"Media Mix Is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part Three)

The term, “character goods,” is often attached to cultural productions from Japan. What does this term suggest about the centrality of character to Japanese media mix? What ideas about character shape these productions? What factors led to this focus on character (as opposed to, say, story or world, or simply style) in the Anime system?

Ian: I see characters as operating in a space somewhere between celebrities and brands. Pikachu can act like a brand logo, standing for the Pokemon franchise when it’s plastered on the side of an airplane. Pikachu is also a character that can be active, like a celebrity, doing things in the Pokemon universe.

I think the dominance of Hollywood in the US makes Americans like myself more accustomed to viewing celebrities as pinnacles of human renown. Yet in Japan, characters, more than brand logos, are commonly used for even very serious organizations. I feel I know the FBI logo from all those DVD warnings to stop illegal copying. But Japan’s National Police Agency has a cutesy character.

In the end, maybe the ubiquity of logos in the US and characters in Japan have the same cause. In the US, if I was starting a new company, or trying to rename my academic department, I would naturally think: What should our new logo be? In Japan, I’d have to ask, what should our character look like?

Popularity breeds more popularity, and we learn those forms from all around us.

In the United States, there’s a tendency to speak of toys, candy, and other tie-in products as “ancillary” yet they seem to have at times exerted very strong influences on Japanese popular culture. How would you define their roles here?

Marc: The more I looked into the practices around the media mix, the more it seemed that every part played an important role. The work “ancillary” just doesn’t do justice to the significance of the sticker in the popularity of Astro Boy in the 1960s.

Or, to take a more contemporary example, Pokémon is not first a game, and only secondarily comics and animation series. It is all of these. Sure, some media have more weight than others, but what’s so fascinating about the media mix is the way the addition of each new element reconfigures the entire ensemble.

Jonathan Gray does a great job of pointing out the centrality of the “ancillary” in the North American context in the wittily titled Show Sold Separately. I think we have to do the same for the Japanese context where actually it’s more difficult to say what is primary to begin with.

Again, taking the case of Astro Boy, the TV show acts back on and influences the comic, the logic of replication found in the stickers work their way back into the theme of replication in the comic, character designs developed for the anime inform the toys, and so on. There’s a way you can write the history of Japanese pop culture from the point of view of candy makers (I was initially tempted to do this), or toys (with video games flowing naturally out of the character-centrism of manga and anime, and toy makers like Bandai becoming major anime producers), or freebees.

Marc, you especially make a point in your book that practices of fragmentation, multiplication, and dispersal, central to the media mix practices, precede the emergence of digital networks. What are some of the roots of these practices then and why do you think that these logics have been so influential on Japanese media?

Marc: The roots of these practices are difficult to pin down exactly. But I’d say the most two important elements here are an intensified serialization and transmediation that occur in the early 1960s.

First, we have a serialized narrative running in a monthly comic magazine. The long-form narrative serial really started in the 1950s. (There were pre-war and wartime serialized manga, but these were more like what television studies calls “series”: sit-com like formats that don’t have any narrative progression.) Then this narrative is transposed to another medium like television, or the character is transposed to another medium like the metal or plastic toy. So there is a further fragmentation of an already fragmented narrative. The more series develop out of the initial one, the harder the consumer has to work to chase after them all.

Granted, 1960s serials hadn’t yet formalized the transmedia storytelling approach where different narratives were told in different media. It’s really not until the 1980s that this approach becomes formalized. But still, I see the early transmedia serialization of 1960s TV anime as an important precursor to the fragmentation and dispersal we find with digital media.

Some media mix producers like Otsuka Eiji have even remarked on this, saying digital tools make the narrative experiments they were doing in the 80s all the more easy to pull off. So while there is an intensification of the fragmentation and dispersal with the rise of digital networks, the serial and transmedial format of the anime media mix already contains the logic of digital networks in nascent form.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Media Mix Is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part Two)

Research on the Japanese “media mix” and the western “transmedia” phenomenon both must grapple with the blurring boundaries between storytelling/imagination/creativity/play and branding/marketing/promotion. Are these two forces separable at this point within the system you describe? Does the presence of branding necessarily negate the meaningfulness of the characters and stories for those people who are playing with their likenesses?

Marc: My book focuses more on the marketing side of things, and Ian’s on the collaborative side of things (fan collaboration and production-side collaboration). Simply put the system and the soul. I’d hazard to guess that we both agree that in practice one can’t be separated from the other. They can be described separately but they work together.

Our books are very complementary in that sense. The marketer in me wants to say: send us proofs of purchase for both and we’ll send you some stickers!

But joking aside, I think if you look at developments in the media mix over the last couple decades, the storytelling-creativity and branding-marketing are getting closer and closer.

One of the reasons for this is the rise of amateur production and the fluidity of boundaries between amateurs and pros. The Comike (Comic Market) where amateurs meet to sell their creations is one of the places where these boundaries break down. Publishers learn from fans, and successful dojinshi creators become professional comic artists.

In more recent years many of the top amateur game makers have gone pro. But what pro means is itself hard to pin down. My pessimistic side sees this as the increasing appropriation of fan labor and fan production by large corporations. But I also tend to see the circulation of character images as having a media life of its own. Corporations may see this as moving for their own profit. Fans see this circulation as moving to their benefit. But neither can exist without the other, and creativity exists on both sides of this equation, producers and consumers.

I think this is something Ian shows really nicely in his ethnographies of production sites, and it’s something I feel all the more concretely the more I learn about particular moments of media mix production.

Ian: You ask, “Does the presence of branding necessarily negate meaningfulness . . . ?” Certainly not. I recall an acquaintance that wore a T-shirt with an illustration of the playful “Pipo” character, who represents the National Police Agency, and it was version of this: (The orange character is Pipo, who represents the National Police Agency in Japan).

As graffiti artists have shown for a long time, those without the resources to pay for them can use the power of billboards. On the question of whether the forces of play and imagination are separable from branding and marketing, I like to think so, but deep down, I’m not sure.

Or, to put it another way, maybe that distinction is not the one that matters. Maybe a different question is the purposes that marketing and advertising are put towards. Both Greenpeace and Wal-Mart rely on branding and marketing, but evaluating their role depends on thinking beyond the category of marketing to include an analysis of the larger roles organizing play in our society. As an FCC chairman once said, “All TV is educational; the question is what does it teach.” So, too, with advertising.

Even fan activity can be marketing, but what are the implications for what is being exchanged? That’s something I learned from Textual Poachers and it’s still vitally relevant today.

Both “media mix” and “transmedia” imply a certain kind of immateriality -- characters that can draw interest across a range of media -- and materiality -- a focus on the affordances or material properties of the different medium involved. When and how do the specific properties of the media involved in “media mix” matter?

Marc: Materiality is a good way to keep an eye on the specificity of its medial incarnation. Even in the age of digitization, where there is to some degree a convergence around hardware or platforms, there is still the materiality of the interface, and the specificity of the particular media object you’re reading or watching or playing. Immateriality is a way of understanding the character as something that exceeds any one of these material incarnations or interfaces. Whenever we engage with a media mix property we’re engaging with both at the same time.

Personally, I came to these questions of materiality and immateriality when I wanted to understand why children of the 1960s went so crazy over Astro Boy stickers. And why they also wanted Astro toys, and all else, from comics to shoes to records with the theme song.

Ian: When I think of immateriality, I would draw attention to the social energy that flows through characters and worlds. Characters and worlds are certainly one aspect of immateriality. They can move among media forms, from comic book pages, to TV screens, to portable gaming systems. But I see these characters as a link between people.

For me, the immateriality is a kind of social energy that flows through the characters and helps bind us together as creators and fans. When I meet someone who cares about an anime series that I like as well, I experience a kind of electrical charge. I get energized in the sense of having an urge to learn more, to connect, to share.

The materiality of media has a mirror image in the sociality of media. If not, how could media be meaningful? To what degree are the practices described as “media mix” a byproduct of media conglomeration? Is it possible for smaller companies and independents to compete effectively within a media mix economy?

Marc: That’s a key question, and something that’s interesting me more and more. The media mix came out of a franchising or licensing model at a time when there wasn’t much conglomeration, at least not between the companies doing the media mix. Publishers were publishers, animation companies were animation companies, albeit with licensing divisions that dealt with the commercial side of the media mix. There seemed to be little in the way of horizontal conglomeration in the media sphere (though the exception might be in the television industry, with a kind of TV-radio-newspaper companies like Asahi).

But as far as I can tell, it’s really in the 1970s when Kadokawa Books starts a film division that media conglomeration develops around media mix practice. This was based on a blockbuster model of high investment, high return – and the returns weren’t always so high.

So in the 1990s and especially the 2000s, Kadokawa and other companies shift to a “production committee” model of financing that sees the outlay spread over a number of media or non-media companies. Book publishers promise funds, novelizations, or promotions in bookstores; TV stations promise funds, but also spots on air; ad agencies promise TV spots, and so on.

The total cut a given company takes is based on their initial investment. That’s why you often see the words “ ‘XYZ’ Production Committee” at the end of a production – for instance “‘Attack on Titan’ Production Committee” at the end of the credits for the current show Attack on Titan. Most Japanese anime, TV drama and films have this credit line and use this kind of financing. I think of it as a kind of distributed or temporary conglomeration. (There are two excellent reports on this trend available at: http://www.mangamoviesproject.com/publications.html)

That said, the companies that tend to make up the production committees are often the large publishing houses, TV stations and ad agencies. The best chance for independents to develop their own media mix is for their content to catch on in one of the many informal channels – like NicoNico Douga (the YouTube of Japan), or the Comic Market – or to start as a serialization in one of the many comic or novel magazines.

Lucky Star, for instance, started off as a 4-frame “gag” comic in Comptiq, a game magazine. It was basically just filler. But it really caught on, and became one of the media mix hits of the 2000s, and helped kick off a whole craze around 4-frame comics. There are also some daring animation production houses like Kyoto Animation or Shaft that are willing to take chances on untested material.

Many of the media mixes with the greatest impact actually start out as a manga print serialization, and magazines have been called the R&D labs for the media mix. So compared to a Hollywood production or even an HBO TV series, the bar for entry even to official media channels is a lot lower in Japan.

Henry: Anime has become a global phenomenon with consumers world-wide. To what degree are decisions surrounding animation production driven by local market conditions and to what degree are producers seeking to develop a product which will have transnational appeal?

Ian: In my experience, few of the companies in Japan were specifically aiming for a transnational market. The story I often heard was that Pokemon was designed for Japan with no consideration for overseas’ audiences, and yet it was a huge success, so Japanese creators would do best to aim simply for a Japanese market.

At the same time, the prices for anime DVDs in Japan are much higher than the US, often upwards of $60 for 50 minutes (two episodes) worth of animation, so there was also less incentive to make animation for American audiences.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed. I went to script meetings in part to hear about how the creators thought about audiences both in Japan and the US. I remember writing grant proposals with this as a research question. But in script meetings, no one ever talked about fans.

In my experience, the creators viewed themselves as the fan-experts who mattered. When Mamoru Hosoda, an anime director said he also rarely thinks about the audience, I admitted that I was a little hurt by that. I always imagined media creators imagining me when they worked. He laughed and said I was getting it all wrong: “I don’t think about your reaction because I’m hoping you’ll have reactions that I can’t even imagine.” That, for him, is what makes anime an intriguing art form.

On the other hand, some studios, like Gonzo, were thinking at least somewhat about reaching out overseas, and this was one of the reasons that they set their series Red Garden in New York City. By and large, though, anime studios felt they had to aim for their main, domestic audience first.

I think some of the current backlash among US fans against “fan service” (i.e., racy or sexist, depending on your perspective) anime is partly an outcome of Japan’s studios aiming for a particular, domestic fan.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Media Mix is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part One)

This is the second in a series of interviews with key thinkers whose work addresses questions of world-building as they relate to media mix and transmedia practices. The previous installment featured Mark J. P. Wolf talking about his work on Tolkien's notion of "subcreation" and the larger concept of "imaginary worlds." In a Making Of video included on the dvd release of The Matrix, it is revealed that the Wachowski Siblings first conceived of their transmedia approach to the franchise as they were flying back from the first film's premiere in Tokyo. I have always assumed that this mid-Pacific brainstorming was inspired by what they saw when they visited the media capital of Japan and no doubt talked to creators there who have long worked in the media mix tradition. Some years back, I made this trip myself, tagging along with my then-MIT colleague Ian Condry as he began to do the interviews with anime and manga producers that would form the foundations for his new book, The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story. For me, the experience was eye-opening as I developed a sense of the scale, scope, and speed with which a pop culture phenomenon moves through this culture. I still discuss with amazement the cosplayers I saw in Yoyogi Park and the massive manga stores we visited in Akiharbara. Japanese media mix long proceeded the American transmedia tradition and it's no shock when I discover yet another transmedia producer who started out as an anime/manga geek. I have featured an interview here before with Condry about his earlier work on hip hop in Japan and about a fascinating Anime-inflected performance he helped to stage while I was at MIT.

My own understanding of media mix has been strongly informed by the work of Marc Steinberg -- both his own recent book, Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan and his translations of some key works by Japanese critics and practioners about the media mix tradition. I had a chance to sit down and talk with Marc when I visited Concordia University earlier this year, and at the time, I invited a scheme to get Marc and Ian to do a joint interview which might help place the Japanese approach into greater clarity for my readers. What follows is that exchange, conducted this summer, via email.

Henry: Let’s start with a question that Ian raises early in his book, “Why did Japan, of all places, become a global leader in animation”?

 Ian: Japanese animation or “anime” makes up 60% of the world’s broadcast TV cartoons, according to JETRO, a Japanese trade organization. Feature film anime is a global presence as well, with notable directors like Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, and Mamoru Hosoda. Anime has gone global with both mass audiences and a diversity of subcultures. I would break down the sources of Japanese success in these too simple terms:

• Astro Boy beat Bambi by making animation more cheaply and quickly.

• Much anime is based on already popular comics, or “manga,” and manga are more expansive and diverse compared to US comics in part because Americans fell for junk science in the 1950s.

• Anime’s success centers on characters more than stories, opening particular spaces for fan participation and transmedia collectives.

I discuss each of these elements in more detail in my book, but let me touch on some of the highlights. Osamu Tezuka was a pioneer in television animation in Japan, and also a leading comic book artist from the 1950s to his death in 1989. He was deeply influenced by Disney’s classic animated films, including Bambi, which he allegedly watched more than 80 times. (The “big eyes” of anime characters might be traced in part to this influence and that of the Fleischer Brothers’ animation like Betty Boop.)

Marc will discuss the business model Tezuka relied on for his first TV series Astro Boy, begun in 1963, which was based on an already popular manga character of his. Let me point out that his production studio also innovated in the sense of pushing “limited animation” further than other studios. Tezuka Productions was able to meet television deadlines and work with a tiny budget in part by radically reducing the number of frames that had to be drawn (using few mouth movements, re-using flying scenes, and relying on dramatic poses rather than detailed action, etc.).

This produced relatively poor quality animation, at least, poor in comparison to Disney’s full animation, but, as Tom Lamarre argues in his book Anime Machine, certainly even limited animation was and is artful in its own way. Still, the legacy of slight embarrassment continues today: When I interviewed Japanese animators and asked them what made Japanese animation distinctive, I often heard, “Well, it’s not very animated, is it?”

Even so, with Astro Boy, the series was a huge success. This solidified the notion in Japan that even relatively poor animation could be popular, especially if it relied on already-popular manga characters. To this day, about 60% of Japanese animation is based on popular characters.

Japan also has a much larger comic book universe compared to the US, constituting about 40 percent of the units sold, and 20 percent of the value of Japanese publishing overall. Manga is read by children, teens and adults, even as it increasingly moves online and into mobile phones.

Manga is famous for generally having more sex and violence than comics in the US, and there is a historical reason for that. As David Hajdu describes in his book The Ten-Cent Plague, in the 1950s, America was rallied to protect children from salacious and gritty comic books in part by the research of psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent found comic books harmful to kids. US publishers at the time responded by setting up the Comics Code Authority, which required comic books to be suitable for children. There were always doubts about Wertham’s research, and recently more evidence has emerged showing a misuse and even falsification of data (see, for example, this coverage )

In Japan, there have been outcries against troubling comic book material, but in general, a wider range of manga is readily available and continues to attract enormous readership. This variety lends itself to a diversity of source material for anime as well.

Arguably, fan participation has played a larger role in the history of anime than is the case with TV cartoons in the US. To take one example, the giant robot TV series Gundam, which began airing in 1979, was initially deemed a failure due to low viewership and poor sales of toys. Over time, however, amateur activity around the series grew, as fans created encyclopedias and timelines extending the fictional world of the series. Importantly, the Gundam producers did not object to these extensions, and eventually the series was revived, and has become one of the longest-running and most successful series of all time.

This kind of fan activity remains part of the bedrock of anime’s success, and can be seen in other media forms as well. Japan’s largest annual convention is Comic Market held each year in August, and it draws almost half a million people over three days to buy and sell fan-made comics (often with unauthorized uses of copyrighted characters). Miku is a virtual singer made popular through crowd-sourced production, where some people make music and others make the music videos, for example.

The concept, “media mix,” seems central to the project of both of your books. What does this term imply about the ways popular culture is produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed in Japan?

Marc: The media mix is really central to how media operate in Japan. One of reasons I call my book Anime’s Media Mix is because ever since the beginning of television anime in 1963, the media mix has been central for anime’s very existence.

Betting that TV stations would refuse to pay the actual costs of production of a 30-minute animated TV show, Tezuka Osamu sold Astro Boy at a loss. He figured he’d make back the money on licensing fees for character goods – what we’d now call franchising – and international sales. So anime depends on other media (from toys to comics to video games) for its very survival.

The media mix is anime’s life support system. In turn anime grabs audiences that wouldn’t otherwise read a comic, or a novel, expanding the fan base. So ultimately there’s a kind of virtuous circle between the financial side of things and the fan side of things. As time moved on, and especially into the 1980s and 1990s, these grew closer and closer together. In the end it is rare to have a stand-alone cultural product, at least in the spheres considered “subcultural” in Japan, like comics, animation and light novels.

The media mix practice has even become central to “mainstream” areas like live-action films and TV dramas, especially since the 2000s.

Ian: I like the idea that the “media mix is anime’s life support system.” One of the questions I think about is, who supports the media mix? Whose activities bring this “media mix” to life?

As a cultural anthropologist, I like to draw more attention to the people, both professional producers and amateur creators, who form a nexus of collaborative creativity. The outcome is the “media mix,” but to ask about collaboration brings about a slightly different focus, in my opinion.

Like you, Henry, I too am interested in “spreadable media,” but I guess I see the impetus in the people who do the spreading, rather than being a function of the media object itself. (Editor's Note: I would have said that the focus of our Spreadable Media book is on the community that is circulating the content and the ways the content functions as social currency in their interactions with each other. So I don't think we are actually disagreeing here.) Granted, there is something amazing about Susan Boyle’s rise to stardom, and a lot of that has to do with her superior singing talent. It’s interesting as well, however, that her fans found something worth sharing and reached out to friends and colleagues to push interest in her even farther than the TV show alone could.

What relationship exists between “media mix” and the western concept of “transmedia storytelling”? How has the emergence of “media mix” changed the nature of storytelling in Japan?

Marc: This question about the relationship between media mix and transmedia storytelling is an important one. On the one hand I see Japan’s media ecology as really central to the conceptualization of transmedia storytelling. I think back to what I think is a key chapter of your book, Convergence Culture, where you analyze The Matrix as a key example of transmedia. As you point out, the Wachowskis develop the conception of The Matrix expanded universe on the way back from Japan, and you point out how influential the Japanese model of dispersing content across media was to them.

The conception of an expanded world which consumers access part by part was developed in Japan around Kadokawa Books by Kadokawa Tsuguhiko, Otsuka Eiji, Mizuno Ryo, Sato Tatsuo, Inoue Shin’ichiro and others in the late 80s and early 90s. These magazine editors and media creators associated with Kadokawa effectively shifted from being authors to being media mix producers. Otsuka, Mizuno and others create manga, or write novels – MPD Psycho and Record of the Lodoss War being two of their most renown works, respectively – but most importantly they oversee the production of various media incarnations or fragments of a whole. They were also keen to include fans as part of this, leaving holes in the narratives for fans to fill in.

Gainax’s Evangelion – funded and then published in part by Kadokawa – is an excellent example of this kind of media mix. Storytelling became focused not on development in a single medium, but around the development of a world or series of narratives across media. So I see the more recent emphasis on transmedia in North America especially as at least partly influenced by media mix practice from Japan.

Of course the twist to this narrative is that Kadokawa Tsuguhiko and others were deeply influenced by the table top role playing game (TRPG) model – where a preexisting world could be developed across multiple works. They give Dungeons and Dragons and the Dragonlance series of books that used D&D as a basis as an example.And in an early theorization of Kadokawa media mix practice, Otsuka analogizes the producer position to the TRPG “game master.” So there’s definitely a kind of mutual influence going on.

On the other hand, and this brings us back to some of what Ian said a moment ago about the importance of the popularity of characters, there are debates as to just how central narrative is to the media mix. Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals makes the case that from the late 90s through the early 2000s there is a decline in “grand narratives” and an increasing centrality of non-narrative characters in the media mix. Basically he revives the postmodern thesis about the decline in grand narratives to apply it to developments in anime, manga, and games.

And it’s true, there are a lot of character-based works that don’t have much emphasis on narrative at all. Lucky Star comes to mind, and so does Ian’s discussion of Hatsune Miku. But we can think a little more historically about this too. Hello Kitty is one of the most successful characters of all time, but narrative was only an afterthought, and generally unimportant to what is for all intents and purposes a hugely successful media mix.

Ian and I both make the case that characters and worlds come first, and narratives are often built subsequently to the characters and worlds. Again, I think Japan is an important precursor to the recent trend towards world-building in Hollywood that you’ve highlighted, Henry. So there is an important connection between transmedia storytelling and the media mix.

But the media mix is not always about storytelling. That said I personally find the development of narratives across media a particularly interesting way of using the affordances of Japan’s rich media ecology to create fascinating story worlds. And I’m personally intrigued by the high tolerance for inconsistencies or divergences in media mix worlds that I find in Japan, much more than in North American models of transmedia. /blockquote>

Ian: I agree completely. I experienced this ambiguity around storytelling in an unusual way during fieldwork in Tokyo when a colleague invited me to meet with some producers from Bandai Visual to hear about their then-forthcoming series Code Geass. They spent an hour describing the characters and world of the series, but never talked about the story. I left the meeting thinking, “I still have no idea what happens in the series.” My Japanese friend was surprised at my confusion. “They probably haven’t written the story yet,” he noted.

For them, the key part of the planning was the characters and the worlds, which ideally would be spun off into a range of stories. The design is much more about characters and the rules of the world.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Hope Is An Active Verb": Brenda Laurel Revisits Computers as Theatre (Part One)

Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre was one of the few truly transformative books to emerge in the heady early days of the "digital revolution," demanding that we think of the computer as posing a series of creative problems that might best be address through the lens of the dramatic arts rather than purely technical problems that remain in the domain of the computer scientists. In a new edition released this month, she revisits that classic text in light of her rich and diverse experiences as a designer, educator, and entrepreneur. The resulting work looks backwards, at how far we have come towards transforming the computer into a new expressive medium and looks forwards to the technical and cultural problems we still need to resolve if we are going to produce a diverse and sustainable digital culture in the years ahead. I have been lucky enough to have had Laurel as a friend throughout my professional career and especially to be able to watch her journey with Interval Computing and Purple Moon games, where she broke new ground in seeking to broaden who played computer games, what kinds of experiences games offered, and what this new expressive media could accomplish. Justine Cassells and I documented some of her core insights in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games and we were with her shortly after Matel acquired and pulled the plug on the whole Secret Paths franchise. But, the story is perhaps best told through Brenda's own book, Utopian Entrepreneur, which I still turn towards when I seek inspiration about the value of doing interventions into the creative industries as a vehicle for promoting one's own personal and professional agendas. Laurel's insights predicted much that has happened in the games industry since, including the success of The Sims, which in many ways followed her template, the growth of transmedia entertainment which she helped to model, and the expansion of the female market around casual games.

Brenda Laurel has been and remains an important voice -- in many ways, the conscience of the digital industries -- and so it is with enormous pride that I share with you this exchange conducted online over the summer. Here, she reflects back on where we have been in digital theory and expression and speculates on some directions forward.

Reading back through this, I was struck by curious parallels between your work in Computers as Theatre and what Sherry Turkle was writing about in The Second Self around that same period. Both of you were trying to understand something of the mental models people brought with them to computers, even as you were asking questions that operated on different levels. What relationship do you see between these two key early works of digital theory?

Neither of us could have foreseen the firestorm of FPSs, social networks, and tiny interactions on tiny screens. In a way, I think that Sherry spoke a note of caution which I am trying to make actionable by suggesting that it’s not that these things exist, but to what use they are put (and how designers think about them) that can make them good for us or not (or somewhere in between). The relationship between the books may have been that we were each looking at the coming wave of technology as something fundamentally about humans, our social and developmental and cultural contexts.

Humans extrude technology. It is part of us. We are responsible for it. Each generation of the last 10 has had a new technology to deal with, to set norms about, to learn about appropriate usage. Parents and schools can help with media literacy—this would fit well into a Civics class, if we still had those.

As the topology of social networks complexifies, so do the opportunities and risks. I remember sitting with our girls in the age of television advertising and asking them, what are they trying to sell you? How are they trying to do it? Now they ask others the same questions as casual media critiques.

As I sat down to re-read this book, I was struck by the fact that I had no problem accepting the premise that what Aristotle had to say about drama might be valuable in thinking about what we do with computers (a theme upon which I gather you had some push back at the time the book was first published) but I had more difficulty wondering whether something written so early in the history of digital media would have anything to say to contemporary designers. It did, but the fact that this question surfaced for me leads me to ponder, what does this say about the nature of media change over the two decades since you first published this book?

It’s gratifying to me that many folks have worked on ideas in that first book and have made some progress, even recently. The largest excursions in the new edition are probably those about using science more robustly to model interaction. I’ve also emphasized the combined causal factors in multiplayer games and social media. Pointing back to your first question, I think that governance and civility are still essentially unsolved problems in this new world. I included Pavel Curtis and Lambda MOO in the new edition because there was such a valiant effort to figure out governance. I suspect that the lack of civility in multiplayer spaces today (especially in terms of sexual harassment) has something to do with the general lack of civility in our national character at this moment in time. But it also has to do with the designer’s role in framing and normalizing civil relations among multiple participants. There are great opportunities in this regard that might well channel back to our national discourse.

As I fan, I appreciated your rant about J. J. Abrams, Lost, and of course, Star Trek. What do you see as the limits of his “magic box” model for thinking about how to generate interests around stories? What alternatives do you think a more drama-centered approach offers?

As far as JJ says, his Magic Box has never been opened. That’s a problem for starters. If he wants to keep a virgin souvenir, great. But thoughtful plotting does not come out of thin air (or a closed box). Pleasing dramatic structures do not arise ad hoc. To the extent that character is a material cause of plot, the damage JJ has done to Spock and Uhura is unforgivable. It’s like throwing out some of the enduring stock characters in a Commedia piece. Spock stood for pure (if tortured) intellect; overtly sexualizing him was not a good thing for the Star Trek mythos. Transforming Uhura from a kick-butt, competent female officer into a romance queen (whose phasers don’t work as well as a man’s) fundamentally changed the ethos of the character as well as the mythos. That’s like saying that Oedipus held his temper at the crossroads and lived happily ever after with Mom.

A more drama-centric approach offers the pleasures of a well-structured plot, including catharsis. For enduring characters and ‘properties’ (e.g., The Odyssey), some core of dramatic tension already exists in the potential of the myth, and it can be spun out into many stories without exhausting its potential to deepen our relationships with the characters, their actions, and their universe.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher in the domains of human-computer interaction and games. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012 and the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre: Second Edition (2013).

Guerrilla Marketing: An Interview with Michael Serazio (Part Two)

You make an interesting argument here that today’s guerrilla advertising represents the reverse of the culture jamming practices of the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. if culture jamming or adbusting involved the highjacking of Madison Avenue practices for an alternative politics, then today’s branding often involves the highjacking of an oppositional stance/style for branding purposes. Explain.  

There have been various examples that have popped up here and there that hint at this hijacking: Adbusters magazine’s apparent popularity with ad professionals; PBR’s marketing manager looking to No Logo for branding ideas; heck, AdAge even named Kalle Lasn one of the “ten most influential players in marketing” in 2011.  Similarly, you see this subversive, counterculture ethos in the work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the premier ad shop of the last decade.  But I think the intersection goes deeper than these surface ironies and parallels.  There’s something about the aesthetics and philosophy of culture jamming that contemporary advertising finds enticing (especially when trying to speak to youth audiences): It resonates a disaffection with consumer culture; a streetwise sensibility; and so on.  For culture jammers, such stunts and fonts like flash mobs and graffiti art are political tools; for advertisers, they’re just great ways to break through the clutter and grab attention.  More abstractly, culture jammers see branding as an elaborate enterprise in false consciousness that needs to be unmasked toward a more authentic lived experience; guerrilla marketers, on the other, simply see culture jamming techniques as a way of reviving consumers from the “false conscious” of brand competitors.  Think different, in that sense, works equally well as an Apple slogan and a culture-jamming epigram.

You cite one advertising executive as saying, “friends are better at target marketing than any database,” a comment that conveys the ways that branding gets interwoven with our interpersonal relationships within current social media practices. What do you see as some of the long-term consequences of this focus on consumer-to-consumer marketing?

In a sense, the whole book – and not merely the friend-marketing schemes – is an exploration of how commercial culture can recapture trust amidst rampant consumer cynicism.  That’s what drives guerrilla marketing into the spaces we’re seeing it: pop culture, street culture, social media, and word-of-mouth.  These contexts offer “authenticity,” which advertisers are ever desperate to achieve given their fundamental governmental task is actually the polar opposite: contrivance.  (Sarah Banet-Weiser’s new book offers a sophisticated analysis of this fraught term across wide-ranging contexts in this regard.)  As far as long-term consequences go, I think it’s important to keep in mind the complicity of consumers in this whole process: In other words, being a buzz agent is still just a voluntary thing.  It’s not like these participants are being duped or exploited into participating.  It’s worth accounting for that and asking why shilling friends is acceptable in the first place.  Is it because of some kind of “social capitalism” wherein we already think of ourselves in branding terms and use hip new goods to show we’re in the marketplace vanguard?  The book is, of course, only a study of marketers not consumers, so it’s pure conjecture, but I think understanding that complicity is key to any long-term forecast of these patterns’ effects on our relationships and culture.

Both of our new books pose critiques of the concept of “the viral” as they apply to advertising and branding, but we come at the question from opposite directions. What do you see as the core problems with the “viral” model?

From my perspective, there’s an implicit (and not necessarily automatically warranted) populism that accompanies the viral model and label.  Viral success seems to “rise up” from the people; it has a kind of grassroots, democratic, or underground ethos about it.  In some cases, this is deserving, as we see when some random, cheap YouTube video blows up and manages to land on as many screens and in front of as many eyeballs as a Hollywood blockbuster which has all the promotional and distribution machinery behind it.  And because viral is supposedly underdog and populist, it’s “authentic,” so advertisers and brands naturally gravitate toward it, which, for me, makes it an intriguing object of study.  Abstractly speaking, that, too, is at the heart of the book’s inquiry and critique: The masquerades and machinations of powerful cultural producers (like advertisers) working through surrogate channels (like viral) that exude that authentic affect in different guises (here, populist).  Again, this is not to invalidate the genuine pluckiness of a “real” viral hit; it’s simply to keep watch on efforts to digitally “astroturf” that success when they show up.

While this blog has often treated what I call “transmedia storytelling” or what Jonathan Gray discusses as “paratexts” sympathetically as an extension of the narrative experience, you also rightly argue that it is an extension of the branding process. To what degree do you see, say, alternate reality games as an extension of the new model of consumption you are discussing in this book? Does their commercial motives negate the entertainment value such activities provide?

Oh, certainly not – and I should clarify here that I’m by no means taking the position that commercial motives necessarily negate the pleasure or creativity of participatory audiences.  Alternate reality games (or alternate reality marketing, as I call it) are, in a sense, the fullest extension of many of these practices, themes, and media platforms scattered throughout the book.  They feature outdoor mischief (e.g., flash mob-type activities) and culture jamming-worthy hoaxes, seek to inspire buzz and social media productivity from (brand) communities, and, above all, seem to be premised upon “discovery” rather than “interruption” in the unfolding narrative.  And the sympathetic treatments of their related elements (transmedia storytelling, paratexts) are assuredly defensible.  But they are, also, advertising – and, for my purposes here, they’re advertising that tries not to seem like advertising.  And, again, I believe in that self-effacement, much is revealed about today’s cultural conditions.

You end the book with the observation that “more media literacy about these guerrilla efforts can’t hurt.” Can you say more about what forms of media literacy would be desirable? What models of media change should govern such efforts? What would consumers/citizens need to know in order to change their fates given the claims about structure and agency you make throughout the book?

I suppose I end the book on a lament as much as a diatribe.  I’m not an abject brand-hater and I hope the book doesn’t come off that way.  That said, I certainly do empathize with the myriad critiques of advertising mounted over the years (i.e., its divisive designs on arousing envy, its ability to blind us to the reality of sweatshop labor, its unrealistic representation of women’s bodies, etc.).  The media literacy I aim for is awareness that these commercial forms are (often invisibly) invading spaces that we have not traditionally been accustomed to seeing advertising.  In general, brands don’t address us on conscious, rational terms and, thus, if we’re wooed by them, our subsequent consumer behavior is not necessarily informed as such.  In that sense, I guess, it’s as much a Puritan critique of commercialism as it is, say, Marxist.  Media literacy like this would encourage consumers to think carefully and deeply about that which advertisers seek to self-efface and to (try to) be conscious and rational in the face of guerrilla endeavors that attempt to obfuscate and bypass those tendencies.  The cool sell is an enticing seduction.  But we can – and do – have the agency to be thoughtful about it.

Thanks very much for the opportunity to discuss the book!

Michael Serazio is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication whose research, writing, and teaching interests include popular culture, advertising, politics, and new media.  His first book, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013), investigates the integration of brands into pop culture content, social patterns, and digital platforms amidst a major transformation of the advertising and media industries.  He has work appearing or forthcoming in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Culture & Critique, Television & New Media, and The Journal of Popular Culture, among other scholarly journals.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and also holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of San Francisco and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.  A former staff writer for the Houston Press, his reporting was recognized as a finalist for the Livingston Awards and has written essays on media and culture for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and Bloomberg View.  His webpage can be found at: http://sites.google.com/site/linkedatserazio

A Whale Of A Tale!: Ricardo Pitts-Wiley Brings Mixed Magic to LA

Last February, I announced here the release of Reading in a Participatory Culture, a print book, and Flows of Reading, a d-book extension, both focused around work my teams (first at MIT and then at USC) have done exploring how we might help educators and students learn about literary works through actively remixing them. Our central case study has been the work of playwright-actor-educator Ricardo Pitts-Wiley from the Mixed Magic Theater, who was successful at getting incarcerated youth to read and engage with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick by having them re-imagine and re-write it for the 21st century. You can read more about this project here. And you can check out the Flows of Reading d-book for free here. 

If you live in Los Angeles, you have a chance to learn more about Pitts-Wiley and his work first hand. I've been able to bring Ricardo for a residency at USC this fall, which will start with a public event at the Los Angeles Public Library on September 26. Ricardo is going to be recruiting a mixed race cast of high school and college aged actors from across the Los Angeles area and producing a staged reading of his play, Moby-Dick: Then and Now, which will be performed as part of a USC Visions and Voices event on Oct. 11th. You can get full details of both events below. I hope to see some of you there. We are already hearing from all kinds of artists here in Southern California who have sought creative inspiration from Melville's novel and used it as a springboard for their own work. But you don't have to love the great white whale to benefit from our approach to teaching traditional literary works in a digital culture, and we encourage teachers and educators of all kinds to explore how they might apply our model to thinking about many other cultural texts.

For those who live on the East Coast, our team will also be speaking and doing workshops at the National Writing Project's national conference in Boston on Nov. 21.

Thursday, September 26, 2013 7:15 PM

Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library

Thu, Sep 26, 7:15 PM [ALOUD]

Remixing Moby Dick: Media Studies Meets the Great White Whale 

Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley

Over a multi-year collaboration, playwright and director Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, and media expert Henry Jenkins have developed a new approach for teaching Moby-Dick in the age of YouTube and hip-hop. They will explore how "learning through remixing" can speak to contemporary youth, why Melville might be understood as the master mash-up artist of the 19th century, and what might have happened if Captain Ahab had been a 21st century gang leader.

* Part of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Public Library’s month-long citywide initiative "What Ever Happened to Moby Dick?"

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than fifteen books on media and popular culture, including Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. His most recent book, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom was written with Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Erin Reilly, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York and of Herman Melville: An Introduction. She also co-author Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom with Henry Jenkins and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. She is former Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville. A founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, she has collaborated with the New Bedford Whaling Museum on lecture series, conferences, exhibits, and a scholarly archive. She serves as Associate Director ofMEL (Melville Electronic Library), an NEH-supported interactive digital archive for reading, editing, and visualizing Melville’s texts.

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is the co-founder of the Mixed Magic Theatre, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to presenting a diversity of cultural and ethnic images and ideas on the stage. While serving as Mixed Magic Theatre’s director, Pitts-Wiley gained national and international acclaim for his page-to-stage adaptation of Moby Dick, titled Moby Dick: Then and Now. This production, which was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, is the centerpiece of a national teachers study guide and is featured in the book, Reading in A Participatory Culture. In addition to his work as an adapter of classic literature Pitts-Wiley is also the composer of over 150 songs and the author of 12 plays with music including:Waiting for Bessie Smith, Celebrations: An African Odyssey, andThe Spirit Warrior’s Dream.

Reservation Policy for Free Programs: As most [ALOUD] at Central Library programs are free of charge, it is our policy to overbook. In the case of a FULL program your free reservation may not guarantee admission. We recommend arriving early. Space permitting, unclaimed reservations will be released to standby patrons at 7 PM. 

Book signings ALOUD is one of the many free programs the Library Foundation makes possible at the Los Angeles Public Library. Most ALOUD author programs are followed by book signings.  To help sustain this valuable cultural exchange, at least one copy of the author’s book must be purchased from the Library Store if you wish to participate in the post-program book signing. Proceeds support the Los Angeles Public Library.  Library Foundation members receive a 15% discount on all Library Store purchases.

From Page to Stage: Moby-Dick: Then and Now Featuring Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and Mixed Magic Theatre Visions and Voices
	Friday, October 11, 2013 : 7:00pm University Park Campus Annenberg Auditorium (ASC) Reception to follow. Admission is free. Reservations required. RSVP at the links below beginning Tuesday, September 17, at 9 a.m. USC Students, Staff and Faculty: To RSVP,click here. General Public: To RSVP, click here.
The fateful voyage of the Pequod and its revenge-obsessed Captain Ahab is reimagined in Moby Dick: Then and Now. Alba, a young woman in contemporary urban America, is hell-bent on avenging the gang-related death of her brother Pip in this adaptation of Herman Melville’s classic American novel. Moby Dick: Then and Now emerged through Ricardo Pitts-Wiley’s work with incarcerated youth at the Rhode Island Training School, a juvenile prison. Pitts-Wiley, an actor, director, playwright and composer with Mixed Magic Theatre, encouraged the youth to read and rewrite this challenging novel in relation to their own realities. The 19th-century whaling trade became the 21st-century drug trade, and the young writers’ creativity inspired the stage production, which remixed Melville’s language with hip hop. Pitts-Wiley’s approach is featured in the new book Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom, co-written by USC professor Henry Jenkins. This staged reading will feature student actors from USC and local high schools. Henry Jenkins will moderate a post-show discussion with Pitts-Wiley and the cast. Organized by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Co-sponsored by the USC School of Dramatic Arts. For further information on this event: visionsandvoices@usc.edu

Building Imaginary Worlds: An Interview with Mark J. P. Wolf (Part Four)

You make an important observation about the nature of sequels here: “A trade-off between novelty and familiarity occurs: The world is no longer new to the audience, but the burden of exposition is lessened by what has already been revealed of the world.” So, one could argue that the creator of the sequel is freed to do different things than the creator of the original. If this is true, what are some examples of creators who have effectively exploited that freedom to do something interesting?

Contrary to the negative image many people have when it comes to sequels, some sequels are generally considered better than the original works they follow.  In my experience, anyway, people often say they like The Empire Strikes Back (1980) better than Star Wars (1977); The Lord of the Rings certainly builds interestingly on the world introduced in The Hobbit; and Riven (1997) is arguably better than Myst (1993).  In all three cases, the sequel expands the world a great deal, while carrying forth characters and situations established in the original.  Each also builds upon how the world works, extending the world logic from the original work (for example, the rules regarding the functioning of lightsabers, the One Ring, and linking books).

Authors may find it easier to develop an existing world than begin an entirely new one, and expansions can still introduce as much (or more) new world material as the original work.  Practically speaking, this can also have to do with economics; a longer book or a higher-budget movie is more of a financial risk to a publisher or studio, so original works that introduce a world may be more likely to be represented by shorter books and lower-budget movies, while sequels to a successful work will be given more investment (for example, Pitch Black (2000) had a budget of $23 million, while its sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) had a budget of over $100 million).  Whatever the case, world expansion is necessary for a sequel to continue to engage an audience, who wants to revisit the world they like, but at the same time, have new experiences in it.

The Star Trek film this summer was controversial precisely because of its ret-conning practices: it’s restaging and reimagining of the Wrath of Khan narrative seems to have been embraced by some new fans, but at the cost of much gnashing of teeth by veteran fans (myself among them). What does this example tell us about the challenges or opportunities in revising or revisiting familiar worlds within popular media?

 In the case of Star Trek, they wanted to have it both ways; a fresh start, while keeping continuity with what has come before.  Technically speaking, the 2009 film was not a reboot, due to the “alternate timeline” device (complete with “Spock Prime”, with a Nimoy cameo that may have been thrown in to suggest to fans that if Nimoy accepts this film enough to appear in it, then you ought to accept it, too), but most people still consider it a reboot.  Like you, I, too, found this recasting of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy annoying; why not move on to a new set of characters, as the TV shows did, and mostly successfully at that?  And the motive here is not the best, either.

Retconning, even when not taken to the extreme of a reboot, may be done for artistic or narrative reasons (as with Tolkien’s adjusting of The Hobbit so as to fit The Lord of the Rings better, or Lucas’s clean-up and added effects shots in the “Special Edition” re-releases), but when it’s done for purely commercial reasons, it may seem more suspect, since money, not art, is the motive.  Of course, the degree to which retcon occurs also makes a difference; cosmetic changes are more easily accepted than those which change the story or characters too directly or too much.It’s also usually easier to reboot a character-based franchise than a world-based franchise, because the background world is closer to the Primary world to begin with, and reboots are usually concerned with bringing things up-to-date more than anything else; changes in the Batman, Spider-man, and Superman franchises are a good example of this.

But in more world-centered franchises, like Star Trek and Star Wars, you don’t need to have the same characters present all the time (Star Trek shows remained on TV 1987 to 2005 without relying on Kirk, Spock, and McCoy); it’s the world, with all its designs, devices, locations, and logic, that keeps the audience engaged.  So one can only hope that Abrams doesn’t reboot Star Wars.

While as the book jacket informs us, you reference more than 1400 imaginary worlds across the book, certain worlds keep recurring, among them Oz, Middle-earth, and the worlds associated with Star Wars. What makes these worlds especially rich for your analysis?

Certain worlds are larger and better developed, so when it comes to discussions of infrastructures, internarrative theory, sequence elements, and so forth, there’s just more to work with and examine in larger worlds.  Their infrastructures have thousands of pieces, and some are still growing.  The worlds of Oz, Middle-earth, and Star Wars are also very influential ones, and ones that helped forge the imaginary world tradition.  And, when using them for examples, they are also worlds that the readers of the book will likely already be familiar with, and which require less explanation.  But there are so many interesting ones that are less known, and deserve more attention (like Defontenay’s Star and Dewdney’s Planiverse), and I try to highlight some of these in the book as well.

You revisit the familiar debate between interactivity and storytelling (or narratology and ludology as it is sometimes framed in game studies), which seems to be unresolvable. But, you suggest that there are ways to reconcile competing claims for game play and world building/exploring. Can you elaborate a bit? How might this focus on immersion offer us a way of reframing these core issues in Game Studies (which is a field where you have made many contributions already)?

Video games and the experiencing of imaginary worlds both involve such activities as world exploration and the learning of a set of intrinsic rules and how things work, and in many cases, piecing together a backstory and seeing how actions relate to consequences.  So interactivity is perhaps more compatible with the experiencing of a world than it is with the telling of a story.  It’s the difference between causality and a causal chain of events.  You can have causality built into a world, so that one kind of action results in a particular result, but due to choices made or chance, you don’t always get the same sequence of events.  A fixed causal chain of events, like that found in a novel, stays the same and doesn’t change.  But a world can accommodate either.

The interactivity vs. storytelling debate is really a question of the author saying either “You choose” (interaction) or “I choose” (storytelling) regarding the events experienced; it can be all of one or all of the other, or some of each to varying degrees; and even when the author says “You choose”, you are still choosing from a set of options chosen by the author.  So it’s not just a question of how many choices you make, but how many options there are per choice.  Immersion, however, is a different issue, I think, which does not always rely on choice (such as immersive novels), unless you want to count “Continue reading” and “Stop reading” as two options you are constantly asked to choose between.  And it isn’t just immersion, but what happens after it as well (that is, absorption, saturation, and overflow, which are discussed in detail in chapter one).  By focusing on worlds and the experience of them, video games studies will be better able to make comparisons between game experiences, and describe them in a more world-based fashion.

Your term, “deinteractivation” may be somewhat awkward, but it also provides the best explanation I’ve seen for why it has been so difficult to translate games into other kinds of media experiences -- for example, films or comics. Defiance represents an interesting recent experiment. To what degree do you think it has been successful at creating a world that bridges between games and television?

Although long, I believe “deinteractivation” is a morphologically-sound coinage, related as it is to words like “deactivation” and “interact”, and no more clumsy than the words one finds in polysynthetic languages like Ainu, Chukchi, or Yupik. Hopefully its etymology is clear enough to indicate that it means the removal of interactivity, something that occurs when a world or narrative makes a transmedial move from an interactive medium to a noninteractive medium.  (As a form of adaptation, it is something we will see more of as video games make transmedial moves into other media.)

In the case of Defiance, where both the TV show and the game were developed together, I would say that the world appears to have been designed with both media in mind already, rather than beginning as a game that was later adapted into a TV series.  But it will be interesting to see which survives longer, the game or the show, and how they influence each other.

Also, the fact that the game is an MMORPG means that it is more interactive than a stand-alone game, but also more vulnerable to the ravages of time; while a stand-alone game, just like a TV show, could be experienced in its entirety at some future date, an MMORPG can really only be experienced as it was during the time it is being run; once it ends, it’s over, and it cannot be re-experienced.  It may be too soon to know whether it successfully bridges the two medium, or creates a solid fan community around the show/game experience (will other media venues follow?)

Perhaps we can get some idea from the text on the Defiance website: “Players of the Defiance game will have the chance to cross over into the show in a new and bigger way: By seeing their avatar recreated as a character in the second season!” First, this conflates players and their avatars, and second, the avatar will be “recreated” as a character; so it appears all interactivity has been lost during these two removes.  One can imaging other ways an MMORPG and a TV show could be linked; for example, a TV show could be made from the events of the MMORPG as they occur, or perhaps the storyline of the TV show could be adjusted based on the events of the MMORPG (the game events could provide the ever-changing background for the TV characters’ lives; if a revolution is stirred up in the MMORPG, it occurs in the background of the TV show, affecting the characters, and so on).  If nothing else though, and despite the outcome, Defiance is an interesting experiment, its name perhaps referring to its attitude toward standard television fare.

Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin.  He has a B. A. (1990) in Film Production and an M. A. (1992) and Ph. D. (1995) in Critical Studies from the School of Cinema/Television (now renamed the School of Cinematic Arts) at the University of Southern California.  His books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The World of the D’ni: Myst and Riven (2006), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Before the Crash: An Anthology of Early Video Game History (2012), the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (forthcoming), Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (forthcoming), Video Games Around the World (forthcoming), and LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (forthcoming) and two novels for which he has begun looking for an agent and publisher.  He is also founder and co-editor of the Landmark Video Game book series from University of Michigan Press.  He has been invited to speak in North America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life, and is on the advisory boards of Videotopia and the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, and on several editorial boards including those of Games and Culture, The Journal of E-media Studies, and Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and The Fan Arts.  He lives in Wisconsin with his wife Diane and his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis.  [mark.wolf@cuw.edu]

Building Imaginary Worlds: An Interview With Mark J. P. Wolf (Part Two)

There is a tendency for critics to dismiss sequels and prequels as being driven almost entirely by commercial motives. Yet, you show here that such structures have a much longer history. What does this history tell us about other motives that might drive such devices?

Sequels and prequels (and other kinds of sequence elements) are seen as commercially attractive in the first place only because there are other motives for wanting them to begin with; if not, then why would they be thought of as having commercial potential? I think the main reason for wanting them is the idea of returning for more visits to a world that you like, whether you are the audience or the author. That’s really the only reason there is; if you don’t like the world enough to want to go back, there’s no reason to make another work which is set there. One can experience the same work multiple times (as happens with works like Star Wars (1977) or The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)), which may be rich enough in detail to require multiple visits in order to notice everything, but ultimately audiences will want new experiences within the same world.

Authors who world-build will often create a world to house the original story set there, but if they like world-building, they may go beyond the needs of the story, generating more and more of the world, eventually developing additional narratives set in the world, usually ones connected in some way to the original narrative. The same thing can happen with popular characters that people want to hear more about; a rather early sequel, the second part of Cervante’s Don Quixote (part one, 1605; part two, 1615), was written in response to the audience’s desire to read more of Quixote’s adventures, and particularly because a spurious sequel had appeared after the first volume was published (the spurious sequel is even mentioned within the second volume of Don Quixote, and is condemned by the characters as noncanonical).

So I think commercial potential can only exist if other motives already exist; although one could try to make a sequel to a failed work set in an unpopular world, such a work is also likely to be a commercial failure (even if it is better than the original, its success could actually be hurt by its association with the original, if the original is disliked enough).

You note throughout that world-building (and world-exploring on the part of the audience) can be an activity which is meaningful quite apart from its role in a particular story. There may well be films -- Avatar come to mind -- which are widely criticized for their stories but widely praised for their world-building, and there are certainly directors -- Tim Burton for example -- who consistently seem more interested in exploring worlds than in telling coherent stories. Why, then, do we tend to devalue world-building in favor of story-telling when we evaluate so many media and literary texts?

 In works set in the Primary world (which are arguably the dominant kind), world-building mainly exists to serve storytelling, not the other way around. Thus, world-building is seen as a background activity, something done not for its own sake, and something done only to the extent necessary for a story to be told. As such, most critics’ methods of analysis still center around story (and such things as character, dialogue, and events) as the way meaning is conveyed, and many are intolerant of anything that departs too far from the “realism” of the Primary world (Tolkien notes this when he points out how calling something “escapist” is considered by many as an insult, whereas he says this is confusing the “escape of the prisoner” with the “flight of the deserter”; but this is another issue altogether).

But, of course, character, dialogue, and events are not the only ways meaning is conveyed; only the most obvious ways.

A world’s default assumptions, which differ from the Primary world, can suggest new ways that something can be considered, and perhaps make an audience more aware of their own assumptions they normally take for granted. Just like encountering other cultures can help you become more aware of your own culture, and make you realize that there are other ways of doing things or other ways to live, imaginary worlds can comment on the Primary world through their differences, they can embody other ideas and philosophies, and convey meaning in a variety of ways beyond the traditional ways found in stories set in the Primary world.

But these effects are the most powerful when the worlds in question have a high degree of completeness and consistency, in order to be believable; when this is lacking, the world may be risk being rejected as too outlandish and merely silly. And enough worlds are that way, that critics may regard even good ones suspiciously. The popularity of The Lord of the Rings is still not understood by some literature faculty, and likewise, some critics of the Star Wars prequel trilogy wonder why the films were so popular.

Stories and Worlds are evaluated by different sets of criteria, and one cannot simply apply one to the other. Sometimes a story is only there to serve the purpose of providing a framework with which to experience a world, as is the case, I would argue in a movie like Titanic or a book like The Planiverse (1984). While we generally do not fault good stories which don’t involve much world-building (since one has the Primary world to fall back upon, when the author does not provide invention), worlds, even elaborate ones, are often faulted if they do not contain good stories.

Of course, a world is always more enjoyable if the stories set in it are good ones, but some stories are clearly vehicles to convey a vicarious experience of a world and nothing more; once this is realized, one can set aside narrative expectation and focus on the world for what it is. General audiences seem to be able to do this rather well, especially in cinema, where the experience of visiting a world is made vivid through concrete imagery and sound, or in literary genres like fantasy and science fiction. Now that worlds and world-building are more prominent in culture, and particularly in popular culture, and with the rise of media like video games in which the experiencing of a world can be done with little or no narrative, critical criteria may begin to change to recognize the merits of well-built worlds.

Given what we’ve said above, what might be the criteria by which we would evaluate a text based on its world-building capacity?

 Well, as I discuss in chapter three, one way to examine the depth to which a world has been built is to examine the degree to which its infrastructures (such as maps, timelines, genealogies, nature, cultures, languages, mythologies, and philosophies) have been developed, and the interconnections between these infrastructures (which involves examining their degree of invention, completeness, and consistency). The more developed a world is, with these criteria in mind, the more we have something which appears viable, and the more we can extrapolate a world’s logic to fill in missing details, making the world seem more complete than it actually is (a well-designed world makes it so easy to fill in missing details that we may do so without even consciously noticing that we are doing so).

And it is not simply a question of the quantity of details, but their quality as well; their aesthetics must be appealing, in one way or another (this does not always mean something is beautiful) and the ideas embodied within a world must be engaging as well. Good stories will still always help the enjoyment of a world, since vicarious experience relies on character identification to some degree; one can marvel at a work of world-building but not feel one is within a world; and one could argue that such vicarious experience need not be a criterion of greatness.

But most audiences will still want such experiences. When one looks at the worlds that have endured over the years, or have found great popularity, one will find many of these elements are usually present; although some excellent and well-built worlds, like those of Defontenay’s Star (1854) or Wright’s Islandia (1942) remain obscure despite their greatness, but will perhaps hopefully gain the respect they deserve, now that world-building is becoming more valued.

 As I am writing these questions, I just saw Pacific Rim. Here, the filmmaker sets himself a challenge in creating a totally new franchise in introducing the viewer into a fictional world and establishing its basic contours. In this case, of course, he is not creating in a vacuum, since he relies heavily on audience familiarity with conventions from Japanese popular media -- the Mecha and giant monster genres. Yet, it can still be challenging to make sense of what we are seeing on screen given the range of unfamiliar objects and creatures going at it at once. What might Pacific Rim teach us about the challenges of introducing new worlds to audiences?

While Pacific Rim does feature some futuristic cities and a single glimpse of a new planet (near the very end of the film), it is still mainly set in the Primary world (our world) and not all that far into the future, so the world-building that occurs is mainly on a more local level (like the Shatterdomes).  But as you say, there’s much in the way of new technologies and creatures appearing on-screen, combined with a rapid pace.  And I also found it interesting that the film was neither based on an existing franchise or constructed as a star vehicle; it seems to have been made and marketed strictly on its own merits (although special effects were highlighted as an audience draw).  Also, as you mention, most of what we need to learn to follow the story relies on established science fiction conventions, along with the film’s two new terms naming its combatants (Kaijus and Jaegers) literally defined up front.

So while I liked the fact that the film starts a new franchise, it seems as though doing so made the filmmakers (most likely, the producers) cautious to do anything too far removed from established conventions. As a result, the film has relatively little innovation and there seems to be little reason to see it a second time; everything seems clearly explained, leaving few, if any, unsolved enigmas.

While concentrating on making the story clear is fine, there could have been more extensions of the world beyond what was required to tell the story; there is not a lot of background detail and action that would warrant additional screenings, and very little world outside the activities surrounding the Kaijus and Jaegers themselves.  As the Star Wars films have shown, though developing and creating such additional background world material may raise the cost of a film, the richness that it adds to a world will make audiences want to return again, inviting speculation and perhaps even generating enigmas that need not be solved for the narrative to be complete.  The world of Pacific Rim, on the other hand, does not seem to extend far beyond the needs of the narrative.

Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin.  He has a B. A. (1990) in Film Production and an M. A. (1992) and Ph. D. (1995) in Critical Studies from the School of Cinema/Television (now renamed the School of Cinematic Arts) at the University of Southern California.  His books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The World of the D’ni: Myst and Riven (2006), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Before the Crash: An Anthology of Early Video Game History (2012), the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (forthcoming), Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (forthcoming), Video Games Around the World (forthcoming), and LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (forthcoming) and two novels for which he has begun looking for an agent and publisher.  He is also founder and co-editor of the Landmark Video Game book series from University of Michigan Press.  He has been invited to speak in North America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life, and is on the advisory boards of Videotopia and the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, and on several editorial boards including those of Games and Culture, The Journal of E-media Studies, and Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and The Fan Arts.  He lives in Wisconsin with his wife Diane and his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis.  [mark.wolf@cuw.edu]

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: A New Syllabus

Last time, I shared the syllabus for a new course I am offering this fall focused on, basically, "how to be a public intellectual." Today, I am sharing the syllabus for the other class I am teaching this term. I have taught Transmedia Entertainment three times since coming to USC, each time I have more or less had to re-imagine and redesign the class to reflect shifts in media practice and especially the expanding body of scholarship about transmedia. You can see my first and second versions of the class as I shared them through earlier blog posts. You will see that recent scholarly publications have resulted in much richer models for thinking about the economic and cultural impact of the current franchise structure, the distinctive nature of "media mix" in Japan as a point of comparison with the ways transmedia has taken shape in Hollywood, and the nature and function of world-building. Alongside this class, I am going to be featuring in my blog this fall a series of interviews with the authors of many of these new books, starting soon with an in-depth exchange with Mark J. P. Wolf, author of Building Imaginary Worlds. As always, I am taking advantage of my Los Angeles location to bring into my classroom a rich array of guest speakers who are doing some of the cutting edge experimentation around transmedia.  

Transmedia Entertainment

We now live in a moment where every story, image, brand, and relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit “synergies” among different parts of the medium system and “maximize touchpoints” with different niches of audiences. The result has been a push toward franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, alternate reality or video games, toys, and other commodities, etc., picking up new audiences as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and Wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual, as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

Each class session will introduce a concept central to our understanding of transmedia entertainment that we will explore through a combination of lectures, screenings, and conversations with industry insiders who are applying these concepts through their own creative practices.

In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be expected to immerse themselves in at least one major media franchise for the duration of the term. You should experience as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to the series as a whole.

REQUIRED BOOKS

• Derek Johnson, Media Franchises: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Creative Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013)
• Andrea Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012)
• Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (London: Routledge, 2013)

All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL RESPONSE

For the first assignment, you are asked to write a 5-7 page autobiographical essay describing your relationship to a media franchise that you have found to be personally meaningful. You should use this essay to identify the cultural attractors that drew you to this franchise, to discuss which variants of the franchise you experienced, and to describe any cultural activators that encouraged you to more actively contribute to the fan community surrounding this franchise. Be as specific as possible in discussing moments in the transmedia story that were especially important in shaping your engagement with the property. Where possible, make explicit reference to ideas about transmedia and engagement from the readings. This assignment is partially about getting to know you as a transmedia participant and partially about getting you to experiment with the critical vocabulary we’ve introduced so far for talking about transmedia experiences. (Due September 23) (20 Percent)

EXTENSION PAPER

Write a 5-7-page essay examining one commercially produced story (comic, website, game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.) that acts as an extension of a “core” text (for instance, a television series, film, etc.). You should try to address such issues as its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural attractors/activators. The paper will be evaluated on its demonstrated grasp of core concepts from the class, its original research, and its analysis of how the artifact relates to specific trends impacting the entertainment industry. Where possible, link your analysis to the course materials, including readings, lecture notes, and speaker comments. (Due October 25) (20 Percent)

FINAL PROJECT – FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

Students will be organized into teams, which—for the purpose of this exercise—will function as transmedia companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book, novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions, though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. You should have identified and agreed on a property no later than Sept. 13th. By the end of the term, your team will be “pitching” this property. The pitch should include a briefing book that describes:

1. the defining properties of the media property
2. a description of the intended audience(s) and what we know of its potential interests
3. a discussion of the specific plans for each media platform you are going to deploy
4. an overall description for how you will seek to integrate the different media platforms to create a coherent world
5. parallel examples of other properties which have deployed the strategies being described

For a potential model for what such a book might look like, see the transmedia bible template from Screen Australia, available here: http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/filmmaking/digital_resources.aspx. Or visit: http://zenfilms.typepad.com/zen_films/2010/06/transmedia-workflow.html. If you use either as a model, include only those segments of their bible templates that make sense for your particular property and approach. You can also get insights on what a bible format might look like from the Andrea Phillips book.

The pitch itself will be a group presentation, followed by questions from our panel of judges (who will be drawn from across the entertainment industry). The length and format of the presentation will be announced as the term progresses to reflect the number of students actually involved in the process and thus the number of participating teams. The presentation should give us a “taste” of what the property is like, as well as lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. Each team will need to determine what the most salient features to cover in their pitches are, as well as what information they want to hold in reserve to address the judge’s questions. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific media platform, as well as to contribute to the overall strategies for spreading the property across media systems.

The group will select its own team leader, who will be responsible for contact with the instructor/TA and who will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed. Team members will check in with the TA on Week Six and with Prof. Jenkins on Week Ten and Week Thirteen to review their progress on the assignment. The instructor may request short written updates throughout the term to insure that the team is moving in the right direction.

Students will pitch their ideas to the panel of judges on December 2. They should expect to receive feedback from the instructor over the following few days, and then turn in the final version of their written documentation on the exam date scheduled for the class. (40 percent)

CLASS FORUM/PARTICIPATION

For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a substantive question or comment via the class forum on Blackboard. Comments should reflect an understanding of the readings for that day, as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that we can explore with visiting speakers. Students will also be evaluated based on regular attendance and class participation. (20 Percent)

Week 1, Monday, August 26

Transmedia Storytelling 101

• Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.
• Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202: Further Reflections,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August 1, 2011,
• Nick DeMartino, “Why Transmedia Is Catching On Now,” Future of Film Blog, July 5-7, 2011. Part Two. Part Three.

• Mark J. P. Wolf, “Transmedial Growth and Adaptation,” Building Imaginary Worlds (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 245-267.

Speaker: Geoffrey Long

Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and storyteller exploring transmedia experiences, emerging entertainment platforms, and the future of entertainment. He is an alum of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment community, and a co-editor of the Playful Thinking book series from the MIT Press. He previously served as Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios. Find more at geoffreylong.com.

Week 2, Monday, September 2

No Class: Labor Day

Week 3, Monday, September 9

A Brief History of Transmedia

• Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia: A Prehistory,” in Denise Mann (ed.), Wired TV (Work in Progress)
• Michael Saler, “Living in the Imagination,” “Delight Without Delusion: The New Romance, Spectacular Texts, and Public Spheres,” As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 25-104.
• J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 61–79.
• Justin Wyatt, “Critical Redefinition: The Concept of High Concept,” High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 1-22.
• Jonathan Gray, “Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films,” Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), pp. 177-187.

Students will meet in their teams for the first time.

Friday, September 13

Teams should have picked media franchise

Week 4, Monday, September 16

Transmedia Engagement

• Christy Dena, “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games,” Convergence, February 2008, pp. 41-58.
• Ivan Askwith, “Five Logics of Engagement,” Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007, pp. 51-150.
• Sam Ford, “True Blood Case Study” (Work in Progress)
• Andrea Phillips, “The Four Creative Purposes for Transmedia Storytelling,” “Interactivity Creates Deeper Engagement,” “Uses and Misuses for User-Generated Content,” “Challenging the Audience to Act,” and “Make Your Audience a Character, Too,” A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), pp.  41-54, 110-126,  137-148, 149-182..
• (Rec.) Ivan Askwith, “Deconstructing the Lost Experience,” Convergence Culture Consortium white paper,

Week 5, Monday, September 23

The Japanese Media Mix

• Otsuka Eiji, “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative,” Mechademia 5, 2010, pp. 99-116.
• Marc Steinberg, “Media Mixes, Media Transformations,” Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
• Ian Condry, “Characters and Worlds as Creative Platforms,” The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
• Mizuko Ito, “Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix,” in Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun (eds.), Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 97-110.

Autobiographical response due

Speaker: Aaron Koblin

Aaron Koblin is an artist and designer specializing in data and digital technologies. Aaron's work takes real-world and community-generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they create. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His projects have been shown at international festivals including TED, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. He received the National Science Foundation's first place award for science visualization and two of his music video collaborations have been Grammy nominated. He received his MFA in Design|Media Arts from UCLA. In 2010 Aaron was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT and he leads the Data Arts Team in Google's Creative Lab.

Week 6, Monday, September 30

Transmedia Learning

• Meryl Alper and Becky Herr-Stephenson, “T is for Transmedia,” Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Annenberg Innovation Lab white paper.

TA meets with franchise development teams to review progress.

Speaker: Erin Reilly

Erin Reilly is Creative Director for Annenberg Innovation Lab and Research Director for Project New Media Literacies at USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.  Her research focus is children, youth and media and the interdisciplinary, creative learning experiences that occur through social and cultural participation with emergent technologies. Having received multiple awards, such as Cable in a Classroom’s Leaders in Learning, she is most notably known for co-creating one of the first social media citizen science programs, Zoey's Room.  Her current projects include PLAY!, a  new approach to professional development that refers to the value of play as a guiding principle in the educational process to foster participatory learning and The Mother Road, a chance to explore collective storytelling through the development of the Evocative Places eBook series. Erin consults with private and public companies in the areas of mobile, creative strategy and transmedia projects for children.

Week 7, Monday, October 7

The Franchise System

• Derek Johnson, “An Industrial Way of Life,” “Imagining the Franchise: Structures, Social Relations, and Cultural Work,” “From Ownership to Partnership: The Institutionalization of Franchise Relations,” Media Franchises: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Creative Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 1-106.
• Sam Ford, “Glee Case Study” (Work in Progress).

Week 8, Monday, October 14

Producing Transmedia

• Brian Clark, “Transmedia Business Models,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, November 7, 2011
• Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “Courting Supporters for Independent Media,” Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 229-258.
• Henry Jenkins et al., “Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation about the Future of Television," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 26-29, 2013, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

• Andrea Phillips, “How to Fund Production Costs,” “And Maybe Make Some Profit, Too,” A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), pp. 223-239..

Speaker: Andrea Phillips

Andrea Phillips (born 20 July 1974) is an American transmedia game designer and writer. She has been active in the genres of transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games (ARGs), in a variety of roles, since 2001. She has written for, designed, or substantially participated in the creation of Perplex City, the BAFTA-nominated Routes (a project of Channel 4), and The 2012 Experience, a marketing campaign for the film 2012. Phillips came to the genre in 2001, when she co-moderated the Cloudmakers mailing list, which served players of "The Beast", the ARG which revolved around the release of the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Phillips in 2012 published A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling as a guide for current and aspiring modern storytellers.

Week 9, Monday, October 21

No Class: Meet with your teams

Friday, October 25

Extension Paper Due

Week 10, Monday, October 28

World Building

• Derek Johnson, “Sharing Worlds: Difference, Deference, and the Creative Context of Franchising,” Media Franchises: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Creative Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 107-152..
• Mark J. P. Wolf, “World Structures and Systems of Relationships,” Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (London: Routledge, 2013), pp.153-197.
• Michael Saler, “The Middle Positions of Middle Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and Fictionalism,” As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 158-196.
• Henry Jenkins, “The Pleasure of Pirates and What It Tells Us about World Building in Branded Entertainment”, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, June 13, 2007
• If you have not already done so, please try to watch Oz, the Great and Powerful before this class session.

Prof. Jenkins check-in with teams

Speaker: Alex McDowell

Alex McDowell is one of the most innovative and influential designers working in narrative media today, with the impact of his ideas extending far beyond his background in cinema. McDowell advocates for an immersive design process that acknowledges the key role of world building in visual storytelling. Since moving to Los Angeles from London in 1986, McDowell has designed for directors as diverse as Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and Steven Spielberg. Currently McDowell is production designer for Man of Steel with director Zack Snyder, produced by Chris Nolan. He recently completed In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol. With many awards for his film design work, McDowell was named a Royal Designer by the UK’s Royal Society of Arts in 2006. McDowell, who currently serves on the AMPAS SciTech Council, recently joined the faculty of the School of Cinematic Arts, where he will teach across several of the SCA divisions focusing on the role of world-building in the cinematic process. McDowell is co-founder and creative director of 5D | The Future of Immersive Design, a global series of distributed events and an education space for an expanding community of thought leaders across narrative media.

Week 11, Monday, November 4

Continuity and Multiplicity

• William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, “I’m Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise,” in Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (eds.), The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to A Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 182-213.
• Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, “Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics,” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 303-313.
• Shawna Kidman, “Five Lessons For New Media From the History of Comics Culture,” International Journal of Learning and Media 3.4 (2012): 41-54.

Speaker: Corniela Funke

During the late 1980s and the 1990s, Corniela Funke established herself in Germany with two children's series, namely the fantasy-oriented Gespensterjäger (Ghosthunters) and the Wilde Hühner (Wild Chicks) line of books. Funke has been called "the J. K. Rowling" of Germany. The first of her books to be translated into English was Herr der Diebe in 2002. It was subsequently released as The Thief Lord by Scholastic and made it to the number 2 spot on The New York Times Best Seller list. The fantasy novel Dragon Rider (2004) stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 78 weeks. Following the success of The Thief Lord and Dragon Rider, her next novel was Inkheart (2003), which won the 2004 BookSense Book of the Year Children's Literature award.  Inkheart was the first part of a trilogy which was continued with Inkspell (2005), which won Funke her second BookSense Book of the Year Children's Literature award (2006). The trilogy was concluded in Inkdeath (published in Germany in 2007, English version Spring 2008, American version Fall 2008). Funke has been working with Mirada to create a multimedia experience for the iPad based on her Mirrorworld book series.

Week 12, Monday, November 11

Immersion and Extractability

• Henry Jenkins, “He-Man and Masters of Transmedia, “ Confessions of an Aca-Fan, May 21, 2010,
• Henry Jenkins, “Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or What Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, December 14 2009.
• Mark J. P. Wolf, “Immersion, Absorption and Saturation,” Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.48-51.
• Andrea Phillips, “Bringing Your Story Into the Real World,” A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), pp. 209-222.

Time to meet with teams

Speaker: David Voss, Vice-President of Design, Mattel Toys

David Voss is Vice-President of Design at Mattel Toys in Los Angeles. He is an alum of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Week 13, Monday, November 18

Seriality

• Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic,” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 429-438.
• Neil Perryman, “Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling,” Convergence, February 2008, pp. 21-40.
• Mark J. P. Wolf, “More Than a Story: Narrative Threads and Narrative Fabric,” Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (London: Routledge, 2013) pp. 198-225.
• Sam Ford, “U.S. Soap Operas” (Work in Progress)
• Elena Levine, “’What the Hell Does TIIC Mean?’: Online Content and the Struggle to Save Soaps,” in Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik, and C.Lee Harrington (eds.) The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), pp. 201-218.
• Andrea Phillips, “Conveying Action Across Multiple Media,” A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), pp.  93-102.

Prof. Jenkins check-in with teams

Speaker: Katie Elmore Mota, Executive Producer, East Los High

Katie Elmore Mota is CEO of PRAJNA Productions: Stories with Social Relevance, a Los Angeles-based production company that is focused on creating cutting edge television/transmedia programming that is socially relevant for the Americas and beyond. PRAJNA specializes in the development and production of top-rated dramatic series that address a wide array of social and health issues. Prior to founding PRAJNA, Katie served as Vice President of Communications and Programs for Population Media Center, an international NGO
specializing in entertainment-education, for more than 6 years. At Population Media Center, Katie oversaw the design, development, and management of numerous programs using media for social change around the world. Katie was also Executive Producer for a cutting edge new series that takes place in East Los Angeles called, ‘East Los High’ that will go to air in 2013. She also produced a 70-episode novela with MTV for all of Latin America called ‘Ultimo Año,’ which will premier in the US in February 2013.

Week 14, Monday, November 25

Subjectivity And Performance

• Henry Jenkins, “‘We Had So Many Stories to Tell’: The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, Dec. 3, 2007
• M. J. Clarke, “Tentpole TV: The Comic Book,” Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp.27-61.
• Andrea Phillips, “Online, Everything is Characterization,” A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), pp. 83-92.
• Sam Ford, “World Wrestling Entertainment: A Case Study,” (Work in Progress).

Time to work with teams

Week 15, Monday, December 2

Final Presentations

Is This the End of Television As We Know It?

The Future of Television- Annenberg Innovation Lab Summit from Annenberg Innovation Lab on Vimeo.

This video captures a really extraordinary and timely conversation that was recently hosted by the Annenberg Innovation Lab as part of its 2013 research summit. The panel was called "Transmedia and the Future of Television," but it was really much more focused on exploring the future of television -- particularly the future of the "program bundle" at a time of tremendous transition in the ways television operates within our culture. (If you want to know more about the research we are doing on transmedia, check out the "T is For Transmedia" report which the Innovation Lab released a few months ago in cooperation with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center).

I was moderator and the panelists were:

• Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Professional Practice, Journalism, USC
• Hardie Tankersley, VP of Platforms and Innovation, Fox Broadcasting
• Aaron DeBevoise, Executive Vice President, Network Programming, Machinima
• Howard T. Stein, Strategist for Entertainment, Facebook Inc.

The concept of "bundling" -- that is, the selling of a package of networks to subscribers rather than offering them a la carte -- has been a foundation of the cable television industry over the past several decades: cable companies advertise based on the number of channels they offer, lesser interest networks survive because they are attached to high interest networks, and industry insiders claim that this is an approach that supports diversity. Others argue that bundling is to television which block booking was to the Hollywood studio era and that sooner or later, disagregation, which has hit the music and newspaper industries, will hit television also. Part of the premise of the panel was that events over the past year or so have been transformative in how television content gets funded, produced, and distributed, and how we consume it. Part of the goal of the panel was to get people from journalism, from the television industry, and from some of the emerging digital challengers to talk about these changes and how they feel they will impact the future of the medium.

What follows are some of the key indicators that the nature of television is undergoing some radical shifts as we write (some of them are discussed here, some did not get talked about because of time limits, and some have occurred since the conference, but they all represent good background for watching this session).

• YouTube announces that 100 media companies and celebrities have signed up to launch their own channels for content distribution and the company has solicited a broader and more diverse group of people to curate their own playlists, directing attention on content which Wired describes as having a “cable feel” but being “way more niche than cable ever could.”

• Surpassing the speed and scope of the earlier Susan Boyle phenomenon, Kony 2012,  a 30 minute documentary about child soldiers in Africa, reaches more than 77 million views in under four days through grassroots circulation, drawing more eyeballs that week than the highest rated television series on American television and the top grossing Hollywood box office hit that week, combined. Its success has since been followed by the global circulation of Psy’s “Gangem Style,” which has helped to introduce KPop content into the U.S. Market.

• Hulu is offering an extensive array of international television programs as exclusive online content to their subscribers, suggesting that national borders are increasingly arbitrary in terms of television consumption, even for U.S. consumers.

• Netflix commissions House of Cards, based on their insights into the tastes of their consumers, releasing a seasons worth of episodes at once to encourage binge viewing. Netflix also brings back Arrested Development, suggesting there is life on the web after cancelation for cult shows.

• Rob Thomas finances the production of a new Veronica Mars film at least partially on the basis of funds raised from fans via Kickstarter, breaking all records by raising more than 2 million dollars worth of production costs in a single day. (See the discussion of these developments I ran here on the blog a few weeks ago)

• Amazon announces that it is commissioning eleven pilots for production as web-based television series, with the pilots to be available to the public, which will help decide which ones will go into full production.

• Some media observers note that brands may have gained greater advantage over their spontaneous social media responses during the Super Bowl blackout than they did for their paid advertising during the event. In any case, most of the brands now release their spots to YouTube and other video sharing sites prior to the Super Bowl event itself.

• According to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.”

• A federal appeals court in New York upholds a lower court ruling in favor of Aereo, Barry Diller's Internet startup company, which streams content from local stations via the internet without compensating the original rights holders.
• Cablevision and Verizon have filed legal action challenging the bundling of television networks as an unreasonable constraint on trade and a threat to innovation.

• Facebook invests heavily in becoming the central vehicle for supporting mobile television around the world.

• Participant Media announces that their new television network, Pivot, will be available to "cordcutters" through a mobile app, whether or not they subscribe to cable television.
• Prospect Park has brought former ABC soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, from cancelation via web distribution.

Taken collectively, these shifts represent a significant tipping point in terms of how television is produced, distributed, and consumed. Does this spell the end of television as we know it? What happens when "television" is less a technology than a set of programming practices? What happens when more people "cut the cord" or when the industry no longer depends on the "bundle"? What happens when the intensity of fan response may become as important as the quantity of viewers in shaping which programs remain in production?

Videos for Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

On behalf of the conference organizers, I am proud to be able to share with you today the videos of our April 12 Transmedia Hollywood 4 conference. As many regular readers know, this event is run jointly by myself, representing USC's Cinema School, and Denise Mann, representing our counterparts at UCLA and it is funded by a grant from the Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation. This year's focus was on models of social change, and we were excited to see a conversation emerge across the four panels, starting with panel 1's focus on the community outreach efforts of major brands and studios, panel 2's focus on smaller scale transmedia projects and entertainment education, panel 3's attention to grassroots activist efforts, and panel 4's consideration of young entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Each of the panels is interesting in its own right, but those who attended the event agreed that there was something magical about how the parts came together as a whole this year. I want to specially think David McKenna who worked around the clock to get these videos up and out to the world in record time. Enjoy. Panel 1 Revolutionary Advertising: Cultivating Cultural Movements In the web 2.0 era, as more and more millennials acquire the tools of participatory culture and new media literacy, some of this cohort are redirecting their one-time leisure-based activities into acts of community-based, grassroots social activism. Recognizing the power of the crowd to create a tipping point in brand affiliation, big media marketers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and members of the Madison Avenue advertising community, are jumping on board these crowdsourcing activities to support their respective industries. In other words, many of the social goals of grassroots revolutionaries are being realigned to serve the commercial goals of brand marketers. In the best-case scenarios, the interests of the community and the interests of the market economy align in some mercurial fashion to serve both constituencies. However, in the worst case scenario, the community-based activism fueling social movements is being redirected to support potato chips, tennis shoes, or sugary-soda drinks. Brand marketers are intrigued with the power and sway of social media, inaugurating any number of trailblazing forms of interactive advertising and branded entertainment to replace stodgy, lifeless, 30 second ads. These cutting edge madmen are learning how to reinvent entertainment for the participatory generation by marrying brands to pre-existing social movements to create often impressive, well-funded brand movements like Nike Livestrong, or Pepsi Refresh. Are big media marketers subsuming the radical intent of certain community-based organizations who are challenging the status quo by redirecting them into unintentional alliance with big business or are they infusing these cash-strapped organizations with much needed funds and marketing outreach? Today’s panel of experts will debate these and other issues associated with the future of participatory play as a form of social activism.Todd CunninghamFormerly, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Insights and Research at MTV Networks.

Denise Mann (Moderator)

Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Associate Professor, Head of Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Rob Schuham CEO, Action Marketing

Michael Serazio Author, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing

Alden E. Stoner VP, Social Action Film Campaigns, Participant Media

Rachel Tipograph Director, Global Digital and Social Media at Gap Inc.

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change. Panel 1 - Revolutionary Advertising: Creating Cultural Movements from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 2 Transmedia For a Change

Hollywood’s version of transmedia has been preoccupied with inspiring fan engagement, often linked to the promotional strategies for the release of big budget media. But, as transmedia has spread to parts of the world which have been dominated by public service media, there has been an increased amount of experimentation in ways that transmedia tactics can be deployed to encourage civic engagement and social awareness. These transmedia projects can be understood as part of a larger move to shift from understanding public media as serving publics towards a more active mission in gathering and mobilizing publics. These projects may also be understood as an extension of the entertainment education paradigm into the transmedia realm, where the goal shifts from informing to public towards getting people participating in efforts to make change in their own communities. In some cases, these producers are creating transmedia as part of larger documentary projects, but in others, transmedia is making links between fictional content and its real world implications.

Panelists Henry Jenkins (Moderator) Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School for Communication

Katerina Cizek Filmmaker-in-Residence, National Film Board, Canada

Katie Elmore Mota Producer, CEO of PRAJNA Productions

Sam Haren Creative Director, Sandpit

Mahyad Tousi Founder, BoomGen Studios

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change. Panel 2 - Transmedia for a Change from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 3: Through Any Media Necessary: Activism in a DIY Culture A recent survey released by the MacArthur Foundation found that a growing number of young people are embracing practices the researchers identified as “participatory politics”: “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” These forms of politics emerge from an increasingly DIY media culture, linked in important ways to the practices of Makers, Hackers, Remix Artists and Fan Activists. This panel will bring together some key “change agents,” people who are helping to shape the production and flow of political media, or who are seeking to better understand the nature of political participation in an era of networked publics. Increasingly, these new forms of activism are both transmedia (in that they construct messages through any and all available media) and spreadable (in that they encourage participation on the level of circulation even if they do not always invite the public to help create media content).

Panelists:

Megan M. Boler Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education OISE/University of Toronto

Marya Bangee Community Organizing Residency (COR) Fellow, OneLA, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)

Erick Huerta Immigrant’s rights activist

Jonathan MacIntosh Pop Culture Hacker and Transformative Storyteller

Sangita Shreshtova (Moderator) Research Director of Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism

Elisabeth Soep Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio-Youth Media International

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change. Panel 3 - By Any Media Necessary: Activism in a DIY Culture from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Panel 4 The e-Entrepreneur as the New Philanthropist Nonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters. While the boomers treated the cultural movements of the late sixties as a cause, today’s e-citizens are treating their social activism as a brand. They are selling social responsibility as if it were a commodity or product, using the same strategies that traditional business men and women used to sell products.

Sarah Banet-Weiser Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and Department of American Studies and Ethnicity

Sean D. Carasso Founder, Falling Whistles

Yael Cohen Founder/CEO, Fuck Cancer

Ann Pendleton-Jullian (Moderator) Professor, Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University, and Distinguished Visting Professor, Georgetown University

Milana Rabkin Digital Media Agent

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change. Panel 4, The e-Entrepreneur as the New Philanthropist from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About The Future of Television (Final Installment)

Suzanne Scott: Thanks, AJ, for doing the heavy lifting by synthesizing the tensions emerging out of this conversation, and for tackling the industrial context. You’re absolutely right, fans and producers both know the score, and I think it’s vital to acknowledge fan agency in this discussion, despite my qualms about how the campaign frames fan participation and labor.  That said, I’d add a couple of corollaries to the core tensions you’ve identified above, drawing on the framing of fans across the past few exchanges.

First, I want to revisit Maurício’s point about the ultimate “winner” of the shifting power dynamics between media audiences, producers, and distributors being the story itself.  Both Maurício and Henry make a strong case for the how this emerging model might be most beneficial for liminal producers and properties, those that don’t fall neatly into the categories of “mainstream” or “independent” production.  But there’s a catch with fan-funded stories, and it’s already visible in the discourses around the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.  It’s baked into the FAQ’s nod to shipping and fan expectations (see image), and it’s directly addressed in this remark from Thomas after the success of the campaign:

“I had some desire, as a filmmaker, to take Veronica in a slightly new direction and do something adventurous with her. Or, there's the ‘give the people what they want’ version. And I think partly because it's crowd-sourced, I'm going with the ‘give the people what they want’ version. It's going to be Veronica being Veronica, and the characters you know and love. Certainly, I think I can make a fun, great movie out of that, and I'm excited about that, but it was a creative debate I had with myself, and I finally made the decision that I'm happy with it, to go with, ‘Let's not piss people off who all donated. Let's give them the stuff that I think that they want in the movie.’”

It’s the “give them the stuff that I think they want” that troubles the notion that story emerges the clear “winner” in this particular case.  Whether Thomas is justifiably hedging his bets in response to the intense scrutiny that has accompanied the campaign’s success (“If the movie ultimately sucks, don’t blame me, my vision was hindered by fan service…after all, they paid for it…”) is beside the point.  To return to the first tension AJ identified, fan “satisfaction” is clearly the central concern here, but it’s ultimately framed as a potential detriment to Thomas’ creative control.  There is something empowering about the fact that, in Maurício’s terms, we can now frame fans as studios.  But what I think might be getting lost here is the fact that fans are independent creators too, and it’s often their dissatisfaction with a story, or the industrial structures and strictures that limit it, that drives their textual production.  Henry’s right that fans will always be read, first and foremost, through an economic lens.  But, fans aren’t just storybuyers, they’re storytellers.  They make their own satisfaction.

On a second and related point, you all make a compelling case for how distribution on Netflix, or similar platforms, might help reshape industrial investments in media properties, encourage experimentation with transmedia or non-linear textualities, and cater to pre-existing fannish consumption patterns such as binge watching. Our conceptual understanding of what “television” is (who produces and distributes it, and where, when and how we consume it) continues to be radically reimagined in the post-network era.  Within the Netflix television model, the television temporalities of seriality and seasonality are effectively eradicated. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but I do wonder how these new “telelvision” models might fundamentally alter our conception of television fandom.

If fans produce their richest work in the gaps and margins of a television text, they’ve also historically used the temporal gaps and margins between episodes and seasons to their advantage.  I return, time and again, to Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures and his useful notion of “just-in-time” fandom to describe how fan practices have “become increasingly enmeshed within the rhythms and temporalities of broadcasting” (178).  Moreover, Hills cautioned (back in 2002, no less), that eradicating time lags function “ever more insistently to discipline and regulate the opportunities for temporally-licensed ‘feedback,’ and the very horizons of the fan experience” (179).  So, what happens when we begin to reconceptualize the afterlife for cult television series strictly as films, or in one large seasonal installment with no lag time between episodes?  The pleasures of television fandom are deeply tied to its form, and the impact of these shifts deserves further consideration.

My concern here isn’t just the horizons of the fan experience, but the horizons of the industrial and cultural framing of fans and fan participation. Whether we’re talking about fan-funded film extension of a cult television series, or an entire new season of a cult show dropping on Netflix, these temporal horizons are potentially less generative for fans, which in turn might make it increasingly difficult to discursively shift our understanding of them as producers of anything but capital.  If I’m being totally honest, as a Veronica Marsfan, what I really want is another season of Veronica Mars.  And as an Arrested Development fan, I will absolutely binge watch the new season (and, let’s be real, I’ll binge watch the prior three seasons as an amuse bouche the day before the launch).

Understandably, we all want to focus on what we’re gaining.  I’m admittedly more interested in what’s potentially being lost or overlooked, but I don’t want that emphasis to be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm about these developments.  I do think they have game-changing potential, particularly as the beginnings of a creators’ rights movement.  I just worry that fans’ legacy as creators in their own right will once again be obscured in favor of celebrating industrially sanctioned modes of fan engagement.

Mauricio Mota:

From all of our contributions so far, the ones that mostly intrigued me were the ones related to roles (fans, producers, distributors) and business models.

And both rely on a discussion that, if not well explored, can become a "chicken or the egg" equation.

Some questions to provoke that discussion:

Would Veronica Mars raise all that money on Kickstarter if it was an independent movie from a new director with an unknown actress about an unknown character?

Do we really need algorithms to figure out that BBC Format + David Fincher + Kevin Spacey + Washington politics is a success formula for House of Cards?

Is 60 thousand people as a Box Office number for a movie a sufficient number for a studio to green light to produce it?

When fans "invest" or donate for IP development and or production they are looking for some sort of creative control or ownership or just wanting the story to come to life?

We are entering - with or without the help from the Studios - an era of what we like to name as  "Grassroots Blockbusting": where IPs are nurtured to the ground up and more independent of the "normal" way of becoming a success. All Studios have what we name "Dormant IPs" - stories that have already a whole world built, good story arches and some sort of audience built through generations. But very few of these IPs (and even less Studios) are being developed in a way that allows them to become something profitable and successful.

Unfortunately it is still naive to come to a studio or any big show runner in town and tell them to "hand over IP". This is not only a conversation about studios focusing on blockbusters and mainstream stories because of shareholders. They are also investing on their libraries and keeping as much control of that IP as possible. Their framework is built around owning as much % of the IPs as possible since the same framework is built around giving more power and control for the part that invests more to make a story happen. And although roles are blurring,  very few creators can say they can make their own shows without a major investment from a studio.

In Brazil, the Government is making an immense effort to grow our TV industries by creating a new law that makes every cable channel to invest massively on original content produced by Brazilian companies (like mine). It is a huge achievement but it has also been very tricky and challenging for the producers to convince studios and networks ( still the most important distribution channels) to give up on a big percentage of an IP they would air because of that new law. Simply because it forces them to not own majority of brazilian original content. So, better said than done.

However, there are independent funds - in the US, Latin America and Asia - that are starting to invest into new green IPs or buying turnaround scripts from studios/production companies to re-start them from the ground using transmedia and the digital tools to start them small and sustainable. Like I said before, lines are blurred, roles are confused and money and knowledge about what works is more democratized.

The existing cases we have been discussing are actually good starters for a possible different model where fans and creators are closer by sharing a common dream and making it happen. And by doing so more and more the Studio system will then have new competitors among the same people they see as consumers. Which is a good thing since humans and companies tend to pay more attention to things and people that threat them than to people that they take for granted. And to AJ's points looks like creators and fans are paying more attention to what is happening around them.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.

Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation on the Future of Television (Part Two)

Suzanne Scott:

Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to this conversation.  I’ve been attempting to work through my ambivalent response to the Veronica Mars kickstarter for the past few days, particularly where it bumps up against my unadulterated fannish glee that Netflix Saved Our Bluths.  Two of my favorite cult TV series are being revived.  It should feel like a win-win, but I can’t shake this sense that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter (or fan-ancing generally) sets a problematic precedent for what constitutes fan “participation.”  Or, to AJ’s point, my concern doesn’t stem from the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, or even the value that fans are generating from this kickstarter campaign, but how producers are increasingly and strategically generating value from fans.

My work broadly engages with industry-fan relationships within convergence culture, and how those relationships are gendered.  In particular, I’m interested in which types of fans and modes of fannish engagement are valued, normalized, or incorporated, and which remain marginalized or are subject to containment.  I’ve written in the past about how industrial efforts to engage fan culture often function as re-gifting economies, or planned communities that strive to “repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new, something unwanted (or unwieldy) as something desirable (or controllable, or profitable).”  I’ve also blogged about the problematic legitimization discourses that surround industrial efforts to co-opt fan practices and retain ownership over fan texts.  Many, myself included, are inclined to view the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a prime example of fan empowerment (or, in Henry’s terms, as a techno-realization of a longstanding fannish frustration with audience measurement metrics, and a desire to revive media properties that were cut down in their prime).  But, I still worry about what it means to discursively celebrate fans’ power in purely economic terms.

I’m a frequent donor to Kickstarter campaigns, especially those like Womanthology or Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games that are attempting to make a transformative intervention into media industries and fannish subcultures that can be unwelcoming to women.  I’m also all for using Kickstarter to launch creator-owned projects.  For example, I get why Batgirl writer Gail Simone, who was recently fired and rehired by DC Comics after a massive pushback from fans, would want to kickstart a graphic novel where she’ll have full control over the creative direction and, more importantly, the intellectual property rights. I’ll probably pull the trigger and donate to the Veronica Mars movie before the days tick down to zero…or, let’s be realistic, probably before the end of this conversation.  But it’s not because I want a t-shirt, or a digital download of the finished product from Flixter, Warner Bros.’ proprietary video platform.  What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass that it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents.

As AJ rightly notes above, crowdfunding may not be the great equalizer, but it is a vital emergent tool that allows minority voices and audiences that are too often underrepresented by media industries to carve out a space to be heard.  The figures that you’re tracking on your blog are vitally important.  They aren’t just dollars, they’re pointed messages sent to media industries by media audiences.  Can we view the massive success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a call to television executives that there’s a market to be tapped for programs with compelling, complex young female protagonists?  Hopefully.  Would I feel better if Rob Thomas had Kickstarted an original web series, where the profits would be funneled into developing the next Veronica Mars, rather than into Warner Bros.’ coffers?  Absolutely. It's the slippage between crowdsourcing and outsourcing financial risk here that I find troubling.

Mauricio Mota:

Ok, here comes the black sheep-capitalist storyteller from Brazil ;-)

I was born - literally - at the intersection between Academia, Commerce, Storytelling and Marxism. While my parents were academics and Marxists during the 70-80's, my mom was a fiction writer trying to figure out how to keep working, teaching, studying, paying bills and finally get picked by a publisher to bring her words to the world. The funny thing of that intersection is that till I was 8 I thought one of my grandfathers was Karl Marx - because of a picture my parents had in the home office. But actually my grandfather was considered the Latin-American Shakespeare.

That mix of backgrounds, struggles and opportunities trained my eyes and perceptions (with some scars and learnings) to always pay deep attention to the relationship between Creators (Storytellers), Distributors (Storysellers) and Readers (Story…buyers?) and to keep on the pace around one of the most fascinating dynamics ever. In the past, the roles were so clear, the imposed status quo was so comfortable/a given and people in general were just having fun with their stories that the Veronica Mars/House of Cards models were impossible to imagine.

Kickstarter didn't invent crowdfunding for storytelling. Neither did Felicia Day or Joss Whedon. The most efficient systems of crowdfunding for storytelling that I ever seen in my life are the Catholic and the Evangelical Churches. People have been funding saints, bibles, sagas, music concerts, souvenirs or tokens for more than 2000 years. In Brazil, the evangelicals own one of the top three tv channels (where they air religious programs, produced telenovelas and bought series from the US like Veronica Mars). So the whole conversation about "exploring" fandom or using fans to fund a movie owned by a big studio is a little bit strange for me because generally people want to watch and share an experience around a story: be it that story about a guy who could regenerate fast (no, I'm not talking about Wolverine, I'm talking about Jesus), Veronica Mars or about an elite group that uses people's trust to do whatever they want (I'm talking about House of Cards).

The line between owning something and owing was completely blurred when the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign started. Many fans donated something because they feel such an emotional connection to that cannon that gave them so many good times that they feel the owe something to it and they want more of the pleasure that story gives -- with or without having something material back (a shirt or equity). It is the difference between Profit Sharing and Sharing Collective Value.

The roles are also blurred, thanks G'd -- both on Veronica Mars and House of Cards. And today I'm able to fund the stories my company creates from different sources: fans, non-profits, global advertisers, studios, networks or a toy company.

Because the Veronica Mars campaign is like advance money given by fans to the creator that implicitly says: "Hey, here is the money I would already buy for this and that, so now go make that extension so I can have the storytelling experience that no money nor a shirt can give me. Oh, I can also make it with my Mastercard and don't need to wait for someone to decide to fund it?". Instead of investing money on the IP after it airs, fans are doing it before.

Everyone, on the House of Cards case, was mesmerized by two things: launching 13 episodes at once on Netflix and the fact that some of the decisions to produce were based on algorithms. In the end of the day, the "series marathon" culture is something that is part of the fabric of pop culture consumption; Kevin Spacey is a great actor and amazing villain; politics brings eyeballs, fans add value whenever they watch something and the British version was already really good. If we build it, they will come. And with David Fincher behind, maybe (just maybe), the execution will be good. ;-)

By the way, The funders behind House of Cards are also "outside" the regular model as the Kickstarter examples: Goldman Sachs, WPP Group (one of the largest advertising groups in the world) and AT&T.

Netflix move to offer exclusive content at once was brave and risk taking strategy in a town where networks kill shows on episode 3. VOD changes the importance of focus groups and research to a level that makes me love where all this is going. Because so many amazing pilots or shows would have survived if Netflix, Amazong, Hulu and Kickstarter existed and gave that opportunity to fans, creators and last but not least, studios to make a decision.

Yes, studios.

Because everybody loves to blame the Studios for Hollywood's lack of innovation. Being a Studio is HARD. Crowdfunding is also hard. But what happens next is the point I'm trying to make.

The Veronica Mars case will show how sending the gifts and tokens for all the 50k+ backers (including movie sessions into remote cities) is really, really, really hard to accomplish but a Studio knows how to make something like this happen. And before the tomatoes come, the discussion is not if the studios do it well or not, but they make it and they have a system. If fans, indies, academics and writers believe there are improvements to be made, fight for it or kickstart a project and start your own Studio. It is about re-allocation of power and responsibilities and not resetting a whole organism that has brought to the world amazing stories - including Veronica Mars.

The Studios used to have the formula of success. Using Henry's recent book as a reference, the formula was "If doesn't get picked by studio it is dead". Now it probably would be "If doesn't get picked, lets talk to the fans and other distribution channels" (not so charming as "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" but really fascinating).

Now nobody has is total control, decision-making power is more shared. But Studios/Networks still have the most efficient marketing and logistics machine in the world and they deserve their share. Fans and storytellers that know how to build their own micro-networks also deserve a share.

Fans are now Studios. Advertisers are Studios. Amazon is a studio. Netflix too.

So, the roles are not only changing, they are blurred and the winner is the story. Because generally we don't know what we want until a story is in front of us and we say: I want more of that. And I will pay with my time, my emotions, my network of friends and my money.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.

Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About the Future of Television (Part One)

Henry Jenkins: When I was writing Textual Poachers in the late 1980s, I stumbled across a fascinating scheme being floated by fans of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, Beauty and the Beast, a series with a very committed audience, but one that was small enough that the program was always in danger of being canceled. The fans were suggesting a plan where fans would pay into a fund that would cover the cost of the series production and then would received VHS tapes of episodes once they had been made. The fans rightly recognized that the Nielsen Ratings measured the scope of viewership but not its intensity, and that the scale of success demanded to stay on network television was considerably lower than what would be required to cover the costs of production. At the time, such plans were unlikely to succeed, given the nature of the media environment: they really did not have a robust method for collecting funds from dedicated fans, the producers would not have had a viable business model for proceeding under this unstable system, and the distribution of episodes via VHS was going to be clunky at best.

We flash forward two decades and recent events suggests we have moved dramatically closer to making such a scenario possible. First, we have seen Netflix become a producer and distributor of original television content -- programs that look and feel like network television (actually like HBO or AMC programming) but which are distributed digitally without ever being broadcast. Netflix's first venture in this direction was House of Cards, which seems to have attracted a very solid audience, and their second will be the relaunch of Arrested Development, a fan favorite series that Netflix has brought back after several years in limbo. We are seeing similar moves by Hulu and YouTube, both of which would like to get into the business of producing and distributing web-based television content.

And, then, we have seen Kickstarter emerge as a platform that, with the example of Veronica Mars, has demonstrated the possibilities of fan support pushing a once canceled program back into production -- in this case for the big screen. And for the Veronica Mars scheme to work, we have to assume there were behind the scenes discussions between Rob Thomas and Warner Brothers (which still owns the rights to Veronica Mars) that would allow them some basis of proceeding. We now are hearing that a range of other producers and show-runners are starting to explore whether they might deploy similar tactics to gain a second chance for their passion projects.

This week, I have gathered together three friends, who bring different kinds of expertise to thinking about the short term and long term implications of these developments.

Aymar  Jean “AJ” Christian:

Hello!

It’s been fascinating to see relationships between producers, fans and distributors reconfigured in digital marketplaces!

About a year before Kickstarter launched, I was drawn into the world of crowdfunding through Felicia Day. Day was a working actress with credits on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she decided she wasn’t ever going to get a leading role and showrunner status unless she did it herself. Intermittently unemployed as so many workers in Hollywood are, she wrote a pilot for The Guild, about a group of gamers, based on her experience playing World of Warcraft in between gigs. She and a skeleton crew produced most of the first season on a dime and then came to place a lot of indie producers find themselves: without funds to continue. But those few episodes had built a fan base, and, through a Paypal link on the show’s active website, she raised thousands to kick-start the rest. That early fan interest shocked the industry, distributors came calling, and The Guild found distribution through Microsoft, who was/is trying to build an entertainment platform outside of television. Day is now a huge source of inspiration within and outside the web television industry and a key brand ambassador for MSN.

In my years researching the “web series” or independent television market I’ve seen crowdfunding take a central place in show development (so much so I’ve tried to track it on my site). Series that built communities of fans early and quickly inevitably turned to crowdfunding. Soon shows targeting all sorts of groups dissatisfied with legacy television used sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to keep indie brands alive. Lesbian web series Anyone But Butraised over $30,000 for its third and final season; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl ($56,000, nearly twice the ask) for its second; The Outs (over $20,000, many times the ask), a gay-led show, did it in two rounds; last year brought Black & Sexy’s The Couple ($32,000) and Latino-focused show East WillyB ($51,000), not to mention the prodigious work of Freddie Wong, whose canny, Asian-American-led Video Game High School has crowdfunded over $1 million to date (season 1, season 2).

Raising money not only gave them funds to survive, and extra opportunities for press and marketing, they also let creators build a database of their strongest fans and supporters, who would then proselytize the show on social networks. This sometimes led to distribution and development deals with both online and on-air networks.

In short, crowdfunding causes us to rethink relationships in media industries, and think very specifically about the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, as a number of scholars are exploring, from Jason Mittell, to Michael Newman, to your work in Spreadable Media. For independent producers, crowdfunding rewards creators with a clear pitch to specific communities, who are in turn rewarded with a show conglomerates might be reluctant to green light. Of course, this kind of value is hard to sustain in our media landscape, and the fact that Veronica Marsraised several times more than most projects before it in 24 hours speaks to the kinds of value conglomerates are able to generate when they have already invested in marketing properties.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.

Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

He began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 15, when he developed a story-creation platform with writer Sonia Rodrigues. Used in over 4000 schools, it was licensed 8 times and used as a tool to facilitate innovation and creativity for  many top 500 companies and the UN.

Kickstart This!: Is The World Ready For a Nigerian Superhero?

 

Like many of my readers this week, I am enormously excited about the ground-breaking success of the Kickstarter campaign to get Veronica Mars into production as a feature film and what this means about the future relations between fans and producers of cult media. Next week, I am planning to run a extended conversation with some key thinking partners placing the Veronica Mars campaign (and Netflix's venture into original television content) into some perspective.

But I don't want us to forget that Kickstarter has been as powerful if not more so in helping to provide seed funds for independent artists of all kinds and as such, it has become a key vehicle for increasing the diversity of cultural production. My co-authors Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and I discuss Kickstarter in our book, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, alongside a range of other developments which are creating stronger bonds between independent artists and their supporters -- from pre-production through release.

Today, I want to put my weight behind an independent media property -- Spider Stories -- which was brought to my attention by a USC undergraduate, Charles Agbaje. The Agbaje Brothers (Charles and John) have been publishing independent comics under the Central City Tower label for several years now, and they are seeking funds to take their efforts to the next level -- developing a cartoon series which has its roots in traditional African folktales and myths, but which speaks to the genre expectations of our current pop cosmopolitan generation.

Here's how they describe the basic premise:

Spider Stories follows the tale of Princess Zahara who is thrown into hiding after the royal family is overthrown by a corrupt neighboring kingdom. While traveling with a misfit caravan of merchants she meets a wandering drummer griot who introduces her to the spirit world. Armed with a mystical staff, the fearless princess embarks on quest to reconnect with the spirits, reunite her homeland, and reclaim the throne.

We are developing an 11 minute animated pilot for a fantasy adventure series called Spider Stories. Your pledges will go towards funding a team of animators to get it done at a professional level of quality.

 They argue that fans of superhero comics have grown up on Norse myths (Thor) and Greek myths (Hercules); we are starting to see Japanese and Chinese folktales making their way into anime and manga, but that comics and animation have so far done  little to tap into the rich cultural traditions of Africa (with the possible exception of the recent revamp of The Black Panther at Marvel). The Agbaje Brothers have expressed concern with the fact that African-American youth are often cut off from their own cultural traditions and all of us receive a single-dimensional understanding of Africa (which many westerners see as a country rather than a continent with many diverse national traditions). However, they are also concerned that so often stories by and for African-Americans get cut off from the cultural mainstream and thus do not reach the largest possible audience. So they very much want to create something that speaks across racial and cultural divides.

If the art work and proof of concept videos they share on their Kickstarter page are any indication, this has the potential to be a spectacular project, and it is precisely the kind of production that Kickstarter was designed to support -- one which is unlikely to get very far with mainstream animation or comics producers unless they can demonstrate a broad range of support and can show the world what they can do. Let's see if we can give them their chance.

In some of their promotional materials, the brothers talk about how their experiences growing up together had shaped the kinds of stories they want to share through their work. I asked Charles to tell me more about these formative influences on their work:

The stories we made growing up span all kinds of sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero tales. We were first inspired by the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, and you can see early on we invented several mutant animals of our own. Later we were influenced by the wide variety of anime that hit in the late 90s, particularly shows that made their way onto Toonami. Dragonball Z, Gundam Wing, Tenchi and more were among our favorites. As video games became more sophisticated RPGs and Adventure game story-lines such as The Legend of Zelda also influenced our style. Throughout, the complexity and action in the DCAU such as Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and Justice League also contributed to our sensibilities.

We have our fair share of costumed superheroes such as the Storm Surfers, mutant animals like The Frogs, and classic swords and sorcery in Crimson Knight. Even though a lot of these characters started off fairly simple, some we've had in our minds literally since we were 5 years old, and the stories have since grown and matured.

Starting with Project 0 in 2010, we moved away from our old ideas and began to synthesize them into new properties that couldn't be so easily labeled. This also helped us as story tellers. In creating new stories we were able to critique them objectively without the nostalgia lens that would only really make sense to us. Project 0 is a mix of fantasy, sci-fi and adventure taking cues from a lot of our previous original properties, to as diverse sources of inspiration as Digimon and The Matrix.

Though we still plan to revist several of our age old stories, we are now moving forward with another new series called Spider Stories.

Spider too takes cues from a lot of our old ideas, and then more modern fantasies such as Avatar The Last Airbender or Nintendo's Fire Emblem. It takes the same grand scale epic appraoch to world building and story telling that fans around the world love to see. But it does it in an African inspired backdrop which, while there are a few out there, have never really been acknowledged by mainstream audiences. We're doing a lot of homework on African mythology and history. And we are always sure to consult our cultural experts, our parents, to make sure it stays authentic.

So often the depiction of blacks and Africans in the media is one of poverty, corruption, or ignorance. At its most positive, black characters are often sidekicks or best friends to the lead, and black culture is typically framed through an other-ed lens. Even when it isn't, such shows and movies are often relegated to niche markets and targeted so narrowly as 'black entertainment' that it may be alienating to non-black audiences.

We want Spider to really be a universal story. While it takes on African aesthetics and sensibilities, it is written to be accessible to all audiences regardless of ethnicity. It's pure fantasy, not historical fiction or an adaptation of an existing myth. We hope audiences will be able to relate to the characters as people first. The nods to culture and history should spark interest in fans to seek out and learn more about Africa on their own. Art is often a launching point for cultural exposure, and the more it's seen, the more normalized it becomes.

T is for Transmedia...

T is for Transmedia from Annenberg Innovation Lab on Vimeo.

Today, the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center announced the release of "T is for Transmedia: Learning Through Transmedia Play." The report is written by Becky Herr-Stephenson and Meryl Alper, under the supervision of Erin Reilly. This paper provides a much-needed guidebook to transmedia in the lives of children age 5-11 and its applications to storytelling, play, and learning. Building off of a review of the existing popular and scholarly literature about transmedia and children, this report identifies key links between transmedia and learning, highlights key characteristics of transmedia play, and presents core principles for and extended case studies of meaningful transmedia play experiences.

"We really have two goals for the report," says co-author Becky Herr-Stephenson. "Our first is to get educators thinking about how they might incorporate transmedia play into activities, lesson plans, or projects. Our second goal is to put the design recommendations before media makers in the hopes that the principles will reinforce the good work people are already doing as well as encourage others to bring play and learning to the forefront of their transmedia projects.”

“T is for Transmedia” is embedded below and is also available for download here.

I know that this report is going to generate a lot of interest from the transmedia enthusiasts and new media literacy educators who constitute this blog's most loyal readers, so to give you a taste of what to expect, I am sharing with you the introduction I contributed to this project.

There's a Monster at the End of This Report

There is a monster at the end of this report (well, maybe there is, but you won’t know for sure until you turn all of the pages and read what we have to say).

But, it is telling that most of you probably recognize this phrase as a reference to a classic children’s book, written by Jon Stone, illustrated by Michael Smollen, released in 1971 just a few years after Sesame Street debutted on PBS, and “starring lovable, furry old Grover.” Much has been made of the ways that Sesame Street reinvented children’s television, embracing rather than running away from the properties of its medium, incorporating tricks from advertising, parodies of popular culture, songs and skits, into something which encouraged the active engagement of its young viewers. Yet, far less has been made of the fact that Sesame Street from the very start encouraged its young fans to follow it across media platforms - from television to records, books, stuffed toys, public performances, feature films, and much more. Certainly, the then-Children’s Television Workshop’s steps in that direction were cautious, given the anxieties many parents have about the commercialization of children’s culture. But, over time, much of the American public came to embrace those experiments in transmedia storytelling as part of what made Sesame Street such a powerful learning system. In a 2007 online poll, the American Education Association voted The Monster At the End of This Book onto a list of “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children,” and a few years later, the School Library Journal gave it a prominent spot on its list of the Top 100 picture books.

Part of what makes The Monster so compelling is that it is as reflexive about the nature of the printed book as a medium as Sesame Street was about our experiences of watching and learning from television. Reading this book becomes a kind of play as children scream with a mixture of fear and delight as we turn each page, wondering when the scary monster is going to appear, only to discover that it is “lovable furry old Grover” who is the monster we warmly welcome at the end of the book. Grover tries to do everything he can to block us from turning the pages, from tying knots to constructing brick walls, from begging to harranging us, yet the desire to read overcomes all of the walls he might try to erect. The children’s book has long been a site for domestic performance, as parents and children alike try out different voices, make sound effects, respond with mock emotions, to the pictures on the page.

This book had effects which go beyond the printed page: Grover emerges as an early fan favorite on Sesame Street as his personality took shape across platforms. When young people pick up The Monster, they already know who Grover is, they know his back story, they understand his motivations, they identify with what he is feeling, and as a result, there is an immediacy about our experience of this book.

Predictably enough, Monster has in recent years evolved into a digital book, an interactive experience children on their iPad. We certainly do not want to exclude adults from the fun - reading books together across generation is perhaps the most powerful way to foster a deeper appreciation of the pleasures of reading. But, Sesame Street has always understood that children do not enjoy equal opportunities to learn. Some children are left on their own while their parents work long hours. Some parents do not have good models for active reading with their children and look for prompts that might allow them to learn how to play and perform and speculate around the printed page. The experience of an e-book version of Monster will ideally supplement and scaffold the experience of reading the traditional picture book, not replace it, but it also adds a new layer to the ever expanding “supersystem” which constitutes the world of Sesame Street. So does The Putamayo Kids Presents Sesame Street Playground, a CD/DVD set which shares with children songs from the many versions of the program which have been localized to languages and cultures around the world, and video clips featuring the original casts in India, Mexico, Russia, or South Africa. And Sesame Street, the longest street in the world, just keeps growing.

Today, we might describe Sesame Street as a transmedia experience - that concept did not exist in 1971 when Monster was first published. Transmedia is an idea that has come into sharper focus over the past decade, having emerged from active conversations between academic researchers, creative artists, policy makers, fan communities, anyone and everyone interested in the future of entertainment and storytelling. Transmedia, by itself, means “across media” and it describes any number of possible relationships which might exist between the various texts that constitute a contemporary entertainment franchise. Marsha Kinder (1991), a media scholar who has written extensively about children’s media, coined the term, “transmedia,” to refer to the “entertainment supersystem” which had emerged around characters such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Muppet Babies, or the Super Mario Brothers, as personalities and characters that move across media platforms, encouraging their fans to follow them where-ever they appeared. In my own work (Jenkins, 2006), I extended her concept to talk about transmedia storytelling, which refers to the systematic unfolding of elements of a story world across multiple media platforms, with each platform making a unique and original contribution to the experience as a whole.

Monster at the End of the Book builds off what we know of Grover on television but it creates a new kind of experience that takes advantage of the distinctive affordances of the printed book, which is designed to be read aloud in the child’s bedroom or playroom. Follow that Bird expands upon the time we get to spend with Big Bird while watching the television series in order to flesh out his backstory, situate him within a quest narrative, and suggest how much he means to the larger Sesame Street community. Neither example builds on extensive narrative information that must be remembered across different texts -- that would not necessarily be appropriate for younger viewers -- but it does reward fans who apply what they learned in one context to each new appearance of the characters.

Each of these texts, thus, contributes something to our knowledge of this fictional realm, and each takes advantage of those things their respective medium does best. We want the depiction of Oscar or Cookie Monster or the Count in a Sesame Street game to be consistent with what we see on television, but we also want the game to provide us with an interactive experience that is only possible in digital media. By combining media with different affordances, we create a more layered entertainment experience. Or at least, that’s the theory. A good transmedia narrative uses these various cross-platform extensions to flesh out the world, to extend the time line, to deepen our familiarity with the characters, and to increase our engagement.

With an educational property like Sesame Street, transmedia does something else - it reinforces the learning both by encouraging us to reread and re-experience a particularly pleasurable narrative (something, as we all know, kids are often inclined to do with little or no adult encouragement) and because they are invited to connect together pieces of information across multiple installments. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000) describes the original Sesame Street as “sticky,” suggesting that young people become so drawn to its vivid characters that they keep coming back for more and in the process, these repeated encounters reinforce what they learn from its curricular design.

Transmedia encourages additive comprehension. We learn something new as we follow the story across media. This distinguishes it from cross-media, which refers to the use of these other media platforms as simple delivery mechanisms for the same old content. So, if we watch Sesame Street online or on a DVD and change nothing else about the content, that’s cross-media. We might also distinguish transmedia from multimedia. Multimedia might use multiple kinds of media - words, pictures, sounds, videos - which are brought together in a single package: so, in the old days, there might be a CD-ROM developed around Sesame Street, where clicking a button opens us up to a range of different kinds of media. In transmedia, there’s something powerful about how the reader is incited to search out dispersed content and reassemble it into a meaningful mental model.

In a hunting society, children learn by playing with bows and arrows. In an information society, they learn to play with information. That’s part of why we think transmedia learning is such a potentially transformative concept. A science fiction writer has to construct a world which can extend across media platforms, but there already exist many rich worlds - the world under the sea, the universe beyond the Earth, the ancient world, the people who live on the other side of the planet -- which are central to our desired curriculum. Perhaps, the best way to learn about them is to explore their stories, their environments, across media platforms, much as we acquire a deeper affection for Grover through repeated encounters.

Like any other kind of storytelling, transmedia is something which can be done well or badly. You can be attentive to the possibilities of expanding a story in new directions or you can simply slap a logo on something and pretend like it’s part of the same franchise. Transmedia can be enriching or exploitative, can be motivated by the crudest of economic motives or shaped by the most cutting edge learning science. But, when transmedia is done well, it creates a deeply engaging, immersive experience, which multiplies the number of learning opportunities.

Young people do not simply consume transmedia narratives; rather, transmedia encourages playful participation. In my book, Convergence Culture (2006), I talk about attractors (things that draw together an audience) and activators (elements which give the audience something to do, especially in a network society, ways to interact with each other around the shared content). Narrative-inflected play is hardly new. Go back and reread the great children’s books of the 19th century. There’s Meg in Little Women developing a backyard game based on Pilgrim’s Progress. There’s Tom Sawyer in Mark Twain’s novel pretending to be a pirate or Robin Hood. There’s Anne, she of the Green Gables, who re-enacts the story of the Lady in the Lake. Each of these books remind us that children before the era of mass media actively engaged with stories told to them by adults and transformed them into resources for their own creative play.

In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional forms of storytelling, but children’s play with narrative remained meaningful as a way of trying on adult roles and expanding core stories that matter to them. And this is what this report means by transmedia play. Certainly, adults have some legitimate worries about commercial media “colonizing” their children’s imaginations, but keep in mind that the human imagination feeds upon the culture around it and children show enormous capacity to re-imagine the stories that enter their lives.

Transmedia encourages this kind of creative reworking. The scattered fragments of a transmedia story are like pieces of a puzzle; they encourage curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and problem solving. Transmedia’s process of dispersal creates gaps which require our active speculation: some call this negative capability. Transmedia processes show us that there are more than one way to tell story, that there is always more we can learn about the characters and their world, and that represents a provocation to imagine aspects of these characters that have not yet made it to the screen. Young people make these stories their own through their active imaginations. The stuffed toy becomes their avatar: they use it to work through their problems; they use it as a vehicle for their emotions; they project their own personality onto the plush or for that matter, they use it a a stand in for some other powerful figure in their life. For a short moment, as they are reading about or manipulating Grover, they become the monster, and again, that’s a valuable experience. The child psychologist Bruno Betellheim (1976) tells us that young people need to read stories which acknowledge the darker sides of life, because children know that they are not always good and they need resources for thinking through how they should respond to the things that frighten them in the real world.

So, there you have the core concepts of this report - transmedia stories, transmedia play, transmedia learning. Put them all together and something magical happens.

Transmedia is not the monster at the end of the book; it’s not something you need to be afraid of encountering. So far, we know more about transmedia in entertainment and branding contexts than in relation to learning. That’s not a reason to take off running down the street. That’s a reason for people who care deeply about insuring the most diverse learning opportunities for our children to take transmedia seriously, to try to understand how to link multiple media together to create new pedagogical experiences, to be ready to explore how we might play together around the materials of a transmedia franchise, to invite children to explore what it means to read a story across the borders and boundaries between different texts and different media. This report offers some rich exemplars of groups who are doing well by children through their creation of powerful and transformative transmedia experiences, and it offers some design principles so that educators and producers might generate more meaningful, even mind blowing, transmedia experiences for the coming generation.

Transmedia lc3 dan 05_a final 144 from amandafo

How Sound Can "Unify" Transmedia: Christy Dena on AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS

Today, we are going to continue this week's focus on transmedia with the following guest post by Christy Dena. Dena's PhD dissertation transmedia really put her on the map for those of us who closely follow developments in this space. Dena is a gifted designer/theorist or theorist/designer depending on one's priorities at a given moment: someone who has a deep knowledge of the historic evolutions of theories of multimedia, intermedia, and transmedia, as she aptly demonstrates in the piece below, someone who can move between avant grade experiments and the commercial mainstream in her consideration of examples, and someone who can have a model for a transmedia design document on one page and a discussion of renaissance theories of art on the next. Transmedia has become a place which attracts artists who are also theorists, designers who are also intellectuals, and it has emerged through conversation across all of these spaces. I have come to think of Dena as someone who consistently sharpens my own thinking, since she is unafraid to critique anyone but also knows of what she speaks. You can read her PhD dissertation here.

I recently learned that she is seeking crowd funding for an exciting new project -- AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS -- which explores the use of sound -- including something like radio drama -- as the center piece of a transmedia franchise. It is the kind of project that needs to be done as a thought/design experiment that will help us to better understand some of the potentials of transmedia, but it is also the kind of project that it will be difficult to fund through commercial or state sponsorship. The crowd funding scheme is in its final hours and they are painfully close to meeting their goals, so I'm rushing this post out today in hopes some of you will read it, help spread the word about an interesting project, and kick in a little cash to support a worthy cause.

Here's where you can go to help Christy meet her goals.

Everything below here is Christy Dena describing -- in her own words -- the thought process that led to the development of this project. Dramatically, she wrote this on a laptop with dwindling battery juice in a house that had lost its power somewhere in Australia. Or, at least, that's the story.

HOW SOUND CAN "UNIFY" TRANSMEDIA by Christy Dena

I’d like to take the opportunity with this guest post to talk about how my research into transmedia has greatly influenced my creative project AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. Here's what I like about where transmedia is moving now -- we’re seeing both practitioners and researchers take on their own approaches more and more. Not everyone is thinking the same way about transmedia. While in the past this was a sign that no-one had a clue what was going on, it is now a sign that people are making it their own. There are universals that can help newcomers understand the area, but when transmedia is under your skin, once it is a relatively unconscious activity, we start to see personal difference. This is because people are bringing their own influences and experiences to the table. We’re seeing more of themselves in their works rather than the imitative approach that is necessary when learning. So this post is about some of the influences on my transmedia thinking.

One of the criticisms of transmedia that raises it’s head every now and then is the idea that fragmentation is bad, that transmedia does away with wholeness. So during my PhD research, I trekked back to look at the notion of “dramatic unities” -- an approach to theatre that began with Aristotle and was extended later by Italian scholars. Dramatic unities includes unity of action (plot), time, and place:

Aristotle argues that tragedy must have a “unity of plot” (Aristotle 1997 [c330B.C.], 16). What this unity of plot means is that not all “incidents in one man’s life” should be included, for they “cannot be reduced to unity” (ibid.).

Unity of time, on the other hand, was introduced by Cintio Giraldi in 1554 with his Discorso sulle Comedie e sulle Tragedie publication, where he “converted Aristotle’s statement of an historical fact”—that “Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun” (Aristotle 1997 [c330B.C.], 9)—“into dramatic law’ (Spingarn 1963 [1899], 57).

And then it was Ludovico Castelvetro in his 1570 edition of Poetics, who introduced the theory of unity of place based on the idea of the unity of time (ibid., 61). It was considered proper dramatics, that a whole month of actions should not be represented (performed) in two or three hours. “This principle,” Spingarn explains, “led to the acceptance of the unity of place”: “Limit the time of the action to the time of representation, and it follows that the place of action must be limited to the place of representation” (ibid.).

As Gilbert Highet further explains, the “action of the play must seem probable,” and it “will not seem probable if the scene is constantly being changed” (Highet 1985, 143). In the end, scholarship on dramatic unities was “an attempt to strengthen and discipline the haphazard and amateurish methods of contemporary dramatists—not simply in order to copy the ancients, but in order to make drama more intense, more realistic, and more truly dramatic” (ibid.). So the notion is that a performance will be better if it has a unity of action, time, and place -- and that means focusing on small events that are linked by probability, at a certain time, and place.

Anyone who has worked on a transmedia project -- whether it be an alternate reality game or book, TV, film, and console experience -- knows that it is difficult to have your audience or players engage with all the multiple texts or touch-points you create. I remember Evan Jones observing in the early days that we could expect about 10% of our audience to continue to each touch-point. And so for some, this difficulty is in some way associated with the notion of unity. People cannot experience unity if the media texts are fragmented across time and space (and probably include many plot elements). But I’ve chosen to see this as a design challenge rather than impossibility. How can we have unity across media?

To answer this question, the other research area I looked at was “intermedia”. In 1965, Higgins introduced the term intermedia to “offer a means of ingress into works which already existed, the unfamiliarity of whose forms was such that many potential viewers, hearers, or readers were ‘turned off’ by them” (Higgins 2001 [1965], 52). It is a significant notion to discuss because its introduction coalesced a long-standing aesthetic approach, as Jack Ox and Jacques Mandelbrojt explain in their introduction to the special issue on intermedia in Leonardo: “Higgins did not invent these doings—many artists before him had achieved ‘intermediality’—but he named the phenomenon and defined it in a way that created a framework for understanding and categorizing a set or group of like-minded activities” (Ox and Mandelbrojt 2001, 47). Now, as Fluxus artist and theorist Ken Friedman explains, Higgins coined intermedia “to describe the tendency of an increasing number of the most interesting artists to cross the boundaries of recognized media or to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered art forms” (Friedman [1998]). Intermedia works brought together what had been artificially estranged:

Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the Renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought—categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers—which we call the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. […] We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant. (Higgins 2004 [1965])

The creation of works that combine conventionally separate artforms and/or media is a somewhat political as well as aesthetic act:

Thus the happening developed as an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies between collage, music and the theater. It is not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs. The concept itself is better understood by what it is not, rather than what it is. Approaching it, we are pioneers again, and shall continue to be so as long as there’s plenty of elbow room and no neighbors around for a few miles. (ibid.)

Not all practices that bring together different media and artforms are intermedia though. Higgins distinguishes between mixed media and intermedia according the degree of integration. Opera is an example of mixed media for it has “music, the libretto, and the mise-en-scene” which are “quite separate: at no time is the operagoer in doubt as to whether he is seeing the mise-en-scene, the stage spectacle, hearing the music, etc.” (ibid.). On the other hand, intermedia practices involve a fusion to the degree that elements cannot be separated.

In her essay discussing her father’s theory of intermedia, Hannah Higgins reinforces this notion of fusion with her argument that intermedia “refers to structural homologies, and not additive mixtures, which would be multimedia in the sense of illustrated stories or opera, where the various media types function independently of each other” (Higgins 2002, 61). An example she cites of fusion is the blending of musical and visual techniques in Jackson Mac Low’s A Notated Vocabulary for Eve Rosenthal (1978).

It is important to note too that the distinctions from opera are, among other functions, an attempt to distance intermedia from German opera composer Richard Wagner’s “gesamtkunstwerk” or “total work of art”:

The true Drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common public. In this Drama, each separate art can only bare its utmost secret to their common public through a mutual parleying with the other arts; for the purpose of each separate branch of art can only be fully attained by the reciprocal agreement and co-operation of all the branches in their common message. (Wagner 2001 [1849], 4–5, original emphasis)

The difference between Wagnerian practices and intermedia has been further articulated by Jürgen Müller (Müller 1996). Since Müller’s writings on this topic are not in English, I refer to Joki van de Poel who, in his dissertation on intermediality, discusses Müller’s argument about the difference between the “multimediality” and “intermediality”:

He makes, like Wagner, a distinction between multimedia and intermedia along the lines of the functioning of media next to each other (Nebeneinander) and with each other (Miteinander). With Nebeneinander he means that the separate media function within a larger production but maintain there own qualities, concepts and structure, whereas in the Miteinander variant the different media function in an integrative way. The media take over each others structure or concepts and are changed in this integrative process. (Poel 2005, 36, original emphasis)

This notion of separation, or more appropriately retention of separation, is actually a key trait of transmedia projects. So what I surmised is that while transmedia projects do share a concern with bringing together media and artforms that are distinct, in transmedia projects each distinct media retains its manifest nature. Fusion does exist in transmedia projects, but it happens at an abstract level. It is characterized by a conceptual synthesis of separate media rather than an assemblage or transformation at the expressive or material level. The peculiar challenge of this approach is to bring together elements that are disparate, incompatible or isolated, in a way that retains their independent nature. This approach does not try to change that which is manifest, but tries to find connections at a level that reconfigures them conceptually. The objects change, but that change happens around the materials, within the minds of those who design and experience them. Unity is perceived, variety is manifest.

For a few years, I concentrated on this idea of abstract unity through the use of content techniques: how can we motivate activity across media with a call-to-action? What role does character and worldbuilding play in this activity? And so on. But then I had a moment when I suddenly realised there was another kind of abstract unity that can happen with media. I had also been researching simultaneous media usage or multitasking. I read novels that came with music CDs to be played at certain chapters; and read studies on what media combinations people find the most complimentary, such as having a documentary on TV when surfing the Internet. And then when I did the Da Vinci Code audio tour of The Louvre it hit me. Audio. Audio is this media element that has an intangible manifestation, it can be used in conjunction with other media and help bind them together.

I’ve since implemented that epiphany into a full-fledged creative project: a web audio adventure called AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. I’m mixing together the apparently dead artform of radio drama, with web navigation and online storytelling. I’m playing with having an ensemble cast that guide players across fictional websites (multiple touch-points) with the use of humour. It is a mix of storytelling, gaming, radio drama, alternate reality gaming, and electronic literature. It is a mix of audio and vision. So we have a content and medial unity without disturbing the distinct nature of each of those websites. It is an experiment, it is exciting to me, and it is working. This is all, I guess, an example of how one can draw on research, critical reflection, theory, and practice all in one to produce something...and that something is for me both a project and an insight into how we can unify in a world of diversity.

Christy’s crowdfunding page for AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS: www.pozible.com/project/11529

References:

Aristotle. 1997 [c330B.C.]. Poetics. Mineola: Dover Publications.

Friedman, Ken. ([1998]). Ken Friedman’s contribution to “Fluxlist and Silence Celebrate Dick Higgins. Fluxus. http://www.fluxus.org/higgins/ken.htm (accessed Jan 26, 2008).

Higgins, Dick. 2001 [1965]. Intermedia. Leonardo 34(1): 49–54.

Higgins, Dick. 2004 [1965]. Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia. UbuWeb http://www.ubu.com/papers/higgins_intermedia.html (accessed April 25, 2007).

Higgins, Hannah. 2002. Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 8(4): 59–76.

Highet, Gilbert. 1985. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman influences on Western Literature. New York, Oxford Univ. Press.

Müller, Jürgen E. 1996. Intermedialität. Formen modener kultureller Kommunikation. Münster: Nordus Publikationen.

Ox, Jack and Jacques Mandelbrojt. 2001. Special Section Introduction: Intersenses/Intermedia: A Theoretical Perspective. Leonardo 34(1): 47–48.

Poel, Joki van de. 2005. Opening up Worlds: Intermediality Reinterpreted. PhD diss., Universiteit Utrecht.

Spingarn, Joel Elias. 1963 [1899]. A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. New York: Harbinger Books.

Wagner, Richard. 2001 [1849]. “Outlines of the Artwork of the Future,” The Artwork of the Future. In Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, 3–9. New York: Norton

Christy Dena is a writer-designer who worked on global alternate reality games such as Nokia's Conspiracy for Good, Cisco's The Hunt, and ABC's Bluebird AR. She recently created a phone story for the pervasive gaming event Fresh Air Festival. Her web audio adventure for the iPad, AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS, was nominated for "Best Writing in a Game" at the 2012 Freeplay Independent Games Festival and is currently in production. Christy wrote her PhD on transmedia practice, and presents worldwide on transmedia writing, design, and philosophy.

What Transmedia Producers Need to Know About Comics: An Interview with Tyler Weaver (Part Two)

I was interested in your description of transmedia audiences as “absorptive.” Explain what you mean by that concept and describe some strategies by which producers might support these desires to absorb your story, especially as they seek to also maintain a relationship with more “passive” viewers who can feel overwhelmed by a dense mythology or elaborate story arcs.

An absorptive audience will seek out as many pieces of a transmedia experience as they can and absorb it into their lives somehow. Some will take it to the (wonderful) extreme of creating their own stories within the storyworld. This is different from a passive audience. Some people simply want to sit back and be entertained. Both have are essential. The key with transmedia design going forward will be to give both passive and absorptive audiences something to chew on.

In my own highly unscientific poll while I was researching the book, I found that there are two sticking points keeping a more passive audience member from becoming absorptive. One we can’t do anything about. The other we can.

The first sticking point is time. We talked about it a bit in the first question. Time is the unspoken transaction in a creator-audience relationship. Money is the secondary transaction, given when time is available.  A movie may ask two or three hours of your time in a single sitting. A video game anywhere from four to a hundred hours. A fully absorptive transmedia experience that may continue indefinitely? Who knows.

There is one thing that we can control, and I hate to belabor the point, but the story has to be worth absorbing. People will invest time and money if they are first emotionally invested in the story being told. I talk a lot about irresistible - not expectant - transmedia in the book. We have to give the audience a complete story within each medium so that they want to absorb more pieces of the story experience, not force them into a hunt for a complete story across media they may not normally use in their lives.

As you note, Superman went transmedia – or at least the character was appearing across multiple media platforms – within a few years of his first appearance in comics. What is it about the superhero genre which made such transmedia extensions a logical and compelling development?

The superhero genre is an iconic representation of being more than we are and of tapping into the best qualities of human nature, the mythological potential in all of us. With that in mind, there are aspects to the superhero genre that are more visceral in other media. There's nothing like seeing Superman fly on the big screen. I was giddy when I saw the new "Man of Steel" trailer and saw and heard him fly, a visceral, emotional experience that you don't get from turning the pages of a comic (usually). Even in his radio appearances, there was something “super” about Bud Collyer’s voice. He sounded like Joe Shuster’s drawings brought to life. The representation of superheroes in other media can inform our perspective of the ongoing adventures in comics - sometimes as a detriment, sometimes as a positive.

Extending a superhero into other media - in the best cases - utilizes the inherent characteristics of that medium to present the mythological potential of the superhero genre in its most visceral form, thus forming an emotional investment and bond. Comics can offer the wild and crazy, budget-free ongoing adventures and a deep fan community. Movies give us the chance to be the “man on the street” in the comics, experiencing the wonder that is inherent in the genre (much like Kurt Busiek’s masterpiece, Marvels). Video games give us the chance to be that hero - and be rewarded for it. Want to BE Batman? Play Arkham City, then read the accompanying comics to find out how things became what they became in the gap between Arkham Asylum and City - if you so choose. I would argue that the reason that all other Batman video game adaptations were so awful in the years prior to Arkham Asylum was that they failed to satisfy that urge to embody the hero, a hero that is actually human. Perhaps the reason Superman video games haven’t been that great is that there’s actually a possibility (no matter how remote) of us being Batman - much moreso than the possibility of us physically being Superman.

Comic fans are often obsessed with the ideal of a perfect “continuity,” yet comics publishers have found it difficult to maintain total consistency in a story which has extended over 40-50 years and which unfolds across multiple titles. What might other kinds of transmedia producers learn by looking more closely at the comics industry’s decades-long struggle with fan effort to police continuity?

As is often the case, reality interferes with the ideal. When something is explored and mined by human beings over the course of decades, hiccups are bound to occur. Chains are great in spurring creative solutions to problems, but when pulled too tightly, they can cut off circulation. One way forces you to be creative, the other makes you a prisoner (as I talked about in our first question).

As for what transmedia storytellers can learn about fan-policed continuity? Embrace it. Make it part of the experience. The Marvel Universe of the 1960s is the single best effort at a shared universe put to paper. The Marvel Universe was the superheroes yes, but it was more than that. It was a family that contained the fans and foragers of the second generation of comics fans. And Lee, Kirby, and the Marvel Bullpen, while they took the work seriously, never took themselves seriously - at least outwardly. Look at the brilliant No-Prize (in its early incarnation) for example. An empty envelope for spotting a continuity error. Simple, cheeky, but effective. Most importantly? Fun and engaging.

As you note, comics production involves deep collaboration between artists and writers, a situation which closely parallels the challenges transmedia producers are facing in bringing together artists who are used to work within very different media. What might producers learn by studying more closely the “Marvel Method” or some of the other strategies for collaboration developed within the comics industry?

The Marvel Method is a leap of faith in the abilities of your collaborator, sort of the creative (and less humorous) version of “trust falls” at corporate retreats. But we have to look at where and when the Marvel Method worked best: it arose out of a need to get comics released on a reasonable schedule with a small team. It didn’t hurt that the “small team” consisted of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, Wally Wood, John Buscema - all master comics storytellers.

Kurosawa had a saying that I love, and can be applied to any collaborative effort - not just film. It was something along the lines of “if it comes out just the way I envisioned it, I’m unhappy.” The point of collaboration is to work with great people and let your vision become more than you envisioned in the first place. Otherwise, what’s the point in collaborating?

The lesson for producers? Work with the best and let them do their job.

Right now, there’s a lot of buzz about Marvel’s plans to develop a television series based on S.H.I.E.L.D. as part of its ongoing effort to build out a series of franchises, all linked together through The Avengers. What do you think has worked about this strategy for Marvel? Are there any concerns you might have about this approach?

I’m intrigued by the S.H.I.E.L.D. series and hope that it’s successful. It’ll be fascinating to watch it play out - both as a critic and a fan. It sounds like they’re on the right track, though I do have a few questions, which I try to keep updating   as new information becomes available. http://comicstoryworld.com/whedon-and-shield/.

As a whole, Marvel’s done a lot of things right with their “Cinematic Universe.” They’ve brought the concept of a shared universe to the mainstream in a way that no other film company has. They’ve brought some fun to the superhero film genre. Plus, they FINALLY got The Hulk right.

There have been missteps along the way - Iron Man 2 being the most egregious. By having a shared universe and distinct continuity within a non-serialized medium, Iron Man 2 felt more like Avengers .5, setting up plot points necessary for The Avengers to the detriment of the film as a whole.

I’m curious if there’s an endgame in mind for this iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With a reliance on a tight continuity between films, the longevity of the respective individual film franchises is questionable unless they take the James Bond series continuity as an inspiration. The James Bond series is a perfect example of a series that has both endured and achieved longevity through a loose continuity, sliding time scale, and different actors taking on the role. In a way, the Bond series is approached like a comic book series, but instead of pencillers changing the look of the character, actors change. But then again, there’s always the magical reboot button somewhere down the road. Either way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a fascinating experience and experiment that gave us Joss Whedon’s Avengers, so I’m in for the ride.

TYLER WEAVER is a writer of stories in (and across) books, comics, radio, and film. He is the author of Comics for Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld and the writer/co-creator of Whiz!Bam!Pow!  a story experience of family, forgery, death rays, secret codes, laundry chutes, and the Golden Age of Comics. You can find him on Twitter under the creative handle of @tylerweaver.

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For another perspective on the relationship between comics and transmedia, check out this video essay produced by Drew Morton as an expansion of his PhD Dissertation from the UCLA film school. Here, Morton offers a critique of transmedia storytelling (primarily based on the limits of The Matrix model) before delving deeper into the forms of remediation he associates with the comic book film. Using the translation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World across media, he introduces the concept of transmedia style as a unifying factor, showing how aspects of comics, video games, popular music, and cinema merge to create a unique look and feel for this property. I was lucky enough to be on Morton's dissertation committee so I am proud to be sharing this video with you today. It's another great example of the kinds of video essays that UCLA faculty and students are exploring right now. Again, I think the compelling use of visual and audio evidence makes scholarly concepts more broadly accessible, and it produces something that can be taught in classes or as here, embedded into blogs where it will reach audiences that would never look at an academic journal.

What Transmedia Producers Should Know About Comics: An Interview with Tyler Weaver (Part One)

From the very start, one of the powers of the superhero has been the capacity to leap across media in a single bound. Part of what cemented Superman's role in the American popular imagination was the degree to which he came at consumers from multiple media at once -- as a character who moved from comic books to comic strips, radio, animated shorts, live action serials, all in a matter of a few years, and then, television series, feature films, and computer games. This process of extending the mythology by absorbing elements associated with these other media has refreshed the character over time and made it feel that much more vivid in the minds of its fans. We will soon be seeing yet another transmedia reboot of the Man of Steel with the release this summer of a new feature film and all of the other stuff that is being constructed around it. Tyler Weaver's new book, Comics For Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld represents the latest in a growing series of books that seeks to explain the still emerging and evolving practices associated with transmedia. In this case, Weaver combines a healthy dose of transmedia theory and production advice with a rich history of the American comics tradition (one primarily focused around the evolution of the superhero as the now dominant genre in mainstream comics production). The book also provides us with thoughtful analysis of specific transmedia products and franchises, including some that represent the movement of comics into other media (such as Batman: Arkham City or Batman: The Animated Series), some representing the movement of other media franchises into comics (such as Halo and Star Trek), some representing the attempts of other media to create their own superhero characters (The Incredibles), and finally, a few (such as The Fountain) which have sought to create and integrate original narratives across comics and other media. The result will be a treat for those of us who have been life-long comics readers, but it may also be a revelation for those who are just discovering how central comics have become to the operations of contemporary popular culture.

More than that, Weaver makes a strong case that many of the practices of contemporary transmedia were prefigured or had their origins in the ways that DC and Marvel have managed their extended universes over the past half decade or more. A better understanding of comics, for example, might help us to think through the shifting balance between continuity and multiplicity, the challenges of maintaining seriality over an extended period of time, the risks of balancing the veteran's fascination with mastery with the new comer's interest in accessibility. Over the course of this interview, Weaver speaks to each of these issues and much more.

You cite the adage, “every comic book is someone’s first,” several times across the book.  Yet, while comics publishers often acknowledge this truism, there are also wide spread complaints that many current comics are impenetrable to first time readers, since they assume a hardcore fan deeply immersed in the continuity and mythology of the publisher’s own fictional universe. What does this suggest about the challenges of transmedia design?

I’m not convinced that the impenetrability of continuity and mythologies is at fault for keeping “new readers” away from the experience of buying comics on a regular basis. First, there are more demands on time and greater competition for attention from other media. Video games are to this generation what superhero comics were to kids in the 20^th century, with many featuring deep continuities and mythologies with the added appeal of “you are the hero” immersion and the opportunity to demonstrate expertise through accomplishments, rewards, and completing the game on heightening levels of difficulty.

But the problem goes much deeper than demands on time. While continuity is a chain that produces longevity, unlocks story potential and gives fans something to dig into and a means to demonstrate expertise, it can strangle innovation and storytelling when it is wielded in the name of nostalgia and isn’t in line with the values and storytelling tendencies of the current generation. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. I’m a lifelong comics lover, and I hate to say it, but the story offerings of the biggest and most visible publishers (there are exceptions) aren’t that compelling.

A great continuity and mythology gives audiences something to dig into and a reason to hunt for back issues and return month after month. The only way stories — be it a transmedia story experience, video game, comics, television, novel –– inspire that sort of emotional and time investment is through incredible storytelling and characters that the audience wants to revisit again and again.

Your book includes an extensive history of the notion of seriality, a principle which I have long contended is central to understanding contemporary transmedia. Yet, it has been surprisingly absent from most accounts of the arts of comics and graphic storytelling, appearing no where, say, in the work of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. What do we gain by emphasizing the serial nature of American comics publication and what might we learn by seeing the expansive and interlocking narrative structures of long-form superhero comics as an exemplar for what contemporary transmedia practice might look like?

Seriality is an essential component in a storytelling equation:

Seriality plus Elasticity (or, Evolutionary Ability of a Character) plus Craft equals Longevity.

Spider-Man just celebrated his 50^th birthday. Batman? Going strong at 74. Superman? 75.  Superman alone has been published regularly for nearly 900 months, usually more than once a month in a variety of books (in the 1990s, he was up to five solo books including the quarterly Man of Tomorrow). When something is published for that long on a regular basis, the confines of reality and human lifespan make it inevitable that the original creator won’t be with the character all those years. Again, there are exceptions, such as Will Eisner and The Spirit, though I would argue that The Spirit is more known for the craft and innovations Eisner brought to the medium through that character than the character himself.

But, in most cases - such as Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man - this is where the elasticity of a character - the evolutionary ability of that character - comes into play. Each creative team can build upon, pay homage to, deviate, stretch, and bring their own vision to the character because of the serialized nature of American comics and the reality of reality.

Seriality and elasticity require great storytelling craft to connect with an audience.  There has to be some sort of primal connection between audience and mythology. I would argue that in the case of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, it’s their simplicity. Orphan from doomed planet (shown most brilliantly in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman in the space of four panels), through the love of a kindly couple, becomes symbol of truth and justice and Earth’s protector. Boy witnesses murder of parents, vows that no one will feel the same pain, dedicates life to war on crime. High school nerd bitten by spider, with great power comes great responsibility. All are vibrant mythologies and iconic representations of popular culture created by simplicity and populated with memorable characters that connect to audiences on a primal level.

Transmedia storytellers should understand this equation and consider it in the construction of their stories. How long do they want the experience to last? Is it a finite experience? An ongoing one? How can they craft enduring characters that can evolve - both with technology and with the vision of new creators (like Halo and the leap from Bungie to 343 Industries)?

TYLER WEAVER is a writer of stories in (and across) books, comics, radio, and film. He is the author of Comics for Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld and the writer/co-creator of Whiz!Bam!Pow!  a story experience of family, forgery, death rays, secret codes, laundry chutes, and the Golden Age of Comics. You can find him on Twitter under the creative handle of @tylerweaver.

Announcing Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television,and USC Annenberg School of Communication & USC School of Cinematic Arts

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

Presented by The Andrew J. Kuehn, Jr. Foundation

Friday, April 12, 2013 James Bridges Theater, UCLA

9:00 am – 6:00 pm

Transmedia, Hollywood is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Transmedia, Hollywood is co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and media research centers in the nation.

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

Transmedia entertainment has been advanced within the Hollywood system primarily through a logic of promotion, audience building, and engagement, offering the ideal tools for capturing the imagination of networked audiences through the creation of immersive and expansive imaginary worlds. As transmedia has spread around the world, especially to countries with a much stronger tradition of public media, these same practices have been embraced as a means not of building fictional realms but of changing the world:

• As advertisers seek to construct their own “brand communities” as a way of forging strong affiliations with their consumers, many are embracing cause-based marketing. In the process, these brand marketers are recognizing young viewers’ capacity for civic engagement and political participation, one of the hallmarks of the millennial generation. While sometimes these brand messages end up advancing cultural movements, in other instances, they simply coopt these shared generational concerns.
• Educational approaches to entertainment, popular across the developing world, are now extending across multiple media platforms to allow fans to develop a deeper understanding of health and social policy issues as they dig deeper into the backstories of their favorite characters. Alternative reality games, which seek to encourage grassroots participation as a marketing tool, have shifted from solving puzzles to mobilizing players to confront real world problems.
• Fan networks, organized to support and promote favorite media franchises, are taking on the challenge of training and mobilizing the next generation of young activists, using their capacity as thought leaders to reshape the attention economy by increasing public awareness of mutual concerns.
• Nonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters.

Each of these productive, participatory, community-based activities have been facilitated over the past decade by a widening web of 2.0 social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The millennial generation’s mastery of “play” has now expanded to include a growing number of apps, casual games, short-form digital entertainment experiences, and expansive alternate reality games. Millennials, who have been acclimating themselves with the tools of connectivity in times of play, now have at their disposal the means to harness a global community to solve such pressing issues as global warming, ethnic, racial or religious genocide, labor unrest, the inequities associated with class, and countless other modern-day assaults. Many of today’s thought leaders—baby boomers that witnessed an earlier social revolution during the late sixties—marvel over the subtle but pervasive shift that is underway in the web 2.0 era and beyond as social connectedness is becoming reframed as a means for large-scale community action.

Transmedia producers in Hollywood have much to learn from a closer examination of these other forms of entertainment and educational discourse, which we might describe as “transmedia for a change.” When is it appropriate for the big media companies to incorporate such themes and tactics into their pop culture franchises? And when should they tolerate, even embrace, the bottom up activities of their fans which have used their content as vehicles for promoting social justice and political change? What does it mean to produce entertainment for a generation which is demanding its right to meaningfully participate at every level — from shaping the stories that matter to them to impacting the governance of their society?

For more information, see http://www.liquid-bass.com/conference/

For conference Registration, see : http://transmediahollywood4.eventbrite.com/#

Also, that same weekend, 5D Institute, in association with University of Southern California, invites you to join us in The Science of Fiction, our first Worldbuilding festival. This groundbreaking event will take place on April 13, 2012 in honor of the unveiling of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media complex. For more information, see http://5dinstitute.org/events/science-of-fiction

9:00—9:10 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks – Denise Mann & Henry Jenkins

9:10—11:00 am: Panel 1 Revolutionary Advertising: Cultivating Cultural MovementsIn the web 2.0 era, as more and more millennials acquire the tools of participatory culture and new media literacy, some of this cohort are redirecting their one-time leisure-based activities into acts of community-based, grassroots social activism. Recognizing the power of the crowd to create a tipping point in brand affiliation, big media marketers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and members of the Madison Avenue advertising community, are jumping on board these crowdsourcing activities to support their respective industries. In other words, many of the social goals of grassroots revolutionaries are being realigned to serve the commercial goals of brand marketers. In the best-case scenarios, the interests of the community and the interests of the market economy align in some mercurial fashion to serve both constituencies. However, in the worst case scenario, the community-based activism fueling social movements is being redirected to support potato chips, tennis shoes, or sugary-soda drinks. Brand marketers are intrigued with the power and sway of social media, inaugurating any number of trailblazing forms of interactive advertising and branded entertainment to replace stodgy, lifeless, 30 second ads. These cutting edge madmen are learning how to reinvent entertainment for the participatory generation by marrying brands to pre-existing social movements to create often impressive, well-funded brand movements like Nike Livestrong, or Pepsi Refresh. Are big media marketers subsuming the radical intent of certain community-based organizations who are challenging the status quo by redirecting them into unintentional alliance with big business or are they infusing these cash-strapped organizations with much needed funds and marketing outreach? Today’s panel of experts will debate these and other issues associated with the future of participatory play as a form of social activism.Todd CunninghamFormerly, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Insights and Research at MTV Networks. Denise Mann (Moderator)       Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Associate Professor, Head of Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Rob Schuham CEO, Action Marketing Michael Serazio      Author, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing Alden E. Stoner      VP, Social Action Film Campaigns, Participant Media Rachel Tipograph Director, Global Digital and Social Media at Gap Inc.

11:10 am—1:00 pm: Panel 2 Transmedia For a ChangeHollywood’s version of transmedia has been preoccupied with inspiring fan engagement, often linked to the promotional strategies for the release of big budget media. But, as transmedia has spread to parts of the world which have been dominated by public service media, there has been an increased amount of experimentation in ways that transmedia tactics can be deployed to encourage civic engagement and social awareness. These transmedia projects can be understood as part of a larger move to shift from understanding public media as serving publics towards a more active mission in gathering and mobilizing publics. These projects may also be understood as an extension of the entertainment education paradigm into the transmedia realm, where the goal shifts from informing to public towards getting people participating in efforts to make change in their own communities. In some cases, these producers are creating transmedia as part of larger documentary projects, but in others, transmedia is making links between fictional content and its real world implications.  Panelists Henry Jenkins (Moderator)      Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School for Communication Katerina Cizek      Filmmaker-in-Residence, National Film Board, Canada Katie Elmore Mota      Producer, CEO of PRAJNA Productions Sam Haren Creative Director, Sandpit Mahyad Tousi      Founder, BoomGen Studios

1:00—2:00 pm: LUNCH BREAK

2:00—3:50 pm: Panel 3 Through Any Media Necessary: Activism in a DIY CultureA recent survey released by the MacArthur Foundation found that a growing number of young people are embracing practices the researchers identified as “participatory politics”: “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” These forms of politics emerge from an increasingly DIY media culture, linked in important ways to the practices of Makers, Hackers, Remix Artists and Fan Activists. This panel will bring together some key “change agents,” people who are helping to shape the production and flow of political media, or who are seeking to better understand the nature of political participation in an era of networked publics. Increasingly, these new forms of activism are both transmedia (in that they construct messages through any and all available media) and spreadable (in that they encourage participation on the level of circulation even if they do not always invite the public to help create media content). Panelists Megan M. Boler      Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education OISE/University of Toronto Marya Bangee Community Organizing Residency (COR) Fellow, OneLA, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) Erick Huerta      Immigrant’s rights activist Jonathan MacIntosh Pop Culture Hacker and Transformative Storyteller Sangita Shreshtova (Moderator) Research Director of Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism Elisabeth Soep      Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio-Youth Media International

4:00—5:50 pm: Panel 4 The e-Entrepreneur as the New PhilanthropistNonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters. While the boomers treated the cultural movements of the late sixties as a cause, today’s e-citizens are treating their social activism as a brand. They are selling social responsibility as if it were a commodity or product, using the same strategies that traditional business men and women used to sell products. Sarah Banet-Weiser Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and Department of American Studies and Ethnicity Sean D. Carasso Founder, Falling Whistles Yael Cohen Founder/CEO, Fuck Cancer Milana Rabkin      Digital Media Agent Sharon Waxman (Moderator) Editor-in-Chief, The Wrap

6:00—7:30 pm:RECEPTION