "With the elections, lets all light a flame of hope, that we will not let Pakistan be destroyed by people who are not part of us." Moreover, SMS text messages were used to counter widespread fear that there would be violence and bomb blasts at polling stations.

In the west, we often think of these tools -- Flickr, YouTube, text messaging -- primarily in terms of their place in our social and recreational lives. I've often argued that we are acquiring through our play and through our consumption of popular culture skills and knowledge which we will later deploy towards more serious ends in changing the world around us. I've also suggested that the recent presidential campaign pointed to many different ways that candidates and movements were building a bridge between participatory culture and participatory culture. In Yusuf's report on the Pakistan crisis, a somewhat different pattern emerges:

In Pakistan, however, access to information--rather than the desire to participate--has driven the adoption of new media platforms. When old media distribution channels were compromised, new media was harnessed to fill in the gaps and maintain a flow of news and information. As such, new media in Pakistan has helped old media survive. The result is a media amalgamation in which information is pushed to the public, promiscuously distributed across broadcast media, new media platforms, and various digital technologies to prevent being disrupted or corrupted by the authorities. Thanks to amateurs and activists, students and concerned civilians, a nugget of information can leap from local televised news broadcasts to YouTube to SMS text message to FM radio broadcasts to blog posts to international news reports--whatever it takes to go public.

It would be a mistake to conclude this paper with the impression that digital technologies and new media platforms are the exclusive preserve of educated and privileged activists and citizen journalists, used solely for information dissemination and community organizing. Indeed, some of the best uses of new media and digital technologies address highly localized issues and are emergent, ad hoc, and culturally specific. For example, the residents of Karachi occasionally create an ad hoc, networked public sphere using FM radio broadcasts, cellphones, and landline connections not only to negotiate urban violence, as they did during the Emergency, but also to navigate flash floods during the monsoon, negotiate bad traffic owing to construction, and monitor protest rallies through the city.

This shows how people empowered by creativity and a commitment to aiding their community can use old and new media technologies to make a difference, even on an ad hoc basis. The sheer pervasiveness of new media platforms and digital technologies in Pakistan is leading to a situation whereby not only the digital divide, but also the participation gap, is being narrowed in ways that are unpredictable and unfamiliar, yet highly sustainable because locally relevant.

Yusuf's conclusion suggests that the local conditions in Pakistan, especially in regard to mobile media, resulted in considerable experimentation and innovation -- born as much from desperation as from entrepreneurship -- in how new media tools can be deployed towards civic ends. One reason the Center for Future Civic Media commissioned Yusuf to prepare her report was our recognition that we might have much to learn about the deployment of networked publics in our own society through a better understanding of the techniques which have emerged in Pakistan.

How Brazil Is Reshaping the Futures of Entertainment

Regular readers of the blog know that appropriations of my images or ideas are like catnip to me -- nigh on impossible for me to resist! Indeed, as someone who works on appropriation as a new media literacy, participatory culture and now, spreadable media, I am always intrigued by the ways that media theory is itself appropriated and spread beyond academic circles. So, please, anyone who wants to play around with my image, go ahead, but if I find it, I reserve the right to re-post and analyze it on my blog.

I howled with delight when Mauricio Mota from Brazil's New Content shared this video he had produced during the final panel (on Global Flows, Global Deals) at the Futures of Entertainment conference we hosted last fall. Mota's co-conspirator in generating the video was Ricardo Justus, who also joined us at the November conference.

Mota helped to facilitate the translation of Convergence Culture into Portuguese and was my host during a trip to Brazil earlier last semester; he's been a key player in connecting the Convergence Culture Consortium to a range of Brazilian companies as we are seeking ways to better understand media development in what economists are starting to call the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China), which represent some of the fastest developing high tech economies in the world. And he's part of a smart group of thinkers, who call themselves the Alchemists, who are doing cutting edge work on transmedia storytelling and branding.

Mota's video was intended to dramatize the connection between some of the ideas in Convergence Culture and the practices for promotion that have emerged in his native country. Specifically, the footage here comes from Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), released in 2007 and now one of the most commercially successful Brazilian films ever, despite having almost no conventional advertising or promotion. As Mota explained at the conference, a copy of the film was leaked to pirates while it was in the final stages of production and the pirates spread it across the countryside. It's been estimated that 11.5 million people watched the illegal copy of the film.

This is piracy on a scale which would wake most American media executives up in a cold sweat. But Mota's point is that it also insured an unprecidented level of visibility for the film. According to DataFolha, 77% of São Paulo residents knew about the movie, 180,000 people saw the film on its opening weekend in Sao Paulo and Rio, and by now, more than 2.5 million people have watched the film legally. (These statistics come from Wikipedia. Mota's estimates are even higher, suggesting that by the time the video had been further pirated via torrents in 15 countries around the world, it may have been seen illegally by 13 million and legally by more than 5 million people).

So, how do we read this story -- did the 13 million plus illegal views represent "lost revenue" to the company? Maybe some of them -- but it's also almost certainly the case that the legal box office returns would have been substantially lower if the pirated circulation of the film had not spread the word and heightened awareness about the title, while potentially lowering the cost of its promotion. Mota rightly sees this pattern as a paradox: loss of control may in this case have resulted in increased revenue and much greater cultural impact. In the process, Capitão Roberto Nascimento (the film's antihero) became something of a cult icon and was subject to all kinds of grassroots appropriations (as suggested by the sample from a fan vid which Mota includes at the end of his own mashup).

Mota's story about Tropa de Elite is a powerful illustration of the concept of spreadable media which ran through this year's Futures of Entertainment event. I developed some of the basic framework for thinking about Spreadable Media through my opening remarks at the conference.

we explored them further throughout the first morning of the conference, with a panel on Consumption, Value, and Worth.

Different forms of cooperation between producers and consumers, including the concept of the moral economy, were central to my conversation with Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks).

Later this month, the Convergence Culture Consortium will be releasing what we hope will be a significant white paper which critiques the concept of viral media and offers an alternative model, one which respects the agency and motives of consumers in actively shaping the circulation of media content through a networked society and one which seeks to better understand the interplay between consumer capitalism and the gift economy in shaping the new era of web 2.0. Watch this blog for more on "spreadable media" in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, I wanted to use this post to signal that the webcast versions of the Futures of Entertainment conference have gone up over at MIT's TechTV site and are available for all of you who were unable to attend the conference. In many ways, this was our best event so far in this series -- in part because of a good balance between academics and industry people on each panel. Some of the highlights for me: Kim Moses, the Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, sharing her insights on our Making Audiences Matter session; a very animated discussion of Franchising, Extensions, and World Building, which brought together perspectives from the world of wrestling, soap operas, and cult movies; and an especially provocative series of exchanges about the relationships between the academy and industry. But every panel has something to recommend it and every panelist made at least one contribution that changed the way I thought about the contemporary media landscape.

Given the latest news of the legal battle which is brewing around Watchmen's release, the exchange which I had with Alex McDowell, the film's gift art director, and Georgia State University's Alicia Perren, has been generating a fair amount of interest out there in the blogosphere. Mcdowell just shared with me a very interesting statement issued by one of the film's producers, Lloyd Levin, about the legal struggles around the film's production and distribution. This is a story which we are all following here at CMS with baited breath.

Some of My Best Friends Are Pirates

In mid-September, I went to Singapore to meet with some of our collaborators on the MIT-Singapore GAMBIT games lab and to speak to the Games Convention Asia about "Games as Transmedia Entertainment." In the course of the weekend, I gave an interview to a very thoughtful young reporter from the Philippines Daily Inquirer in which I was asked about the implications of the concept of convergence culture for the developing world. To be honest, I didn't think much more about the interview until some of my comments about "piracy" began to surface in western blogs within the gamer realm. The story spread through news portals focused on Asia to the gamer world, which is often keeping a close eye on developments in the Asian games sector and often gains prestige by being early importers of Asian-produced games before they are legally on offer here in the west. One American blogger even "pirated" one of my portraits, which was doctored to depict me as a pirate. I figured that "pirating" it back is only fair game.

Indeed, the time lag between the interview appearing in a Manila-based newspaper and its surfacing on western blogs could be counted in a matter of hours, rather than days. At no other time in human history would such a flow of information have been imaginable. In the past, an American academic giving an interview in Singapore would in all likelihood have been locked down in a very localized context. And so in many ways, the circulation of this story demonstrates in pretty powerful ways what I saw as the central thrust of my comments -- that media companies can no longer realistically lock down their content into predictable zones and roll it out on their own time table. The moment content emerges anywhere in the world, it creates a hunger around the planet among potential consumers which will be met illegally if it is not met legally.

When I was in Shanghai last January, I learned a good deal about how fans of popular western programs such as Prison Break operate: within a day of an episode appearing on American television, it has been digitized, translated into various Chinese languages by an army of dedicated fans, and begins circulating throughout the Chinese hinterland and across the Chinese diaspora. In many cases, this is content which would never have been commercially available in China as a result of nationalistic and protectionist policies limiting the amount of American media that can be marketed to their country. And if this content was made available commercially, then few Chinese locals outside of the most wealthy and cosmopolitan cities would be able to afford it. So, in what sense can Hollywood be said to have lost markets that it could not have reached and could not have sold to in the first place?

Yet, it is clear that exposure to American media in the developing world often awakens desires and fantasies that can only be satisfied by more such content; it is part of the process of westernization and modernization which is impacting many sectors in Asia at the present time. A growing number of researchers are finding that these same tendencies are operating in reverse across America and Europe, exposing western consumers to Asian-produced media (Bollywood films, Anime, K-Drama, and the like), and gradually creating viable commercial markets where they didn't exist before. In many cases, those fans who have taken these materials without permission, done the hard work of translating them into English from their original language, taken on responsibility for educating consumers about the contexts from which they came and the conventions under which they operate, have gone a long way to open up markets which would previously have been closed to Asian media producers. Here, "piracy" becomes "promotion."

Does it make sense to refer to such practices as "piracy"? It's a debatable proposition but for the moment, many in the media industries are inclined to think of such consumer practices through a language of copyright theft and piracy. If we adopt that framework, then yes, I think there's a solid case to be made that "pirates" actually expand markets, over time, even if they cause short term "losses" for the initial rights holders. That said: I recognize that not all "piracy" follows such a pattern. There are a significant number of people out there who are exploiting the intellectual properties of others for their own financial gain and there are some who buy these materials because they don't want to pay the price being asked for this content. Nothing we say is going to change this basic dynamic, but the media industries could reduce some forms of "piracy" by better understanding what motivates it and reading it as symptomatic of the marketplace reasserting demand in the face of failures in supply.

For example, should we be surprised that protectionist policies surrounding media imports no longer work effectively in a global networked culture? Whatever gets stopped by customs the border will spread easily online and reach geographically dispersed consumers. Should we be surprised that consumers no longer want to wait to view content that they know is already available in other markets and is being actively discussed by others in their online communities?

For example, relatively few hardcore American fans of Doctor Who or Torchwood are willing to wait the six to nine months it is taking these episodes to cross the Atlantic and get aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. Many of them are seeking online channels, mostly illegal, to gain access to this material in something close to the same time frame as British fans are consuming it. This has not necessarily reduced sales of the DVDS or viewership of the cable airings of this content here, but it has pushed many hardcore fans to step outside of the law in order to access content they would most likely willingly pay to access if it was made available to them in a timely, accessible, and legal manner.

In my heart of hearts, I think most people would prefer to work within legal structures if they are available to them and I'd suggest that the relative success of iTunes in the face of readily available "free" sources for much of this content points to a deep desire to behave "honestly" when media companies do not create strong incentives to behave otherwise.

We can also understand this piracy as part of a breakdown of the moral economy between producers and consumers. Here's what I mean by a moral economy: Underlying all economic transactions are certain social understandings between buyers and sellers that reflect their sense that exchanges are just and fair to both sides. We can call this a moral economy.

When the rules of exchange shift, they are accompanied by certain social disruptions as both sides seek to legitimate their new practices and thus secure a higher ground in the emerging moral economy. We can see the deployment of terms like "piracy" or "sharing" as different bids to legitimate these evolving practices. It's a kind of rhetorical war for moral legitimation, which reflects the fact that both sides want to see themselves as behaving fairly. When there is a perception of unfairness, then there is a much higher likelihood that parties will step outside of established mechanisms and adopt practices which the other side sees as illegitimate. And clearly over the past few years, technological and cultural shifts, not to mention the legal battles that have emerged around them, have gone a long way to undermine the existing moral economy and thus create a crisis of trust between producers and consumers. Until media companies find a way to restore the balance, they are going to find themselves increasingly subject to behaviors which undercut their perceived economic interests and such behaviors are likely to be increasingly labeled as "piracy."

Such "piracy" is a global phenomenon, but it occurs in particularly overt ways in much of the developed world, which has historically been used as a final dumping ground for media goods that have played out in the rest of the world. As more and more young people in the developing world go online, have access to information about such content, and desire stronger connections with their counterparts elsewhere, these inequalities of access to media content becomes more and more frustrating. And "piracy" is emerging as the "great equalizer" to insure they have a chance to participate more fully in our emerging media landscape. Such young people, long term, represent the most likely market for western produced media, and this early, often illegal exposure is part of what will make them a desiring market for such materials over time. Framed in these terms, the debate about "piracy" becomes about short term losses versus long term gains for the media industries.

"Piracy" enters the developing world in another way as well: the production of local knock-offs of western media properties. Consider, for example, almost twenty years of the production and circulation of "Black Bart" T-shirts in intercity and impoverished neighborhoods around the world. These appropriations of The Simpsons have been a source of revenue for the small scale entrepreneurs who produce and sell them and they have been another way of connecting to the larger media franchise. Throughout much of the developing world, the images of western media are being translated into local folk art practices and then sold back to visiting tourists from the West. When I visited Shanghai, for example, I came back with hand-woven Chinese New Year decorations which deployed Mickey Mouse to signify the "year of the rat." Such goods were clearly not authorized or licensed by the Disney corporation. Yet, they represent another way that those in the developing world were attaching themselves to Western media franchises and do represent a form of grassroots convergence.

I am not making a moral argument here. I certainly understand why many media companies would feel that all of this represents a serious threat to their livelihood and that it constitutes another example of how they are "losing control" over their content in a networked culture. All I am arguing is that current inequalities of access to media content and the fraying of the moral economy between producers and consumers work together to create a context where more and more consumers, not only in the developing world but here in the west, are stepping outside of legal mechanisms to acquire access to content. We can call this "piracy" or not. But it will continue to be a reality until the media companies develop a more sophisticated understanding of what factors motivate such behavior and the ways that such practices reflect breakdowns in the market mechanisms surrounding the creative economy.

So, in conclusion, I just want to say "Aargh!"

The Informal Pedagogy of Anime Fandom: An Interview with Rebecca Black (Part Two)

To what degree are the pedagogical advances you saw simply a product of being motivated to spend more time writing? to what degree can they be traced back to Beta-Reading and Reader Responses providing greater feedback to the writer?

Well, I believe that one of the best ways to learn a new language and to improve your literacy skills is to practice using the language in meaningful, communicative tasks. So, I think that a good amount of the progress that the English language learners from my study made can be attributed to their motivation to write and read fan fiction and related texts. I also think that their success within the fan community allowed them to develop confidence and begin seeing themselves as people who write and use English effectively. For Nanako and Cherry-Chan, this was very different than how they were viewed in school--basically, in school they were seen as students who struggled with all literacy-based (as opposed to Math or Science-based) tasks. So, if you're constructed as "bad" at something for long enough, after a while you start to believe it. Fortunately, for Nanako at least, her success in the fan community helped her achieve success and popularity as an online author--which in turn provided her with motivation to continue writing and improving her English. Cherry-Chan, on the other hand, used her participation in the fan community to improve her social connections. Still, she used her language and literacy skills to make her own LiveJournal pages, forums, and web sites, and to post reviews of other people's fictions and to leave comments on other people's web pages.

In terms of the effect that beta-reading and peer-feedback might have had on their language abilities--it's important to note that they were both in English classes at school, so I can't really make any causal statements; however, over the 3 years that I followed her participation, Nanako's readers very clearly pointed out grammatical errors that she consistently made in her texts. And, she would acknowledge their feedback and then go back and correct her errors. In terms of second language acquisition, this is an important aspect of learning-- actually noticing errors and then figuring out how to correct them. For Nanako, sometimes her readers would tell her how to correct the errors, but other times they would simply point out the phrases, sentences, or paragraphs with errors and leave her to figure out how to correct them. In my opinion, I think these activities helped her to improve her English composition skills. Most of the fan fiction authors that I've talked with say that their reviewers and beta-readers were definitely responsible for helping them learn to be better writers.

Some argue that the fan fiction world supports literacy skills precisely because it doesn't operate under the structures and constraints of formal education. These critics would argue that we would destroy what's valuable here if we tried to integrate it back into formal schooling. Do you agree or disagree with this claim? What, if anything, can traditional educators learn from this affinity space?

I tend to agree that assigning fan fiction in classrooms would probably ruin its appeal for many students. However, other students might really appreciate having fan fiction texts or gaming-related texts available as options for their in-school composing. For example, many adolescents might feel more comfortable mastering the compare and contrast genre if they were able to write about subject matter that they have some expertise in, such as comparing and contrasting the merits of certain video game character classes or using Inuyasha or Harry Potter to discuss character development. Educators can create lesson plans that include or even encourage different options for students to incorporate their extracurricular literacy activities and/or interests in popular media texts into their classroom activities. Educators can also help students make the connections between their in and out-of-school practices. However, I think it ultimately should be up to students to decide to what extent their out-of-school activities will inform or work in concert with school-based tasks.

What do you see as the value of studying the process of fan fiction writing as opposed to studying fan fiction as a series of texts?

Well, one of the primary values that I see in studying fan fiction writing as a process is that it provides a mechanism for understanding the role of audience participation in the creation of texts. All of my focal participants' received a great deal of feedback from readers--for example, Grace has received around 9400 reviews, Nanako 7600, and Cherry-chan around 650. I don't know about you, but I've never had that many people respond to anything that I've written, especially not when I was a teenager. Hmmm... on second thought, you probably *have* had that many people respond to things that you've written. Anyway, the fan fiction audience often plays a significant role in determining the direction that a text will go in. As you pointed out in Textual Poachers, the audience has a vested interest in the media series, and they have strong opinions about what should and should not happen with the characters. So, they are happy to provide suggestions for how things should go and complaints about how things should not go in a story. Nanako in particular was very responsive to readers' suggestions about her texts. Sometimes she would incorporate their ideas into the narrative, other times she would go back and revise her chapters based on reader feedback. She would also use her Author's Notes to explicitly request guidance on certain parts of her texts, and the audience would respond to these requests. So, simply studying her fan fictions as a body of texts would be missing a great deal of the reciprocal interaction taking place as she goes through the process of writing, negotiating with readers, revising, and finalizing her texts.

Traditional notions of literacy have tended to see it in fairly individual and personalized terms. Yet, one could read your book as making a case for social and collaborative notions of literacy. Would you agree?

Absolutely. I think we have this whole focus in classrooms that's based around "keep your eyes on your own paper," and testing for what each individual learner knows, and it really stifles a lot of the potential for collaborative learning. Using language to effectively communicate ideas, negotiate perspectives, and even collaboratively complete projects is important for all students, but it's especially important for English language learners to have these kinds of interactive learning experiences. Through collaborative interaction, they're able to build on and extend the knowledge that each participant brings to the space. And, they're able to further develop their own skills and knowledge by using language for authentic purposes in meaningful contexts.

Appadurai suggests that the contemporary imagination is collaborative in nature--that people are growing accustomed to creating and thinking through things in collaborative contexts. We can see examples of this in how many people will post their projects or ideas on a blog or publish their creative texts online and await feedback. It seems to me that this sort of approach to creation and even thought might be a very effective way to come up with robust representations, perspectives, and solutions to difficult problems. So, it may not just be a matter of social and collaborative forms of literacy, but rather a turn towards all sorts of collaborative activities that are facilitated by new media and technologies.

Tell us about the cover of the book. You mentioned to me that it was designed by a fan artist. How did that come about and how did the press respond to working with a fan artist?

Well, after one of my talks, a professor from the audience told me that his daughter was actively involved in the anime fan community, creating fan art and scanlations (which are fan-created translations of Japanese manga) and suggested that I contact her. We stayed in contact a bit over the years, and when I started the book, she seemed like the perfect person to create the cover. I told her about the main themes of the book, and she came up with this fantastic cover with an original anime character actually drawing herself onto the page with a pencil. I thought this had a nice parallel with one of the points I was making in the book--that many of the focal participants were writing different aspects of their identities into their fictions. They weren't really writing Mary Sue's, but they did integrate different aspects of themselves and their lives into their fan fiction texts. The series editors, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, and the press, Peter Lang, were all very supportive of using this artwork for the cover. I think it speaks to a strong ethos of valuing the communities and the practices that are represented in the text.

Rebecca W. Black is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers on the forms of literacy and social engagement that are emerging in online environments. In particular, Black has focused on the ways that popular culture-inspired environments, such as fan communities, provide adolescent English language learners with opportunities to develop their language skills, establish social connections with global networks of youth, and construct powerful identities as successful authors and knowledgeable fans. Her work has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, TeacherÂ’s College Record, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In addition, Prof. Black 's book titled Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction was recently published in the Peter Lang series on Digital Epistemologies.

Gay Bombay: An Interview with Parmesh Shahani (Part Two)

A central focus of the research concerns an online discussion list for Gay Bombay. What significance did this site play in the lives of your research subjects? What relationship exists between their online and off-line lives?

My research subjects were physically located in and out of Bombay city, and in some cases, out of India. Some of them accessed the Gay Bombay website and newsgroup exclusively online (either because they were apprehensive, married, lived out of Bombay or simply did not have the time to attend any of its offline manifestations) and for these individuals, the website and newsgroup engendered what Maria Bakardjieva has called "immobile socialization"- enabling them to feel connected to the Gay Bombay community at large. Those that lived in Bombay and were comfortable attending the local events equated their participation in Gay Bombay primarily with attending the city based events, and not with the list or website. Even here, there was a split between those who thought of it as primarily a party space and those who thought of it as a space for other kinds of community events.

For the newsgroup subscribers, the reasons for signing up were varied. For some it was just curiosity, for others, a way to know more about the emerging gay world in India. For activists, the possibility of advocacy and working for the issue of LBGT rights was the lure. But often, it was simply a search for empathic gay friends.

I found the Gay Bombay newsgroup to be an excellent site to observe the performative aspects of my respondents' identities. They used the Gay Bombay newsgroup along all aspects of Annette Markham's continuum of "tool", "place" and finally "a way of being".

The choice of their online nicknames typically resonated with their own sense of self or certain affiliations they wanted to highlight. For some, their nicknames were a combination of their religious and Indian identities. One respondent chose his nickname as a tribute to an iconic lesbian filmmaker, another's was the title of his favourite Bruce Springsteen song, and there were many nods in the direction of famous poets, fashion designers, and characters from literature and cinema. Others shifted between using multiple nicknames while posting to the group. Some respondents stated that their identities were the same online and offline. But the majority reported consciously activating a change in their online persona and performing it with pleasure. A few used their online selves to be more bitchy and flirtatious, something that they could not imagine doing offline because of shyness or being in the closet. Another said that he was very "violent and oppressive" in his writing, something that he was certainly not in his offline life. Significantly, for several respondents, the real issue was about identity in gay versus straight settings rather than online versus offline identities. Several of my interviews spoke about having distinct gay identities that they revealed or 'performed' in settings in which they were comfortable.

Given what you tell us in the book about the mainstream India media's often hostile treatment of gay-related stories, what has been the response to the book in India?

Well, I would call the media's treatment mixed. It is sometimes hostile, but at other times, the mainstream English media has been extraordinarily supportive to gay-related stories. Just last week, for example, the Times of India ran a front page opinion about why they felt section 377 of the Indian Penal Code needs to be abolished.

I am happy to report that the response to my book has been largely positive. It has been reviewed across the board - in mainstream newspapers and magazines, in the business press, and in the lifestyle media. In addition, it has also managed to get some decent international press, as it is available worldwide, including online on Amazon. I am especially happy that reviewers are looking at the book as not just a book about contemporary Indian sexuality, but about contemporary Indianness at large. You can check out some of these reviews:

Businessworld Magazine.

Financial Express.

Mint.

I suspect the autobiographical passages will be some of the most controversial aspects of this book. What do you think those chunks us to see about being gay in Bombay that we would not get through more traditional academic means?

I knew that the autobiographical pieces would be controversial. They were not easy to write, and I'm still queasy when I see them in print. But at the same time, I felt that if I had to do justice to the book, I needed to implicate myself in it, and this felt like the most personal way of doing so. For me, the process of research wasn't just a process of going through media archives, and of conducting and transcribing interviews with others; it also involved trying to understand myself, and where I fit into all of this. I felt that by going through my autobiographical passages, readers might have a closer to the ground view of everything else that I was describing. I call this autobiographical layer my memoryscape, which constitutes my thoughts, memories and lived experiences, both material and symbolic. It s the self-activation of my own imagination at work - my personal narrative of being gay in Bombay. I wrote the narrative exactly the way it appears in the book - in a weaving pattern, between and around the other parts of the book.

I think that all the approaches I use in the book combine to provide readers a fractal view about what it means to be gay in Bombay at this particular point in time. So, the media and cultural background provided segues into the interview comments, which in turn segue into the memoryscape. Also, specific themes raised within the book, such as the importance of family, coming out, class differences, etc. constantly repeat themselves - within the interviewee responses as well as within my own memoryscape.

You end the book with some very optimistic suggestions about the potential for change in your country. What gives you such great hope?

As I write in the concluding chapter, there are two Indian traits - fortitude and adaptability, which provide me with hope as I look towards the future of Gay Bombay and the Indian queer scene at large. Also, if Indianness is something that can be imagined and reimagined, then there's no reason why gay people shouldn't be a part of this imagination. I see daily instances of this imagination taking place all around me. I attended Bombay's first queer pride march some days ago where over a thousand people rallied, marched, sang and danced through the streets of Bombay. I cannot describe in words the spirit of that afternoon. This year, several such pride marches were held across cities in India. Recently, at at the world AIDS summit in Mexico, India's health minister came out strongly for section 377 being abolished. For someone in the government to be making a statement like this is unexpected. But the imagination isn't just confined to the law. There are gay marriages, commitment ceremonies and anniversary celebrations that keep on taking place in India, despite the laws being what they are, and several incidents, big and small, of society accommodating LBGT people, so at the pride march it wasn't just queer people who marched, there were so many families and friends, grandmothers, babies, everyone. It is moments like these that make me feel really positive, in the face of the negative news, and terrible incidents that also take place.

What did your time at MIT contribute to this particular project?

I could only have done this project at MIT. The idea for the thesis came about in 2003, during my first semester at CMS. As CMS students reading this might know (prospective CMS students, kindly note) we are strongly encouraged to think of our thesis from the moment we get into the program. :-) I knew right from the start that I wanted my thesis

to focus on contemporary India, and also work with many different media. There were a couple of factors that led me to fix on Gay Bombay as my final choice.

Firstly, I had just learnt about the existence of the Gay Bombay online-offline community before my arrival in Boston, and I felt kind of silly that I hadn't known about while I was in India. Secondly, I spent my first CMS semester in planning for a film festival and conference that would be held in the following semester called Between the Lines that dealt with South Asian LBGT identity. While working on this event, I discovered that MIT is one of the best places in the world to do queer-related research. The resources are top notch - professors, libraries, institutional support in terms of funding and facilities, LBGT student and faculty groups, and so on. Everyone from Katherine Wilmore then the Vice-President, to the Office of the Arts, to the Graduate Students Council, and of course, CMS, chipped in, and made a difference to the quality of the event. This was also a chance to read up about and see loads of queer South Asian films, which I enjoyed. Thirdly, the sudden death of one of my close friends, Riyad Wadia, the avant garde documentary filmmaker from India, towards the end of 2003. Finally, the encouragement of MIT faculty and staff members like William, Henry, Edward, Tuli, and Chris Pomiecko, who I first bounced the idea off.

Besides the excellent academic and institutional support, my time at MIT was also special in terms of my personal life. I met my (now ex) partner Junri at MIT, to who the book is dedicated, and in a sense the book and the relationship wrote themselves while we were living together. The relationship is a key part of the book; it dictates its optimistic tone and its hetero-normative politics. Incidentally, the break-up also happened at MIT, on the day that I received the first advance copy of the book in my hands, so I suppose, it was like completing a full circle.

Parmesh Shahani is based in Bombay, India, where he works on new media, venture capital and innovation for Mahindra & Mahindra and also serves as the Editorial Director of Verve magazine. He is also a research affiliate with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. His prior work experiences have included founding India's first youth website, business development for Sony's Indian television channel operations, writing and editing copy for Elle magazine and the Times of India group, helping make a low-budget feature film and teaching as a visiting faculty member at a Bombay college. Parmesh holds undergraduate degrees in commerce and education from the University of Bombay, and a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies, from MIT. His first book - Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (New Delhi, London, Los Angeles, Singapore: Sage Publications) was released in April 2008.

Gay Bombay: An Interview with Parmesh Shahani (Part One)

Parmesh Shahani, a recent alum of the Comparative Media Studies Masters Program, now consulting for some of the leading magazines and media companies in India, has published an exciting new book, Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India. The book, which was adopted from his thesis, is a tour de force which manages to apply multiple modes of analysis -- ethnographic, historical, institutional, and autobiographical -- to explore a moment of change as his home country adjusts to what is at once an economic, a sexual, and a media revolution. As one of his thesis advisors, I had a chance to watch this manuscript take shape as he learned how to balance the competing conceptual frames needed to understand and explicate this complex set of transitions. Some of the most compelling aspects of the book are the most confessional: Shahani draws on his own sexual experiences to offer insights into how people are living these changes through their bodies. It is a daring approach, especially given the recent history of homophobic backlash in India, but it also sheds insights that no more distanced writing could offer. In my classes, we read the manifesto introduction to Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture which talks about the importance of writing about "culture that sticks to your skin" and the value of first person perspectives for describing our experiences with popular culture. I recall his enthusiasm as we discussed this material and was happy to see him push this idea to the limits as he was writing his thesis.

So, I hope I can be forgiven a teacher's pride in seeing one of my students make good as I share with you this interview with Shahani about his book, about the place of gay culture in India, and about the methods behind his research.

You write, "Gay does not mean what it does in America, or in the west at large. They have creatively played with it, modified it, made it their own." So what does gay mean in an Indian context?

Homosexuality isn't an alien concept in India. A brief flashback. Ancient Indian texts from the Vedic period and the Kama Sutra all indicate that ancient Hinduism had place for a 'third sex'. Even pre- colonial India was generally tolerant, but things changed under British rule, and in 1861, the British legal system was imposed on to India as the Indian Penal Code. Section 377 of this code was an offshoot of the British 1860 anti sodomy law, and thus male same sex acts were criminalized. The British also collected, translated, rearranged and sometimes rewrote Indian history as part of their 'Orientalist' agenda during the two centuries of their rule and part of their rearrangement included eliminating or marginalizing all traces of positive same-sex references.

Flash forward to today. In contemporary urban India (My research was based solely within this context), while there is no guilt-based taboo against homosexuality, being gay has its own unique set of connotations and experiences because of the cultural and social structures, and family pressures that insist on conformity to traditional patriarchal, heteronormative values.

Family, social and community connections are the primary ties, and gay people do not want to let go of these at all. People hardly come out, and even if they do, they want to accommodate their gay identity within the established framework. In the west, if families are un- accepting, then gay men often move away and form separate communities but almost all the people I interviewed for the book who were living in India were adamant that they were very connected to their families and did not want to move away from them at all.

The second aspect is the institution of heterosexual marriage. It is almost like a compulsory stage of life, and for many gay people, this is the biggest challenge that they have to negotiate. Sometimes they manage to avoid it, but many times, they don't, which creates a whole new set of problems. The pressure to conform is even more intense when the gay person is effeminate and thus visibly marked different. Rebellion against this pressure can sometimes mean banishment but in most cases, the gay person is not thrown out, but pressured to change his ways in order to maintain the family honour.

The third aspect is the law. The Indian penal code continues to criminalize same sex behaviour, and this is really problematic in several ways - in terms of the limitations to health and safe sex outreach, in terms of the restrictions to same sex partnerships in terms of cohabitation and planning a life together, etc. At the same time, there are also so many global influences, whether it is the coverage of gay marriage in the US that gets reported on regularly in India, or films like Brokeback Mountain, or gay dance parties and so on.

When urban Indian gay men construct an idea of their gayness, they draw upon all of these different components and create an imagination with global influences but rooted very much in the local realities. I think that to be gay in Gay Bombay signifies being 'glocal'; and gayness here stands for Indianized gayness. So, one might dance in a Western style disco anywhere else in the world, but one can only munch on a post-dance jalebi sweet in India. The online-offline group Gay Bombay, around which my book is based, is certainly inspired by Western notions of what it means to be gay - its dance parties, PFLAG style meets, website, etc, have all drawn from Western experiences; but they have been customized, glocalized, and made uniquely Indian. For example, several support group meets take place around uniquely Indian festivals such as Holi (festival of colours) and Raksha Bandhan (which celebrates brother-sister love), and the festivals are appropriated to meet the needs of the group.

How are debates about how we label sexual identities tied up with concerns about

westernization and globalization?

Oh, they are very tied up. In fact, this is the main line of attack used whenever the discourse around homosexuality becomes too public, or too threatening. It seems that being gay is something that needs to be prevented from happening to the impressionable young men and women of the country! Right wing Hindu fundamentalist groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Brotherhood of Volunteers) are only too happy to jump on the "anti-Indian culture" bandwagon at any given time. I write in the book about how the current Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh was clearly flustered by a question about same sex marriages by a Canadian journalist and emphasized that these kinds of things were not appreciated in India. The lesbian themed movie Fire (1998) was deemed as an attack by "ultra westernized elite" on "the traditional set up" through "explicit lesbianism and other perversities" by the right-wing newspaper The Organizer.

Concerns about the negative impact of globalization are also expressed by certain

members of the gay community. The English speaking upper middle classes have largely been the beneficiaries of globalization (jobs, travel, media consumption, internet usage, etc.), but for the non-gay identified homosexuals from the working classes, life might have become harder.

Globalization is also viewed as a positive prism to promote the decriminalization of

homosexuality. This point of view wonders if it is right for a country that aspires to

be part of global scene to victimize its minorities. As the journalist Karan Thapar

writes in a recent Hindustan Times article, "by continuing to do so we make a mockery of our commitment to human rights leave aside all the Geneva conventions we have signed up to. So, for the sake of our democracy, this must be repealed."

On a lighter note, some of my interviewees, especially the older ones, were very

uncomfortable with what they felt were the Westernized aesthetics of the younger

generation. One of them was particularly dismayed at the younger lot's disdain for body hair and mustaches, something that he described as inherently Indian.

How are shifts in the status of gay people in India being represented in Indian popular culture, especially in Bollywood films?

I'm not at all satisfied with the way gay people are currently being represented in

Bollywood films. Given the number of gay people within the film industry itself, I'd

have liked that the representation be more nuanced! However there have certainly been

some shifts over the years and these give me hope there will be progress in future.

We should remember that Bollywood has a long tradition of having comic sequences or songs featuring cross-dressing male stars. For instance, Amitabh Bachchan in a sari in

1981's Laawaris (The Orphan), Rishi Kapoor in a dress in 1975's Rafoo Chakkar (The Runaways), Aamir Khan in a gown in 1995's Baazi (Game), and there are so many more

examples. Post the economic reforms of the 1990s, we begin to see the gay sidekick as a regular comic character in many Bollywood films, like Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke (Companions on the Road of Love, 1993), Raja Hindustani (Indian King, 1996) and Taal (Rhythm, 1999). These markedly effeminate, comic gay characters are ridiculed but also indulgently patronized by the protagonists, and effectively neutralized. Thus, the camp phenomenon Bobby Darling (who often plays himself in his on screen appearances) is teased and mocked in whatever film he is a part of, but his place in the youth gang is never in doubt. It is of course understood that he will never behave transgressively with the hero, coo over him or insinuate desire for him. He is accepted, despite being different, because his loyalty as a friend and overall integration into the master narrative overrule his effeminate behavior and implied homosexuality.

In recent years, the camp comic has been replaced in films like Page 3 (2004) and Let's Enjoy (2004) with the debauched, decadent gay designer, hitting on straight men with impunity for his own sexual gratification. I suppose all of this mirrors Hollywood and its initial portrayals of gay men as comic characters or villains. It is still very rare to find somewhat complex gay characters, as in films like Bombay Boys (1998) and Split Wide Open (1999). I want to point to three films that make me hopeful about change, and one trend that I believe is going to accelerate the process. These three films are 2003's Kal Ho Na Ho (If Tomorrow Does Not Come), 2005's My Brother Nikhil and 2007's Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.

In Kal Ho Na Ho, there is a funny 'gay' subplot between the two lead actors, played by stars Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan, who form the two corners of the love triangle in the film, with actress Preity Zinta as the third. Shah Rukh and Saif's characters pretend to be gay throughout the film, much to the disapproval of Kantaben, the housekeeper. They constantly caress each other and spout double- entendre dialogue to shock old Kantaben, and they take us on the ride with them. It is not us, the viewers, but Kantaben who is old fashioned. Shah Rukh and Saif also camped it up with each other as emcees of the annual Filmfare Awards in 2004 (India's Oscar equivalent) - a show that was broadcast to millions of viewers over television. I find the casual breeziness with both these stars treat gayness, both on film as well as on stage, energizing. What's the big deal, they seem to suggest. Get over it. (The film, incidentally also featured a gay kiss between two white New Yorkers in one song sequence, and an overtly camp Indian wedding planner!)

I was very impressed with My Brother Nikhil in 2005, a Bollywood film that dealt with the trials and tribulations of a gay champion swimmer who is found to be HIV positive (based on the real life story of Dominic D'Souza). Its debutant director Onir had managed to portray homosexuality with decency, sensitivity, romance, and something that was completely incidental to the story, which I thought was amazing.

The 2007 film Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. had two gay sub-plots. The story was about six couples on a honeymoon package tour vacation in Goa. During the course of the vacation, two of the respective husbands on the trip get attracted to each other. One comes out to his wife, who is furious about the deception, but they land up becoming friends. The other one gets back in the closet and says nothing to his newly married wife. The film won the Best Film award at the inaugural Indian Queer Media Awards in 2007, that honor sensitive media representations of LBGT characters.

The trends that I think will accelerate a more vibrant, complex portrayal of gay

characters are that of multiplex cinemas and a corporate-managed portfolio-style

approach towards film making. Over the past five years, both these trends have enabled a wide spectrum of Bollywood films being made, right from the low-budget indie like Bheja Fry (Brain Fry) to the giant mega-expensive Singh is Kinng type of extravaganza. At the lower end of the spectrum, there is enough of a chance for creativity and diversity; studios are now bankrolling different type of efforts and small-sized theatres and the ancillary satellite/DVD markets are ensuring that the shelf life of these low budget films gets extended.

Parmesh Shahani is based in Bombay, India, where he works on new media, venture capital and innovation for Mahindra & Mahindra and also serves as the Editorial Director of Verve magazine. He is also a research affiliate with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. His prior work experiences have included founding India's first youth website, business development for Sony's Indian television channel operations, writing and editing copy for Elle magazine and the Times of India group, helping make a low-budget feature film and teaching as a visiting faculty member at a Bombay college. Parmesh holds undergraduate degrees in commerce and education from the University of Bombay, and a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies, from MIT. His first book - Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (New Delhi, London, Los Angeles, Singapore: Sage Publications) was released in April 2008.

Spy Stories

This is the fifth in a series of "intimate critiques" developed by CMS Masters Students as part of my Media Theory and Methods Proseminar. Here, Xiaochang Li interweaves her reflections on the Spy genre, especially Get Smart and Alias, and her own personal and family history. This distinctly cold war genre is deployed in an effort to understand her own identity as a Chinese-American. (Of course, though this will make sense to few outside our circle, but the most fannish gesture in this essay may be, in Xiaochang's case, the opening reference to Marcel Proust!) Spy Stories

by Xiaochang Li

Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures

assembled from faulty memory, the eager sum of our desperate retellings, frantic

optimists. Autobiography is not the province of excavation but construction, and even

the most honest of us are careful architects of repetition and forgetfulness, deliberate

amnesiacs working to amass reasonable explanations for what we have become.

Recollection, I learned, is just another form of secrecy.

In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves.

****

In November of 1989, I was nearly six years old when my grandmother sewed my

identification documents to the inside of my shirt and took me to the Beijing airport. I

crossed the world with the rubbing itch of hastily tied-off threads against my skin and no

one to talk to for thousands of miles and on the other side, I managed to recognize both

my luggage and my parents. They had left China years before, while their university had

me as a sort of bureaucratic hostage, collateral for their return, though my parents had

no such intentions. Our reunion took over three years and exactly $764 (American),

including tax, a fancy camera secretly gifted to the right friend-turned-governmentfunctionary, a stamp-forger-turned-liberator. My life even now feels so clearly defined by that furtive transplantation one place to another, the bisection into before and after what was at once success and loss, discovery and displacement.

And in the weeks following, as if anticipating my arrival, footage of the Berlin Wall being

pulled apart seemed to play in a loop on every network station, the world coming

together again and again between spikes of static and weather disruption, people

spilling over, reaching out in miraculous recognition of the faces worn away to

unfamiliarity by the passage of years. Raised as I was to see all coincidence through

the lens of destiny and superstition, it seems prophetic to me now that the news footage

showed an endless cycle of reunion and celebration, but not the view after the flush of

victory had faded. What did the world look like when your physical geography no longer

bore the markers of your history?

In those first long rudderless years within an aggressively unfamiliar landscape -- the

squat sprawl of apartment complexes and strip malls and other structures of uniformity

-- I was raised by secret agents. Though finally in the same country, I still saw relatively

little of my parents -- dishwashers and pizza deliverers with graduate degrees,

consistent volunteers for double-shifts. With no one around to enforce bedtimes, the TV

had become confidant and oracle, a late-evening companion during the long, wintery

nights in rural Idaho. Knees clutched underneath my chin, I watched 60s reruns full of

covert operatives on missions to save the world from disorder, comforted by the

repeated inevitability of favorable outcomes. I cared less that these spies were saving

the world than that, however impossible the situation, they could always save

themselves.

Rewatching those episodes now, they are fraught with the almost too-obvious appeals

to racism and misogyny, a boys club of government agents fighting the good fight

against the unarticulated threats of foreign bodies. In one episode, Maxwell saves some

obscure european royalty from the aimless, but nevertheless dastardly, clutches of the

Asian arm of KAOS. America neutralizes the attacked upon the western (monarchial,

colonial) tradition, reified in the form of a swooning blonde princess, preserving the

world against uncanny reversals of power and the spiteful malevolence of the east.

But Maxwell's advantage was not in his ability, his comic incompetence, but the very

nature of his work. Episodes began with briefings, the transfer of information that left

him, however inept, knowing more about his opponents than they knew of him. Spies

appeared to me to live a thrilling carnival of carefully mistaken identity, wherein

information acquired, remembered, withheld, became the central ingredient in the

conversion of secrecy into strength. It seemed a landless utopia of well-pressed

tuxedoes and other uniforms of distinguished anonymity that existed in any place they

went, however alien. Mastery was just a matter of careful observation.

So the logic of my unlikely alliance was simple: my home was something likewise

unruly, threatening in its foreignness, and the fantasy of being a spy had everything to

do with knowing more, knowing better. Everyday I pushed further and further into

neighboring sections of the town, memorizing street patterns and license plates and

faces and behaviors: reconnaissance. Information seemed the best method by which to

wield difference as power.

*****

My great uncle was a spy. Before fleeing to Taipei with the rest of Chiang Kai Shek's

forces, he left my grandfather his military-issue binoculars, a dangerous artifact that, if

discovered, might have meant any number of unimaginable penalties. But even as he

burned all other counter-revolutionary trokens -- books, diaries, photographs -- my

grandfather kept those binoculars carefully hidden through the whole of the Cultural

Revolution and for decades after, until his death just a few years ago.

It's hard to say whether he had meant to leave them hidden for so long, whether he left

them secreted away out of habit, or of shame for compromising the safety of the family

he still had for a tangible relic of the one he lost. Or if he has simply forgotten where he

had left them, so thorough was his secrecy.

As I got older, the pressures of fitting in drew me further and further into narratives of

captivity and subterfuge, political and literal sleights of hand. I had always been resilient,

adaptable, and spies in the popular imagination and within my own history became

kindred spirits and strategic advisors, offering me a way around the oppositional

positioning of assimilated versus resistant, a framework where fitting didn't necessarily

mean selling out. Armed with an metaphor of assimilation as espionage, I found a back

door out of a system in which I was apparently so weak-willed that I wouldn't be able to

tell the difference between my clothes and my history.

In fourth grade, a classmate explained to me patiently, "You could never be president

because there's no way we can know for sure you aren't really a spy," and I thought,

fiercely, I must be doing something right.

Alias aired when I was in high school, and by then my adaptability had shifted from a desire to emulate and master my surroundings to a refusal of the assumptions that went along with being read as "Asian." Like my grandfather, I had recognized the dangers of letting others define you by what they thought your heritage meant, and understood that keeping your origins to yourself and meant keeping them for yourself, out of the hands of those who would use them against you.

On TV, Sydney Bristow embodied a vision of individual agency, and the pleasure of

watching people underestimate her was a simple, if not necessarily simplistic, feminist

revenge fantasy. She fulfilled the dream that we've all had every we've been not so

accidentally groped in a crowded room or had to walk home with our keys clenched

between our knuckles: that we can overcome the long histories of violence and trauma

and social logics that systematically privilege some people over others through personal

strength, through the fail-proof combination of karate-chop and witty retort.

She was also a double agent.

As such, she became too the fantasy of a preservable sense of self, despite the

demands of duty and survival. Her costumes were usually so flamboyantly unconvincing

that you couldn't help but recognize them for what they were, wigs and sequins and

trappings that somehow only manage to articulate the fact that she was still something

undeniably, essentially Sydney underneath. And even in her ambivalence over her

betrayal of her manipulated SD-6 colleagues, she never lost her brash devotion to a

cause.

Through her, blending in, passing, became not a denial of history but a tactical and

superficial obscuring of difference to meet your desired ends. It was an image in which

Otherness, especially hidden, was not only still meaningful, but a source of incredible

power, a knowledge of the motivating mechanisms of a world in crisis and a glock

strapped to your thigh.

The problem, of course, is this: I am no Sydney Bristow, and I've had more than one

person tell me, delighted, that I am "practically white."

The allegory of racial assimilation as espionage a nice fantasy, a neat justification, but it

falls apart at the realization that unlike Sydney, unlike Maxwell Smart, my battle is not

one for order, but representation. I have neither the conviction nor the comfortable

naïveté to stumble through the treacherous negotiations of racial identity, safe in the

knowledge that the sacrifices will always be justifiable and the outcomes always

favorable. In the struggle for visibility on my own terms, at what point is my "cunning"

disappearance of opposition and difference just another disappearance? At the end of

the day, does it matter if my camouflage is so convincing that it's always read as

assimilation, if "practically" means "strategically" to me, but "nearly" to everyone else?

Even more troubling: the last time I was in China, I spoke with an accent, unable to spit

out the slurring tightness of all my years away. How long before passing becomes

being, before your secrecy becomes so thorough that you forget where you hid your

history for safe keeping?

****

If I am honest with myself, I never quite outgrew the spy fantasies. Sometimes, I still

imagine that I'm a sleeper agent, that any day now I'll wake up knowing 13 languages

and as many ways to kill a man using a hair clip and remember, finally, who I was

supposed to be all along.

Because in the end, all of this conflicted, contested, treacherous allegory of identity

politics as espionage is fundamentally the enactment of wishful thinking: the fantasy that

beneath all of this is something more than the sum of what I've forgotten, that I might

one day be able to reassemble from the relics of memory and history, from the

trajectories of departure and return, seeking and displacement, an understanding of

what I have become. That somewhere in this mess, I have an exit strategy.

Xiaochang Li

New York University, BA 2006

Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn.

Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.

The Videocassette or: How I Became a Fanboy and Learned to Love Explosions

Every year, I challenge my Comparative Media Studies Masters Students to tackle a piece of autobiographical prose which describes something of their own relations with media. This may at first glance seem like a pretty cushy assignment, most of us start our writing career on personal essays, but most of the students discover it can be extremely difficult to reconcile the competing modes of autobiographical and theoretical writing. On the one hand, the language of media theory is often highly abstract and for many, alienating. On the other hand, many of us fall into the trap of "overshare" when asked to recount of our own experiences, being so interested in the process of personal revelation that we don't necessarily think through why we are sharing or how autobiography might enable us to make more meaningful generalizations about media. In preparation for this assignment, we read and discuss such essays as Erica Rand's introduction to The Ellis Island Snowglobe, Annette Kuhn's discussion of a family photograph from Family Secrets, Sharon Mazer's discussion of the power relations she encountered in doing an ethnography of professional wrestling, Robert Drew's account of karoaki which draws heavily on his own experiences as a performer, and Geraldine Bloustein's work on "girl-making." (The last three can all be found in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, which I co-edited with Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc.) Each of these writers make effective use of "intimate critique" as a way into dealing with complex aspects of personal identity and popular culture. As we suggested in the introduction to Hop on Pop, there are questions which we can only address through holding a lens up to our subjective experience of media -- the tendency of academics to hold popular culture at a distance may distort their understanding of the work it does for individuals and the society at large.

This assignment produces some of the most exciting writing I see all year and this year's crop of first year masters students produced work which I felt was especially rich and evocative. Last year, I shared some of the work my students produced for this assignment, including essays on what our lists on Netflix tell about us and about the world of Mexican comics. Over the next few posts, I plan to share some of the highlights from this year's crop. This year, there was a strong focus on cult media, fandom, and personal identity formation. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, given my own interests, so what is surprising is how very different each of these narratives about early fan experiences turned out to be.

The Videocassette or: How I Became a Fanboy and Learned to Love Explosions

by Abhimanyu Das

The cultural artifact I have chosen for this paper is the VHS tape. It is an object of resonance on two levels - it possesses enormous personal significance and, on a wider scale, it is the embodiment of a technological development that transformed the film culture of urban India. Given that videocassettes and the material they carried were a "companion for emotion and a provocation to thought" from an early point in my life, they were to me what Sherry Turkle categorizes as 'evocative objects'.

Until the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, films made outside India were very difficult to access legally. Urban centers generally contained only a few theaters (multiplexes did not arrive till the 21st century) and these were mostly dedicated to screening Bollywood fare that guaranteed more ticket sales. A tiny number of foreign films were exhibited every year, usually releases that were a year or more past their original theatrical dates. The situation for Indian cinephiles was dire. All this was transformed by the VHS boom of the mid to late 80s. The introduction of videocassette technology to Indian markets did not, however, signal the beginning of the home video release boom that was witnessed by countries like the United States. The heavily protectionist economy did not lend itself well to studios releasing foreign films on a home video market and availability of video recorders was initially too limited for any kind of real profitability from the exercise. This, however, did not preclude the burgeoning of a system of piracy and peer to peer sharing that was working well in Indian cities long before any of us had even heard of the Internet and was to survive till the cable television boom of the mid 1990s.

The first manifestation, according to my father, was the appearance in many neighborhoods of the local 'video parlor'. Some of these were larger establishments with proper storefronts while others were holes in the wall that could only be found via word of mouth. All of them, however, were stocked with pirated VHS copies smuggled in from east Asian countries. Given that the foreign studios had practically no presence or representation in India and that the police did not care the least bit about enforcing copyright laws, these parlors were free to operate. In addition to the regular Blockbuster-style services they provided, they could (at a price) copy your favourite film on to a blank videotape or even 'order' an 'official' copy of the film for you (these being a first or second generation shinier print of the film in a case adorned with color xeroxes of its American packaging as opposed to the generally fuzzy affairs in generic slipcases available for rent). The larger shops presented even more options, offering up 'camera prints' at half the usual rental for fans on a budget (the unwatchable prints of movies recorded in a theater) or 'family' versions of films with the sex scenes dubbed out (profanity and violence remained gloriously intact).

A vibrant popular film culture was to grow in the cities within years. My father tells stories of how Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone became household names within a year and I can remember passing by, on my way to school, scores of streetside hawkers selling Rambo and Terminator t-shirts when just a year previous, they had been peddling religious iconography. School-children (like myself) started up movie sticker collections that were traded aggressively. The interesting side effect of the viral nature of the VHS phenomenon was the fact that the parlors were simply one of the available options. People would copy tapes that they had rented from these parlors and circulate them amongst friends and family who would, in turn, copy them. The picture and sound would degrade with each degree of separation but this did not dissuade the enterprising cinephiles that felt like they had put one over the Man ('the Man' presumably being the video parlor guy that rented smuggled goods) by watching the movie for free. Neighborhoods would organize community screenings of films where they would set up a television set in a local clubhouse, rent a tape from the nearest video parlor and charge a nominal fee for entry. The transformation, then, was beginning. India had always had a rich history of movie-watching in the Bollywood tradition and the arrival of VHS expanded the film-goers horizons to include the Western market. Cinema clubs popped up across the cities, catering to tastes across the board, from a weekly dose of 80s action drama to one of Bergman or Antonioni (two especial Calcutta favourites). Indian youth culture was impacted as the fashions, music and slang of the Americans they saw on their television sets (which had hitherto exhibited nothing but the two mostly soul-crushing public TV channels) crossed over into the urban lexicon. This intrusion of globalization (for better or for worse) into a relatively closed cultural space was accelerated manifold by the advent of cable television but I would argue that this particular event was primed by the preceding decade of VHS supremacy.

On a personal level, the VHS tape could be said to have shaped my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are of my father bringing home our first VCR from a business trip abroad and the subsequent weekend film-watching ritual. The homework would get done, be checked over and the approving nod would be the cue for the Disney film du jour to begin. Just as Turkle's closet full of memorabilia shapes the way she thinks about her family, my memories of our weekly congregation around the joys of VHS shapes the way I think about mine. In addition, these experiences contained within and associated with the tapes were to have a profound effect on my identity and interests. Pat or even cliched as these conclusions may seem, it was the memories of those early movie sessions that formed the seed for my later affinity for everything cinematic and helped push me toward the academic, personal and professional direction I am taking now. My love of music began with VHS tapes as my parents would record music videos from the half hour Western music show that aired past my bedtime on the aforementioned public television channel. I would then proceed to play these tapes all day, forming a soundtrack to my childhood that originates as much from VHS as it does my father's LP/audiocassette collection. My affection for everything narrative probably sprang from the multiple viewings of the same films (on the same tape) that we would rent repeatedly when nothing new had come in that week, as plot threads started to get embedded into my skull, complete with dialogue and interrupted by video snow where the tape had been damaged. Even my first induction into the enticing world of 'adult language' was thanks to the verbal clashes (in stereo!) between the working class New York accent of John McClane and the cultured delivery of Hans Gruber. Thanks to Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, I knew how to swear in English before I learned the equivalents in any of the Indian languages.

The actual physical form of the videotape was also important. The tapes from the parlor that we rented from all had a particular smell (that I could never identify) - the first indication of an impending movie experience. Close at its heels was the mystique of the cassette itself, as my brother and I would open the protective tab and stare at the magnetic tape underneath, making wise pronouncements about the quality of the print based on the number of crinkles we could see in it. Despite our carefully performed expertise, however, we were completely in thrall to the inherent mystery of the incomprehensible machine, simultaneously imagining ourselves as a new generation of technopriests through our ability to perform a ritual around these objects and as slaves to our ultimate lack of knowledge about the object itself. The packaging was equally important (when there was any). Familiar faces of actors we were starting to recognize would create patterns in our choices. These packages were generally xeroxes of US or UK poster art and we learned to recognize the MPAA's Restricted logo or the BBFC's '18' and '15' symbols (ironically our parents were too frazzled and rushed to notice such things) and felt the twinge of anticipation for the forbidden darkness that we learned to anticipate within (the films rated such for sexual content were, however, generally pointed out by the 'video parlor man' for the benefit of our parents).

Finally, as the title of this piece indicates, the fanboy in me can actually be traced back to the magic of VHS as well. I still remember with relative clarity, the first defining cinematic moment of my life - my first viewing of Superman II. It was in 1988 and I was six. It was not the first film I had watched on our new VCR but it was the first one to leave an indelible stamp on my still-developing mind. The wonder of Superman's flight to the Eiffel Tower, the foreboding of the criminal Kryptonians' surprisingly brutal assault on the astronauts, the frustration of the beating suffered by humanized Clark Kent at the hands of the diner bully and - above all - the pure adrenaline rush of re-powered Superman's return and climactic clash with the villains in downtown Metropolis are all emotions that I am reasonably sure I remember accurately from that first viewing. This may well be owed to the fact that I replicated this experience countless times over the next few years, goading my hapless parents into renting the same tape to the extent that 'the video parlor man' automatically reached for it when we walked in. The reactions, however, were always echoes of my original visceral responses to what remains, to this day, one of my favourite films and the reason why I instinctively associate villainy of all sorts with General Zod. Superman II was the reason I picked up my first American comic book and marks the beginning of my lifelong fondness for fantastical narratives across media platforms, bringing us to the possibility that my presence at MIT may actually be traced back to the work of Richard Lester (or Donner, according to preference).

It is important to mention that a significant aspect of this anecdote is the fact that I managed to watch Superman II through the eyes of an impressionable young child, thanks to the convenience of VHS. Had it not been for this particular technological marvel, my exposure to pop culture (as embodied by Superman) would have really begun in the mid-90s with the appearance of cable television, by which point I would have been a teenager and - undoubtedly - indoctrinated into the way of the sciences by the ever reliable biases of the Indian educational system as it deals with male students. It was VHS that made the difference between a goggle-eyed child internalizing an epic, life-changing mythology and an engineering-track teenager laughing at a campy movie about an alien in a red cape and underwear fighting two British actors (and an ex boxer from Philadelphia) dressed like dominatrices while Gene Hackman delivered one-liners in the background. And for this, I am thankful.

Abhimanyu Das

Franklin and Marshall College, BA English, 2005

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Abhimanyu Das graduated in 2005 with a BA in English from Franklin and Marshall College. Gradually, his interests in new kinds of media texts (such as computer games, graphic novels, and serialized fiction) began to push against the outer limits of proscribed curriculum of his English department. His struggles with core questions about transmedia storytelling, the audiovisual elements of texts and social context of genre narratives led him to develop a secondary concentration in Film Studies, during which he did archival research at the British Film Institute and also read a lot of comics. His relevant professional experience includes writing about film and literature as well as a brief stint in publishing.

At MIT, he hopes to pursue a thesis project that studies "the confluence of post-colonial influences and the effect of globalization on two rapidly expanding media movements, the Indian independent film and the Indian comic book." He is currently working at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media as an RA. His long-term goal is to be able to make a living as a cultural journalist with the clout to make a few people do more than just smile indulgently while he talks about movies and comics.

From Rodney King to Burma: An Interview with Witness's Sam Gregory (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with human rights advocate Sam Gregory, who I met at USC's DIY Media event earlier this year. In this second part, Gregory explains why Witness is creating its own video distribution site, discusses the role of remix in the realm of human rights activism, and explores what it might mean to "do it with others" rather than "do it yourself." Tell us more about The Hub. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of creating a platform specifically for distributing human rights videos as opposed to tapping into the power of shared or general portals like YouTube?

The Hub, WITNESS' most recent project tries to address what's missing in the online media sharing ecosystem for human rights activists. It's in Beta at the moment, and launched on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2007. In our first four months of quiet beta, we've had in the region of five million views of media, and going on eight hundred items of media uploaded.

It's envisioned as the human rights channel for the online community, as a place where anyone can upload human rights-related footage, share it with others and self-organize into affinity groups, comment on material there, and most importantly access online tools for action, and guidance on how to turn their video into compelling advocacy material. It places a strong emphasis on security both for the uploader and for those filmed, on providing contextualization for imagery wherever possible, and also seeks to provide normative leadership around the impacts of participatory media creation and distribution in oppressive contexts. For me, that option to act is critical. There's nothing worse from the activists' point-of-view than risking your life to film a piece of footage, and to then to have that experience dismissed. From the viewer's point-of-view there's nothing worse than being exposed to scenes of misery, and to have no way to take action. It's deeply draining and de-motivating for people to watch and not be able to act, it misses the opportunity to engage support, and it contributes to the compassion fatigue that we all already experience.

We're not in favor of walled gardens, and to create something like that would be to waste so much of the potential of the networked online environment. So why not just use YouTube? (or Daily Motion? LiveLeak? etc.). In fact, many of the videos on the Hub have also been placed by activists on YouTube (it is possible to use YouTube or any other commercial or non-commercial site to host content, and then embed it on the Hub), and in many cases we can see real value in drawing on the mass public reached by YouTube. The power of YouTube is that it is increasingly becoming the most prominent platform (at least in the global North, and for English-language media) for video online - although finding an appropriate human rights video can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. From an advocacy perspective, we can see how IF a video achieves either prominent placement, or takes off virally on YouTube it can take off in terms of public prominence. Similarly for many non-governmental advocacy organizations that are trying to engage a general public either with a single video or via a channel, YouTube is likely to be the first place that public will look. And we also recognize that YouTube is a pushing-out point for footage that finds homes in many other subculture-specific media systems, including human rights, where it is embedded and re-contextualized - I particularly appreciate Michael Wesch's commentary on this.

However, we see some significant current limitations on YouTube as a platform for human rights activism. For some publics - namely concerned citizens on a global scale concerned about security, looking to ensure that their footage galvanizes action, and suspicious of corporate and government surveillance, it may not be the best choice. These issues of concerns include questions of being a small fish in a big pond raised by the Center for Social Media's report last year, opportunities for meaningful community and to generate action, and the dilemmas raised by the Transmission network and others of commercial exploitation of human rights imagery, safety and security for the uploaders and filmed, surveillance by corporations and state, inflexibility in redistribution, downloading and sharing, and where editorial control is vested.

To illustrate one of these points, human rights video is generally among the least-viewed content on YouTube amidst the proliferation of music videos, parodies and commentary. A March 2007 Center for Social Media study found (though this was before the launch of the YouTube Nonprofit Channel which has increased slightly the visibility of social issue videos, and the pro-active work of the Citizen Tube editor at YouTube), public-issue videos find themselves 'small fish in a vast sea' . The most popular social/public issue video in the Center for Social Media study had 150 times less viewers than the most popular video on YouTube, and the terms on which they must compete for the public audience are the co-option of the characteristics of humor, celebrities, popular culture touchstones and music that are most common in the top-ranked YouTube videos. You yourself talk about the vaudevillian aesthetic of online video in which 'the best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared'. Some human rights video can play in this field. A powerful example is the 'Waiting for the Guards' video developed by Amnesty UK for their Unsubscribe-me campaign that feature a recreation of the stress position enhanced interrogation technique used by the CIA, as the center-piece of a web 2.0 campaign focused on action via social networking sites. But with some exceptions much human rights material is not immediately powerful performance, and may not be most effectively or honestly presented in that mode.

Another aspect is what happens to grassroots human rights video on YouTube if it does secure viewers. WITNESS' own experience with YouTube has included two videos that were very fortunate to be picked as Editor's Picks - 'Shoot on Sight,' produced by partners Burma Issues documenting military attacks on ethnic minority civilians in eastern Burma, and picked during the height of the crisis in Burma in autumn 2007; and 'Awaiting Tomorrow' highlighting lack of access to HIV/AIDs treatment in Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced by locally-based partners Ajedi-Ka, and placed on YouTube's homepage on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day. Both videos received reasonably high viewer levels (approximately 380,000 and 225,000 as of now) and significant levels of comments ('Awaiting Tomorrow' ranks among the top forty most-discussed ever videos in the Non-Profit and Activism Channel with almost 1,400 comments before comments were disabled preventing further belligerent commentary). These levels of viewership are great in terms of reaching an audience that would know little about ethnically-targeted violence in eastern Burma, or access to anti-retrovirals in the Congo. However, the comments ranged from the constructive to the racist, and conspiracy-theory obsessed, and the framework of the YouTube page does not lend itself to using individual videos to focus action of the type WITNESS or local human rights advocates seek, or to foster discussion.

From the point-of-view of human rights advocacy, it was very hard to turn a transitory audience into an engaged public, or to measure the transition from viewing to action or impact. For human rights activism you want a community oriented towards action, recognizing also that online environments where no-one 'listens' to others and responds constructively are the opposite of the empowerment of voice that grounds WITNESS. As Howard Rheingold has observed in relation to youth participation online, in an analogy that could easily be extended to over-stretched, marginalized human rights advocates, "it isn't "voice" if nobody seems to be listening". Our experience illuminated the need for a channel dedicated to human rights and related action.

Recognizing that YouTube should not be viewed solely as a single site, but as a nexus of content that circulates in more detailed, niche contexts, I should note that the most effective uses of the YouTube version of 'Shoot on Sight' were in blog postings where it was embedded in additional context, commentary and recommendations for action, and in its use by venues such as the Facebook 'Support the Monks in Burma' action group.

As additional factors to consider -- in contrast to many commercial platforms -- the Hub carries no advertising, does not track IP addresses and advises users on how to avoid surveillance, and will soon include functionality allowing downloads so that people can use it in the most appropriate setting to generate action. Although we do currently have an editorial process to ensure fit of videos to guidelines, our hope is that the community will eventually monitor, rate and control the content that is on the site; and WITNESS does not claim ownership on the footage and allows the user to choose a Creative Commons license that will exactly lay out how they would like their work to be used

What, if any, kinds of remixing are appropriate in the space of human rights video? How can we reconcile this mash-up aesthetic with the evidentiary claims made for traditional documentaries?

Remixing is one of the most powerful aspects of the new participatory culture. From a human rights advocacy point-of-view, the positive dimensions of this are clear: the narrative possibilities of remixing footage are extensive and build on an increasingly reflexive contemporary media literacy, and there is a possibility to benefit from the creativity and capacity of a distributed network of peer production which can rework the 'raw' audiovisual material to appeal to diverse communities of interest, and within which the opportunity to be a 'co-'producer rather than just a user may promote sustained engagement.

Some of the most powerful political commentary in the US over the past 5 years has featured powerful remixes of news, archival and user-generated footage, especially around President Bush and his actions in Iraq, and groups WITNESS have worked with at a local and regional level around the world have used karaoke remix formats to communicate effectively around human rights issues. One example of the karaoke remix style I've seen in Southeast Asia is a video by one of our Video Advocacy Institute alumni, Dale Kongmonts's from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers. The rub is in how this remix culture relates to a human rights culture that is concerned for the dignity and integrity of victims and survivors, and the role of ethical witnessing. We love seeing George Bush remixed, but where would we draw the line? For me, that's a bigger concern than the evidentiary aspect. I think we have to recognize that the process of narrative creation is always subjective.

The remix question raises the underlying problem that bothers many human rights advocates when they consider visual imagery. WITNESS has wrestled for years with how to try and ensure that people filmed in human rights contexts understand how the video will be used, and the implications both positive and negative (we produced a whole chapter on 'Safety and Security' in our recent 'Video for Change' book), emphasizing model that relies on presenting worst case scenarios for impact, to enable genuine informed consent to be given. Simultaneously, human rights culture emphasizes the value of the integrity and dignity of the individual survivor of abuse on the basis of the first principle that every human being is possessed of 'inherent dignity', a concept which runs through every right articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A particular concern in the victim and survivor-centered human rights model is to avoid re-victimization either directly or indirectly (as can happen when an image is distributed and exploited inappropriately). The most graphic issues - of violent attacks, or at the most extreme, sexual assault - is seen as the material that most easily translates into a loss of dignity, privacy, and agency, and to the potential for real re-victimization. Individuals featured in videos who are not victims or survivors, but bystanders or witnesses, are also understood to be in positions of vulnerability and risk.

But that's a practice that's difficult enough to promote in the 'professional' documentary world, and impossible to sustain in an online participatory media culture of user-generated citizen media. How do we support emerging norms in the emerging online culture that, promote respect, tolerance and an understanding of risks? Over at Internet Artizans Dan McQuillan talks about "propagating an online culture pervaded by a sense of fairness & justice" and suggests "writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in to all web 2.0 Terms of Service". I think this is really one of the key tasks ahead for a concerned community online, only brought home more and more as we increasingly experience global human rights crises - Burma, Tibet - via imagery circulated online. The urgency of this normative work is clear if we think about the implications of increasing live eventcasting from cell-phones facilitated by technologies like Flixwagon and Qik. These technologies will have powerful positive implications for sharing footage and engaging constituencies immediately, but at the same time consent and security norms become even more critical once more video is streamed immediately rather than edited/uploaded after the fact?

You are an advocate of a "DWO" (Do With Others) approach to video production.

Explain. What value does collaborative production and distribution bring to the field of advocacy and activism?

The biggest concern for human rights activists is how video can be deployed to create real change. Alongside renewed opportunities for individual production and targeted advocacy both online and offline, I think collaborative production, distribution and advocacy offer powerful new possibilities for a network-centered video advocacy.

This DIWO (Doing It With Others) recognizes the advocacy possibilities of drawing on some "audiences" as collaborating publics both between themselves and with you, and as co-producers and not just as consumers or passive distributors of advocacy video. This means attention to how to facilitate meaningful and responsible ways in a many-to-many environment for people to speak to each other and create locally-specific and contingent media.

Collaborative production, distribution and advocacy allows for the possibility of drawing on all the potential resources in a given advocacy community. At the most simple format, it includes efforts like the video collages created by campaigns including 24 Hours for Darfur, which gathers expert, citizen and refugee voices to speak out on the situation in Darfur and join an online montage of voices, that was also screened at the UN. It also includes the YouTube and MoveOn.org approaches to user-generated or citizen-generated video contests, and what Greenpeace did last year in the environmental community, where it provided a stock of footage to supporters and encouraged them to "... Download our footage from the e-waste yards in China and India to edit and use in your video. Use it to make your own video about e-waste and how Apple should be a leader in helping tackle this problem...only limitations are please use the logo provided, a positive campaign message and the website URL somewhere in your video"

What is often most effective in advocacy are trusted voices, and often advocacy videos are blunt weapons in terms of finding a trusted voice that will speak to a broad and divergent audience. You either do it by finding a powerful story of a non-famous individual and find ways to engage your audience emotionally, or you take a default option of going with figures with a broad-based of 'authority' or just plain recognition, such as a celebrity. But with collaborative production of advocacy video you can go beyond that - you can mix together, say the footage from Burma or Darfur with the most trusted voices for a specific audience, to create locally-specific advocacy videos.

As a concrete example of this approach, I am currently working with the US Campaign for Burma, which has student chapters across the country on how to facilitate student action around divestment campaigns in universities. One idea in involves collaborative video editing, in this case using a software called Kaltura. At an online editing site they will find a set of stock clips of what is going on in Burma, including some interviews and visual footage as well as tips and advice from the coordinators and their peers about how to construct an effective advocacy video. They will then shoot their own material (for example, someone at University of Iowa could include a clip from a supportive academic or community leader) and create a localized video. All these clips, as well as the contingently finished films are shared online for all the student groups, so that another group has the option to borrow a useful video from others in the campaign, use it straight or remix it, or if they like just one of U-Iowa's local-specific clips borrow it for their own.

This is an example of a situation where collaborative production produces a range of advocacy videos, each locally-specific and targeted. We see the potential here for pressuring at a local level, by using shared footage and adding material that taps into local power dynamics - drawing on influencers and authority figures with specific resonance, or who have the 'ear' of a key person - and by making calls to action as specific as possible. You could also imagine collaborative production being used to produce one product that drew on the capacity and collective knowledge of many to create a more effective advocacy strategy

This approach - which relies on dense information connections to allow individuals to draw on and act with networked, shared resources has been termed 'network-centric advocacy' by Marty Kearns. As he defines it, network-centric advocacy differs from traditional advocacy in the strategy used to 'form and deliver an argument as well as the methodology used to build alliances across stakeholders'. Where traditional advocacy involves the advocate organization picking and packaging an argument for delivery to an audience, a network-centric approach 'asks the network to find, package and select the arguments (think MoveOn Bushin30Seconds example). The network picks the message.' Similarly whereas a traditional advocacy campaign has a core communications team at its center 'managing' the campaign, a distributed network campaign trains 'many spokespeople to speak their own voice'. We're seeing this in political campaigns in the US - see for example the excellent analysis by Connect US (which is doing work on doing network-centered advocacy here in the foreign policy community in the USA) of Obama's campaign.